> There are all these outragous statistics
that say the internet doesn't work for this or that. Like 60% of web shoppers abandon items in their shopping cart and don't complete the sale.
Amen. Betcha most of those people are either:
Trying to find out how much the site charges for shipping/handling/taxes which would require that the items be in the cart,
Figuring out if that coupon they heard about on some site like hotdealsclub.com applies to their purchase, or
For some particularly brain-dead sites that don't list prices until you've set up a shopping cart, well, just looking at the damn price tag.
> As many of you know, we started our dedicated e-mail program a couple of weeks ago. By now you've gotten a total of
four dedicated e-mails, including one from a university and one from a local restaurant.
Hmm. Guess too many beer-cans-and-chicken-bones spammers said "we're opt-in!" and too many non-DMA goons saw through the DMA's attempt last year to redefine "opt-in" as "opt-out".
So now whenever I see the term "dedicated e-mail", I'll think "spam".
Nice bit of newspeak, market00ns. Won't help you, though.
> The only reason that the individual was able to win her suit was because her email is forwarded to one machine to
another which (in her words) 'may make [her] qualify as an electronic mail service provider'.
Moderators: Moderate the parent post up. This was the key to the case, and why Joe Sixpack can't use the CA law himself.
IMHO, what we need is a federal anti-spam law that allows a private right of action (i.e. Joe Sixpack can sue), and for a large enough dollar amount (e.g. $500 per spam, not $10 per spam) that it's worth his while.
Something like the TCPA would be ideal. It's hard to collect with TCPA (telemarketing) because the telemarketers block Caller-ID, and if they hang up (making the $500 violation a willful $1500 violation), you have no convenient way of tracing them. (Especially if you live in a state that, like California, prohibits taping phone calls without the consent of both parties.) The case boils down to your word against the telemarketer's.
By contrast, with spam, you've got headers to work with and your landshark can go straight to the ISP with the subpoena.
Finally - unlike the phone company, who makes money off telemarketing (both from the telemarketers themselves, and from selling you stuff like caller-ID blocking) - the ISP has no financial incentive to cooperate with the get-rich-quick scammer, and would probably be pleased to send your landshark the requested info.
> Afterward, I got mail from them, saying that they would not bother me any more. But, it also said that most of
their customers who have unlisted phone numbers enjoy getting solicited by them!
Rule #1: Spammers lie.
Rule #2: If you think a spammer is telling the truth, see Rule #1.
Rule #3: Spammers are stupid
Sounds like your phone company's telespammers were exhibiting Rules #1 and #2.
I'm particularly convinced of this because just last night, I saw a marketroid from the DMA on National Business Report saying "consumers like to get notice of special offers" along with their credit card bills - in a piece that's explaining why you're (if you're in.us) getting all those "Privacy Notices" in the mail from your bank or brokerage.
(Basically, a new law forces them to let you opt out, but the opt-out doesn't give you anything useful, but the DMA is hoping that so few people bother opting out that they can use it as "evidence" in Congress that no privacy laws are required, because, after all, if consumers didn't like junk mail, they'd have opted-out;-)
When multiple marketroids start saying the same thing, my bullshit detector goes stratospheric.
> 3.Archiving, or "Oops, we're being sued/audited, where are the records from 5 years ago?" Here this is
the ability to get specially designated data back, and to insure that previously stored data remains
intact.
I think you misspelled "intact". In audit situations, it's supposed to be spelled "irretrievably lost, but you've got plausible deniability because you can claim in court that you tried to back it up..."
> > I doubt I'll ever collect, since Kozmo is going out of busines >
But I thought spamming was a big money maker...
So do a lot of companies soon to appear on fuckedcompany.com:)
From AGIS (The backbone that went chapter 11 in the late-90s after hosting Sanford Wallace and getting itself blackholed into oblivion on a zillion routers) to TFSM (24/7 Media), just because you happen to be a "mainstream" company doesn't mean that theft is good business.
> Why would a group of ISP's blacklist CUSTOMER's whe the MPAA's law clearly states that they are not responsable for
their users actions.
Probably because a guy on a cablemodem sharing movies with other people not on his ISP's network costs his cable company a small fortune in transit charges.
> those 62 MILLION Napster users are
going to have to go somewhere to get their fix....
USENET is ill-suited to the distribution of large binaries, but I'll bet it's cheaper from an ISP's point of view to have a 4-5 Terabyte RAID array and an OC-3 (A full USENET feed is 250G per day) to download and serve the alt.binaries.* hierarchy over its own wires than it is to have "those 62 million P2P users" snarfing the same stuff from other networks.
Consider - 500 people downloading a 600M DivX'd movie is 500 * 0.6G = 300G.
When it's 500 different movies, something like USENET breaks down. But when it's 500 people all downloading The Matrix, it's cheaper to grab it once from a feed and serve it over your own LAN.
> one is the ad space at the top of the official AOL client (which right now is showing an ad for AOL 6.0, so they're not making money on it, but it's still free promotion for them).
Au contraire.
It's collecting demographics - so they know who uses the AOL client, how long they use it, and because AOL is a "walled garden", they can cross-reference that with everything else they know about the user.
That's insanely valuable information for when the TW half of the conglomerate wants to sell that ad space to the highest bidder. And gets that premium price because every user is targeted.
Remember - AOL/TW is not an ISP. They're not even an online service provider. They're a media company.
I know, we're used to thinking of them as an ISP or OSP, and the adjustment takes a little getting used to at first, but once you make the mental shift, the battle for marketshare between AOL/TW, ELNK, and MSN becomes much easier to understand.
> what does AOL gain by having the userbase to AIM?
The ability to make sure that the eyeballs of their users don't leave AOL for ELNK or another ISP.
MSFT locks its users into Windows because they (i.e. the people they deal with at work) "need" M$Office.
AOL is trying to lock its users into AOL by ensuring that they (i.e. the people they IM with at home) "need" AIM.
Re:Ok, Dvorak is a spank but...
on
Calling Out TiVo
·
· Score: 2
> Imagine for a minute where a studios make programming with blue-screened areas for individual networks to
put advertising, IN PROGRAM. Each affiliate gets to put its own unique advertising for its region, the
studios get paid, and viewers get familiarity.
No need to imagine. Times Square on the eve of Y2K. It's already been done.
And I believe it's regularly being done at baseball games and other sporting events.
> I wonder though whether it will end here. We already have 3 button mice, 5 buttin mice (yes, the "wheel" is
actually buttons 4 & 5) Adding any more buttons would have been silly to operate with one hand, so they
invented "gesture" control.
I think you're onto something here - why not go all the way - take that "natural" (split) keyboard and turn it into two mice, each with 50-odd buttons?
Wanna keep it still and type? Lean your wrist back a notch. Wanna move around, lean your wrist forward. (Or vice versa, some ergonomics expert has no doubt figured this out:)
If the problem is that users don't want to switch between a movement controller with no buttons and a keyboard with lots of buttons, perhaps the solution is probably to move the buttons to the movement-controller, not, as has been done up until now, the other way around.
> Supposably you could also hear their heartbeat (well at least the *beep* *beep* *beep* of the
EKG).
All legends have a grain of truth in the center.
Theory: The "beep, beep, beep" was just the onboard telemetry saying "yeah, the spacecraft's alive". IOW, a "heartbeat" for the spacecraft. Some enterprising journalist heard the term "heartbeat" and assumed it to be a human heartbeat. (Or an EKG representing one...)
Human nature took care of the rest. It's not a far cry from "heartbeat" [of a spacecraft, in the telemetry sense] to "heartbeat" [of an EKG attached to a human], to "you could hear their heartbeat" [the lub-dub sound of blood going through a heart, as though someone hooked up the mic to a stethoscope]
>Sic Transit Gloria Mundi > >
Thus passes the Glory of the World. > >
One of my favorite latin phrases. But I don't think I've ever really seen the glory of the world.
Well, duh! It passed sometime during the Roman Empire, and it's been all downhill from there.
> Would you have any chance at a run for President under those conditions? I know I wouldn't.
No. But neither would anyone else - including the newsies reporting on the candidates' transgressions.
I would find this system ("everyone can watch anyone else") infinitely preferable to the current one, in which only Big Brother (be he in the form of the Gummint or the Corporates) has access to the details of my life.
> A simple campaign of 'just delete' would be
much more effective.
In your earlier post, you said that spam "works" (from the point of view of the spammer) because of the "y" sales out of "x" spams.
The problem with your logic here is that the people who are likely to realize that things offered by spammers are generally fraudulent - that is, people who will respond to your "just hit delete" campaign - aren't part of the "y" people dumb enough to buy the spamvertised product in the first place. Encouraging people who hate spam to JHD (Just Hit Delete) doesn't threaten a spammer's income stream, because the people who delete it unread aren't gonna buy the product anyways.
In fact, a campaign whereby spam-reporters were encouraged to JHD would result in more spam, not less, as spammers' accounts would live longer, and send more spam.
And if spammers' accounts live longer, and more spam gets sent out, and we accept your (logical) assumption that "y people respond for every x spams", then by increasing x, we would tend to increase y. (Up to a limit - after all, spammers' customers have only a finite amount of money to spend on get-rich-quick scams and fake Viagra, and when they've spent all their money on the former, can no longer afford the latter:)
Thus, a policy of "Just Hit Delete" would not only results in more spam, it would also result in more profit for spammers.
This is why JHD is not a solution, long-term, to the spam problem. It may be the right solution for you, and you've got every right to JHD if you so desire. It is quicker (at least in the short term), and if your goal is to minimize the amount of time you personally spend dealing with spam, it's workable.
But if your goal is to reduce the amount of spam overall, then taking the time to report to abuse@ (thereby hitting them in the pocketbook) is the way to go.
I used to JHD too, by the way. My spamload hit 20 per day around 1997, and then I learned how to read headers. It's now down to one or two a day, and reporting every spam has become quite manageable. A friend in the next cubicle who continued to JHD is now the 50-60 per day range.
> What about productivity losses for those staff members who don't bill by the hour, but still lose the same productivity? What happens if somebody goes on vacation, their mailbox fills with spam, reaches its storage limits and legitimate mail from clients gets bounced?
And before anyone suggests filtering...
...what if your customers are coming from places you're filtering out? Lots of folks can afford to blackhole much of the Far East due to the influx of spam coming from open relays. If your company does business in.jp,.cn,.tw, however, that's just not gonna fly.
Filters are a tool - whether they be client-side or at the router - but they're only a tool, and may not be appropriate in all situations.
And that gets to the real cost. What about the time your admin spends in writing filters and/or maintaining blocklists, rather than keeping up with CERT advisories and his usual sysadminnish tasks?
Oh, right, none of those costs are borne by the spammers either. So they don't count either, at least in spammer-logik.
> ISP bills higher as a result of spam? You mean to tell me your ISP charges you per email stored on their servers?
No, but an ISP's profit margins - and thus, its viability as a business - are affected by the amount of spam it has to process. Due to scaling issues, smaller "local" ISPs are probably hit worse than larger ISPs. (A $1M storage network is a drop in the bucket for AOL, but another $5K RAID setup may be a serious problem for some Mom 'n' Pop operation.)
The costs are indirect, but real.
> As for your friend, hasn't he ever considered turning his pager OFF before he goes to sleep?
I don't know the guy, but if he's paid to be on call 24/7, odds are that he can't just turn off the pager. Kinda defeats the purpose.
> Hey, Tackhead, how many hours a week do you spend complaining to big backbones (ie: UUnet). If
it is more than 0 seconds, you are lame and may need to get a life.
> I've found a rather neat little thing to keep spam from bothering me too much. It's called the Delete key. Trust me, it works.
I think my "delete" key is broken. It seems to be hooked up to my brain, which views and parses the headers of the spam, and forwards a report to the abuse administrator at the spammer's ISP.
For most ISPs, the spammer's account is then deleted. I'm sure that's not what you meant to suggest I do, but it seems to work for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen. Betcha most of those people are either:
Trying to find out how much the site charges for shipping/handling/taxes which would require that the items be in the cart,
Figuring out if that coupon they heard about on some site like hotdealsclub.com applies to their purchase, or
For some particularly brain-dead sites that don't list prices until you've set up a shopping cart, well, just looking at the damn price tag.
Hmm. Guess too many beer-cans-and-chicken-bones spammers said "we're opt-in!" and too many non-DMA goons saw through the DMA's attempt last year to redefine "opt-in" as "opt-out".
So now whenever I see the term "dedicated e-mail", I'll think "spam".
Nice bit of newspeak, market00ns. Won't help you, though.
Moderators: Moderate the parent post up. This was the key to the case, and why Joe Sixpack can't use the CA law himself.
IMHO, what we need is a federal anti-spam law that allows a private right of action (i.e. Joe Sixpack can sue), and for a large enough dollar amount (e.g. $500 per spam, not $10 per spam) that it's worth his while.
Something like the TCPA would be ideal. It's hard to collect with TCPA (telemarketing) because the telemarketers block Caller-ID, and if they hang up (making the $500 violation a willful $1500 violation), you have no convenient way of tracing them. (Especially if you live in a state that, like California, prohibits taping phone calls without the consent of both parties.) The case boils down to your word against the telemarketer's.
By contrast, with spam, you've got headers to work with and your landshark can go straight to the ISP with the subpoena.
Finally - unlike the phone company, who makes money off telemarketing (both from the telemarketers themselves, and from selling you stuff like caller-ID blocking) - the ISP has no financial incentive to cooperate with the get-rich-quick scammer, and would probably be pleased to send your landshark the requested info.
Rule #1: Spammers lie.
Rule #2: If you think a spammer is telling the truth, see Rule #1.
Rule #3: Spammers are stupid
Sounds like your phone company's telespammers were exhibiting Rules #1 and #2.
I'm particularly convinced of this because just last night, I saw a marketroid from the DMA on National Business Report saying "consumers like to get notice of special offers" along with their credit card bills - in a piece that's explaining why you're (if you're in .us) getting all those "Privacy Notices" in the mail from your bank or brokerage.
(Basically, a new law forces them to let you opt out, but the opt-out doesn't give you anything useful, but the DMA is hoping that so few people bother opting out that they can use it as "evidence" in Congress that no privacy laws are required, because, after all, if consumers didn't like junk mail, they'd have opted-out ;-)
When multiple marketroids start saying the same thing, my bullshit detector goes stratospheric.
I think you misspelled "intact". In audit situations, it's supposed to be spelled "irretrievably lost, but you've got plausible deniability because you can claim in court that you tried to back it up..."
> But I thought spamming was a big money maker...
So do a lot of companies soon to appear on fuckedcompany.com :)
From AGIS (The backbone that went chapter 11 in the late-90s after hosting Sanford Wallace and getting itself blackholed into oblivion on a zillion routers) to TFSM (24/7 Media), just because you happen to be a "mainstream" company doesn't mean that theft is good business.
Good on ya, Ellen. Nice kill.
Probably because a guy on a cablemodem sharing movies with other people not on his ISP's network costs his cable company a small fortune in transit charges.
> those 62 MILLION Napster users are going to have to go somewhere to get their fix....
USENET is ill-suited to the distribution of large binaries, but I'll bet it's cheaper from an ISP's point of view to have a 4-5 Terabyte RAID array and an OC-3 (A full USENET feed is 250G per day) to download and serve the alt.binaries.* hierarchy over its own wires than it is to have "those 62 million P2P users" snarfing the same stuff from other networks.
Consider - 500 people downloading a 600M DivX'd movie is 500 * 0.6G = 300G.
When it's 500 different movies, something like USENET breaks down. But when it's 500 people all downloading The Matrix, it's cheaper to grab it once from a feed and serve it over your own LAN.
Yeah, but when I xored my 6G .VOB file with /dev/null, I still got the first 6G of the movie :)
I dunno, criminalizing millions of people overnight seems to have worked fine for the laws that support the War On Some Drugs.
Sure, it's buggered the population and turned the Fourth Amendment into toilet paper, but it's not like that's stopped it or anything.
Au contraire.
It's collecting demographics - so they know who uses the AOL client, how long they use it, and because AOL is a "walled garden", they can cross-reference that with everything else they know about the user.
That's insanely valuable information for when the TW half of the conglomerate wants to sell that ad space to the highest bidder. And gets that premium price because every user is targeted.
Remember - AOL/TW is not an ISP. They're not even an online service provider. They're a media company.
I know, we're used to thinking of them as an ISP or OSP, and the adjustment takes a little getting used to at first, but once you make the mental shift, the battle for marketshare between AOL/TW, ELNK, and MSN becomes much easier to understand.
The ability to make sure that the eyeballs of their users don't leave AOL for ELNK or another ISP.
MSFT locks its users into Windows because they (i.e. the people they deal with at work) "need" M$Office.
AOL is trying to lock its users into AOL by ensuring that they (i.e. the people they IM with at home) "need" AIM.
No need to imagine. Times Square on the eve of Y2K. It's already been done.
And I believe it's regularly being done at baseball games and other sporting events.
Hey! Watch what you say about Jon Katz!
I think you're onto something here - why not go all the way - take that "natural" (split) keyboard and turn it into two mice, each with 50-odd buttons?
Wanna keep it still and type? Lean your wrist back a notch. Wanna move around, lean your wrist forward. (Or vice versa, some ergonomics expert has no doubt figured this out :)
If the problem is that users don't want to switch between a movement controller with no buttons and a keyboard with lots of buttons, perhaps the solution is probably to move the buttons to the movement-controller, not, as has been done up until now, the other way around.
We have cameras covering every square inch of Britain so that every individual can be tracked.
But we can't tell you where Agent 69 was last Tuesday when he lost his laptop.
And it's a good thing we've got these cameras to keep track of the IRA, or they'd set up us the bomb.
So we'll give each agent a small thermite bomb in a briefcase instead, and give 'em free roam of the city.
The fuck-up fairy must be workin' overtime.
Hear, hear.
Of course, we're not immune either (and you didn't imply we were :)
"Sure, we can launch the shuttle in this freezing cold. How bad could it be?"
All legends have a grain of truth in the center.
Theory: The "beep, beep, beep" was just the onboard telemetry saying "yeah, the spacecraft's alive". IOW, a "heartbeat" for the spacecraft. Some enterprising journalist heard the term "heartbeat" and assumed it to be a human heartbeat. (Or an EKG representing one...)
Human nature took care of the rest. It's not a far cry from "heartbeat" [of a spacecraft, in the telemetry sense] to "heartbeat" [of an EKG attached to a human], to "you could hear their heartbeat" [the lub-dub sound of blood going through a heart, as though someone hooked up the mic to a stethoscope]
>
> Thus passes the Glory of the World.
>
> One of my favorite latin phrases. But I don't think I've ever really seen the glory of the world.
Well, duh! It passed sometime during the Roman Empire, and it's been all downhill from there.
(Yeah, it's one of my favorite phrases too.)
No. But neither would anyone else - including the newsies reporting on the candidates' transgressions.
I would find this system ("everyone can watch anyone else") infinitely preferable to the current one, in which only Big Brother (be he in the form of the Gummint or the Corporates) has access to the details of my life.
In your earlier post, you said that spam "works" (from the point of view of the spammer) because of the "y" sales out of "x" spams.
The problem with your logic here is that the people who are likely to realize that things offered by spammers are generally fraudulent - that is, people who will respond to your "just hit delete" campaign - aren't part of the "y" people dumb enough to buy the spamvertised product in the first place. Encouraging people who hate spam to JHD (Just Hit Delete) doesn't threaten a spammer's income stream, because the people who delete it unread aren't gonna buy the product anyways.
In fact, a campaign whereby spam-reporters were encouraged to JHD would result in more spam, not less, as spammers' accounts would live longer, and send more spam.
And if spammers' accounts live longer, and more spam gets sent out, and we accept your (logical) assumption that "y people respond for every x spams", then by increasing x, we would tend to increase y. (Up to a limit - after all, spammers' customers have only a finite amount of money to spend on get-rich-quick scams and fake Viagra, and when they've spent all their money on the former, can no longer afford the latter :)
Thus, a policy of "Just Hit Delete" would not only results in more spam, it would also result in more profit for spammers.
This is why JHD is not a solution, long-term, to the spam problem. It may be the right solution for you, and you've got every right to JHD if you so desire. It is quicker (at least in the short term), and if your goal is to minimize the amount of time you personally spend dealing with spam, it's workable.
But if your goal is to reduce the amount of spam overall, then taking the time to report to abuse@ (thereby hitting them in the pocketbook) is the way to go.
I used to JHD too, by the way. My spamload hit 20 per day around 1997, and then I learned how to read headers. It's now down to one or two a day, and reporting every spam has become quite manageable. A friend in the next cubicle who continued to JHD is now the 50-60 per day range.
And before anyone suggests filtering...
Filters are a tool - whether they be client-side or at the router - but they're only a tool, and may not be appropriate in all situations.
And that gets to the real cost. What about the time your admin spends in writing filters and/or maintaining blocklists, rather than keeping up with CERT advisories and his usual sysadminnish tasks?
Oh, right, none of those costs are borne by the spammers either. So they don't count either, at least in spammer-logik.
No, but an ISP's profit margins - and thus, its viability as a business - are affected by the amount of spam it has to process. Due to scaling issues, smaller "local" ISPs are probably hit worse than larger ISPs. (A $1M storage network is a drop in the bucket for AOL, but another $5K RAID setup may be a serious problem for some Mom 'n' Pop operation.)
The costs are indirect, but real.
> As for your friend, hasn't he ever considered turning his pager OFF before he goes to sleep?
I don't know the guy, but if he's paid to be on call 24/7, odds are that he can't just turn off the pager. Kinda defeats the purpose.
Yup.
As one AC has pointed out - I have no life. 'Sokay. I never claimed to have a life :)
*shrug*, so I'm lame and need to get a life :)
I think my "delete" key is broken. It seems to be hooked up to my brain, which views and parses the headers of the spam, and forwards a report to the abuse administrator at the spammer's ISP.
For most ISPs, the spammer's account is then deleted. I'm sure that's not what you meant to suggest I do, but it seems to work for me.