True spam is indistinguishable from your best friend sending you a message (unsoliticated!) about a business opportunity.
Wrong. Spam is unsolicited bulk mail. The word "bulk" is key. Also, prior relationships (e.g., friendship, customer who asked to be contacted) are generally considered to excuse the first spam, as it could be seen as a natural mistake. For more information, see the various spam definitions out there. E.g., at abuse.net.
I'm sorry, but spam is no different. Speach is speach.
This is blatantly wrong. Good anti-spam laws focus on behavior, not on content. Even an empty message can be spam.
Consider a real-world example: If I have a political message, I can hand you a copy of it on the street. I can tell it to you as you walk by. I can even stick a copy of it to your door. But I can't force you to listen, and i can't break into your house to convey it to you.
Suppose I buy the biggest megaphone I can find, and then I and my pals set up camp outside your house and read our political messages to you around the clock at 140 decibels. If it bothers you, you need not soundproof your house; you can call the police and have me hauled off.
In front of the judge, no amount of waving the Bill of Rights will get me off. Why? Because although I may have a right to speak, you have a right not to be forced to listen. The right to freedom of speech is a requirement that the government not impede communication between willing parties, not a right to make as much noise as you want just because it could be considered speech.
Spamcop may be responsible, but will every outfit take the same precautions?
On the Internet, and especially with collective projects like spam filtering, reputation is everytying. If Spamcop starts putting out lots of bogus reports, nobody will pay attention to them. So yes, I think that any outfit will have to take the same precautions or become irrelevant.
And regardless of responsiblity, the wording of the complaint notice I received from Spamcop was rather aggressive. How do you expect people to react?
It's been a year or so since I received one, so I guess I can't speak as to its current aggressiveness; the one I got was just a couple of lines and a link.
Perhaps the first notice should be pretty polite. If you could do better, I encourage you to get in touch with the Spamcop folks; I'm sure they'd welcome assistance. But in my experience, most of the people responsible for spam-spewing servers these days are either hopelessly overworked or terminally clueless. To get anything done, you have to scare them. So it may be that making the letters nicer will only reduce the response rate.
The banning of spam has nothing to do with censorship. Spamming is a behavior that has nothing to do with the content of the message. The fact that most spam contains commercial advertising has confused some people, though.
If I stand outside your house and rant into a megaphone at 4 am, you can call the police and have me hauled away, even if I'm reading the bill of rights out loud. Why? Because whatever the content of my speech, my behavior is against the law (and also pretty rude).
EFF co-founder John Gilmore runs an open relay mail server at home, which, to anti-spammers, is among the most evil things that you can do.
Suppose he runs an open shell account server that keeps no logs but allows people to break in to your boxes? Is that also virtuous?
Back when nobody spammed and everybody played nice, open relays were swell. I miss the days when the Internet was one big community and pretty much everybody was playing positive-sum games. And the times I've met John Gilmore, he seems like a great guy. But these days an open relay can and will be used to hide the origin of spam.
If I leave my front door unlocked, the cops won't say boo. But if a bunch of crackheads use my open house as a base of operations to steal from my neighbors, then Johnny Law will have some things to say to me about it.
Personally, I don't like the anti-spam groups, because I don't want some lynch-mob arbitrarily deciding what is spam and what isn't.
Well then bug your reps to get some laws passed. I'd rather spend my time doing other stuff, but as long as spammers are stealing resources and gumming up the works, I'll be doing what I can to stop them. Vigilante action is a poor substitute for the rule of law, but it beats anarchy by a mile.
I said they were willing to put us on shitlists, for a single isolated incident. We did respond, and to the best of my knowledge we were
never actually blocked. But the threat was certainly there.
Which "they" is this? And which lists? I still don't believe you were in the slightest danger of anything bad happening. I don't know of any list that will ban on the basis of a single complaint about a single message.
Hell, in this case, what if said coworker had sent *1* message, by chance to the one recipient who complained?
Spamcop is interested in fighting unsolicted bulk mail. If you get a bogus complaint, you can let the people at spamcop know and they'll rap the user on the knuckles. People who make repeated bogus reports will be terminated. The folks at Spamcop are very serious about making sure they produce mainly high-quality reports; the last thing they want is for people to stop taking them seriously.
Hmm..somehow you didn't refute my claim that email spam is no different than junk mail.
I'm glad to do it, then. There are two big differences.
One difference is in how the cost is paid. The sender of junk mail pays 100% of the cost of creating the junk mail and delivering it to your door. Spam is parasitical; most of the cost is paid by the recipients.
The other difference is that spam costs a lot less per unit to send, suggesting that we'll get a lot more of it.
Spammers and junk mailers both do what they do because the money they receive in sales allows them to pay for their unsolicited garbage. Because paper mail is expensive, you need a reasonable (e.g. > 1%) response rate to make it practical. Despite that, about half of my paper mail is junk.
Spam, on the other hand, is orders of magnitude cheaper, especially when you make others pay most of the cost. Response rates for spam campaigns thus are orders of magnitude lower, meaning that a lot more spam has to be delivered to put a dollar in the pocket of the spammer.
This suggests that spam, left unchecked, will be a much larger percentage of your inbox than is true for junk mail. Because of this, I think spam requires special legal treatment. The laws should at least be equivalent to junk faxes, but I favor stronger ones.
===
You do have a point with the ecologic costs of junk mail. But this is a problem endemic to our system of pricing; the true cost of resource depletion, polution, and disposal is hidden from consumers. Better to solve that problem directly, rather than solving this one tiny symptom.
It always strikes me as hypocritical that people who say that they're for freedom [...] throw all those values out the window just so they don't get inconvenienced with extra email
Like the rest of humanity, most of slashdot's readership is in favor of laws that benefit them and opposed to ones that might harm them. And like most of humanity, they'll say it's all for high-minded reasons. There are exceptions, of course, but too few.
However, it's still possible to have an intelectually coherent position like this. I am strongly in favor of freedom of speech and strongly opposed to spam. This makes sense to me because I'm not opposed to the content of the spam, but rather the behavior of forcing me to take something I don't want and making me pay for it, just so that they can make a buck.
Similarly, I take intent into consideration when dealing with hackers. If somebody breaks into my system and leaves no trace but a little note saying "gotcha!" then I'm impressed; they've done me a service and done something cool. If some script kiddie breaks in and uses my boxes to send spam or warehouse the mp3s and pr0n that his mom won't let him keep in the house, then I come down on him like the wrath of god.
I'd love to see what happens if Kevin Mitnick started up his own spam service. There'd be soooo many confused script kiddies.
Heh. That's a good idea. 2600 can do their summer subscription drive that way.
One of the recipients decided to forward it to Spamcop. Next thing I know I'm having to defend my company from being stuck on multiple spam shitlists. One accusation, not even a very strong one, and the spam fighters are willing to cut my company and our clients off.
I believe that somebody forwarded it to Spamcop. It was, after all, unsolicited bulk email, even if it was done on a small scale and with good intentions. But I don't buy the rest of this. I don't know of even one, let alone "multiple spam shitlists" that will block somebody on the basis of a solitary Spamcop report. If you say, "Oops! Clueless user has been beaten!" then your problem will go away pronto.
Spammers, imo, are people who disagree with the federal government. Come on, spammers aren't rapists or pedophiles or deadbeat dads.
I'm going to assume your first sentence is a typo, because I can't make anything sensible out of it. Spammers are people who send unsolicited bulk email.
It's true that spammers aren't violent criminals, and shouldn't be treated as harshly as, say, murderers. But that isn't an argument for letting them off easy, either.
Collectively, spammers cost us $9 billion per year. Like con men, market manipulators, perpetrators of fraud, and common thieves, they are out-and-out parasites. They did nothing to build the internet, but make their living by stealing our time, money, and attention.
Just make it illegal to forge headers, and when spammers are forced to use regular headers, we can
filter them that much more easily. And then it won't be so bad, right?
Wrong. First, you still have to pay the costs of receiving and filtering the message. Second, everybody who received email then has to make sure they have some sort of filtering just to get rid of something they never asked for. Third, it's not obvious how this would help the common problem of "whack-a-mole" spamming. Fourth, spammers have managed to work around every technical solution now in place for spam prevention; it's safe to assume that they'll do it here, too.
So yes, anti-spam laws are needed. And yes, they need criminal penalties as well as civil penalties.
This article reeks with clueless people attempting to explain what they don't understand. How is sophistication related to sending more emails?
There is no question that spammers have become more sophisticated over the years. The first spams were stopped with simple filters (e.g., blocking certain phrases, header fields, or originating networks) and the culprits were easily tracked down. Some even wrote books about their efforts. These days spammers use a variety of techniques to mask spam as normal mail and to make it harder to track them down.
This sophistication allows them to deliver more email by bypassing simple filters and by evading accountability for their actions.
Sure try bringing someone over from a third world country to prosecute them for sending spam.
That won't happen, of course. But your analysis is too simple. First off, most of the spam I receive appears to be for US-based companies; I frequently talk to spammers who say, "but there isn't a law against it."
Secondly, developing countries often look to developed nations for legal models to follow. If we don't have laws against spam, China will hardly take the lead.
Having laws here also allows us to exert pressure on the operators of foreign networks. "It's against federal law" sounds much better than "we think it's not nice" or "it's against our AUP".
Personally though, I think you're a bunch of whiney bastards. Just deal with it. If you get too much spam, stop frequenting porn sites, and signing up for stupid crap. How about not using AOL?
I don't do any of those things, and I still get lots of spam. I've been using the internet for more than a decade, and the amount of spam I get steadily increases despite all my efforts to prevent it. These days I even get spam in foreign languages for products only available on other continents.
As far as I can tell, the "just delete it" argument is just putting your head in the sand. Immense amounts of time and money are already wasted on dealing with it. How bad does it have to be before you acknowledge a problem? 10% of your total mail? 30%? 50%? Or even 90%?
Left unchecked, spam will continue to grow as a percentage of real mail. Eventually, it will reach a level where even you will demand action. Why not stop it now?
Be a liberal arts major. You can become a computer programmer anytime. It's like carpentry, you learn on the job.
Don't listen to this!! The absolute worst people I've programmed with have been these sorts of people... who think they can slack through college and the "pick up this programming thing" on the job. They absolutely lack the discipline of programming, don't plan their programs out well enough, and lack the insight into useful algorithms and methods to make programs work.
You may not be aware of this, but getting a liberal arts degree is different than slacking through college. There is some correlation, but the two are distinct pursuits. People who think they can slack through anything will be bad coders and worse designers. But a CS or CE degree is no guarantee of being useful.
Some of the worst code I've ever had to untangle was written by people with a CS or CE degree; they were so used to doing short projects that they handed in and forgot that they never learned what it takes to write code maintainable over the long term.
At least a liberal arts major approaches the buliding of software knowing that they don't know everything, whereas many people with freshly minted C* degrees are unaware of that. This is especially important when dealing with non-technical issues like software usability, working in a team, understanding the business needs, and surviving office politics.
My personal experience is that experienced developers who lack formal training are much better at overcoming obstacles than those who only have technical degrees. This is probably just because the less driven and adaptable types without degrees give up before making a career out of it, but it's still an important difference when hiring.
That's not to say that CS or CE degrees aren't useful or worthy pursuits; I'd recommend it to anybody who wants to be a top-notch progammer. But I would also recommend a strong dose of liberal arts: without understanding the broader context into which your code fits, your horizions are much more limited.
Agreed. I don't block banners because I know that sites like Slashdot pay the bills that way. No banner views -> no revenues -> no site.
And on sites where the ad quality is high, I often look at the banners. Slashdot's ads are generally relevant to my interests, and when one catches my interest, I'll check it out. I'm really glad that they don't run punch-the-monkey, credit card, or other junk ads; I'm sure I'd tune 'em out pronto if they did.
Here in California, one of the free features you can get from PacBell is "anonymous call rejection". So if somebody is blocking Caller ID, they get a recording when they call you telling them that they need to unblock Caller ID if they want to reach you.
Alas, this doesn't work on most telemarketers. Reputable ones show up with a name and number, and disreputable ones just appear as "UNAVAILABLE" on my current Caller ID box.
Like the earlier poster, I'd be all over a MAPS-style database of telemarketers and other low-lifes, but it'll be a while before enough of us have the hardware to make it worthwhile. In another decade or two, though, I'm sure all the phones will come with a TCP/IP stack, and then we'll be in business. Of course, by then the direct marketers will be using microwaves to wiggle your tympanic membrane.
Just today I received a BASIC Stamp kit, and I'm loving it. Anybody who can code their way out of a paper bag can use one of these to do all sorts of cool electronics work.
Once I have this beast under control, a smart CLID box is tops on my list; my intention was just to make the phone not ring when it's a telemarketer, but I like this idea even better. Please do post your schematic and code once you get it going!
This is an interesting idea, but using copyright law to prevent all copying is probably a bad idea, although IANAL.
First, copyright law has a pretty particular purpose, which is to protect intellectual property so that the creators of it can profit from it. Protecting email addresses doesn't fit well with it.
Second, copyright has all sorts of twisty exemptions and rules that go along with it. That's probably not baggage you want.
Third, the power for misuse of this is awesome. Large companies will often do anything they can to suppress unflattering information; allowing the copyright of email addresses would give them another big stick.
If you really want to shoehorn this into current law, maybe trademark law would work. But if you want to protect your email, you're better off going straight for new laws along the lines of European privacy or data protection laws. Or if you want to stop spamming (but allow trade of email addresses) than the current junk fax law isn't bad model.
I learnt that the only thing to do was to hit 'D'. Call me a pessimist or a fatalist or whatever, but it really is the only solution.
This may work when spam is 10% of your mail. Is it a good solution when it's 50%? How about 90% of your mail?
I don't know about you folks, but about 90% of my paper mail is garbage (sorry, I mean "special offers"). Spam is orders of magnitude cheaper per recipient than snail mail, so there's no reason to expect the spammers to stop at 90%. And once your mailbox is 99% trash, you'llstart getting 2 MB Flash advertisements in your inbox from marketroid who want to "cut through the clutter" that they themselves created.
The truth is that there is plenty you can do:
Never buy from it - In getting rid of roaches, rule #1 is to remove their food source. Same thing here. Spammers only spam because they think it will profit them.
Report it - I use SpamCop; it does 95% of the work.
Automatically reject it - Tell your MTA to make use of the spammer blacklists at MAPS and elsewhere.
Tell your friends - Most people don't realize that spammers inflate ISP fees and reduce service quality by clogging servers with garbage. Educate them!
Tell your legislators - Some countries and US states have already outlawed spam. To help make this universal, you have to let your legal reps know how you feel. Check out The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email.
Don't do business with spamhausen - Especially if you are a network admin, don't do businesses with companies that profit from spam. Check out spamhaus.org and spamsites.org for details. And make sure to let the sales droids know why you won't buy from 'em!
This is a problem that we will all have to deal with eventually. We should do it now while the problem is only costing us 10 billion dollars a year, up from approximately zero a decade ago.
This is true. A lawyer of mine was fond of saying, "They can sue you for anything; they just are unlikely to win." It's an important distinction, as defending a lawsuit isn't cheap.
Still, that shouldn't scare you too much. Many companies are very sensitive to public image, so you can counter this by raising a ruckus if they threaten you. Publish their correspondence with you, contact reporters, open a legal defense fund, post again to slashdot, and so on.
Make sure you discuss this with a lawyer first, and make sure you have a clear idea of how far you are willing to go. But I encourage you not to give up quite yet; many more people threaten to sue than are really willing to do it.
Oh, and if they do actually sue you, I'm in for $100 for your defense fund.
The previous poster has some excellent suggestions. The only one I'd add is to start learning the technology of choice in your spare time and then make some functional demo apps.
If you can come into an interview, open up a web browser, point them to a site and say "I built this using X, Y, and Z, which are the technologies you use here" then they'll be much less likely to worry about your age. Given the state of the job market, I'd hire a cephalopod as long as it interviewed well and its portfolio code was well-commented and functional.
Also look for a way to make use of your old experience. No matter what you worked on a decade ago, somebody is probably running a copy of it. Being able to say "You know that legacy system you're interfacing with? I know it cold, and I'd be glad to write an XML-based interface to it," could make somebody's day.
You are absolutely correct, and I regret making such a foolish error. Art education is indeed not just valuable in the long term, but also in the short.
One minor correction: tempera paint is water-soluble. Much better is to give those nippers a good shellacking.
Wow! There's so much wrong with this post that I don't know where to begin. But here's Exhibit A:
1.Engineering's worth is self-evident. [...]3.Physics is overrated. All the great minds are like my fellow engineers at IBM.
Oh, of course! "The smartest people are all just like me!" Hey, that's original. If you had read a little more history, you might know that this is a classic mistake. Or a little more art in your life and you might have heard of hubris.
4.Art is vulnerable to misuse by tyrrants in propaganda.
Which is, of course, utterly unlike the products of engineers, which are never used to maintain tyrrany.
You're just being ridulous here; art and literature have an enormous power to subvert, and all tyrants suppress "dangerous" art. Note also that broadly educated people are immunized against propaganda in ways that uneducated people and people with only technical educations cannot be.
Truth, Beauty, and Goodness are wonderful unattainable quanitities.
So? You can never get to "East", either, but that doesn't mean that compass directions are useless. Moreover, capitalized essences like Truth and Beauty were a western intellectual fashion; they are an interesting way of looking at the world, but by no means the only one. Yet another thing you don't learn in a Mech E class.
It's not that things can't be nice or pleasant, and perhaps someone is willing to pay for such commodities in the free market. But if we're going to finance public education with public taxes, then we'd better show some results now.
I will happily grant that art instruction shows absolutely no value this week. You can't eat it. It doesn't keep you dry in the rain. If an animal bites you, you can't use it to cover the hole.
The utilitarian value of art is in the longer term. For the artist, the value is twofold. As another poster pointed out, art develops skills and capacities that are not easily gained otherwise. But beyond that, the artist uses art to explore the world, to come to grips with and to gain and understanding of something. Art is especially good at dealing with the sorts of non-rigorous and ill-defined areas that science is poor at: perception, emotion, culture, and what it means to be human.
For the consumer of art, the utilitarian value is not mainly, as you seem to think, entertainment. It is in the ability of art to present new views, to challenge old understandings, to convey and evoke emotion.
A Slashdot-friendly example is George Orwell's book 1984. It makes issues of privacy, transparency, and the power of information control accessible to anyone, and it gives it personal, viceral meaning. Through his art, George Orwell developed his view of the evils of totalitarianism; through his art, he helped us all see his terrifying vision.
That piece of "useless" art has been continuously in print for more than 50 years. Thank goodness you weren't on his school board to guide him away from "useless" activities. And thank goodness you weren't on my school board to cancel the literature class where I read it.
In a nutshell, I just see Utilitarianism as being boring, but that's just me.
The problem isn't with utilitarianism, it's with naive utilitarianists. The original poster is a great example:
If they don't have an immediate and apparent application, then they're not worth pursuing.
The arrogance of this is breathtaking. It implies a clear, simple, immutable understanding of what all human activity should be for. It also assumes that the world is simple enough that all worthwhile goals are simply and apparently connected to things that contribute to them.
Both of these are clearly and demonstrably untrue. The world's a big, complex place; anybody who thinks they know it all hasn't been paying attention.
Slashdot Mirror
True spam is indistinguishable from your best friend sending you a message (unsoliticated!) about a business opportunity.
Wrong. Spam is unsolicited bulk mail. The word "bulk" is key. Also, prior relationships (e.g., friendship, customer who asked to be contacted) are generally considered to excuse the first spam, as it could be seen as a natural mistake. For more information, see the various spam definitions out there. E.g., at abuse.net.
I'm sorry, but spam is no different. Speach is speach.
This is blatantly wrong. Good anti-spam laws focus on behavior, not on content. Even an empty message can be spam.
Consider a real-world example: If I have a political message, I can hand you a copy of it on the street. I can tell it to you as you walk by. I can even stick a copy of it to your door. But I can't force you to listen, and i can't break into your house to convey it to you.
Suppose I buy the biggest megaphone I can find, and then I and my pals set up camp outside your house and read our political messages to you around the clock at 140 decibels. If it bothers you, you need not soundproof your house; you can call the police and have me hauled off.
In front of the judge, no amount of waving the Bill of Rights will get me off. Why? Because although I may have a right to speak, you have a right not to be forced to listen. The right to freedom of speech is a requirement that the government not impede communication between willing parties, not a right to make as much noise as you want just because it could be considered speech.
Spamcop may be responsible, but will every outfit take the same precautions?
On the Internet, and especially with collective projects like spam filtering, reputation is everytying. If Spamcop starts putting out lots of bogus reports, nobody will pay attention to them. So yes, I think that any outfit will have to take the same precautions or become irrelevant.
And regardless of responsiblity, the wording of the complaint notice I received from Spamcop was rather aggressive. How do you expect people to react?
It's been a year or so since I received one, so I guess I can't speak as to its current aggressiveness; the one I got was just a couple of lines and a link.
Perhaps the first notice should be pretty polite. If you could do better, I encourage you to get in touch with the Spamcop folks; I'm sure they'd welcome assistance. But in my experience, most of the people responsible for spam-spewing servers these days are either hopelessly overworked or terminally clueless. To get anything done, you have to scare them. So it may be that making the letters nicer will only reduce the response rate.
Well, unless it's spam. Censor away!
The banning of spam has nothing to do with censorship. Spamming is a behavior that has nothing to do with the content of the message. The fact that most spam contains commercial advertising has confused some people, though.
If I stand outside your house and rant into a megaphone at 4 am, you can call the police and have me hauled away, even if I'm reading the bill of rights out loud. Why? Because whatever the content of my speech, my behavior is against the law (and also pretty rude).
EFF co-founder John Gilmore runs an open relay mail server at home, which, to anti-spammers, is among the most evil things that you can do.
Suppose he runs an open shell account server that keeps no logs but allows people to break in to your boxes? Is that also virtuous?
Back when nobody spammed and everybody played nice, open relays were swell. I miss the days when the Internet was one big community and pretty much everybody was playing positive-sum games. And the times I've met John Gilmore, he seems like a great guy. But these days an open relay can and will be used to hide the origin of spam.
If I leave my front door unlocked, the cops won't say boo. But if a bunch of crackheads use my open house as a base of operations to steal from my neighbors, then Johnny Law will have some things to say to me about it.
Personally, I don't like the anti-spam groups, because I don't want some lynch-mob arbitrarily deciding what is spam and what isn't.
Well then bug your reps to get some laws passed. I'd rather spend my time doing other stuff, but as long as spammers are stealing resources and gumming up the works, I'll be doing what I can to stop them. Vigilante action is a poor substitute for the rule of law, but it beats anarchy by a mile.
I said they were willing to put us on shitlists, for a single isolated incident. We did respond, and to the best of my knowledge we were
never actually blocked. But the threat was certainly there.
Which "they" is this? And which lists? I still don't believe you were in the slightest danger of anything bad happening. I don't know of any list that will ban on the basis of a single complaint about a single message.
Hell, in this case, what if said coworker had sent *1* message, by chance to the one recipient who complained?
Spamcop is interested in fighting unsolicted bulk mail. If you get a bogus complaint, you can let the people at spamcop know and they'll rap the user on the knuckles. People who make repeated bogus reports will be terminated. The folks at Spamcop are very serious about making sure they produce mainly high-quality reports; the last thing they want is for people to stop taking them seriously.
Hmm..somehow you didn't refute my claim that email spam is no different than junk mail.
I'm glad to do it, then. There are two big differences.
One difference is in how the cost is paid. The sender of junk mail pays 100% of the cost of creating the junk mail and delivering it to your door. Spam is parasitical; most of the cost is paid by the recipients.
The other difference is that spam costs a lot less per unit to send, suggesting that we'll get a lot more of it.
Spammers and junk mailers both do what they do because the money they receive in sales allows them to pay for their unsolicited garbage. Because paper mail is expensive, you need a reasonable (e.g. > 1%) response rate to make it practical. Despite that, about half of my paper mail is junk.
Spam, on the other hand, is orders of magnitude cheaper, especially when you make others pay most of the cost. Response rates for spam campaigns thus are orders of magnitude lower, meaning that a lot more spam has to be delivered to put a dollar in the pocket of the spammer.
This suggests that spam, left unchecked, will be a much larger percentage of your inbox than is true for junk mail. Because of this, I think spam requires special legal treatment. The laws should at least be equivalent to junk faxes, but I favor stronger ones.
===
You do have a point with the ecologic costs of junk mail. But this is a problem endemic to our system of pricing; the true cost of resource depletion, polution, and disposal is hidden from consumers. Better to solve that problem directly, rather than solving this one tiny symptom.
It always strikes me as hypocritical that people who say that they're for freedom [...] throw all those values out the window just so they don't get inconvenienced with extra email
Like the rest of humanity, most of slashdot's readership is in favor of laws that benefit them and opposed to ones that might harm them. And like most of humanity, they'll say it's all for high-minded reasons. There are exceptions, of course, but too few.
However, it's still possible to have an intelectually coherent position like this. I am strongly in favor of freedom of speech and strongly opposed to spam. This makes sense to me because I'm not opposed to the content of the spam, but rather the behavior of forcing me to take something I don't want and making me pay for it, just so that they can make a buck.
Similarly, I take intent into consideration when dealing with hackers. If somebody breaks into my system and leaves no trace but a little note saying "gotcha!" then I'm impressed; they've done me a service and done something cool. If some script kiddie breaks in and uses my boxes to send spam or warehouse the mp3s and pr0n that his mom won't let him keep in the house, then I come down on him like the wrath of god.
I'd love to see what happens if Kevin Mitnick started up his own spam service. There'd be soooo many confused script kiddies.
Heh. That's a good idea. 2600 can do their summer subscription drive that way.
One of the recipients decided to forward it to Spamcop. Next thing I know I'm having to defend my company from being stuck on multiple spam shitlists. One accusation, not even a very strong one, and the spam fighters are willing to cut my company and our clients off.
I believe that somebody forwarded it to Spamcop. It was, after all, unsolicited bulk email, even if it was done on a small scale and with good intentions. But I don't buy the rest of this. I don't know of even one, let alone "multiple spam shitlists" that will block somebody on the basis of a solitary Spamcop report. If you say, "Oops! Clueless user has been beaten!" then your problem will go away pronto.
Spammers, imo, are people who disagree with the federal government. Come on, spammers aren't rapists or pedophiles or deadbeat dads.
I'm going to assume your first sentence is a typo, because I can't make anything sensible out of it. Spammers are people who send unsolicited bulk email.
It's true that spammers aren't violent criminals, and shouldn't be treated as harshly as, say, murderers. But that isn't an argument for letting them off easy, either.
Collectively, spammers cost us $9 billion per year. Like con men, market manipulators, perpetrators of fraud, and common thieves, they are out-and-out parasites. They did nothing to build the internet, but make their living by stealing our time, money, and attention.
Just make it illegal to forge headers, and when spammers are forced to use regular headers, we can
filter them that much more easily. And then it won't be so bad, right?
Wrong. First, you still have to pay the costs of receiving and filtering the message. Second, everybody who received email then has to make sure they have some sort of filtering just to get rid of something they never asked for. Third, it's not obvious how this would help the common problem of "whack-a-mole" spamming. Fourth, spammers have managed to work around every technical solution now in place for spam prevention; it's safe to assume that they'll do it here, too.
So yes, anti-spam laws are needed. And yes, they need criminal penalties as well as civil penalties.
This article reeks with clueless people attempting to explain what they don't understand. How is sophistication related to sending more emails?
There is no question that spammers have become more sophisticated over the years. The first spams were stopped with simple filters (e.g., blocking certain phrases, header fields, or originating networks) and the culprits were easily tracked down. Some even wrote books about their efforts. These days spammers use a variety of techniques to mask spam as normal mail and to make it harder to track them down.
This sophistication allows them to deliver more email by bypassing simple filters and by evading accountability for their actions.
Sure try bringing someone over from a third world country to prosecute them for sending spam.
That won't happen, of course. But your analysis is too simple. First off, most of the spam I receive appears to be for US-based companies; I frequently talk to spammers who say, "but there isn't a law against it."
Secondly, developing countries often look to developed nations for legal models to follow. If we don't have laws against spam, China will hardly take the lead.
Having laws here also allows us to exert pressure on the operators of foreign networks. "It's against federal law" sounds much better than "we think it's not nice" or "it's against our AUP".
Personally though, I think you're a bunch of whiney bastards. Just deal with it. If you get too much spam, stop frequenting porn sites, and signing up for stupid crap. How about not using AOL?
I don't do any of those things, and I still get lots of spam. I've been using the internet for more than a decade, and the amount of spam I get steadily increases despite all my efforts to prevent it. These days I even get spam in foreign languages for products only available on other continents.
As far as I can tell, the "just delete it" argument is just putting your head in the sand. Immense amounts of time and money are already wasted on dealing with it. How bad does it have to be before you acknowledge a problem? 10% of your total mail? 30%? 50%? Or even 90%?
Left unchecked, spam will continue to grow as a percentage of real mail. Eventually, it will reach a level where even you will demand action. Why not stop it now?
You may not be aware of this, but getting a liberal arts degree is different than slacking through college. There is some correlation, but the two are distinct pursuits. People who think they can slack through anything will be bad coders and worse designers. But a CS or CE degree is no guarantee of being useful.
Some of the worst code I've ever had to untangle was written by people with a CS or CE degree; they were so used to doing short projects that they handed in and forgot that they never learned what it takes to write code maintainable over the long term.
At least a liberal arts major approaches the buliding of software knowing that they don't know everything, whereas many people with freshly minted C* degrees are unaware of that. This is especially important when dealing with non-technical issues like software usability, working in a team, understanding the business needs, and surviving office politics.
My personal experience is that experienced developers who lack formal training are much better at overcoming obstacles than those who only have technical degrees. This is probably just because the less driven and adaptable types without degrees give up before making a career out of it, but it's still an important difference when hiring.
That's not to say that CS or CE degrees aren't useful or worthy pursuits; I'd recommend it to anybody who wants to be a top-notch progammer. But I would also recommend a strong dose of liberal arts: without understanding the broader context into which your code fits, your horizions are much more limited.
Agreed. I don't block banners because I know that sites like Slashdot pay the bills that way. No banner views -> no revenues -> no site.
And on sites where the ad quality is high, I often look at the banners. Slashdot's ads are generally relevant to my interests, and when one catches my interest, I'll check it out. I'm really glad that they don't run punch-the-monkey, credit card, or other junk ads; I'm sure I'd tune 'em out pronto if they did.
Uh, how about
Oh, that was a rhetorical question. Sorry. You can have your soapbox back now.
Here in California, one of the free features you can get from PacBell is "anonymous call rejection". So if somebody is blocking Caller ID, they get a recording when they call you telling them that they need to unblock Caller ID if they want to reach you.
Alas, this doesn't work on most telemarketers. Reputable ones show up with a name and number, and disreputable ones just appear as "UNAVAILABLE" on my current Caller ID box.
Like the earlier poster, I'd be all over a MAPS-style database of telemarketers and other low-lifes, but it'll be a while before enough of us have the hardware to make it worthwhile. In another decade or two, though, I'm sure all the phones will come with a TCP/IP stack, and then we'll be in business. Of course, by then the direct marketers will be using microwaves to wiggle your tympanic membrane.
Just today I received a BASIC Stamp kit, and I'm loving it. Anybody who can code their way out of a paper bag can use one of these to do all sorts of cool electronics work.
Once I have this beast under control, a smart CLID box is tops on my list; my intention was just to make the phone not ring when it's a telemarketer, but I like this idea even better. Please do post your schematic and code once you get it going!
For those who want to make a simple Caller ID box, a generous fellow has already posted the details of his project. For more information, check out Parallax, the makers of the Stamp, and the BASIC Stamp FAQ. To get an idea of what you can do, see the List of Stamp Applications (LOSA), the first item of which is, no foolin', a cyborg cat.
Jim Allchin, main Windows guy at Microsoft [...] argues that [...] Open Source [...] stifles innovation
I'm inclined to take Microsoft's word on this; they are the world's foremost experts on stifling innovation, aren't they?
You misread my post. Currently, 90% of my USPS-delivered mail is junk mail. Approximately 10% of the non-mailing-list email I get is spam.
My point is there's no obvious reason that spammers will stop before my email box becomes even worse than my snail-mail box.
This is an interesting idea, but using copyright law to prevent all copying is probably a bad idea, although IANAL.
First, copyright law has a pretty particular purpose, which is to protect intellectual property so that the creators of it can profit from it. Protecting email addresses doesn't fit well with it.
Second, copyright has all sorts of twisty exemptions and rules that go along with it. That's probably not baggage you want.
Third, the power for misuse of this is awesome. Large companies will often do anything they can to suppress unflattering information; allowing the copyright of email addresses would give them another big stick.
If you really want to shoehorn this into current law, maybe trademark law would work. But if you want to protect your email, you're better off going straight for new laws along the lines of European privacy or data protection laws. Or if you want to stop spamming (but allow trade of email addresses) than the current junk fax law isn't bad model.
This may work when spam is 10% of your mail. Is it a good solution when it's 50%? How about 90% of your mail?
I don't know about you folks, but about 90% of my paper mail is garbage (sorry, I mean "special offers"). Spam is orders of magnitude cheaper per recipient than snail mail, so there's no reason to expect the spammers to stop at 90%. And once your mailbox is 99% trash, you'llstart getting 2 MB Flash advertisements in your inbox from marketroid who want to "cut through the clutter" that they themselves created.
The truth is that there is plenty you can do:
- Never buy from it - In getting rid of roaches, rule #1 is to remove their food source. Same thing here. Spammers only spam because they think it will profit them.
- Report it - I use SpamCop; it does 95% of the work.
- Automatically reject it - Tell your MTA to make use of the spammer blacklists at MAPS and elsewhere.
- Tell your friends - Most people don't realize that spammers inflate ISP fees and reduce service quality by clogging servers with garbage. Educate them!
- Tell your legislators - Some countries and US states have already outlawed spam. To help make this universal, you have to let your legal reps know how you feel. Check out The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email.
- Don't do business with spamhausen - Especially if you are a network admin, don't do businesses with companies that profit from spam. Check out spamhaus.org and spamsites.org for details. And make sure to let the sales droids know why you won't buy from 'em!
This is a problem that we will all have to deal with eventually. We should do it now while the problem is only costing us 10 billion dollars a year, up from approximately zero a decade ago.This is true. A lawyer of mine was fond of saying, "They can sue you for anything; they just are unlikely to win." It's an important distinction, as defending a lawsuit isn't cheap.
Still, that shouldn't scare you too much. Many companies are very sensitive to public image, so you can counter this by raising a ruckus if they threaten you. Publish their correspondence with you, contact reporters, open a legal defense fund, post again to slashdot, and so on.
Make sure you discuss this with a lawyer first, and make sure you have a clear idea of how far you are willing to go. But I encourage you not to give up quite yet; many more people threaten to sue than are really willing to do it.
Oh, and if they do actually sue you, I'm in for $100 for your defense fund.
The previous poster has some excellent suggestions. The only one I'd add is to start learning the technology of choice in your spare time and then make some functional demo apps.
If you can come into an interview, open up a web browser, point them to a site and say "I built this using X, Y, and Z, which are the technologies you use here" then they'll be much less likely to worry about your age. Given the state of the job market, I'd hire a cephalopod as long as it interviewed well and its portfolio code was well-commented and functional.
Also look for a way to make use of your old experience. No matter what you worked on a decade ago, somebody is probably running a copy of it. Being able to say "You know that legacy system you're interfacing with? I know it cold, and I'd be glad to write an XML-based interface to it," could make somebody's day.
You are absolutely correct, and I regret making such a foolish error. Art education is indeed not just valuable in the long term, but also in the short.
One minor correction: tempera paint is water-soluble. Much better is to give those nippers a good shellacking.
Wow! There's so much wrong with this post that I don't know where to begin. But here's Exhibit A:
1.Engineering's worth is self-evident. [...]3.Physics is overrated. All the great minds are like my fellow engineers at IBM.
Oh, of course! "The smartest people are all just like me!" Hey, that's original. If you had read a little more history, you might know that this is a classic mistake. Or a little more art in your life and you might have heard of hubris.
4.Art is vulnerable to misuse by tyrrants in propaganda.
Which is, of course, utterly unlike the products of engineers, which are never used to maintain tyrrany.
You're just being ridulous here; art and literature have an enormous power to subvert, and all tyrants suppress "dangerous" art. Note also that broadly educated people are immunized against propaganda in ways that uneducated people and people with only technical educations cannot be.
Truth, Beauty, and Goodness are wonderful unattainable quanitities.
So? You can never get to "East", either, but that doesn't mean that compass directions are useless. Moreover, capitalized essences like Truth and Beauty were a western intellectual fashion; they are an interesting way of looking at the world, but by no means the only one. Yet another thing you don't learn in a Mech E class.
It's not that things can't be nice or pleasant, and perhaps someone is willing to pay for such commodities in the free market. But if we're going to finance public education with public taxes, then we'd better show some results now.
I will happily grant that art instruction shows absolutely no value this week. You can't eat it. It doesn't keep you dry in the rain. If an animal bites you, you can't use it to cover the hole.
The utilitarian value of art is in the longer term. For the artist, the value is twofold. As another poster pointed out, art develops skills and capacities that are not easily gained otherwise. But beyond that, the artist uses art to explore the world, to come to grips with and to gain and understanding of something. Art is especially good at dealing with the sorts of non-rigorous and ill-defined areas that science is poor at: perception, emotion, culture, and what it means to be human.
For the consumer of art, the utilitarian value is not mainly, as you seem to think, entertainment. It is in the ability of art to present new views, to challenge old understandings, to convey and evoke emotion.
A Slashdot-friendly example is George Orwell's book 1984. It makes issues of privacy, transparency, and the power of information control accessible to anyone, and it gives it personal, viceral meaning. Through his art, George Orwell developed his view of the evils of totalitarianism; through his art, he helped us all see his terrifying vision.
That piece of "useless" art has been continuously in print for more than 50 years. Thank goodness you weren't on his school board to guide him away from "useless" activities. And thank goodness you weren't on my school board to cancel the literature class where I read it.
The problem isn't with utilitarianism, it's with naive utilitarianists. The original poster is a great example:
The arrogance of this is breathtaking. It implies a clear, simple, immutable understanding of what all human activity should be for. It also assumes that the world is simple enough that all worthwhile goals are simply and apparently connected to things that contribute to them.
Both of these are clearly and demonstrably untrue. The world's a big, complex place; anybody who thinks they know it all hasn't been paying attention.