"For examples of what you'll receive, check out [this list of some of our past deals]. We'll send about one email a week, and you stop us from sending them whenever you like. ([Click here for more info about how this works.]) We might also send you information from other businesses if we think it's of use to you, but we won't be give them your contact details (without specific permission), or accept money from them to forwarding it."
You can shorten this to We'll never send you mass email written right below the field where you type your email address.
Anything else, or the lack of such a clear notice, gets me think twice before I ever register.
I once had a (dis)pleasure of publicly ridiculing a Norwegian spammer at a local gathering. I think he has changed his business to someting more socially acceptable shortly afterwards.
And I have learned that he is a spammer after having seeing his personal domain on my university's blocklist and asking the sysadmin how in the hell an acquintance of mine got there.
That's how it works in small countries, laws aside.
Indeed your site is targeted to nerds. My sites (a hodgepodge of non-nerdy international resources) have more general audience though, thus they have lower and, I deem, closer to the world average Mozilla stats. The actual Firefox share in the aggregate statistics is just below 10%. MSIE share is about 70%.
Don't they have a webserver log to have a peek at the browser statistics? For my site, it's 16.5% Mozilla and growing. It wouldn't be fair if any government service excluded such a significant fraction of visitors.
by the police if the hardware (the camera) is in full control of the police? There's no way but to trust the police presenting evidence. MD5 or whatnot is irrelevent.
I'm in Russia and I just cannot get locally a lot if stuff I want (classical music, less-than-mainstream Western pop and so on). Sometimes it can be found as mail order from Western online stores (at exorbitant prices and two-weeks delivery time), sometimes not. Many Western online sellers will not ship to Russia even when they have what I want. For your information, iTunes does not work in my country either. This is valid not just for Russia, but perhaps for the majority of the countries in the world.
Locating all this stuff via p2p is a bingo! It's here, now!
Make it all download to me legally in a convenient format and at a reasonable price, and I will have no reason to sort through poorly ripped, not annotated p2p files.
Interestingly I have a recording of Shostakovich' 7th symphony by the USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra under Gennady Rozhdestvensky (a very strong performance by the way), and it's exactly 75 minutes long.
The fundamental problem with "legal download services" is that they are LIMITED, LIMITED, LIMITED. iTunes works in how many, six or seven countries (Russia is out, and so is much of the rest of the world)? Other pay-for services offer a very small subset of those media recordings I can with some effort find via various peer-to-peer networks.
I am writing this as an author of this resource. How many of the recordings I publish there one could go and download legally, paying per download, from any country in the world? The answer is: about none. This stuff is just not sold in a convenient way acceptable for a visitor to the museum to listen to it as-you-go, paying per download. Neither expect I it to become available in the foreseeable future. This is why it's free here - it has to, otherwise the museum could not exist.
If there were an ideal download service it would have to have EVERYTHING, every audio and video record made on the planet, including all radio and TV station broadcasts. Just like a good national library system can deliver all the books and periodicals ever published in the country, this global media service would have to have everything, and I mean everything. Hey records associations, get working on this goal and I will one day be your happy customer. Yet I doubt the records associations will be interested, this is inconsistent with their PROFITS. Long live "piracy" then: it lets us keep and further our human knowledge and culture!
To add to the original subject, I think I have about as much recordings on CDs bought legally as I have filesharing downloads. Don't let me start on what it sometimes takes to order CDs to Russia form the USA and Great Britain. Amazon Marketplace, for example, doesn't sell them to my country, and I have to painstakingly negotiate "special delivery terms" with every seller (sometimes unsuccessfully) before placing the order.
Well, the killing turned out to be an ordinary bulgrary gone awry. Here is a preliminary information from the police (in Russian). Sorry for disappointing those who hoped it's a revenge for spam, and also those who thought it's the dreaded Russian mafia. It is neither.
According to the police, he acquinted three women in a night club and invited them to his flat. The women mixed in a strong dormitive medication into wine ("Clofeline", traditionally ised in such scenarios by the crime) and, when the Mr. Kushnir went asleep, opened the door to accomplices. Unfurtunately, the dose of dormitive was not sufficient. Mr. Kushnir woke up and a fight ensued, during which he was beaten to death. A laptop, money and credit cards are missing from his flat. Also an underdress were left by one of the women in hurry. This is the only version the Police is considering now.
The article also says his company exists since 2000 and has had an anuual turnaround of mere $100,000-120,000. Its spamming activity was so visible that it got under investigation by the government, but no action was made against it due to the lack of aplicable laws. To avoid being charged in Russia, the company sent all its spams via an offshore company located (guess where!!!) in the USA. It also says the quality of language education the company has offered is reported to be quite low, with a high turnover of teachers (because they stop paying salary to everyone after a couple first months of employment) and no coherent education program. It only stayed afloat because of endless spamming.
I'm Russian, and somehow I completely fail to have any pittance for this particular man. It's just a gut reaction. Can't do anything with it.
Let me check my junk folder... there have come two new messages while I've been reading this discussion. One message is about a one-day business course, and another pitches a small printing house in Moscow. They are representative of the kind of advertising that dominates Russian spam right now. Worse yet, Russian spammers are probably the best in the world at their, umm, job, and these are messages that seep through my rather well tuned spam filter (SA + Bayes + RBLs). No matter what I do they keep wasting my time, on average ten to fifteen minutes every day as I estimate, including the time I have to spend every now and then to keep up with the latest anti-spam solutions.
If this innovatively-designed product follows the other innovatively-designed products previously announced by this studio (yes I'm watching them), then the keyboard will be available in two years, direct order from their Moscow office only, at the cost of $3000. No mass manufactirer will care to produce them.
1. I get several pieces of spam in Russian every day advertising these databases. Dammit.
2. Law enforcement in Russia does nothing about it. In the current situation, it is trivial to catch the seller: the databases advertised in spam, for example, are delivered by a courier. If the police were interested in hindering this activity (or forcing it deeper underground, at least), they would do this in a blink of the eye. Nothing is done, though.
3. I like the way Norway deals with this danger, partially at least. A lot of information in Norway is public, period. National and mobile operatiors phone directory is public (unless you specifically ask the mobile operator to withhold yor number from the listing) and searchable online. Summaries of tax amount, personal income and fortune by year are public for everybody, complete with mail addresses and year of birth (it used to be the full date of birth, but they have decided to limit it to the year recently). The tax database have been open for a good hundred of years, previously as paper records and now online. Only a handful of persons in the country can have their records hidden from the public view, usually those stalked by sex offenders (e.g. by former hisbands) and the like. Basic information on all companies and organizations is searchable online, too.
For example, one of the criteria that they use is the number of years that your site has been registered. If your site has been registered for less than a year, then it counts against you.
So I get the following:
Date: 2 Jun 2005 11:42:45 -0000 From: Bettina Jensen <bdomains@itmarketinggroup.com> To: makarov@vad1.com Subject: [#17922] Buying your domain: vad1.com
Dear Webmaster
I am interested in buying your domain vad1.com for $400. I'm only interested in the domain not in your content, so you can sell your domain and move your content to another domain. If you are interested please respond to this e-mail.
Thank you for the explanation. I've actually spent the whole evening reading the standard outline, but your post has provided a nice clarification. The way the standard is written, it indeed appears to be a complex stuff not readily accessible on an intuitive level (i.e. in a typical Slashdot discussion as THIS ONE shows).
I have a question. Do I understand correctly that all the big players are collaborating to make rights management built in into the standard for this new high-capacity media types (throuugh the means of cryptographic techniques, legislation, licensing policy for the standard, and orchestrated market domination in licensed content distribution)? Is there a chance that a non-protected version of these media types, or PC players that ignore the requirement of in-player obligatory encryption of the disk data, will independently appear on the market, or this is effectively prevented through the licensing policy for the high-capacity media technology?
(If this is indeed what it sounds to be, we need to do something! This takes away freedom!)
Anothel smaller question: the security of the Media Key Block depends on a "robust one-way function". What one-way function is used and how cracking-resistable is it? Is it technically possible to create a player with built-in hardware for cracking the MKB (licensing and legal hurdles aside)?
Your analogy isn't valid. The stereo in your car is a physical product where each copy of it costs the manufacturer money. The player in the OS costs nothing, zero, nil to include into additional copies of Windows. Yet it effectively kills competition on the media player market. This is why the government shall interfere.
Don't worry. This whole checklist thing is a joke: it cannot be fully satisfied in principle, not in this universe at least:-). Just proceed with your idea.
Random idea: if two people separately post two files that, when XOR'ed together, produce copyrighted music, can either be sued?
Yup. They are both equally responsible.
Technically, tricks like this are called encryption and obfuscation, which does not change the essence of action: posting the file. Using additional measure to evade prosecution may make things even worse for the perpetrator.
The particular method you are talking about is encrypting the file with one-time pad and posting both the encrypted file AND the key. Curiously, the one-time pad encryption is symmetric in regard to the cleartext and the key (it's just XORing them together) so you can't tell which of the two posted files is the key and which is the ciphertext. Not that it should matter at the court:)
Why are digital camera manufacturers keeping the lid on the capabilities of their products
Because they want full control over the features they make available in a specific model. Many product lines have some features available only in more expensive top-of-the-line models, even though the implementation of the feature is purely software-based. This allows them to sell the more expensive models to more demanding customers and to professionals at a good profit.
One example are little things in SLR camera bodies that only professional photographers need, like MLU, leader out rewind, flash exposure compensation and the like. I remember a story when one local Canon service center started re-programming less expensive camera bodies with modified firmware that made it behave like a more expensive body (like Canon EOS A2, as far as I recall). They had to discontinue that offer at a request from Canon!
Another example are film scanner features, most notably multi-pass averaging. Again, the implementation is just a different firmware, but it allowed Nikon for example to sell LS-2000 scanners that have it enabled at twice as much price, comparing to the cheaper LS-30 model (granted, there was also a hardware difference in the number of digits the ADC had, I think, but that didn't stop a third-party PC software to implement almost as good multi-pass averaging with the LS-30).
I respectfully disagree with the following items in your assessment:
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
- This doesn't apply because money are collected BEFORE one is able to start getting the escrow tokens. It has to be a 100% pre-payment service.
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
- It has a chance stop the spam forever. We will eventially have other types of electronic scams instead, but email spam as we know it today will either be limited to the average of several messages a day that emanate from compromised accounts, or cease to exist.
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
- It's true that spammers will immediately try to break any scheme devised or find a workaround in the least expected ways, which is a very valuable contribution we expect from them. If the scheme stands the test, however, no further cooperation from spammers is required.
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
- Exactly how?
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
- We have DNS. It has been introduced at some point in the development of electronic communications, not from the very beginning. It is a central controlling authority for several services, including email. It is a paid service. It works. It is possible for another central controlling authority to be introduced.
(x) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
- Why?
I do not think the following items in your assessment are in principle possible to satisfy with any solution:
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
- Chicken and egg problem is not new to this world. It gets solved all the time, however.
(x) Sending email should be free
- Impossible to satisfy beyond a small closed society where everyone knows everyone.
Furthermore, this is what I think about the assessment in general:
[x] Your assessment is mostly realistic.
[ ] You are taking constructive approach and try to improve the proposed imperfect ideas.
[ ] You are taking the spam problem seriously and genuinely want to solve it permanently.
[ ] You or your employer have means and market leverage to solve the spam problem permanently.
Also, the following may apply to the expert who has performed the assessment. Please excuse me in advance for taking things to the personal side:
[x] Spam war is a great fun for you as an IT specialist / system administrator / programmer, and you are not interested in peace for this reason.
[x] Spam war is a great educational environment for you as an IT specialist / system administrator / programmer, and you are not interested in peace for this reason.
[x] Spam war is probably partly or wholly justifies your own employment as an IT specialist / system administrator / programmer, and you are not interested in peace for this reason.
[x] Unfortunately we have no social mechanism in place to fix any of the three problems above. Overally the society loses, of course.
I am going to post this link in every discussion commemorating the ongoing spam war until someone explains me why the outlined economic solution won't work.
Slashdot Mirror
You can shorten this to We'll never send you mass email written right below the field where you type your email address.
Anything else, or the lack of such a clear notice, gets me think twice before I ever register.
And I have learned that he is a spammer after having seeing his personal domain on my university's blocklist and asking the sysadmin how in the hell an acquintance of mine got there.
That's how it works in small countries, laws aside.
Let's all now pray the world continues to warm, for otherwise the Russian science will be bankrupt in ten years.
Indeed your site is targeted to nerds. My sites (a hodgepodge of non-nerdy international resources) have more general audience though, thus they have lower and, I deem, closer to the world average Mozilla stats. The actual Firefox share in the aggregate statistics is just below 10%. MSIE share is about 70%.
Don't they have a webserver log to have a peek at the browser statistics? For my site, it's 16.5% Mozilla and growing. It wouldn't be fair if any government service excluded such a significant fraction of visitors.
by the police if the hardware (the camera) is in full control of the police? There's no way but to trust the police presenting evidence. MD5 or whatnot is irrelevent.
I'm in Russia and I just cannot get locally a lot if stuff I want (classical music, less-than-mainstream Western pop and so on). Sometimes it can be found as mail order from Western online stores (at exorbitant prices and two-weeks delivery time), sometimes not. Many Western online sellers will not ship to Russia even when they have what I want. For your information, iTunes does not work in my country either. This is valid not just for Russia, but perhaps for the majority of the countries in the world.
Locating all this stuff via p2p is a bingo! It's here, now!
Make it all download to me legally in a convenient format and at a reasonable price, and I will have no reason to sort through poorly ripped, not annotated p2p files.
Interestingly I have a recording of Shostakovich' 7th symphony by the USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra under Gennady Rozhdestvensky (a very strong performance by the way), and it's exactly 75 minutes long.
I am writing this as an author of this resource. How many of the recordings I publish there one could go and download legally, paying per download, from any country in the world? The answer is: about none. This stuff is just not sold in a convenient way acceptable for a visitor to the museum to listen to it as-you-go, paying per download. Neither expect I it to become available in the foreseeable future. This is why it's free here - it has to, otherwise the museum could not exist.
If there were an ideal download service it would have to have EVERYTHING, every audio and video record made on the planet, including all radio and TV station broadcasts. Just like a good national library system can deliver all the books and periodicals ever published in the country, this global media service would have to have everything, and I mean everything. Hey records associations, get working on this goal and I will one day be your happy customer. Yet I doubt the records associations will be interested, this is inconsistent with their PROFITS. Long live "piracy" then: it lets us keep and further our human knowledge and culture!
To add to the original subject, I think I have about as much recordings on CDs bought legally as I have filesharing downloads. Don't let me start on what it sometimes takes to order CDs to Russia form the USA and Great Britain. Amazon Marketplace, for example, doesn't sell them to my country, and I have to painstakingly negotiate "special delivery terms" with every seller (sometimes unsuccessfully) before placing the order.
According to the police, he acquinted three women in a night club and invited them to his flat. The women mixed in a strong dormitive medication into wine ("Clofeline", traditionally ised in such scenarios by the crime) and, when the Mr. Kushnir went asleep, opened the door to accomplices. Unfurtunately, the dose of dormitive was not sufficient. Mr. Kushnir woke up and a fight ensued, during which he was beaten to death. A laptop, money and credit cards are missing from his flat. Also an underdress were left by one of the women in hurry. This is the only version the Police is considering now.
The article also says his company exists since 2000 and has had an anuual turnaround of mere $100,000-120,000. Its spamming activity was so visible that it got under investigation by the government, but no action was made against it due to the lack of aplicable laws. To avoid being charged in Russia, the company sent all its spams via an offshore company located (guess where!!!) in the USA. It also says the quality of language education the company has offered is reported to be quite low, with a high turnover of teachers (because they stop paying salary to everyone after a couple first months of employment) and no coherent education program. It only stayed afloat because of endless spamming.
Let me check my junk folder... there have come two new messages while I've been reading this discussion. One message is about a one-day business course, and another pitches a small printing house in Moscow. They are representative of the kind of advertising that dominates Russian spam right now. Worse yet, Russian spammers are probably the best in the world at their, umm, job, and these are messages that seep through my rather well tuned spam filter (SA + Bayes + RBLs). No matter what I do they keep wasting my time, on average ten to fifteen minutes every day as I estimate, including the time I have to spend every now and then to keep up with the latest anti-spam solutions.
Good luck to break the rule, Art Lebedev :)
1. I get several pieces of spam in Russian every day advertising these databases. Dammit.
2. Law enforcement in Russia does nothing about it. In the current situation, it is trivial to catch the seller: the databases advertised in spam, for example, are delivered by a courier. If the police were interested in hindering this activity (or forcing it deeper underground, at least), they would do this in a blink of the eye. Nothing is done, though.
3. I like the way Norway deals with this danger, partially at least. A lot of information in Norway is public, period. National and mobile operatiors phone directory is public (unless you specifically ask the mobile operator to withhold yor number from the listing) and searchable online. Summaries of tax amount, personal income and fortune by year are public for everybody, complete with mail addresses and year of birth (it used to be the full date of birth, but they have decided to limit it to the year recently). The tax database have been open for a good hundred of years, previously as paper records and now online. Only a handful of persons in the country can have their records hidden from the public view, usually those stalked by sex offenders (e.g. by former hisbands) and the like. Basic information on all companies and organizations is searchable online, too.
So I get the following:
are the ones that don't move?
I have a question. Do I understand correctly that all the big players are collaborating to make rights management built in into the standard for this new high-capacity media types (throuugh the means of cryptographic techniques, legislation, licensing policy for the standard, and orchestrated market domination in licensed content distribution)? Is there a chance that a non-protected version of these media types, or PC players that ignore the requirement of in-player obligatory encryption of the disk data, will independently appear on the market, or this is effectively prevented through the licensing policy for the high-capacity media technology?
(If this is indeed what it sounds to be, we need to do something! This takes away freedom!)
Anothel smaller question: the security of the Media Key Block depends on a "robust one-way function". What one-way function is used and how cracking-resistable is it? Is it technically possible to create a player with built-in hardware for cracking the MKB (licensing and legal hurdles aside)?
On a side note, when am I able to install the British SS DNA Fight CyberCrime screensaver?
Your analogy isn't valid. The stereo in your car is a physical product where each copy of it costs the manufacturer money. The player in the OS costs nothing, zero, nil to include into additional copies of Windows. Yet it effectively kills competition on the media player market. This is why the government shall interfere.
Don't worry. This whole checklist thing is a joke: it cannot be fully satisfied in principle, not in this universe at least :-). Just proceed with your idea.
Yup. They are both equally responsible.
Technically, tricks like this are called encryption and obfuscation, which does not change the essence of action: posting the file. Using additional measure to evade prosecution may make things even worse for the perpetrator.
The particular method you are talking about is encrypting the file with one-time pad and posting both the encrypted file AND the key. Curiously, the one-time pad encryption is symmetric in regard to the cleartext and the key (it's just XORing them together) so you can't tell which of the two posted files is the key and which is the ciphertext. Not that it should matter at the court :)
Because they want full control over the features they make available in a specific model. Many product lines have some features available only in more expensive top-of-the-line models, even though the implementation of the feature is purely software-based. This allows them to sell the more expensive models to more demanding customers and to professionals at a good profit.
One example are little things in SLR camera bodies that only professional photographers need, like MLU, leader out rewind, flash exposure compensation and the like. I remember a story when one local Canon service center started re-programming less expensive camera bodies with modified firmware that made it behave like a more expensive body (like Canon EOS A2, as far as I recall). They had to discontinue that offer at a request from Canon!
Another example are film scanner features, most notably multi-pass averaging. Again, the implementation is just a different firmware, but it allowed Nikon for example to sell LS-2000 scanners that have it enabled at twice as much price, comparing to the cheaper LS-30 model (granted, there was also a hardware difference in the number of digits the ADC had, I think, but that didn't stop a third-party PC software to implement almost as good multi-pass averaging with the LS-30).
score BIZ_TLD 1.5
score MOBI_TLD 1.5
score JOBS_TLD 1.5
I respectfully disagree with the following items in your assessment:
I do not think the following items in your assessment are in principle possible to satisfy with any solution: Furthermore, this is what I think about the assessment in general: Also, the following may apply to the expert who has performed the assessment. Please excuse me in advance for taking things to the personal side:I am going to post this link in every discussion commemorating the ongoing spam war until someone explains me why the outlined economic solution won't work.
you buy music at 5 cents a song.