I think every government budget should be slashed, from schools to police. FORCE them to be efficient.
You may not realize it, but you are arguing a point the person who wants to maintain/increase the budget always argues. Whenever there are talks of cuts, they put up a plan for across the board spending cuts. Now everyone is pissed because everyones' personal pet project is detrimentally affected and the whole idea of budget cuts goes down in flames. Bravo.
BTW, didn't Bush promise NASA a budget increase? This just in from the Ministry of Truth: NASA has exceeded all efficiency goals and has patriotically pledged it's remaining funds to the war against the Eurasians.
Now, wanna really get your britches in a twist? The Executive branch gets more money than NASA. (Java applet, if you're using IE or life otherwise sucks, 27B Executive, 16B NASA) Almost twice as much.
This is brilliant! Using newsgroup archives that stretch back some 20 odd years to provide evidence that a patent is not novel or non-obvious! I think I shall patent this concept:-P
My activities in public are Intellectual Property
on
1984 Comes To Boston
·
· Score: 1
Uh, when you're out in public everything you do is subject to observation by the public.
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. -- Amendment V, US Constitution
My day to day activities are a one man performance. It is my Intellectual Property, and thus I own copyright on them. By recording them without compensation, the government is in violation of our strong Intellectual Property laws. "All the world is a stage". Therefore, they may view, but it is against the law to record. They are pirating my performances! It's no different than someone sneaking into a public venue and recording a movie screening. Next thing you know, they'll be file sharing on some darpa.net thing, and everyone will be viewing MY performance for free!!! They are blatantly stealing my IP. I think a DMCA notification is in order, don't you?
Except that with few exceptions, more people have been killed at the hands of their own governments than have ever died from foreign or even domestic terrorist networks.
Excellent point. Let's put some hard numbers with that assertion. Oh, somewhere in the neighborhood of 170,000,000 civilians killed by government in the 20th century. How many military deaths? 33,000,000. Total, 203 Million. That's right, nearly 6 times as many people died at the hands of government than died fighting for it. 83,000,000 died as a result of tyranny and genocide in the last 100 years, but no, we don't need liberty or habeas corpus or the right to bear arms anymore. Those things are so 18th century.
You want to know what drives someone to fly a jet full of passengers into one of the tallest buildings in the world? Some idiot is saying it's because they hate freedom and democracy... I have a different theory.
Killed through U.S. foreign policy since WWII: 10,774,706 to 16,856,361 (1945-May 2003)
Monsanto is not the only company making GMOs. GMOs are not, by definition, all designed to improve yield.
Microsoft is not the only company making OSes. OSes are not, by definition, all designed to stifle competition and disable competing products. So does that mean Microsoft is not a problem because Linux is open source? You cannot simply ignore the 800 lb gorilla, because he is the trend setter for the majority and his actions have the most pronounced effect on the world around him. Unfortunately in America, his money also makes him above the law.
Please tell me what chemicals my food has been soaking in before you give me its family tree.
Giving you its family tree often directly informs you of what chemicals your food has been soaking in, as my previous post should illustrate. I'm sure GMO manufacturers would be against you having knowledge of either though.
You are a computer guy, aren't you (judging by the cs.queensu.ca)? Do you know that growing Roundup Ready(TM) beans implies using MORE herbicide than regular soybeans? I mean, that's the whole point of Roundup Ready(TM) beans. Roundup(TM) doesn't kill 'em. You can dump buckets of Roundup(TM) to kill evolved Roundup(TM) resistant weeds without hurting your beans. Ask anyone with an Ag degree. GMOs are not about reducing chemical usage/dependance. GMOs are about improving yield. Think about it. Why would Monsanto, a company that has a lot of money invested in selling you their chemicals, want to do away with the need for their chemicals?
Monsanto is the Microsoft of agriculture, so please take their literature with a grain of salt:-) Oh, and speaking of salt, please don't buy any of that Scotts weed killer for the weeds between the cracks in your sidewalks, as their commercials suggest. A bag of salt will do the trick and keep anything from growing back in that spot for years. Cheaper, more effective, and the fewer chemicals the better, right? Ok, so even if you love toxic chemicals, the salt is still cheaper and more effective. Oh, and boiling water, applied correctly, will kill your fire ants... since we're on that whole reducing chemical usage thing... uh, yeah, so I'll drop the valley girl thing now (Two five minute episodes of Pink Five, forgive me) and say...
People like to own things, whether it be a car, home, clothes, etc. Only when there is no other choice will be use "communal" stuff (electricity, etc)
Not to minimize your point at all, but I just have to throw this in...
Most people like to think they own things. Cars, homes... people don't own these things in America. They owe a bank several years of their lives for them. Most people do not own anything of substantial value. Most people are upside down in their 60 month car loan until it is finally paid for, at which point their car is a wholesale piece and practically worthless. Most are 2nd and 3rd mortgaged in a house they will never pay off. They have 30 year loans that are all interest for several years and only have an intention to 'trade up' to something even less affordable later.
If you asked me, I'd say people like wage slavery and convenience more than they like owning things.
Well, that's where the server admin comes in. You don't just ban a whole server. You give the server admin a short period of time to ban the user, and then ban the whole server if they haven't complied. You could distribute the code which checks to see if they have stopped spamming.:-)
I not saying server side wouldn't work, I just think client side is where it belongs. Why should stupid user activity be the admin's problem?
As an example, just take a look at all the open wi-fi hotspots on ISP networks. There ARE legitimate reasons to run open wi-fi. That would be an admin's nightmare, contacting each of those people individually, dictating their setup under threat of pulling their account. People who don't want to play 'kill the spammer' are forced to do so anyway. Customers are pissed, and the ISP looses business on their holy anti-spam crusade.
With client side, you have none of that. Nobody is required to play, but you can whenever you are ready. You only have to not send spam and report signed spam. Simple. Getting people on board will happen naturally, we just need a proper foundation to start with. That means a big OS distribution is going to have to get behind the idea and deliver a solution. Apple is practically there. I hope they hit the mark with 10.4.
In regards to PGP v. S/Mime... As long as it's user friendly, most really won't care about the specifics. I use S/Mime, because support is built into my mail client. I could use PGP, but the GPGMail plugin breaks every time Mail.app is upgraded. PGP being the original PKE is no doubt more familiar to most of us geeks, but PKE is PKE whether you call it PGP or S/Mime. The same issues apply, only the message format is changed. Oh yeah, and the key server is managed by "Giant MegaEvil Inc." But like I mentioned in another post, I think that is a due to a small number of competitors serving a small market rather than a requirement of the technology itself. As long as I am generating the private key though, I don't think it really matters. If they sell out to spammers, just pull their root cert from your system and if necessary, choose another CA to sign your cert.
If all the CAs sell out, then you have yourself a business opportunity! Contact Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple and Linus about getting your CA cert packaged with their root certs:-)
The problem isn't that Bob is going to spam Alice. The problem is that Bob is going to spam several thousand (or million) people.
This is true, and the primary reason for having a small charge for a signed certificate in the first place. Without some kind of charge involved, Bob can generate a different key for each individual email, and defeat the purpose of the system. Believe me when I say I am against most any pay for email solution you can come up with, but I don't think a dollar a year is significant.
he gets his key revoked when Alice forwards it to his certificate authority. Now his key can be blacklisted by email clients
So Bob then just buys a new key, and discards the old one.
And every message sent with that key is canned once his key is revoked. Bob is forced to buy keys at a rate directly proportional to the rate at which his email is classified as spam and his key is revoked.
Or are you suggesting that everybody who wants to send email has to go through a background check first?
If the certs were a dollar each, the simple act of charging it to your credit card would probably be sufficient to ID you. Personally, I don't find Thawte.com's id process overly intrusive, even though they do require a 'National ID Number' and have mention of $10,000 fines for entering false information. But that's why it's called the web of trust. When you receive a signed message, you are supposed to be able to trust that the sender is who he says he is. Those CAs that are the fittest, the ones that strike the balance of identification/convenience will eventually win. It's ultimately up to you to decide who to trust. If you get a lot of spam from keys signed by one certificate authority, you can remove their root certificate from your list. And no CA wants that.
If you're the tin foil hat type, unsigned mail will still be there for you. This is not a server side scheme that blocks anyone who doesn't want to play. It is simply my belief that most people WOULD want to play. Secure email, no spam, backwards compatible, and minimal cost.
a small charge for a signed certificate should be enough to prevent Bob from generating an endless numbers of keys
Wrong. A small charge wouldn't stop a spammer from buying a new key every few days (the length of time it will take for the CA to investigate the complaint, revoke the cert and add it to the CRL.)
The idea is that Bob cannot afford to buy a single, on shot, disposable key for every single email. Bob is forced to reuse keys due to the price. Since he is forced to reuse keys, once one message is flagged, all messages sent with that key are flagged as well.
As you've noted, it then boils down to how quickly we can ID Bob's message as spam. Frankly, I think "days" is a quite unrealistically long time. The folks at Brightmail would be out of business by now if that were the case. I think a timeframe in minutes would be much more realistic.
But it will be enough to prevent Fred, the innocent person who is living paycheck-to-paycheck, from using email at all.
I don't think Fred is going to have a huge problem with a dollar a year. I mean, he can swing that by giving up one 20 oz. Coke... per year!:-) As long as Fred isn't sending spam, he should have no problem getting a full year out of his key.
And after Bob and all the other spammers have done this a few thousand times, the CRLs get so big as to become unmanageable, and the whole system crumbles under the load.
But CAs will no doubt have acceptable use policies. I'd say after 1000 or so incidents in a year, you would have a pretty hard time not being booted by their admin, even if you are a 'reputable' company. Any CA would be free to accept endless payment from spammers, but then end users are likely to remove that CA's root certificate from their system. It's another one
Well, the reason I can't see it working at the server level is that one bad apple spoils the bunch. If someone on my mail server starts spamming, then my super important "Terrorists are planning to attack the brooklyn bridge in a half hour!!!" email gets blocked because of it. No, not a realistic scenario, but you get the idea.
Individual responsibility, individual protection.
S/MIME is just evil. I wish everyone using S/MIME would just use PGP already.
PGP the product supports S/Mime, no? I'm not terribly wild about PGP since Phil Zimmerman left though. No source, no trust in my book. OpenSSL has the clear advantage in the open source code dept.:-)
If your certificate is locked in a keychain, and the keychain is configured appropriately, worms would have scarce little chance to send 10000 emails without grandma noticing. I have my signed certificate on my keychain, and it is configured to only allow Mail.app access to it. The only way a worm is sending mail with my key is to open Mail.app, and start sending messages in plain view of anyone sitting at the machine. I can also set it to ask for the keychain password before access and create yet another stumbling block for worms if necessary.
At the worst, grandma has to spend a buck to get a new certificate and maybe get a lecture about opening attachments in unsigned mail;-) Being a good grandson though, you would probably install Mozilla for her, thus limiting the possibility of a worm taking advantage of her to begin with, no?
There are multiple certificate authorities, and there could be more. It's simply a matter of getting your root certificate distributed with the OS and browsers out there. Unless by central authority, you mean Microsoft. And unless they start their own certificate authority and refuse to ship with anyone else's root certificate, I don't see that as a problem. Lack of diversity, I believe, is directly related to lack of use.
As for the scheme being open, sure it can be. Not everyone has a root certificate distributed with Mozilla or Windows. You could always send me a self signed certificate, but Mail.app on my Mac complains that it is not singed by any root certs. Those would be equivalent to an unsigned mail message and filed appropriately... At least until I added the senders root certificate to my list of trusted root certificates.
Imagine if everyone used encryption. Would spam not then be a relatively small problem? If Bob spams Alice, then he gets his key revoked when Alice forwards it to his certificate authority. Now his key can be blacklisted by email clients. Carol receives Bob's message after Alice had it revoked, and as a result her email client sends the message straight to her junk mail box. Unsigned mail is not broken by this scheme, and a small charge for a signed certificate should be enough to prevent Bob from generating an endless numbers of keys at no cost. Again, assuming the majority is using encryption, unsigned mail is probably spam, but filtered to an unsigned mail box. No worse than what we have today. Revoked keys could be sent directly to the junk mail box, and all validly signed mail is whitelisted. This is by no means a new theory, and would require very little work to implement for a company like Microsoft or Apple. Would anyone care to explain why this is not in use? Would a dollar per certificate not be worth secure email and a relatively spam free existence?
The thing about computers before was that it was super easy to just write ten lines of code and have something happen. Now you have to hunt down an IDE or an editor, and chances are you're writing a lot more than ten lines even for Hello World!
Open/Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor.app and type in:
display dialog "Hello World!"
Click run. Yeah, Windows is almost as easy to use as a Mac;-)
Speaking of Real and QuickTime, I was just made aware of this little gem a couple of days ago. It allows you to export movies to Real format from within QuickTime Player Pro. Now if there were only a decoder component, I could toss Real Player for good...
You forgot to show her how to avoid giving the RIAA money at all... You're heart seems to be in the right place, but next time this happens, show them iTunes + RIAA radar. For those that want free, send 'em over to iRate. Encourage those who care to do these simple things, and bands will quickly find out how unpopular it is to be affiliated with those thugs.
Fine. But don't whine when it's not economically feasible for people to produce these forms of entertainment because the piracy is so rampant.
Yeah, because we all know VHS movie distribution failed horribly due to lack of region coding. Region coding is not about piracy, it is about erecting artificial barriers in the supply/demand equation. A practice more commonly known as Price Fixing!
If you're going to protest these companies, then protest their products completely.
That is EXACTLY the idea I'm trying to convey. I am pointing out the hypocrisy of those in the Slashdot crowd who become enraged by MPAA lawsuits against 'DVD Jon', and then turn around and fund those lawsuits by purchasing the latest release of $MPAA_SCI_FI_MOVIE. In short, 'put up or shut up' to all on the board.
Nothing irks me more than someone who shows their protest by downloading and consuming as much as they can. Way to show the man! Not trying to say you are guilty of the above - you might be, you might now be.
I don't, I'm not, and by bring it up, you insinuate that most of us arguing for the preservation of fair use (backup copies, time shifting, etc) and the rest of our rights are trying to justify criminal intent.
I resent that. We are not the criminals. The criminals are the ones making unconstitutional laws and infringing on our constitutional rights with impunity. The criminals are telling college professors to take down their websites and censoring their lectures via threat of litigation. The criminals are the ones suing students for writing software.
They are the criminals, not those of us voicing our displeasure with them. They have nothing I am willing to trade for my constitutionally protected liberties, and I will not stand by quietly while they try to take them by force.
And remember, these are forms of entertainment. They aren't denying... the ability to live your life.
Through the perversion of our legal system, they are doing just that.
You could argue they are affecting your rights, but come on, it's a movie (I won't go so far as to say it's a "cartoon," since most anime fans hate that:)
You value entertainment more than liberty? I find that appalling.
If you don't like how they play, you simply don't have to play with them.
Oh, but you do. You have no choice. You buy a blank CD and BY LAW you must contribute to the RIAA's coffers. My CD blanks are used to back up data, drivers, preserve original copies of legally acquired audio CDs, and to ferry multi-megabyte software updates to my modem bound brother. Why should I have to pay the entertainment industry 25 cents per blank to do that? So they can file groundless lawsuits, of course! When they knock on your door with a subpoena and an IP address which they claim is yours, you have two options. 1) Spend years of your life in court and tens of thousands on legal bills fighting it, or 2) give them $3000 and beg them to leave you in peace. Guilt or lack thereof is irrelevant. You don't see a problem with this legalized extortion?
If you re-read what I emphasized, you will probably notice that I was pointing out a logical fallacy in the parent's post. They are indeed engaging in a MPAA style practice, which you yourself have pointed out is 'a damned inconvenience' and 'pretty pointless'.
Practically every music or movie submission on Slashdot contains the same glaring absence of contempt for the MPAA/RIAA as this one. Yet every YRO post regarding the MPAA/RIAA is a 900 post +5 flamefest. According to you yourself, Dreamworks is "huge and a member of the MPAA". According to the 'here' link with the story submission, the movie is trademark and copyright 2004 Dreamworks, LLC for each and every Slashbot to see. Where are the posters who flame the MPAA for fun and mod points now? Either practice what you preach or wallow in ignominy.
Or you can buy the retail version that comes out July 27th
(in the US, region 1). Most of the US anime companies are very fan-friendly and do not carry the same practices as the RIAA/MPAA. Please support an industry that is fan-friendly.
Uh, right. Please refresh my memory. Who practices region coding besides the MPAA? I click the 'here' link and see MPAA.ORG at the bottom of the front page. Slashbots are just as bad as the hoi polloi on whom they heap so much derision. I see not one post criticizing the MPAA. Why? Because nerds wanna see anime, principles be damned. Boycott this picture or shame on you all.
The poor clerk:-( If he didn't know WTF you were talking about when you mentioned copy restriction, berating him about it is going to accomplish squat. Rather, ask him for a corporate address or phone number and vent there. It isn't his fault, he just works there (for very little $$ I'm sure). Take it out on a pointy haired boss. They're the SOBs that deserve it anyway.
When you are done venting, find some music without the restrictions. I would advise checking RIAA Radar before any purchase. We wouldn't want to help the bastards, now would we? Try my two favorite sources of DRM-free music: CDBaby and iRate.
You remind me of Jack Valenti when I saw him on CSPAN. He would argue against piracy in one sentence, the next he's pitching new movies. Argue, pitch, smile. Argue, pitch, smile.
Argue:
People don't really care that the album is copy protected.
Well apparently, some do, because there are iPod issues, no?
Pitch:
Hell, I'll go buy this one. These guys make good music. Plain and simple.
Oh yeah, Stone Temple Pilots, right. They're great.
I saw Stone Temple Pilots this weekend. I liked them better the first time around...when they were called Pearl Jam - David Spade
Don't forget the smile. Now go pick up your RIAA "Slashdot +5" bonus check and astroturf another story for fun and profit. Who mods this crap insightful?
That's $330 vs. $59 for machines that are about the same age. Given, the Compaq doesn't have a monitor or modem like the iMac. Those two things can hardly make up for that much price difference though. It's simple. A four year old PC is crap. A four year old Mac is still useful. Remember that the next time you bemoan how expensive Macs are;-)
Just take your DV cam to the next public birthday party they attend. Preferably, his own. Then you can lock up all his friends, supporters, and major financial contributers.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I think every government budget should be slashed, from schools to police. FORCE them to be efficient.
You may not realize it, but you are arguing a point the person who wants to maintain/increase the budget always argues. Whenever there are talks of cuts, they put up a plan for across the board spending cuts. Now everyone is pissed because everyones' personal pet project is detrimentally affected and the whole idea of budget cuts goes down in flames. Bravo.
BTW, didn't Bush promise NASA a budget increase? This just in from the Ministry of Truth: NASA has exceeded all efficiency goals and has patriotically pledged it's remaining funds to the war against the Eurasians.
Now, wanna really get your britches in a twist? The Executive branch gets more money than NASA. (Java applet, if you're using IE or life otherwise sucks, 27B Executive, 16B NASA) Almost twice as much.
This is brilliant! Using newsgroup archives that stretch back some 20 odd years to provide evidence that a patent is not novel or non-obvious! I think I shall patent this concept :-P
Uh, when you're out in public everything you do is subject to observation by the public.
My day to day activities are a one man performance. It is my Intellectual Property, and thus I own copyright on them. By recording them without compensation, the government is in violation of our strong Intellectual Property laws. "All the world is a stage". Therefore, they may view, but it is against the law to record. They are pirating my performances! It's no different than someone sneaking into a public venue and recording a movie screening. Next thing you know, they'll be file sharing on some darpa.net thing, and everyone will be viewing MY performance for free!!! They are blatantly stealing my IP. I think a DMCA notification is in order, don't you?
Except that with few exceptions, more people have been killed at the hands of their own governments than have ever died from foreign or even domestic terrorist networks.
Excellent point. Let's put some hard numbers with that assertion. Oh, somewhere in the neighborhood of 170,000,000 civilians killed by government in the 20th century. How many military deaths? 33,000,000. Total, 203 Million. That's right, nearly 6 times as many people died at the hands of government than died fighting for it. 83,000,000 died as a result of tyranny and genocide in the last 100 years, but no, we don't need liberty or habeas corpus or the right to bear arms anymore. Those things are so 18th century.
You want to know what drives someone to fly a jet full of passengers into one of the tallest buildings in the world? Some idiot is saying it's because they hate freedom and democracy... I have a different theory.
Monsanto is not the only company making GMOs. GMOs are not, by definition, all designed to improve yield.
Microsoft is not the only company making OSes. OSes are not, by definition, all designed to stifle competition and disable competing products. So does that mean Microsoft is not a problem because Linux is open source? You cannot simply ignore the 800 lb gorilla, because he is the trend setter for the majority and his actions have the most pronounced effect on the world around him. Unfortunately in America, his money also makes him above the law.
Please tell me what chemicals my food has been soaking in before you give me its family tree.
Giving you its family tree often directly informs you of what chemicals your food has been soaking in, as my previous post should illustrate. I'm sure GMO manufacturers would be against you having knowledge of either though.
Monsanto is the Microsoft of agriculture, so please take their literature with a grain of salt :-) Oh, and speaking of salt, please don't buy any of that Scotts weed killer for the weeds between the cracks in your sidewalks, as their commercials suggest. A bag of salt will do the trick and keep anything from growing back in that spot for years. Cheaper, more effective, and the fewer chemicals the better, right? Ok, so even if you love toxic chemicals, the salt is still cheaper and more effective. Oh, and boiling water, applied correctly, will kill your fire ants... since we're on that whole reducing chemical usage thing... uh, yeah, so I'll drop the valley girl thing now (Two five minute episodes of Pink Five, forgive me) and say...
Thanks for reading :-)
People like to own things, whether it be a car, home, clothes, etc. Only when there is no other choice will be use "communal" stuff (electricity, etc)
Not to minimize your point at all, but I just have to throw this in...
Most people like to think they own things. Cars, homes... people don't own these things in America. They owe a bank several years of their lives for them. Most people do not own anything of substantial value. Most people are upside down in their 60 month car loan until it is finally paid for, at which point their car is a wholesale piece and practically worthless. Most are 2nd and 3rd mortgaged in a house they will never pay off. They have 30 year loans that are all interest for several years and only have an intention to 'trade up' to something even less affordable later.
If you asked me, I'd say people like wage slavery and convenience more than they like owning things.
Well, that's where the server admin comes in. You don't just ban a whole server. You give the server admin a short period of time to ban the user, and then ban the whole server if they haven't complied. You could distribute the code which checks to see if they have stopped spamming. :-)
I not saying server side wouldn't work, I just think client side is where it belongs. Why should stupid user activity be the admin's problem?
As an example, just take a look at all the open wi-fi hotspots on ISP networks. There ARE legitimate reasons to run open wi-fi. That would be an admin's nightmare, contacting each of those people individually, dictating their setup under threat of pulling their account. People who don't want to play 'kill the spammer' are forced to do so anyway. Customers are pissed, and the ISP looses business on their holy anti-spam crusade.
With client side, you have none of that. Nobody is required to play, but you can whenever you are ready. You only have to not send spam and report signed spam. Simple. Getting people on board will happen naturally, we just need a proper foundation to start with. That means a big OS distribution is going to have to get behind the idea and deliver a solution. Apple is practically there. I hope they hit the mark with 10.4.
In regards to PGP v. S/Mime... As long as it's user friendly, most really won't care about the specifics. I use S/Mime, because support is built into my mail client. I could use PGP, but the GPGMail plugin breaks every time Mail.app is upgraded. PGP being the original PKE is no doubt more familiar to most of us geeks, but PKE is PKE whether you call it PGP or S/Mime. The same issues apply, only the message format is changed. Oh yeah, and the key server is managed by "Giant MegaEvil Inc." But like I mentioned in another post, I think that is a due to a small number of competitors serving a small market rather than a requirement of the technology itself. As long as I am generating the private key though, I don't think it really matters. If they sell out to spammers, just pull their root cert from your system and if necessary, choose another CA to sign your cert.
If all the CAs sell out, then you have yourself a business opportunity! Contact Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple and Linus about getting your CA cert packaged with their root certs :-)
The problem isn't that Bob is going to spam Alice. The problem is that Bob is going to spam several thousand (or million) people.
This is true, and the primary reason for having a small charge for a signed certificate in the first place. Without some kind of charge involved, Bob can generate a different key for each individual email, and defeat the purpose of the system. Believe me when I say I am against most any pay for email solution you can come up with, but I don't think a dollar a year is significant.
So Bob then just buys a new key, and discards the old one.
And every message sent with that key is canned once his key is revoked. Bob is forced to buy keys at a rate directly proportional to the rate at which his email is classified as spam and his key is revoked.
Or are you suggesting that everybody who wants to send email has to go through a background check first?
If the certs were a dollar each, the simple act of charging it to your credit card would probably be sufficient to ID you. Personally, I don't find Thawte.com's id process overly intrusive, even though they do require a 'National ID Number' and have mention of $10,000 fines for entering false information. But that's why it's called the web of trust. When you receive a signed message, you are supposed to be able to trust that the sender is who he says he is. Those CAs that are the fittest, the ones that strike the balance of identification/convenience will eventually win. It's ultimately up to you to decide who to trust. If you get a lot of spam from keys signed by one certificate authority, you can remove their root certificate from your list. And no CA wants that.
If you're the tin foil hat type, unsigned mail will still be there for you. This is not a server side scheme that blocks anyone who doesn't want to play. It is simply my belief that most people WOULD want to play. Secure email, no spam, backwards compatible, and minimal cost.
Wrong. A small charge wouldn't stop a spammer from buying a new key every few days (the length of time it will take for the CA to investigate the complaint, revoke the cert and add it to the CRL.)
The idea is that Bob cannot afford to buy a single, on shot, disposable key for every single email. Bob is forced to reuse keys due to the price. Since he is forced to reuse keys, once one message is flagged, all messages sent with that key are flagged as well.
As you've noted, it then boils down to how quickly we can ID Bob's message as spam. Frankly, I think "days" is a quite unrealistically long time. The folks at Brightmail would be out of business by now if that were the case. I think a timeframe in minutes would be much more realistic.
But it will be enough to prevent Fred, the innocent person who is living paycheck-to-paycheck, from using email at all.
I don't think Fred is going to have a huge problem with a dollar a year. I mean, he can swing that by giving up one 20 oz. Coke... per year! :-) As long as Fred isn't sending spam, he should have no problem getting a full year out of his key.
And after Bob and all the other spammers have done this a few thousand times, the CRLs get so big as to become unmanageable, and the whole system crumbles under the load.
But CAs will no doubt have acceptable use policies. I'd say after 1000 or so incidents in a year, you would have a pretty hard time not being booted by their admin, even if you are a 'reputable' company. Any CA would be free to accept endless payment from spammers, but then end users are likely to remove that CA's root certificate from their system. It's another one
Well, the reason I can't see it working at the server level is that one bad apple spoils the bunch. If someone on my mail server starts spamming, then my super important "Terrorists are planning to attack the brooklyn bridge in a half hour!!!" email gets blocked because of it. No, not a realistic scenario, but you get the idea.
Individual responsibility, individual protection.
S/MIME is just evil. I wish everyone using S/MIME would just use PGP already.
PGP the product supports S/Mime, no? I'm not terribly wild about PGP since Phil Zimmerman left though. No source, no trust in my book. OpenSSL has the clear advantage in the open source code dept. :-)
Oops, sorry. Make that... "If your private key is locked in a keychain," and so on :-)
At the worst, grandma has to spend a buck to get a new certificate and maybe get a lecture about opening attachments in unsigned mail ;-) Being a good grandson though, you would probably install Mozilla for her, thus limiting the possibility of a worm taking advantage of her to begin with, no?
As for the scheme being open, sure it can be. Not everyone has a root certificate distributed with Mozilla or Windows. You could always send me a self signed certificate, but Mail.app on my Mac complains that it is not singed by any root certs. Those would be equivalent to an unsigned mail message and filed appropriately... At least until I added the senders root certificate to my list of trusted root certificates.
Imagine if everyone used encryption. Would spam not then be a relatively small problem? If Bob spams Alice, then he gets his key revoked when Alice forwards it to his certificate authority. Now his key can be blacklisted by email clients. Carol receives Bob's message after Alice had it revoked, and as a result her email client sends the message straight to her junk mail box. Unsigned mail is not broken by this scheme, and a small charge for a signed certificate should be enough to prevent Bob from generating an endless numbers of keys at no cost. Again, assuming the majority is using encryption, unsigned mail is probably spam, but filtered to an unsigned mail box. No worse than what we have today. Revoked keys could be sent directly to the junk mail box, and all validly signed mail is whitelisted. This is by no means a new theory, and would require very little work to implement for a company like Microsoft or Apple. Would anyone care to explain why this is not in use? Would a dollar per certificate not be worth secure email and a relatively spam free existence?
Open /Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor.app and type in:
display dialog "Hello World!"
Click run. Yeah, Windows is almost as easy to use as a Mac ;-)
Speaking of Real and QuickTime, I was just made aware of this little gem a couple of days ago. It allows you to export movies to Real format from within QuickTime Player Pro. Now if there were only a decoder component, I could toss Real Player for good...
You forgot to show her how to avoid giving the RIAA money at all... You're heart seems to be in the right place, but next time this happens, show them iTunes + RIAA radar. For those that want free, send 'em over to iRate. Encourage those who care to do these simple things, and bands will quickly find out how unpopular it is to be affiliated with those thugs.
Yeah, because we all know VHS movie distribution failed horribly due to lack of region coding. Region coding is not about piracy, it is about erecting artificial barriers in the supply/demand equation. A practice more commonly known as Price Fixing!
That is EXACTLY the idea I'm trying to convey. I am pointing out the hypocrisy of those in the Slashdot crowd who become enraged by MPAA lawsuits against 'DVD Jon', and then turn around and fund those lawsuits by purchasing the latest release of $MPAA_SCI_FI_MOVIE. In short, 'put up or shut up' to all on the board.
I don't, I'm not, and by bring it up, you insinuate that most of us arguing for the preservation of fair use (backup copies, time shifting, etc) and the rest of our rights are trying to justify criminal intent.
I resent that. We are not the criminals. The criminals are the ones making unconstitutional laws and infringing on our constitutional rights with impunity. The criminals are telling college professors to take down their websites and censoring their lectures via threat of litigation. The criminals are the ones suing students for writing software.
They are the criminals, not those of us voicing our displeasure with them. They have nothing I am willing to trade for my constitutionally protected liberties, and I will not stand by quietly while they try to take them by force.
Through the perversion of our legal system, they are doing just that.
You value entertainment more than liberty? I find that appalling.
Oh, but you do. You have no choice. You buy a blank CD and BY LAW you must contribute to the RIAA's coffers. My CD blanks are used to back up data, drivers, preserve original copies of legally acquired audio CDs, and to ferry multi-megabyte software updates to my modem bound brother. Why should I have to pay the entertainment industry 25 cents per blank to do that? So they can file groundless lawsuits, of course! When they knock on your door with a subpoena and an IP address which they claim is yours, you have two options. 1) Spend years of your life in court and tens of thousands on legal bills fighting it, or 2) give them $3000 and beg them to leave you in peace. Guilt or lack thereof is irrelevant. You don't see a problem with this legalized extortion?
If you re-read what I emphasized, you will probably notice that I was pointing out a logical fallacy in the parent's post. They are indeed engaging in a MPAA style practice, which you yourself have pointed out is 'a damned inconvenience' and 'pretty pointless'.
Practically every music or movie submission on Slashdot contains the same glaring absence of contempt for the MPAA/RIAA as this one. Yet every YRO post regarding the MPAA/RIAA is a 900 post +5 flamefest. According to you yourself, Dreamworks is "huge and a member of the MPAA". According to the 'here' link with the story submission, the movie is trademark and copyright 2004 Dreamworks, LLC for each and every Slashbot to see. Where are the posters who flame the MPAA for fun and mod points now? Either practice what you preach or wallow in ignominy.
Uh, right. Please refresh my memory. Who practices region coding besides the MPAA? I click the 'here' link and see MPAA.ORG at the bottom of the front page. Slashbots are just as bad as the hoi polloi on whom they heap so much derision. I see not one post criticizing the MPAA. Why? Because nerds wanna see anime, principles be damned. Boycott this picture or shame on you all.
When you are done venting, find some music without the restrictions. I would advise checking RIAA Radar before any purchase. We wouldn't want to help the bastards, now would we? Try my two favorite sources of DRM-free music: CDBaby and iRate.
You remind me of Jack Valenti when I saw him on CSPAN. He would argue against piracy in one sentence, the next he's pitching new movies. Argue, pitch, smile. Argue, pitch, smile.
Well apparently, some do, because there are iPod issues, no?
Oh yeah, Stone Temple Pilots, right. They're great.
I saw Stone Temple Pilots this weekend. I liked them better the first time around...when they were called Pearl Jam - David Spade
Don't forget the smile. Now go pick up your RIAA "Slashdot +5" bonus check and astroturf another story for fun and profit. Who mods this crap insightful?
Lots of good information directly from Apple can be found here.
Fine, then compare resale value. 333 Mhz iMac vs. 350 Mhz PII Compaq.
That's $330 vs. $59 for machines that are about the same age. Given, the Compaq doesn't have a monitor or modem like the iMac. Those two things can hardly make up for that much price difference though. It's simple. A four year old PC is crap. A four year old Mac is still useful. Remember that the next time you bemoan how expensive Macs are ;-)
Just take your DV cam to the next public birthday party they attend. Preferably, his own. Then you can lock up all his friends, supporters, and major financial contributers. :-)