Civil disobedience is generally an acceptable form of behavior in a civil society and as such does not deserve to be compared to military action.
I disagree. There is a direct parallel between civil disobedience and military action. Obviously the consequences are different, and usually more serious in one case than the other, but nevertheless the same underlying principle applies: you are placing yourself above the normal rules that everyone else follows, and essentially adopting a might-is-right policy because you believe you can get away with it/history will be on your side/whatever. You write "civil society" a lot. I suggest to you that a civil society might reasonably be defined by the fact that such self-centred action is not necessary.
Anyone who simply invested a sum in a typical index tracker in recent years will have made a lot of money. Sure, you can make more by playing the fluctuations, but very few people can do this well, as the long term performance of most professionally managed funds relative to the underlying indices clearly demonstrates.
But recently, we've been lucky. The major trend has always been upwards, and the worst big hits the market has taken in recent years have been around the 20–30% range and recovered within a few months. This will not always be the case, as anyone who invested in what they thought was a dip at the start of the dot com bust can attest.
The problem with it is that deciding on what is fairly here is impossible through market-place forces.
Of course it's not. The default is that something you can't control afterwards (the no copyright case) is worth whatever a single patron is prepared to pay for it, as indeed happened for hundreds of years. If you introduce an alternative economic mechanism through which the costs can be shared, then the product is worth whatever the sum of the individual contributions would be. In either case, if the value of the work at market rates is less than what the work costs to do, allowing for a profit the artist is prepared to accept, then the work won't get done.
What that happens to be is subject to a great deal of debate. BUT!!!! One cannot be "taking advantage" of another if ones actions do not cause the other to change that other's actions. So not honoring a copyright most definitely does not amount to taking advantage of the copyright holder -- it does not require or involve any interaction with the copyright holder (so it cannot be causing the copyright holder to change his/her actions). And no, you cannot claim that it cause copyright holder to stop producing because you simply don't know that copying is an action alternative to purchasing. It could very well be an action alternative to ignoring the copyrighted work altogether.
That is an economic nonsense, and the number of people who repeat it on Slashdot does not change this. We can readily demonstrate this by the fact that if everyone ignored copyrights in this way and the artists received no compensation at all, then the actions of the artists most certainly would change. Your argument holds only as long as a substantial number of people do honour copyright, at which point those who do not are simply freeloaders taking advantage of those who do.
Thus he might argue that an anonymous copyright infringement might be an act of civil disobedience.
One might argue that a government that doesn't like an individual court ruling in another country should drop a tactical nuke on the courtroom as well, but it would demonstrate a remarkable lack of appreciation for when a last resort outside the normal system is justified and a complete loss of perspective on the significance of the offending action.
This isn't personal, but needs to be trotted out every now and then.
Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Our gift economy will destroy your way of life.
So a certain type of person keeps saying. Do drop by and let us know when it actually happens. Meanwhile, personally I think the millions of people in the world who work to produce non-physical products should be compensated fairly for their efforts and allowed to pay their rent too, without others taking advantage of them.
The point is that I don't believe that Internet anonymity does do much to protect freedoms in practice. If you like, I don't regard it as what Franklin famously called "essential liberty". If it were actually effective in this regard, I would be far less willing to sacrifice it, but as I said, on this issue, I'm a pragmatist.
If you mean why don't I post here under my real name, then it's for the same reasons that I noted in my final paragraph. But there is a distinction between letting the legal authorities in a country track down those who are committing crimes and using the Internet as a shield to avoid being held accountable, and putting all my comments out in the open for anyone to see in a world where data mining, personal profiling, lawsuits based on the fact that you breathe air, and anything-in-the-name-of-profit corporate politics are the standard MO.
Society isn't even grown up to deal with this sort of thing responsibly yet, nor will be until we evolve beyond electing unprincipled morons and having laws that favour profits over privacy amongst other things. Until we reach that time, I choose to hide my identity to some extent, because it's less hassle. In doing so, I understand that I will lose out on any recognition I may get for saying good, worthwhile things, but I come here for interesting discussion and to learn new things, not to blow my own horn, so that is a price I am willing to pay. I also don't expect anyone here to take my word alone for anything I write, and I know that if I were somehow to break the law, Slashdot is not immune from lawsuits and they know who I am.
In short, I'm not really anonymous at all. You may not know who I am, but that is an entirely different thing. If I were truly attempting to contradict my stated principle, I would be posting using an anonymising proxy, from somewhere other my home computer, with a throwaway e-mail address, etc.
I think we can agree on the idea that the existence of data havens is a potential godsend, but the misuse of those havens is a huge headache.
I'm not sure I'd even agree with that. I am pretty much a pragmatist when it comes to on-line anonymity: I think it is, on balance, overwhelmingly a bad thing. Much the same arguments apply to data havens.
Sure, these things can theoretically protects discourse, investigative journalism, whistle-blowing and such in an undemocratic society. However, practice is a long way from theory, and on-line "anonymity" is a long way from on-line anonymity. Does anyone really believe, despite the fact that I post under an alias here, that from a technical perspective my government could not track a post back to me if it really had sufficient motivation to do so? Does anyone really believe that if I had sufficiently sensitive information and stored it on a system hosted in one of these less legally restrictive regimes that the Powers That Be could not track it down and take steps to contain it?
Meanwhile, we have spammers, phishy types such as identity thieves and credit card fraudsters, deceptive folk like inside traders and corporate PR plants, copyright infringers, and countless other people basically abusing a near-anonymous Internet identity and data centres like the one in this article to further their own interests, often at the expense of others... and getting away with it, because no-one has the resources to stop them all reliably.
For what it's worth, I don't like this position. I appreciate the value of free communications, and I'm well aware of the inhibition imposed by having to put your name to something, and the damage this can do in extreme cases. But I also appreciate the value of privacy, and of being left to mind your own business without constantly having to defend yourself from attacks. Until society grows up, learns not to trust information or offers from anonymous sources, and learns to respect sensitive information — and it has a very long way to go to reach that point — I think we'll do a lot better if people on the Internet are not effectively placed above the law and not held accountable for their actions.
Yes, yes, you're very clever. You're also not the only one who understands some basic economics and has done well out of the rising stock market in recent years, by the way.
The fact remains that most people will never have the time, understanding and willingness to research sound investments that are required to do so, while any fool can win the lottery and overtake even a pretty successful investor in a heartbeat. There is value in that possibility, and that is what even some smart people will pay for.
I give it a week after that before a Marine Expeditionary Force is bringing "freedom" to the people of Antigua.
Cute. Care to try that with a country you piss off that can fight back? There are something like 150+ nations that belong to the WTO, and all of them but one are pissed about this.
All gambling games are funded off the winnings. No gambling game in existence continues to exist if they lose to the player over time. With this simple knowledge, people still play to win. Dumb.
Is it? It doesn't take a genius with a statistics PhD to realise that the expected returns from gambling are below 0, but your argument completely ignores the variance.
Though the average punter will lose a bit of money gambling, some will win big. The possibility that "it could be you", however remote, is the reason that people play the lottery. They aren't interested in winning back $25 on every $50 they spend, they're interested in having some chance — small as it is — of winning a life-changing amount, and they're willing to spend $50 to have that chance.
By your argument, people who take out insurance are stupid, too. After all, the insurance companies are in it to make money, and the premiums they charge will always leave them something after the average pay-out. But you don't buy insurance because for that $500 you'll at least get $250 back if someone steals your TV. You buy insurance because you don't want your life to be ruined if your whole house burns down. Most people will never be so unlucky, but many value the peace of mind from knowing that if they are, then most of the loss will be recovered.
As for the meaningless cabal of US bashers - get a grip. We are the WTO. Without our commitment to abide by the treaties there will be no WTO.
I don't know whether your claim is due to ignorance or arrogance, but either way it is a perfect example of why the US has such a poor international standing today. If you are the WTO and the rest of us are just irrelevant wannabes, presumably you won't be taking any further action to promote your intellectual property framework in China and eastern Europe, you're OK with the Arab states collaborating to push up the price of your oil supply, you won't mind if everyone else adopts trade policies that let their currencies slide the way you've let yours go even though this will do far more economic damage to you than to them...?
Unfortunately, while their plans for Baldur's Gate IV: You Are Not A God include using edgy 3D character models instead of carefully animated sprites, replacing all the NPC interactions with shrugs and "huh" noises (and some bad chat-up lines between Minsc and Aerie if you know how to find the easter egg), cutting out the spell effects with complex graphics and having a guy just pull out a gun and shoot the bad guy first instead, scrapping the D&D-based game mechanics in favour of "highest level always wins", and allowing Elminster to join your party, there are no plans at the present time to include football in the courtyard of the De'Arnise Hold. Sorry.
I remember from my teenage years how EA used to be a name you could rely on for a fun game. Now, they're a shambling zombie force that sucks the life out of anything they touch, and causes their newly assimilated zombie-children to spew foul darkness onto the marketplace.
You probably feel like you shouldn't have to invest in your own email server, or you shouldn't have to pay an ISP to host your mailing list traffic. You might have a point there.
Might? We're talking about a non-profit organisation, running a mailing list as a service to the community. There is no question of "investment", because there is no money to invest.
However, if you don't want to play by the rules that others are setting up, you can't expect your mail to be delivered.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. For the overwhelming majority of people on our list, everything works just fine. It is only those who choose to use substandard mail services that lose out. Our position — and this was discussed — is that this is their problem, not ours.
You might not have spammers who have appropriated your domain name for their purposes. I'm honestly surprised that you're able to change the From: header and have it work.
It's funny: I hear that a lot, yet not one of the various people I mentioned before, using any of the mail services from the local university through small local ISPs up to some pretty big names, has ever reported encountering this problem in practice. Given that many of us have our own personal domains, but again we send mails through various ISPs' servers, I rather doubt this is because mail is getting silently dropped.
We did get one guy mailing us the other day, telling us how our system was set up "wrong" and helpfully telling us how to "fix" it by adding SPF to our domain. He had discovered this because he had configured his own mail system to reject incoming mail based entirely on whether the sending domain had a matching SPF record, and he happened to notice a bounce message in his logs.
I contemplated replying to explain to him why he was a fool for configuring his mail system in that way. I could have pointed out that fewer than 1/10 of all domains actually have an SPF record, and that of those who do, getting on for half of them are just set to "accept all" to get around this sort of foolishness. But I decided I had better things to do with my time. If he configures his mail filtering that aggressively, not receiving an occasional update from us is the least of his worries.
The organisation that runs the mailing list I've mentioned elsewhere has a large organising committee, which changes fairly frequently (each post changes hands at least once per year, more frequently in some cases). On that committee, there are several different people who would want to send a mail to our announcements list at times. We have no mail server of our own, but always send mail with a From: header set to our general contact address. Thus we can have several people, each of whom will post to the list using whatever mail server they personally have access to, and those people change quite often.
Of course, we could try to work out all the IPs used by each person's ISP/mail provider, and include them in an SPF record for our domain, and update it every few weeks when one of the posts changes hands to someone new. We could set up Sender ID and DomainKeys and so on as well. But frankly, that's a lot of hassle, and gains us very little. As I said earlier in the discussion, until there is a common, widely used, effective standard for this stuff, we just don't consider it worth our time to support everyone's pet idea.
SPF is, IMHO, a flawed implementation of a worth-a-try idea:
If you legitimately have mail being sent from your domain via many servers, it's a royal PITA to set up and there is a time lag for any changes to propagate. SPF is based on the obviously untrue idea that each domain from which mail might originate will generate that mail from its own server, or at least a reasonably small and consistent set of servers that can be readily identified. This might work for big business with professional sysadmins setting up all the server boxes, but it's hopeless for small-scale home users, volunteer groups, etc. etc.
It's not an accepted standard: if you support SPF, do you also support Sender ID for this big free mail system, DomainKeys for that one, tomorrow's rehash for the next guy...?
Nowhere near enough people use it properly. Of the domains that set SPF records, a very significant proportion are just set to allow all to avoid SPF-related bounces, undermining the entire scheme.
In other words, it's a pain to set up if you're the little guy, it's not future proof even if you do, and in any case, improper use is so widespread that its concept is undermined before you even start. The idea wasn't a bad one, but the implementation is hopeless as it stands.
Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't think the Spamhaus-recommended terminology is any better. "Double opt-in" has been the common name for our approach since a long time before anyone heard of Spamhaus, and I don't see how "confirmed opt-in" is any less vulnerable to word-twisting abuse according to the argument they give. They even acknowledge on the page you cited that "double opt-in" is a term in use by legitimate mailers (unlike some of the other suggestions they mention, which frankly I've never heard of until today).
As you have demonstrated, the form I tend to use makes it very clear both that we are not in the business of spamming and that we take technical measures to ensure that we don't come across that way. As long as people understand that, I'm happy.
If you started dissing hotmail (which I just tested with a 50 recipients list and stopped checking after the 11th) for "abusive SPAM filtering", maybe _you_ need to check how you send emails and/or the clients (scripts hopefully better then client for massmailing) to achieve your goals.
We send out our mails using a standard issue mailing list manager, which deals with confirming all the addresses before they are added to the list among other things. All mails we send come from recognisable addresses, include a recognisable keyword in the subject line to help people wanting to use mail filters, include appropriate headers to indicate that the mail is a bulk message, and contain only content of the kind a list subscriber would expect.
We do not use SPF, Sender ID, DomainKeys, or any similar fundamentally flawed system, nor will we support one until a recognised, widely adopted and effective standard is in place.
This suits our goals, and those of most of our community, just fine. We don't lose any sleep over the few people who choose to blame us rather than their mail service because their mail service doesn't follow the same rule as everyone else.
Our (100% legitimate, double opt-in) mailing list gets a few Hotmail addresses added to it every now and then. We frequently get people complaining about missing mails and so on. Invariably, it's because of something silly, usually spam filtering that has been set to be so ludicrously aggressive that practically anything not white-listed (i.e., nothing on a new account) gets through.
We have now reached the point where we consider Hotmail an irrelevance. We don't even advise complainants to use another mail client any more, we just ignore them. The list is not run for profit, and the effort of supporting Microsoft's not-playing-ball freebie mail system just isn't worth it for what is basically a hobby set-up run for the benefit of our community.
I think there is a piracy problem simply if honest people are paying for something but dishonest people are getting the same thing for free by breaking the rules. The system doesn't scale to everyone breaking the rules, which makes it unethical and selfish to do so while others playing by the rules do not.
Please note that this argument is based on simple economic principles, and is utterly unaffected by whether or not the prices asked are fair, the record labels are themselves breaking anti-competition laws, what proportion of illegally ripped material realistically constitutes lost sales, or any of the other make-me-feel-better excuses.
<analogy type="obligatory, dubious, car"> Copyright infringement is somewhat similar in effect to driving illegally up the bus-only/HOV/cycle lane to bypass the queue and then cutting in. You can try to rationalise it away by saying, "But the other guys would have queued anyway!" However, the reality is that those who play by the rules are indirectly damaged by those who do not, because it takes longer for them to get to the front of the queue, instead of everyone getting the same deal. Overall, it is a zero-sum game, because if everyone broke the rules, no-one would have an advantage. Queue-jumping wins only because you are taking advantage of the good nature of others who do not queue-jump. </analogy>
Not exactly a formal survey, but FWIW, I often buy music to dance to direct from the bands (some of whom basically run their own independent mini-label) or via resellers who source direct from the bands. This is for loads of different kinds of dancing: Latin American, swing, ballroom, that kind of thing. You can get CDs from some of the better-known bands via the major record labels, but no-one really does, because it just costs more and all of the best bands made their name playing live gigs and through word-of-mouth publicity anyway. If my friends are anything to go by, the same is probably true for folk, choral/religious music, and many other "niche markets" too.
Unfortunately, I think you'll find a long-standing Intel patent on "a method for getting completely wrong answers to basic mathematical problems using a computer" and its applications constitute prior art that undermines your patent.
Slashdot Mirror
Civil disobedience is generally an acceptable form of behavior in a civil society and as such does not deserve to be compared to military action.
I disagree. There is a direct parallel between civil disobedience and military action. Obviously the consequences are different, and usually more serious in one case than the other, but nevertheless the same underlying principle applies: you are placing yourself above the normal rules that everyone else follows, and essentially adopting a might-is-right policy because you believe you can get away with it/history will be on your side/whatever. You write "civil society" a lot. I suggest to you that a civil society might reasonably be defined by the fact that such self-centred action is not necessary.
Anyone who simply invested a sum in a typical index tracker in recent years will have made a lot of money. Sure, you can make more by playing the fluctuations, but very few people can do this well, as the long term performance of most professionally managed funds relative to the underlying indices clearly demonstrates.
But recently, we've been lucky. The major trend has always been upwards, and the worst big hits the market has taken in recent years have been around the 20–30% range and recovered within a few months. This will not always be the case, as anyone who invested in what they thought was a dip at the start of the dot com bust can attest.
The problem with it is that deciding on what is fairly here is impossible through market-place forces.
Of course it's not. The default is that something you can't control afterwards (the no copyright case) is worth whatever a single patron is prepared to pay for it, as indeed happened for hundreds of years. If you introduce an alternative economic mechanism through which the costs can be shared, then the product is worth whatever the sum of the individual contributions would be. In either case, if the value of the work at market rates is less than what the work costs to do, allowing for a profit the artist is prepared to accept, then the work won't get done.
What that happens to be is subject to a great deal of debate. BUT!!!! One cannot be "taking advantage" of another if ones actions do not cause the other to change that other's actions. So not honoring a copyright most definitely does not amount to taking advantage of the copyright holder -- it does not require or involve any interaction with the copyright holder (so it cannot be causing the copyright holder to change his/her actions). And no, you cannot claim that it cause copyright holder to stop producing because you simply don't know that copying is an action alternative to purchasing. It could very well be an action alternative to ignoring the copyrighted work altogether.
That is an economic nonsense, and the number of people who repeat it on Slashdot does not change this. We can readily demonstrate this by the fact that if everyone ignored copyrights in this way and the artists received no compensation at all, then the actions of the artists most certainly would change. Your argument holds only as long as a substantial number of people do honour copyright, at which point those who do not are simply freeloaders taking advantage of those who do.
Thus he might argue that an anonymous copyright infringement might be an act of civil disobedience.
One might argue that a government that doesn't like an individual court ruling in another country should drop a tactical nuke on the courtroom as well, but it would demonstrate a remarkable lack of appreciation for when a last resort outside the normal system is justified and a complete loss of perspective on the significance of the offending action.
This isn't personal, but needs to be trotted out every now and then.
Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Our gift economy will destroy your way of life.
So a certain type of person keeps saying. Do drop by and let us know when it actually happens. Meanwhile, personally I think the millions of people in the world who work to produce non-physical products should be compensated fairly for their efforts and allowed to pay their rent too, without others taking advantage of them.
The point is that I don't believe that Internet anonymity does do much to protect freedoms in practice. If you like, I don't regard it as what Franklin famously called "essential liberty". If it were actually effective in this regard, I would be far less willing to sacrifice it, but as I said, on this issue, I'm a pragmatist.
Why not practise what you preach ?
If you mean why don't I post here under my real name, then it's for the same reasons that I noted in my final paragraph. But there is a distinction between letting the legal authorities in a country track down those who are committing crimes and using the Internet as a shield to avoid being held accountable, and putting all my comments out in the open for anyone to see in a world where data mining, personal profiling, lawsuits based on the fact that you breathe air, and anything-in-the-name-of-profit corporate politics are the standard MO.
Society isn't even grown up to deal with this sort of thing responsibly yet, nor will be until we evolve beyond electing unprincipled morons and having laws that favour profits over privacy amongst other things. Until we reach that time, I choose to hide my identity to some extent, because it's less hassle. In doing so, I understand that I will lose out on any recognition I may get for saying good, worthwhile things, but I come here for interesting discussion and to learn new things, not to blow my own horn, so that is a price I am willing to pay. I also don't expect anyone here to take my word alone for anything I write, and I know that if I were somehow to break the law, Slashdot is not immune from lawsuits and they know who I am.
In short, I'm not really anonymous at all. You may not know who I am, but that is an entirely different thing. If I were truly attempting to contradict my stated principle, I would be posting using an anonymising proxy, from somewhere other my home computer, with a throwaway e-mail address, etc.
I think we can agree on the idea that the existence of data havens is a potential godsend, but the misuse of those havens is a huge headache.
I'm not sure I'd even agree with that. I am pretty much a pragmatist when it comes to on-line anonymity: I think it is, on balance, overwhelmingly a bad thing. Much the same arguments apply to data havens.
Sure, these things can theoretically protects discourse, investigative journalism, whistle-blowing and such in an undemocratic society. However, practice is a long way from theory, and on-line "anonymity" is a long way from on-line anonymity. Does anyone really believe, despite the fact that I post under an alias here, that from a technical perspective my government could not track a post back to me if it really had sufficient motivation to do so? Does anyone really believe that if I had sufficiently sensitive information and stored it on a system hosted in one of these less legally restrictive regimes that the Powers That Be could not track it down and take steps to contain it?
Meanwhile, we have spammers, phishy types such as identity thieves and credit card fraudsters, deceptive folk like inside traders and corporate PR plants, copyright infringers, and countless other people basically abusing a near-anonymous Internet identity and data centres like the one in this article to further their own interests, often at the expense of others... and getting away with it, because no-one has the resources to stop them all reliably.
For what it's worth, I don't like this position. I appreciate the value of free communications, and I'm well aware of the inhibition imposed by having to put your name to something, and the damage this can do in extreme cases. But I also appreciate the value of privacy, and of being left to mind your own business without constantly having to defend yourself from attacks. Until society grows up, learns not to trust information or offers from anonymous sources, and learns to respect sensitive information — and it has a very long way to go to reach that point — I think we'll do a lot better if people on the Internet are not effectively placed above the law and not held accountable for their actions.
Yes, yes, you're very clever. You're also not the only one who understands some basic economics and has done well out of the rising stock market in recent years, by the way.
The fact remains that most people will never have the time, understanding and willingness to research sound investments that are required to do so, while any fool can win the lottery and overtake even a pretty successful investor in a heartbeat. There is value in that possibility, and that is what even some smart people will pay for.
I give it a week after that before a Marine Expeditionary Force is bringing "freedom" to the people of Antigua.
Cute. Care to try that with a country you piss off that can fight back? There are something like 150+ nations that belong to the WTO, and all of them but one are pissed about this.
All gambling games are funded off the winnings. No gambling game in existence continues to exist if they lose to the player over time. With this simple knowledge, people still play to win. Dumb.
Is it? It doesn't take a genius with a statistics PhD to realise that the expected returns from gambling are below 0, but your argument completely ignores the variance.
Though the average punter will lose a bit of money gambling, some will win big. The possibility that "it could be you", however remote, is the reason that people play the lottery. They aren't interested in winning back $25 on every $50 they spend, they're interested in having some chance — small as it is — of winning a life-changing amount, and they're willing to spend $50 to have that chance.
By your argument, people who take out insurance are stupid, too. After all, the insurance companies are in it to make money, and the premiums they charge will always leave them something after the average pay-out. But you don't buy insurance because for that $500 you'll at least get $250 back if someone steals your TV. You buy insurance because you don't want your life to be ruined if your whole house burns down. Most people will never be so unlucky, but many value the peace of mind from knowing that if they are, then most of the loss will be recovered.
Wanna bet who is going to win?
Count me in. My money's on the lawyers!
As for the meaningless cabal of US bashers - get a grip. We are the WTO. Without our commitment to abide by the treaties there will be no WTO.
I don't know whether your claim is due to ignorance or arrogance, but either way it is a perfect example of why the US has such a poor international standing today. If you are the WTO and the rest of us are just irrelevant wannabes, presumably you won't be taking any further action to promote your intellectual property framework in China and eastern Europe, you're OK with the Arab states collaborating to push up the price of your oil supply, you won't mind if everyone else adopts trade policies that let their currencies slide the way you've let yours go even though this will do far more economic damage to you than to them...?
Unfortunately, while their plans for Baldur's Gate IV: You Are Not A God include using edgy 3D character models instead of carefully animated sprites, replacing all the NPC interactions with shrugs and "huh" noises (and some bad chat-up lines between Minsc and Aerie if you know how to find the easter egg), cutting out the spell effects with complex graphics and having a guy just pull out a gun and shoot the bad guy first instead, scrapping the D&D-based game mechanics in favour of "highest level always wins", and allowing Elminster to join your party, there are no plans at the present time to include football in the courtyard of the De'Arnise Hold. Sorry.
I remember from my teenage years how EA used to be a name you could rely on for a fun game. Now, they're a shambling zombie force that sucks the life out of anything they touch, and causes their newly assimilated zombie-children to spew foul darkness onto the marketplace.
If you treat your staff like slaves, that's what you get.
I haven't bought an EA game in years, but I've very much enjoyed several Bioware ones. I fear those days are over.
You probably feel like you shouldn't have to invest in your own email server, or you shouldn't have to pay an ISP to host your mailing list traffic. You might have a point there.
Might? We're talking about a non-profit organisation, running a mailing list as a service to the community. There is no question of "investment", because there is no money to invest.
However, if you don't want to play by the rules that others are setting up, you can't expect your mail to be delivered.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. For the overwhelming majority of people on our list, everything works just fine. It is only those who choose to use substandard mail services that lose out. Our position — and this was discussed — is that this is their problem, not ours.
You might not have spammers who have appropriated your domain name for their purposes. I'm honestly surprised that you're able to change the From: header and have it work.
It's funny: I hear that a lot, yet not one of the various people I mentioned before, using any of the mail services from the local university through small local ISPs up to some pretty big names, has ever reported encountering this problem in practice. Given that many of us have our own personal domains, but again we send mails through various ISPs' servers, I rather doubt this is because mail is getting silently dropped.
We did get one guy mailing us the other day, telling us how our system was set up "wrong" and helpfully telling us how to "fix" it by adding SPF to our domain. He had discovered this because he had configured his own mail system to reject incoming mail based entirely on whether the sending domain had a matching SPF record, and he happened to notice a bounce message in his logs.
I contemplated replying to explain to him why he was a fool for configuring his mail system in that way. I could have pointed out that fewer than 1/10 of all domains actually have an SPF record, and that of those who do, getting on for half of them are just set to "accept all" to get around this sort of foolishness. But I decided I had better things to do with my time. If he configures his mail filtering that aggressively, not receiving an occasional update from us is the least of his worries.
The organisation that runs the mailing list I've mentioned elsewhere has a large organising committee, which changes fairly frequently (each post changes hands at least once per year, more frequently in some cases). On that committee, there are several different people who would want to send a mail to our announcements list at times. We have no mail server of our own, but always send mail with a From: header set to our general contact address. Thus we can have several people, each of whom will post to the list using whatever mail server they personally have access to, and those people change quite often.
Of course, we could try to work out all the IPs used by each person's ISP/mail provider, and include them in an SPF record for our domain, and update it every few weeks when one of the posts changes hands to someone new. We could set up Sender ID and DomainKeys and so on as well. But frankly, that's a lot of hassle, and gains us very little. As I said earlier in the discussion, until there is a common, widely used, effective standard for this stuff, we just don't consider it worth our time to support everyone's pet idea.
SPF is, IMHO, a flawed implementation of a worth-a-try idea:
In other words, it's a pain to set up if you're the little guy, it's not future proof even if you do, and in any case, improper use is so widespread that its concept is undermined before you even start. The idea wasn't a bad one, but the implementation is hopeless as it stands.
Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't think the Spamhaus-recommended terminology is any better. "Double opt-in" has been the common name for our approach since a long time before anyone heard of Spamhaus, and I don't see how "confirmed opt-in" is any less vulnerable to word-twisting abuse according to the argument they give. They even acknowledge on the page you cited that "double opt-in" is a term in use by legitimate mailers (unlike some of the other suggestions they mention, which frankly I've never heard of until today).
As you have demonstrated, the form I tend to use makes it very clear both that we are not in the business of spamming and that we take technical measures to ensure that we don't come across that way. As long as people understand that, I'm happy.
If you started dissing hotmail (which I just tested with a 50 recipients list and stopped checking after the 11th) for "abusive SPAM filtering", maybe _you_ need to check how you send emails and/or the clients (scripts hopefully better then client for massmailing) to achieve your goals.
We send out our mails using a standard issue mailing list manager, which deals with confirming all the addresses before they are added to the list among other things. All mails we send come from recognisable addresses, include a recognisable keyword in the subject line to help people wanting to use mail filters, include appropriate headers to indicate that the mail is a bulk message, and contain only content of the kind a list subscriber would expect.
We do not use SPF, Sender ID, DomainKeys, or any similar fundamentally flawed system, nor will we support one until a recognised, widely adopted and effective standard is in place.
This suits our goals, and those of most of our community, just fine. We don't lose any sleep over the few people who choose to blame us rather than their mail service because their mail service doesn't follow the same rule as everyone else.
Our (100% legitimate, double opt-in) mailing list gets a few Hotmail addresses added to it every now and then. We frequently get people complaining about missing mails and so on. Invariably, it's because of something silly, usually spam filtering that has been set to be so ludicrously aggressive that practically anything not white-listed (i.e., nothing on a new account) gets through.
We have now reached the point where we consider Hotmail an irrelevance. We don't even advise complainants to use another mail client any more, we just ignore them. The list is not run for profit, and the effort of supporting Microsoft's not-playing-ball freebie mail system just isn't worth it for what is basically a hobby set-up run for the benefit of our community.
I think there is a piracy problem simply if honest people are paying for something but dishonest people are getting the same thing for free by breaking the rules. The system doesn't scale to everyone breaking the rules, which makes it unethical and selfish to do so while others playing by the rules do not.
Please note that this argument is based on simple economic principles, and is utterly unaffected by whether or not the prices asked are fair, the record labels are themselves breaking anti-competition laws, what proportion of illegally ripped material realistically constitutes lost sales, or any of the other make-me-feel-better excuses.
<analogy type="obligatory, dubious, car"> Copyright infringement is somewhat similar in effect to driving illegally up the bus-only/HOV/cycle lane to bypass the queue and then cutting in. You can try to rationalise it away by saying, "But the other guys would have queued anyway!" However, the reality is that those who play by the rules are indirectly damaged by those who do not, because it takes longer for them to get to the front of the queue, instead of everyone getting the same deal. Overall, it is a zero-sum game, because if everyone broke the rules, no-one would have an advantage. Queue-jumping wins only because you are taking advantage of the good nature of others who do not queue-jump. </analogy>
Not exactly a formal survey, but FWIW, I often buy music to dance to direct from the bands (some of whom basically run their own independent mini-label) or via resellers who source direct from the bands. This is for loads of different kinds of dancing: Latin American, swing, ballroom, that kind of thing. You can get CDs from some of the better-known bands via the major record labels, but no-one really does, because it just costs more and all of the best bands made their name playing live gigs and through word-of-mouth publicity anyway. If my friends are anything to go by, the same is probably true for folk, choral/religious music, and many other "niche markets" too.
Unfortunately, I think you'll find a long-standing Intel patent on "a method for getting completely wrong answers to basic mathematical problems using a computer" and its applications constitute prior art that undermines your patent.
If SCO has taught us anything it's that you don't have to tell anyone the details, even the judge.
Really? That's amazing. How are things working out for them?