The very fact that we're having this discussion shows that, unfortunately, you are wrong.
Would a responsible adult behave in this way? No. And yet we keep seeing stories about some illegal act or another performed by children using the Internet without adequate supervision. That's why parents shouldn't treat children who would do this sort of thing like responsible adults.
But an awful lot of home users rely on the advice of their knowledgeable friends and family members in making decisions.
I reckon it takes around two upgrade cycles for a serious shift in the market to result from geek momentum alone, once the geeks decide they've had enough and switch. First time out, the geeks start encouraging friends and family to switch the next time they buy/upgrade/install, and some will. The purchase/upgrade/installation after that, it's not just geek friends and family that use the alternative, it's a couple of the guys at work and your next-door neighbour, who know about as much about computers as you do, and if they're all happy, why not give it a go?
Microsoft already has had geeks turning against it for several years; Win2K was probably their best ever bang-for-buck OS, and a load of geeks never upgraded to XP, or at least saw it for the changed window-dressing it mostly was on the desktop, while switching to Linux for server/hosting systems.
The first generation shifters are starting to move away. My dad uses Linux. Several of my work colleagues use Linux. Several friends I know through diverse hobbies use Linux. Apple have produced a good rival system in MacOS X for people who think Linux is too scary.
Moreover, on the application front, MS Office has been stationary for years as far as Joe Average is concerned, and people are starting to realise that they don't have to pay the "Microsoft tax" if all they want to do is write the occasional letter. Firefox is gaining market share, and other browsers like Opera and the main Mac-based systems are getting their claws in with some people too. iTunes is way more popular than any other legal on-line music service. This sort of thing will lead to the second, much larger generation of shifters before too long.
Moreover, Microsoft's frankly bizarre attempts to lock down their systems seem to have reached the point that they're going to hurt significant numbers of users, not just inconvenience the geeks (until they hack the limitations out, at any rate). Media Player adding copy protection to stuff I scanned from my own CD, and not letting me back up anything I download from legal on-line services? Vista costing a fortune but locking me out if I upgrade my system twice? The constant nagging I now get on my perfectly legitimate, properly licensed Windows XP system, with "Genuine Advantage" splashed all over it? Not playing high-definition video properly without jumping through all kinds of hoops (allegedly)? These are things where average end users are going to start saying "Stuff this, it just doesn't work", and that's just going to accelerate phase two.
Are parents supposed to act like little police states, spying on their kids at every moment?
If that's what's necessary to keep their children under control, then yes, absolutely. Of course, if they need such draconian steps, they've probably already been failing as parents for a long time.
People need to understand that kids are not adults. That's why they're kids. They have not yet learned to behave responsibly as an adult should, and they have not yet earned the rights and freedoms we give to adults. In an ideal world, as children get older and become more responsible, their parents (and society generally) would confer on them increasing freedom in return, until they transition naturally to adulthood with full rights and full responsibility. But respect is earned, and with freedom must come responsibility. If a child doesn't behave appropriately, they don't deserve the privileges, and that includes luxuries like computers in their room, Internet access, and the freedom to combine them unsupervised.
Although you make fun of the "strange contradiction" of applying the Constitution only to citizens, I think that's a more popular interpretation than you think. In fact, I'm not entirely convinced that it's not the correct one; I think the Constitution is pretty clear in outlining a relationship between citizens of the United States and their government.
Indeed. I understand that your Constitution was intended, in essence, to limit the powers of your government with respect to your people. However, that being the case, I question whether it is the right place for human rights law. The ethics of human rights know no international barriers, and have no concept of nationality or citizenship. Human rights, as recognised by most of the world, should be the bedrock of any civilised society, and an integral part of any modern legal system. It seems that the US (or, to be fairer, the current US administration) uses the technicality that such rights as it guarantees are only guaranteed to its people to perpetrate abominations like Guantanamo Bay.
Talking about the Constitutional rights of foreigners -- or even making moral appeals about not torturing foreigners -- is not going to and has not impressed a great many Americans, and this is why I think there is not more widespread opposition to the policies of the Bush administration.
Oh, there is very widespread opposition to the policies of the Bush administration. Take a look in any foreign country in the world. Supporting Bush has basically brought down Tony Blair's administration here in the UK; he only scraped reelection on a technicality at the first General Election after the latest Gulf War, and he was a lame duck less than a year into his "historic third term". The only thing anyone cares about in British politics today is how soon he'll go and who'll replace him (only to lose the next General Election against a landslide, in all probability, for much the same reasons). Europe generally is becoming increasingly anti-US, it seems, as the very story we're talking about demonstrates. Obviously the constant US heavyweight foreign policy agenda is making them no new friends in Russia, around the Pacific, or anywhere else, either.
Sooner or later, this will have consequences for the people who voted for Bush, and (unfortunately) for everyone else in the US who didn't. The rest of the world is already taking steps to insulate its economic prospects at US expense, so that when the US economic bubble inevitably bursts, the damage will be limited. How much support is there for the US stance on North Korea now? I know several people who have decided not to travel to the US on holiday over the past couple of years, because they didn't want to go through the harrassment at the airport or they were afraid they would be caught up in something and screwed because they weren't US citizens. I even know one guy who turned down what should have been an excellent promotion opportunity with a US-based company because he wasn't happy to move there in the current climate. Bush and his supporters can stick their heads in the sand over this if they want, but it won't change the long term damage this sort of isolationist policy has, and relying on citizen-only human rights laws and pretending Guantanamo doesn't make Bush as bad as Saddam ever was is exactly the sort of thing that causes the problem we're talking about, when foreign powers won't co-operate because they don't trust the US administration to act ethically.
Which is the standard answer, yet still utterly useless if the files in question have no particular common structure to their names. Under those circumstances, the GUI approach is vastly more powerful than the command line one.
This is all rather ironic, given that a security expert in the UK has finally stood up and stated the forbidden-but-obvious: all the added security doesn't really help, it just creates different (but equally damaging, if not worse) targets.
Out of interest, how is that ever going to fly given your Constitution? I can easily believe the legal weasels can trample on the rights of non-US citizens captured outside US soil. I can believe without too much difficulty that they can trample on the rights of non-US citizens captured on US soil; certain areas of the US political system have always suffered from the strange contradiction that it's an important principle to protect basic rights for US citizens, but they're not important for anyone else. But I don't understand how the much-cited Constitutional Rights(TM) of the US citizen are going to be swept away by the wishful thinking of part of the Executive branch.
I'm a habitual maximiser when using WinXP, for two simple reasons:
Maximised windows are more efficient with screen space, since they drop all the border crud. This is a relatively important saving when the current trend is to clutter windows with stupid numbers of toolbars, menus, status bars, scroll bars, sidebars, and if they're not careful crowbars!
As any Mac-loving student of usability knows, the five fastest screen locations to click with a mouse have historically been the current position and the four corners, because the mouse pointer clips at the edges of the screen. The next easiest points to reach quickly and accurately are along the screen edges, for the same reason. This is why the traditional Mac menu along the top of the screen has worked better than the traditional MS Windows menu along the top of each window (leaving aside considerations of space). In a maximised window on WinXP, at least things like the close button should be within easy reach (though modern apps have an irritating tendency not to get this right for scroll bars).
Naturally, as screen sizes get larger, the rules may change. The extra space taken up by window dressing becomes less relevant, the amount of time required to move the mouse all the way across a high-res screen to the far corner goes up, and of course most applications simply don't need the full screen to themselves (and indeed suffer from it in some cases, such as web browsers displaying text blocks too wide for comfortable reading).
It makes sense that with the increasing prevalence of widescreen laptops and large, high-resolution desktop screens, we will move away from the maximise-by-default habit. Personally, I'd love for my GUI to include some of the simple features mentioned by others in this discussion. For example, with a 2560x1600 30" Cinema display, I'd like to have say four quarters of the screen (task bar excluded), and have "maximise" mean "expand to exactly fill this quarter". Then drop the resizing window dressing for "filled" windows, and disallow any accidental moves of those windows except for dragging their title bar to jump it to another quarter of the screen. Add some sort of "mouse hold" effect at the edges of active filled windows (not in general) and you've got all the benefits of the old maximising approach, but in a useful context for a high-res display. (This is the point where someone helpful tells me where to find the tool for WinXP that already does this...;-))
I wonder if multiple desktops helps also. I have a production desktop for my work, a communication desktop with email/IM, and a fun desktop with my music player and such. I can jump between them without moving a lot of windows around. Will that concept be adopted by more than the Gnome/KDE models?
You write as though the big Linux GUIs invented the concept of multiple desktops!
Glancing around my office, that facility is available on the Solaris workstation next to me, it's easy to get for my WinXP PC if I want it (I used it for a while before I had dual monitors), and I think the colleague on the next desk over who runs a Linux machine with I-don't-know-what window manager has it set up mapping four desktops to three screens. Multiple desktops have been around for almost as long as WIMP GUIs, and probably predate the popularity of KDE and Gnome by decades.
I appreciate that you're being funny, but looking at that example from a serious point of view, I imagine I could ctrl-click a dozen files that are all visible in a window at once and drag them to another window faster than I could type a dozen mv commands. I'm doing this sort of thing a lot at the moment, while working on a new web site, since I have a drag-and-drop SCP client. Having only half-size windows (one for local files, one for uploaded ones) is a pain, because it involves a lot of scrolling. With two normal-sized windows, which would be possible with a large monitor or dual monitors, this highly repetitive task would indeed be much faster.
That's pretty much my view of things as well. I was genuinely surprised by how many people in this thread think it's my service provider who is in the wrong, though. I obviously didn't explain myself very clearly, because most of them seem to think my service provider is a spammer, or that its customers are, neither of which is likely to be true for reasons I thought I'd explained. I'm also surprised by how many people think a reply along the lines of "well, e-mail isn't reliable so you shouldn't use it to send important information anyway" makes it all OK.
You really haven't been following this discussion at all, have you?
I don't personally care a whole lot about this case, since as I pointed out elsewhere, I'm only running the IT for this organisation as a volunteer anyway. If someone wants to sign up for our mailing list, but uses a crappy ISP that blanket blocks, that's really not my problem. I suspect, however, that others who are also caught out by such tactics would care rather more, which is why I offered the example.
As for the RBL cases, do your own homework. Two minutes with Google will turn up ample evidence of RBLs blacklisting people who aren't really spammers at all, and then being crappy about removing them. Hell, just read some of the other comments elsewhere in this discussion. Whether you "take my word" or not is your business, and personally, since you obviously aren't bothering to think about what's being written in this discussion anyway, I don't much care.
I'm not personally a content provider per se, though it's true that I do know some people who have been screwed personally in this way.
I also realise the dilemma here; of course there is merit in the "common carrier" approach. However, there comes a point beyond which service providers cannot credibly rely on a claim to such status as a defence. I think when probably half of the content crossing your system is illegal, picking things off one-by-one is not really in the interests of either moral justice or upholding the spirit of the law.
Please learn to read your logs. From my experience over the last 5 years, almost all of thse "aol.com" and "hotmail.com" addresses are forged, and many of them are being forwarded through careless providers like the ones hosting your mailing list.
Please don't assume I'm naive or incompetent. I'm well aware of what my logs say, and in fact I've just this moment received a mail that (looking at those logs) appears to have been forwarded through a big name service provider using exactly the same approach that our service provider uses. Perhaps we should disconnect Microsoft from the Internet to reduce spam as well?
From your own description, your provider is not doing the basic steps to block such abuses: that's all it takes to stay off Spamhaus's blacklists.
The problem in our case wasn't Spamhaus; it was a slightly different example of a heavy-handed approach to spam control causing collateral damage.
As for "being realistic": I don't understand how you can think it's unacceptable for one service provider to forward (not originate) mails in "common carrier" fashion, even though that's exactly what they're being paid to do and have been explicitly instructed to do by the person receiving those mails, yet it's fine for other service providers to disregard the basic protocols as specified in RFCs that define how the Internet is supposed to work.
I think you're exaggerating with the volume of mail you claim that would produce as well: one bounce message going out, and possibly one incoming "bounce failed" message in reply, should be all that's necessary. In fact, if their system is using the protocol properly, they should immediately discover that the address isn't valid, and neither message should ever be sent. Of course, we've already established that they don't use the protocol properly. Perhaps they should work on that, rather than appointing themselves judge, jury and executioner for every small ISP on the planet?
The thing is, it's not a company, it's a not-for-profit organisation run by volunteers (including me). Switching would incur very significant expenses and take a lot of time, not to mention that I have no guarantee that I will receive the same excellent levels of service and support from any other provider that I receive from the much-recommended organisation we currently use. Obviously I do not view this problem as their fault, I am perfectly content to stay where we are, and I have no obligation to spend my time and my organisation's money moving to another provider because some third party is screwing around, particularly when there is no guarantee that any alternative provider won't get screwed the same way next week.
Throwing in pointless ad hominem attacks doesn't make your case any more convincing either. Your signature is quite apt, as you have obviously completely failed to grasp the situation I have described in this thread.
Nowhere have I indicated that my service provider's customers are spammers, nor described spammers as legitimate. Indeed, as I have noted explicitly already, this provider has very sensible policies on such matters, and any of their customers found spamming would probably be kicked far faster than any of the big name mail services would get around to it.
The customers in question are paying for a mail forwarding service. Mail goes to someone@theirdomain.com (hosted by my service provider) and is then forwarded, at the explicit request of the person owning theirdomain.com to another address specified by that person. The only spam is coming in from outside.
Actually, all that needs to be done is for your ISP to properly respond to reports of abuse on their network. It's that simple. Your argument can easily be disproven by looking at all the ISPs that: A) Don't actively filter and B) aren't on the blacklist.
From direct firsthand experience with several such issues at several organisations over several years, that's a load of crap. One ISP's abuse is another's inconvenience. Responding to requests from RBLs does not in any way guarantee that you will be unblocked; indeed, in several of the cases I'm thining of the only reason the person/organisation was on the RBL was because they were unfortunate enough to share a block with a known spammer, and the RBL blocked the lot and refused to lift the block on those people even when they indicated that they had nothing to do with the spammers. I've also seen e-mail correspondence chains that were published by some service providers after these encounters, which made it absolutely clear that the services in question were already taking reasonable steps to limit spam, yet didn't get them taken off the blacklist.
RBLs have no code of conduct and are not regulated, and they frequently act like the kind of bully who has no supervision and throws their weight around with impunity. The sooner you realise this, the more sense you'll make in this discussion.
You know spam is pouring out of that network. You choose to be a part of it. You pay the price.
I don't know that. Actually, I rather suspect it's not, and that the problem is caused entirely by automated systems on big providers' networks being too stupid to understand what's going on. In any case, I don't pay the price at all: no-one pays me to run that list, and the vast majority of our members will get the messages. It's those who use the services that arbitrarily block our provider who are losing out.
Only the copyright holder can tell that they own the video, and that they didn't give anyone permission to share it. Google/YouTube has no magic insight into the legal status of anonymously uploaded videos.
And since when was ignorance a defence in law?
In any case, one clue is in the way a lot of the special interest videos have even included the title sequence, complete with copyright statement!
You could talk to your ISP about the problem or choose an ISP who prevents unwanted harrassment of other ISP's users.
What "unwanted harrassment"? The vast majority of users receiving mail via the service in question will be technically knowledgable people who have deliberately set up the e-mail forwarding, and who quite possibly have also opted not to have any additional spam controls placed on it because they want to perform their own filtering.
The problem here is that AOL, Hotmail et al. assume this is a mistake on their user's part and that the incoming messages they decide are spam are not wanted by their user, which of course is fine until they make a mistake and get a false positive, which is probably why the user opted not to have spam controls run by others in the first place.
In reply to your second point:
The users of these companies choose to have their email automatically filtered by whatever rules their ISP imposes on them.
I would accept that argument if I believed it were a fair representation of what happens. In practice, I suspect very few people know enough about spam and spam-blocking to make any sort of informed decision here, and if you took a random sample of AOL users, I very much doubt any of them would feel they had made any active choices in this regard.
If you wish to be proactive and not have your users bothered with switching, then maybe you need to move to a non-spam supporting ISP?
As I've mentioned elsewhere, I don't have a spam-supporting ISP right now. They don't orginate spam, nor run open relays. The only spam they'll be emitting in any significant quantity is stuff that came from outside, and is being forwarded automatically at the request of one of their users. They're no more responsible for this, nor authorised to block it for that matter, than any other part of the Internet infrastructure through which that message will pass from the real problem (the person or organisation originating it) to the recipient.
Incidentally, further to my previous reply, I just wanted to pick up on this point you made:
But because they are incompetent and allow so much spam to be sent from their network, they are doubtless placing an unreasonable burden on the rest of us.
I doubt that very much, because unless you are one of their customers too, there is no reason you would be receiving any mail passing through their system. Remember, we're only talking about them forwarding incoming mails to another address as specifically requested by one of their customers, not them letting their customers spam others (which, as far as I know, they never have and never would).
Once you have all the people that count on board, you can diligently take down material of comapnies that don't wanna play with you. Whose loss would that be once all the major companies are Google's bussiness partners?
Google's. Anyone and his brother can find ripped copies of a big artist's latest album or the newest blockbuster movie. IME, people often go to the big video sites like YouTube looking for more specialised things that aren't so freely available. Those are the videos that are most damaging infringements (since the people behind them don't have the profit margins of Big Media and can't just write it off as "the price of doing business") so it certainly won't harm the producers/distributers of all the niche content to be removed from Google. It will, however, reduce the number of page hits on the video sites and therefore the number of ad views, and that's the one thing likely to scare Google.
I'm not disputing the US DMCA provisions here; I don't know enough US law to know what the situation is for sure. However, much of the world does not have such provision, and frankly, I'm not sure the US has a terribly credible position on this one, since they're effectively saying "go ahead and infringe until you're told not to, and then have no penalty as long as you stop when you're caught". There are a lot more copyright holders in the world than Big Media, and a lot of the special interest producers/distributors that YouTube/Google harms have a lot more to lose, since they don't make the huge profits Big Media does and their businesses could quite literally collapse under the pressure of illegal copying. They also lack the resources to monitor everyone's video site everywhere in the world constantly, and since infringing their copyright is illegal, I'm not sure why they should have to.
What I don't understand is why so many people here are describing our service provider using terms like "incompetent". They are doing exactly what they are being paid to do. It is not their job to decide on either our behalf or our list recipients' what constitutes unwanted mail, and indeed I would switch away from them to another provider if they started adding involuntary spam(+false positive) controls on my personal incoming mail.
The thing that most annoys me about the position taken by Hotmail and AOL here is that it's so darned hypocritical. I also get the incoming mail to our organisation's general contact address, which runs to a few hundred spams per day, and say 20 legit mails on a busy day. Looking at yesterday's logs, a very significant minority of the spam came via Hotmail or AOL systems, while none whatsoever touched our service provider. By Hotmail and AOL's own argument, the rest of the Internet should therefore cut them off entirely, as they generate (not forward, generate) more spam than all the small ISPs put together.
Putting your comments in bold or capitals doesn't make them any more true, you know. Do you really not appreciate the difference between a service that originates spam, and a service that is a mere conduit acting on the explicit request of its legitimate customers?
By your argument, we should either shut down the entire Internet, or require every mid-stream service provider who carries e-mail to filter it (using their own arbitrary rules, completely outside the control of the people sending and receiving the mail) to be "reputable". I don't think that would be an improvement on today, when at least you can have some control over your own e-mail if you want it.
I think you misunderstand. The spam is not originating with my service provider. It isn't coming from other customers on the same provider, nor does the provider have open relays.
The spam is already being sent to an address hosted by my service provider, and the service provider is merely forwarding all mail sent to that address onto the alternative address requested by their customer, without bias or judgement. That is exactly what they are paid to do, and failing to forward any mail because (in their opinion) it is spam would not just be risking false positives, it would be breach of contract.
If they were allowing spam to originate from their own customers, that would be an entirely different thing, but they're not. In fact, these guys are by far the most responsible and technically knowledgeable people I have worked with in IT. If they did get wind of one of their own customers trying to send spam, I imagine that customer would be kicked faster than players like AOL would even respond to an abuse@ mail. I also use this service provider as a personal customer, independent of my role with the other group I mentioned, precisely because they do what they say they will and don't employ arbitrary, non-optional filtering of my mail using Spamhaus or similar.
And this is exactly the reason that the major Internet infrastructure should not be, directly or indirectly, under the control of a single national government.
Personally, I would be happy to see Spamhaus burn in hell. I'm quite capable of filtering my own junk mail, and sick and tired of the damaging losses when Spamhaus hit an occasional false positive and some random service provider between someone sending me a message I want and my own ISP happened to sign up. And of course Spamhaus are not above the law. Next time their directors visit the US, go ahead and lock 'em up if your law says you must (though you might want to consider the implications of that kind of legal system more deeply, too).
But on the other hand, you have to recognise that this was an action brought against a relatively small organisation in a foreign jurisdiction. If they choose not to defend themselves in that jurisdiction, then it's a very dangerous precedent to have the judiciary/executive branches there trying to screw the (non-)defendants indirectly because they happen to be able to through other means. The government of the US should not be able to disconnect someone in another country from the Internet, whether on a whim, a court order, or an act of Congress. They have no moral authority to do so. Indeed, if the roles were reversed, you'd probably have GWB on TV announcing that the US was under attack from cyber-terrorists attempting to hold its economy hostage or some such claptrap.
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The very fact that we're having this discussion shows that, unfortunately, you are wrong.
Would a responsible adult behave in this way? No. And yet we keep seeing stories about some illegal act or another performed by children using the Internet without adequate supervision. That's why parents shouldn't treat children who would do this sort of thing like responsible adults.
But an awful lot of home users rely on the advice of their knowledgeable friends and family members in making decisions.
I reckon it takes around two upgrade cycles for a serious shift in the market to result from geek momentum alone, once the geeks decide they've had enough and switch. First time out, the geeks start encouraging friends and family to switch the next time they buy/upgrade/install, and some will. The purchase/upgrade/installation after that, it's not just geek friends and family that use the alternative, it's a couple of the guys at work and your next-door neighbour, who know about as much about computers as you do, and if they're all happy, why not give it a go?
Microsoft already has had geeks turning against it for several years; Win2K was probably their best ever bang-for-buck OS, and a load of geeks never upgraded to XP, or at least saw it for the changed window-dressing it mostly was on the desktop, while switching to Linux for server/hosting systems.
The first generation shifters are starting to move away. My dad uses Linux. Several of my work colleagues use Linux. Several friends I know through diverse hobbies use Linux. Apple have produced a good rival system in MacOS X for people who think Linux is too scary.
Moreover, on the application front, MS Office has been stationary for years as far as Joe Average is concerned, and people are starting to realise that they don't have to pay the "Microsoft tax" if all they want to do is write the occasional letter. Firefox is gaining market share, and other browsers like Opera and the main Mac-based systems are getting their claws in with some people too. iTunes is way more popular than any other legal on-line music service. This sort of thing will lead to the second, much larger generation of shifters before too long.
Moreover, Microsoft's frankly bizarre attempts to lock down their systems seem to have reached the point that they're going to hurt significant numbers of users, not just inconvenience the geeks (until they hack the limitations out, at any rate). Media Player adding copy protection to stuff I scanned from my own CD, and not letting me back up anything I download from legal on-line services? Vista costing a fortune but locking me out if I upgrade my system twice? The constant nagging I now get on my perfectly legitimate, properly licensed Windows XP system, with "Genuine Advantage" splashed all over it? Not playing high-definition video properly without jumping through all kinds of hoops (allegedly)? These are things where average end users are going to start saying "Stuff this, it just doesn't work", and that's just going to accelerate phase two.
If that's what's necessary to keep their children under control, then yes, absolutely. Of course, if they need such draconian steps, they've probably already been failing as parents for a long time.
People need to understand that kids are not adults. That's why they're kids. They have not yet learned to behave responsibly as an adult should, and they have not yet earned the rights and freedoms we give to adults. In an ideal world, as children get older and become more responsible, their parents (and society generally) would confer on them increasing freedom in return, until they transition naturally to adulthood with full rights and full responsibility. But respect is earned, and with freedom must come responsibility. If a child doesn't behave appropriately, they don't deserve the privileges, and that includes luxuries like computers in their room, Internet access, and the freedom to combine them unsupervised.
Indeed. I understand that your Constitution was intended, in essence, to limit the powers of your government with respect to your people. However, that being the case, I question whether it is the right place for human rights law. The ethics of human rights know no international barriers, and have no concept of nationality or citizenship. Human rights, as recognised by most of the world, should be the bedrock of any civilised society, and an integral part of any modern legal system. It seems that the US (or, to be fairer, the current US administration) uses the technicality that such rights as it guarantees are only guaranteed to its people to perpetrate abominations like Guantanamo Bay.
Oh, there is very widespread opposition to the policies of the Bush administration. Take a look in any foreign country in the world. Supporting Bush has basically brought down Tony Blair's administration here in the UK; he only scraped reelection on a technicality at the first General Election after the latest Gulf War, and he was a lame duck less than a year into his "historic third term". The only thing anyone cares about in British politics today is how soon he'll go and who'll replace him (only to lose the next General Election against a landslide, in all probability, for much the same reasons). Europe generally is becoming increasingly anti-US, it seems, as the very story we're talking about demonstrates. Obviously the constant US heavyweight foreign policy agenda is making them no new friends in Russia, around the Pacific, or anywhere else, either.
Sooner or later, this will have consequences for the people who voted for Bush, and (unfortunately) for everyone else in the US who didn't. The rest of the world is already taking steps to insulate its economic prospects at US expense, so that when the US economic bubble inevitably bursts, the damage will be limited. How much support is there for the US stance on North Korea now? I know several people who have decided not to travel to the US on holiday over the past couple of years, because they didn't want to go through the harrassment at the airport or they were afraid they would be caught up in something and screwed because they weren't US citizens. I even know one guy who turned down what should have been an excellent promotion opportunity with a US-based company because he wasn't happy to move there in the current climate. Bush and his supporters can stick their heads in the sand over this if they want, but it won't change the long term damage this sort of isolationist policy has, and relying on citizen-only human rights laws and pretending Guantanamo doesn't make Bush as bad as Saddam ever was is exactly the sort of thing that causes the problem we're talking about, when foreign powers won't co-operate because they don't trust the US administration to act ethically.
Which is the standard answer, yet still utterly useless if the files in question have no particular common structure to their names. Under those circumstances, the GUI approach is vastly more powerful than the command line one.
This is all rather ironic, given that a security expert in the UK has finally stood up and stated the forbidden-but-obvious: all the added security doesn't really help, it just creates different (but equally damaging, if not worse) targets.
Out of interest, how is that ever going to fly given your Constitution? I can easily believe the legal weasels can trample on the rights of non-US citizens captured outside US soil. I can believe without too much difficulty that they can trample on the rights of non-US citizens captured on US soil; certain areas of the US political system have always suffered from the strange contradiction that it's an important principle to protect basic rights for US citizens, but they're not important for anyone else. But I don't understand how the much-cited Constitutional Rights(TM) of the US citizen are going to be swept away by the wishful thinking of part of the Executive branch.
I'm a habitual maximiser when using WinXP, for two simple reasons:
Naturally, as screen sizes get larger, the rules may change. The extra space taken up by window dressing becomes less relevant, the amount of time required to move the mouse all the way across a high-res screen to the far corner goes up, and of course most applications simply don't need the full screen to themselves (and indeed suffer from it in some cases, such as web browsers displaying text blocks too wide for comfortable reading).
It makes sense that with the increasing prevalence of widescreen laptops and large, high-resolution desktop screens, we will move away from the maximise-by-default habit. Personally, I'd love for my GUI to include some of the simple features mentioned by others in this discussion. For example, with a 2560x1600 30" Cinema display, I'd like to have say four quarters of the screen (task bar excluded), and have "maximise" mean "expand to exactly fill this quarter". Then drop the resizing window dressing for "filled" windows, and disallow any accidental moves of those windows except for dragging their title bar to jump it to another quarter of the screen. Add some sort of "mouse hold" effect at the edges of active filled windows (not in general) and you've got all the benefits of the old maximising approach, but in a useful context for a high-res display. (This is the point where someone helpful tells me where to find the tool for WinXP that already does this... ;-))
You write as though the big Linux GUIs invented the concept of multiple desktops!
Glancing around my office, that facility is available on the Solaris workstation next to me, it's easy to get for my WinXP PC if I want it (I used it for a while before I had dual monitors), and I think the colleague on the next desk over who runs a Linux machine with I-don't-know-what window manager has it set up mapping four desktops to three screens. Multiple desktops have been around for almost as long as WIMP GUIs, and probably predate the popularity of KDE and Gnome by decades.
I appreciate that you're being funny, but looking at that example from a serious point of view, I imagine I could ctrl-click a dozen files that are all visible in a window at once and drag them to another window faster than I could type a dozen mv commands. I'm doing this sort of thing a lot at the moment, while working on a new web site, since I have a drag-and-drop SCP client. Having only half-size windows (one for local files, one for uploaded ones) is a pain, because it involves a lot of scrolling. With two normal-sized windows, which would be possible with a large monitor or dual monitors, this highly repetitive task would indeed be much faster.
That's pretty much my view of things as well. I was genuinely surprised by how many people in this thread think it's my service provider who is in the wrong, though. I obviously didn't explain myself very clearly, because most of them seem to think my service provider is a spammer, or that its customers are, neither of which is likely to be true for reasons I thought I'd explained. I'm also surprised by how many people think a reply along the lines of "well, e-mail isn't reliable so you shouldn't use it to send important information anyway" makes it all OK.
You really haven't been following this discussion at all, have you?
I don't personally care a whole lot about this case, since as I pointed out elsewhere, I'm only running the IT for this organisation as a volunteer anyway. If someone wants to sign up for our mailing list, but uses a crappy ISP that blanket blocks, that's really not my problem. I suspect, however, that others who are also caught out by such tactics would care rather more, which is why I offered the example.
As for the RBL cases, do your own homework. Two minutes with Google will turn up ample evidence of RBLs blacklisting people who aren't really spammers at all, and then being crappy about removing them. Hell, just read some of the other comments elsewhere in this discussion. Whether you "take my word" or not is your business, and personally, since you obviously aren't bothering to think about what's being written in this discussion anyway, I don't much care.
I'm not personally a content provider per se, though it's true that I do know some people who have been screwed personally in this way.
I also realise the dilemma here; of course there is merit in the "common carrier" approach. However, there comes a point beyond which service providers cannot credibly rely on a claim to such status as a defence. I think when probably half of the content crossing your system is illegal, picking things off one-by-one is not really in the interests of either moral justice or upholding the spirit of the law.
Please don't assume I'm naive or incompetent. I'm well aware of what my logs say, and in fact I've just this moment received a mail that (looking at those logs) appears to have been forwarded through a big name service provider using exactly the same approach that our service provider uses. Perhaps we should disconnect Microsoft from the Internet to reduce spam as well?
The problem in our case wasn't Spamhaus; it was a slightly different example of a heavy-handed approach to spam control causing collateral damage.
As for "being realistic": I don't understand how you can think it's unacceptable for one service provider to forward (not originate) mails in "common carrier" fashion, even though that's exactly what they're being paid to do and have been explicitly instructed to do by the person receiving those mails, yet it's fine for other service providers to disregard the basic protocols as specified in RFCs that define how the Internet is supposed to work.
I think you're exaggerating with the volume of mail you claim that would produce as well: one bounce message going out, and possibly one incoming "bounce failed" message in reply, should be all that's necessary. In fact, if their system is using the protocol properly, they should immediately discover that the address isn't valid, and neither message should ever be sent. Of course, we've already established that they don't use the protocol properly. Perhaps they should work on that, rather than appointing themselves judge, jury and executioner for every small ISP on the planet?
The thing is, it's not a company, it's a not-for-profit organisation run by volunteers (including me). Switching would incur very significant expenses and take a lot of time, not to mention that I have no guarantee that I will receive the same excellent levels of service and support from any other provider that I receive from the much-recommended organisation we currently use. Obviously I do not view this problem as their fault, I am perfectly content to stay where we are, and I have no obligation to spend my time and my organisation's money moving to another provider because some third party is screwing around, particularly when there is no guarantee that any alternative provider won't get screwed the same way next week.
Throwing in pointless ad hominem attacks doesn't make your case any more convincing either. Your signature is quite apt, as you have obviously completely failed to grasp the situation I have described in this thread.
Nowhere have I indicated that my service provider's customers are spammers, nor described spammers as legitimate. Indeed, as I have noted explicitly already, this provider has very sensible policies on such matters, and any of their customers found spamming would probably be kicked far faster than any of the big name mail services would get around to it.
The customers in question are paying for a mail forwarding service. Mail goes to someone@theirdomain.com (hosted by my service provider) and is then forwarded, at the explicit request of the person owning theirdomain.com to another address specified by that person. The only spam is coming in from outside.
From direct firsthand experience with several such issues at several organisations over several years, that's a load of crap. One ISP's abuse is another's inconvenience. Responding to requests from RBLs does not in any way guarantee that you will be unblocked; indeed, in several of the cases I'm thining of the only reason the person/organisation was on the RBL was because they were unfortunate enough to share a block with a known spammer, and the RBL blocked the lot and refused to lift the block on those people even when they indicated that they had nothing to do with the spammers. I've also seen e-mail correspondence chains that were published by some service providers after these encounters, which made it absolutely clear that the services in question were already taking reasonable steps to limit spam, yet didn't get them taken off the blacklist.
RBLs have no code of conduct and are not regulated, and they frequently act like the kind of bully who has no supervision and throws their weight around with impunity. The sooner you realise this, the more sense you'll make in this discussion.
I don't know that. Actually, I rather suspect it's not, and that the problem is caused entirely by automated systems on big providers' networks being too stupid to understand what's going on. In any case, I don't pay the price at all: no-one pays me to run that list, and the vast majority of our members will get the messages. It's those who use the services that arbitrarily block our provider who are losing out.
And since when was ignorance a defence in law?
In any case, one clue is in the way a lot of the special interest videos have even included the title sequence, complete with copyright statement!
In reply to your first point:
What "unwanted harrassment"? The vast majority of users receiving mail via the service in question will be technically knowledgable people who have deliberately set up the e-mail forwarding, and who quite possibly have also opted not to have any additional spam controls placed on it because they want to perform their own filtering.
The problem here is that AOL, Hotmail et al. assume this is a mistake on their user's part and that the incoming messages they decide are spam are not wanted by their user, which of course is fine until they make a mistake and get a false positive, which is probably why the user opted not to have spam controls run by others in the first place.
In reply to your second point:
I would accept that argument if I believed it were a fair representation of what happens. In practice, I suspect very few people know enough about spam and spam-blocking to make any sort of informed decision here, and if you took a random sample of AOL users, I very much doubt any of them would feel they had made any active choices in this regard.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, I don't have a spam-supporting ISP right now. They don't orginate spam, nor run open relays. The only spam they'll be emitting in any significant quantity is stuff that came from outside, and is being forwarded automatically at the request of one of their users. They're no more responsible for this, nor authorised to block it for that matter, than any other part of the Internet infrastructure through which that message will pass from the real problem (the person or organisation originating it) to the recipient.
Incidentally, further to my previous reply, I just wanted to pick up on this point you made:
I doubt that very much, because unless you are one of their customers too, there is no reason you would be receiving any mail passing through their system. Remember, we're only talking about them forwarding incoming mails to another address as specifically requested by one of their customers, not them letting their customers spam others (which, as far as I know, they never have and never would).
Google's. Anyone and his brother can find ripped copies of a big artist's latest album or the newest blockbuster movie. IME, people often go to the big video sites like YouTube looking for more specialised things that aren't so freely available. Those are the videos that are most damaging infringements (since the people behind them don't have the profit margins of Big Media and can't just write it off as "the price of doing business") so it certainly won't harm the producers/distributers of all the niche content to be removed from Google. It will, however, reduce the number of page hits on the video sites and therefore the number of ad views, and that's the one thing likely to scare Google.
I'm not disputing the US DMCA provisions here; I don't know enough US law to know what the situation is for sure. However, much of the world does not have such provision, and frankly, I'm not sure the US has a terribly credible position on this one, since they're effectively saying "go ahead and infringe until you're told not to, and then have no penalty as long as you stop when you're caught". There are a lot more copyright holders in the world than Big Media, and a lot of the special interest producers/distributors that YouTube/Google harms have a lot more to lose, since they don't make the huge profits Big Media does and their businesses could quite literally collapse under the pressure of illegal copying. They also lack the resources to monitor everyone's video site everywhere in the world constantly, and since infringing their copyright is illegal, I'm not sure why they should have to.
What I don't understand is why so many people here are describing our service provider using terms like "incompetent". They are doing exactly what they are being paid to do. It is not their job to decide on either our behalf or our list recipients' what constitutes unwanted mail, and indeed I would switch away from them to another provider if they started adding involuntary spam(+false positive) controls on my personal incoming mail.
The thing that most annoys me about the position taken by Hotmail and AOL here is that it's so darned hypocritical. I also get the incoming mail to our organisation's general contact address, which runs to a few hundred spams per day, and say 20 legit mails on a busy day. Looking at yesterday's logs, a very significant minority of the spam came via Hotmail or AOL systems, while none whatsoever touched our service provider. By Hotmail and AOL's own argument, the rest of the Internet should therefore cut them off entirely, as they generate (not forward, generate) more spam than all the small ISPs put together.
Putting your comments in bold or capitals doesn't make them any more true, you know. Do you really not appreciate the difference between a service that originates spam, and a service that is a mere conduit acting on the explicit request of its legitimate customers?
By your argument, we should either shut down the entire Internet, or require every mid-stream service provider who carries e-mail to filter it (using their own arbitrary rules, completely outside the control of the people sending and receiving the mail) to be "reputable". I don't think that would be an improvement on today, when at least you can have some control over your own e-mail if you want it.
I think you misunderstand. The spam is not originating with my service provider. It isn't coming from other customers on the same provider, nor does the provider have open relays.
The spam is already being sent to an address hosted by my service provider, and the service provider is merely forwarding all mail sent to that address onto the alternative address requested by their customer, without bias or judgement. That is exactly what they are paid to do, and failing to forward any mail because (in their opinion) it is spam would not just be risking false positives, it would be breach of contract.
If they were allowing spam to originate from their own customers, that would be an entirely different thing, but they're not. In fact, these guys are by far the most responsible and technically knowledgeable people I have worked with in IT. If they did get wind of one of their own customers trying to send spam, I imagine that customer would be kicked faster than players like AOL would even respond to an abuse@ mail. I also use this service provider as a personal customer, independent of my role with the other group I mentioned, precisely because they do what they say they will and don't employ arbitrary, non-optional filtering of my mail using Spamhaus or similar.
And this is exactly the reason that the major Internet infrastructure should not be, directly or indirectly, under the control of a single national government.
Personally, I would be happy to see Spamhaus burn in hell. I'm quite capable of filtering my own junk mail, and sick and tired of the damaging losses when Spamhaus hit an occasional false positive and some random service provider between someone sending me a message I want and my own ISP happened to sign up. And of course Spamhaus are not above the law. Next time their directors visit the US, go ahead and lock 'em up if your law says you must (though you might want to consider the implications of that kind of legal system more deeply, too).
But on the other hand, you have to recognise that this was an action brought against a relatively small organisation in a foreign jurisdiction. If they choose not to defend themselves in that jurisdiction, then it's a very dangerous precedent to have the judiciary/executive branches there trying to screw the (non-)defendants indirectly because they happen to be able to through other means. The government of the US should not be able to disconnect someone in another country from the Internet, whether on a whim, a court order, or an act of Congress. They have no moral authority to do so. Indeed, if the roles were reversed, you'd probably have GWB on TV announcing that the US was under attack from cyber-terrorists attempting to hold its economy hostage or some such claptrap.