Could you please direct me to the article of the constitution that grants immunity to 70 year old criminals? Thank you.
No, but I can direct you to
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" - US Constitution Article 1 Section 8
which was intended to grant immunity from 70 year old copyrights.
I lost all respect for CNN when they actually proposed it may be possible to clone Elvis from a lock of his hair. That would be impossible because there is nothing but mitochondrial DNA in hair. The slightest bit of fact checking would have told them this much. Yet they ran it as a story and in the text gutter along the bottom of their newscast as a genuine possibility.
In regard to the current topic, perhaps it was someone's personal pipe dream to clone him and reset the already illegitimately long copyright clock on his works. If copyright law had the same time limitations put in place by the 1790 Copyright Act, then a) all of Elvis' work would be public domain by now, and b) I would have some sympathy for the MPAA on this issue. As it stands though, neither of the above is true.
I do not believe in supporting any bussiness model thats sole purpose is to annoy me. PERIOD.
Why are you telling us? Tell AT&T, Pepsi, Honda, etc. How did Fox and Friends get CBS to pull "The Reagans"? They encouraged everyone to flame the companies sponsoring the show. That is what needs to be done here. Every/.er who dislikes the idea should flame every company on that list and tell them you will never buy their products again if they follow through with this. Not only that, but you'll tell all your friends and family not to buy their products too. Not only that, but you will create urban legends to scare people you don't even know away from their products. "Hey man, did you hear about the glue they were using in Pepsi caps? I heard..."
If the ads annoy you, just e-mail their customer service department or wherever with a polite request that they stop using the ads. See where that gets us.
On their opt-in mailing list I would imagine. Here's an idea, post the links to the ads in a +5 insightful and get every/.er to download the files five or six times each. When their server self destructs under the load and their bandwidth bill arrives, they'll probably can the idea entirely.;-)
NASA was interviewing professionals they were figuring on sending to Mars. The touchy part was that only one guy could go and it would be a one way trip.
The interviewer asked the first applicant, an engineer, how much he wanted to be paid for going.
"One million dollars," the engineer answered. "And I want to donate it all to my alma mater--Rice University."
The next applicant was a doctor, and the interviewer asked him the same question.
"Two millions dollars," the doctor said. "I want to give a million to my family and leave the other million for the advancement of medical research."
The last applicant was a lawyer. When asked how much money he wanted, he whispered in the interviewer's ear, "Three million dollars."
"Why so much more than the others?" the interviewer asked.
The lawyer replied, "You give me three million, I'll give you one million, I'll keep a million, and we'll send the engineer."
But the really insidious side effect is that, according to the news at least (and you can beleive *everything* you read on the news) kiddie-porn peddlers have been using P2P networks to distribute their wares; if this is true, the RIAA's attempts to control all of this will drive well-intentioned programmers to make it even easier for *these* people to hide.
And none of these child pornographers use email, usenet, www, ftp, the US Postal Service or any other method of transport to distribute their wares, do they? Now, please follow that train of thought to your 'logical' conclusion and decide if that is the kind of nation you want to live in.
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
Anonymity and stopping SPAM may, unfortunately, be mutually exclusive goals.... Any thoughts?
Yes, they would be mutually exclusive. If spammers can generate disposable keys, then you might as well be filtering by the from header. I've been shouting this myself lately. Verisign has a fairly in depth whitepaper on the subject. This seems to be the most obvious answer, and more likely to actually succeed than all the hash cash/taxation schemes I've heard people kicking around.
Easy access to the asteroids ($trillion apiece in ore!)
I'll bite. Which ore is this, exactly? Dilithium? Here's a homework assignment: after you realistically estimate the cost of mining an asteroid and shipping it back here, tell us which asteroidal element could be mined profitably. And please don't try and pretend that humanity hasn't invented recycling.
Mine? Who said anything about mining? Find an asteroid full of ore, blow a small chunk of it off and drop it into the atmosphere!;-) And this could garner the all important DOD attention needed to get anything going in this country too. Who needs nukes when we can just drop a big rock on your head:-P
Just like they stopped cheap AIDS drugs in South America, right?:-) Besides, any Slashdotter will tell you software/internet patents are ridiculous and unenforceable. Patent the hyperlink? Yeah, right. Just try to collect.
'There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore,' Carly Fiorina, chief executive for Hewlett-Packard Co.
I wonder if she'll still feel the same way when all those overseas workers decide to form their own company and put her out of business with their cheaper products. When everything is outsourced, what is going to stop them from starting their own company without an American CEO?
the first thing we should do is put an end to zombied machines by getting everybody to secure their machines such that them being usable for spammers
Kinda hard to do when most people are running Windows and design decisions, rather than bugs, are what leave Windows users most vulnerable.
once a key exists and is verified, it is assumed to be valid and non-spam email?
Once a message is verified by the email client software as having been signed by the attached public key, it then checks the blacklist to see if that key belongs to a spammer. If it is blacklisted, it gets marked as spam and dealt with accordingly.
1) What is to stop these zombied machines from simply examining a system and making use of the email encryption scheme available? If a spammer got hold of somebody else's valid key and used it maliciously, the email would be accepted as valid. Also, how can the victim of such misuse prove it was a malicious spyware-type program or worm that sent itself to the world rather than them sitting at a computer?
Stolen private keys would be something I would classify as a usability problem. It has always been a potential risk when using public key encryption. To put the question into perspective though, I think OS X 10.3 would handle this quite gracefully. On OS X you have a keychain. You can decide what applications are allowed to access specific keys. When set up correctly, your private email key resides on your keychain and is only accessible by your keychain aware email client software (Mail.app). Trying to access it with any other software fails. So if along comes the worm du jour, the only way it is going to sign messages with your key is through Mail.app. Surely when you see Mail.app launch itself and begin sending ten thousand emails an hour, you will know something is up. Require a password before accessing the key and no message gets sent unless the spammer can beat that. Barrier after barrier exists to stop a determined spammer. If a spammer beats that kind of redundancy, you've got bigger problems than a blacklisted key that might cost a couple of bucks to replace.
2) If a service such as SpamCop is used to report keys that should be blacklisted, how long would wide public support exist if they had to prove themselves innocent if something went wrong? Remember, this isn't like an email address where I could get a new one for free and with fairly minimal hassle; this is something I paid money for, money that while it may be small, is still my money and I wouldn't take kindly to having it taken away from me. Especially if I really didn't do anything wrong.
In many cases, we know who the spammers are already. Blocking their spam is so extremely hard though because we are trying to block based on where, rather than who. Again though, this is a usability problem. It isn't something that is unsolvable. If Microsoft would put money into making their s/mime simple and bulletproof and widely used instead of blowing it on computational schemes... besides, if my key was compromised, I would worry more about who could now read my private messages.
Assuming everything worked great, might it not also work too great? What about legitimate businesses with opt-in email listing? How could they not be marked as spam in the system?
If I opted-in, why would I report it as spam? The blacklist would be fed by end users, and validated by the people who manage it.
And how do we feel about things we agree to even if we don't like? I am reminded of comments previous about spyware and how most of the time they basically say they're going to install it in your EULA. What if a spam clause is put in instead? Is this spam or not?
If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck...:-) But you do bring up a good point. Assuming section 5c on page 163 of the EULA holds up in court... List managers have no idea what t
I think the devil, as always, would be in the details. How would one get a public key?
You would generate it on your own machine. You can't trust a key pair that you don't generate yourself. From there, the public key is sent to a Certificate Authority (CA). The CA receives your Certificate Signing Request(CSR), and performs some test to validate your identity (small charge, validating the address you provide against the card companies billing address for instance)
I think this might only lead to the rise of disposable keys: a spammer would fire off a day's worth of spam, and then throw out the soon-to-be-useless key just as it starts hitting the blacklists.
But there's the rub, as soon as the key hits the blacklist, all spam sent under that key is disposed of for everyone receiving it. Spam in the morning, key blacklisted shortly thereafter, everyone checking email at lunch is spam free. When I say disposable keys I'm thinking said spammer generates 100000 keys for 100000 email messages. This is the 'perfect' defense against the blacklist. But generating 100000 keys takes a good deal of horsepower, and with a small monetary charge, some deep pockets. Key reuse will be forced on them. The 'economies of scale' collapse. And again, since they are being charged a small fee, finding them should be easier. They could use a stolen credit card number, but that's wire fraud. Spamming may be legal in plenty of places around the world, but I don't know of many locales that look too kindly on wire fraud:-)
Computation microcharges, according to my calculations, couldn't be distributed among zombies.
Have you ever looked at Seti@home's numbers? There are mountains of wasted cycles out there. All you need is one worm.
Presumably, the receiver of the email would issue a challenge and it would be up to the sender to respond.
What happens should the sender be unable to respond. Example, I'm up futzing with a computer problem until I'm exhausted and give up. I send a message to customer service at 3am. I disconnect, go to bed and customer service gets my message at 8am. I'm asleep, the computer is off, and customer service bounces me as spam because I'm not online. Scenario two. I'm a retail salesman and being a good salesman I collect the email addresses of my clients that would like to hear about big sales. Well, three days after the sale started, client number 800 finally gets his notification, because 1-799 didn't whitelist me. And that assumes that my message didn't get bounced because of some built in timeout, give up trying to validate sender after 2 days? Sounds reasonable. IMHO, microcharges seem fraught with major flaws and would be easily circumvented by the spammers they are meant to inconvenience. Encryption does none of that. If you don't spam, you buy one key and never worry about it again. All messages are received, and it is up to the client to sort them out with the help of the blacklists.
If most/all worldwide network traffic goes encrypted, the Feds (or any country's system of government for that matter) will $#!+ bricks, outlaw/criminalize *ALL* non-approved use of encryption (even rot13), and quite possibly pull the plug on the Internet to prevent unauthorized encryption use.
A right you are afraid to exercise is no right at all:-) Besides, I don't see that there would be a whole lot they could do about it. Trying to outlaw encryption didn't work too well the first time around. It was the US Government's Napster. They tried to crush it like a bug, but it crushed like a packet of ketchup. They need to get their brain wrapped around the fact that if they can look at it, so can the bad guys (whether that be other governments, organized crime, Terrorists(TM), or other equally 'bad' people).
There has to be a way to stop email spam without using encryption....
I take it that means you think the plan will work?
Alternatively, institute a microcharge on email -- be it monetary or computational -- to disrupt the economies of scale.
Spam is coming from zombied hosts these days, computational charges will be distributed to the point that they are useless. Monetary charges will destroy mailing lists like the numerous developer lists I subscribe to.
I believe there is a way to stop spam without any government intervention. We can make it so that spamming only costs the spammer money. I believe the widespread use of encryption would eliminate spam completely.
For the sake of argument consider that everyone does use encryption with all of their email messages. Now, instead of worrying about where the email came from, all people like Brightmail and Spamcop have to worry about is who the email came from. Receive spam and report it for blacklisting. Send spam, have your public key blacklisted. Get blacklisted and anyone who decides to trust their list filters your message straight to the trash.
In this scenario, if you receive an unsigned message, it is probably spam. Anyone respectable will sign, and everyone in your address book can be filtered to the 'good' inbox whether they sign or not. Unsigned spam won't be read. Spammers, knowing this, are going to be left trying to generate disposable keys. A small charge by the folks who certify the keys would then force them to reuse their keys, because generating the hundreds of thousands of keys needed to give each message a signature with a disposable key would be far too expensive for them. The speed at which we could blacklist keys in combination with the per key charge would reach a point where the 'economics of scale' no longer apply. Spam would disappear because it would no longer be profitable. Locating the spammer for prosecution would be easier too, since we could trace the payment for the keys.
And of course, this all would have the added benefit of keeping all of our private email guarded by a warm fuzzy blanket of strong encryption.
Would anyone here like to tear down my theory? If so, please avoid the obvious. The obvious being that not everybody uses encryption, Joe Sixpack could never figure out encryption, etc. Those are usability problems. What I would like to know is if I am overlooking a problem with the solution itself.
I don't use the Mac, but I can't imagine that to be true: document and email macro viruses?
I don't use MS Office, so maybe I'm wrong... Wasn't MS Office for the Mac changed a long time ago to not execute macros automatically. I think you at least get a dialog these days.
As for the hard to imagine part... I guess Windows will do that to you. I've been using the Mac OS daily for nearly 7 years now, and I've never had a virus infect any of my systems. Viruses simply are not a problem on the Macintosh platform. I personally find it hard to imagine fearing infection just trying to update a system on the first day of use. Seriously, is that just anti-MS propaganda or prudent advice?
Can you explain how forming a union would have saved our jobs from going to India? Seems to me that as soon as companies got any inkling that a union might form, they would immediately send the work offshore at an even faster pace.
And doing so would be against US Labor laws. It's illegal for employers to threaten to shut down their businesses or to fire employees or take away benefits if workers form a union.
It isn't just an MP3 player. I couldn't see spending $180 on a MP3 player alone. I'd rather get a walkman and listen to FM/CDs for 30 bucks. However, on my $400 iPod, I can use it to wake me in the morning, backup important files and boot a copy of OS X Server. Can your $180 MP3 player do that?
The best way to lose an addiction is to start another one. I find sex is very good to ween you off of anything - just get laid a lot.
I think I've been out of the loop for a while... 420 == sex? When did that start?
Umm, anyway, the real answer to your caffeine addiction is pretty obvious. Sue the cola makers for not putting a warning label on their Deadly Addictive Product(TM)! Caffeine has been linked to heart disease, the #1 killer in America. Heck, the Surgeon General only had statistical correlation between cigarettes and lung cancer (#2). Think of the punitive damages! If people can sue Oscar Mayer for making them fat (thus increasing their risk of heart disease), certainly you can sue Coke for increasing your risk to heart disease and giving you headaches and brown teeth! Just think of how much better the whole world would be then! $3 for one 12 ounce can of soda, you know, to protect our children.
I wish editors would reject stories that are just blatently biased, or at least reserve the right to re-summarize story submissions.
You've got me, I'm definitely biased. I think Apple is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
However, on the note of editorializing, who says they don't? My submission was exactly like my post except it used the 'monkey boy dance' line rather than 'wet dreams' line. I felt it was more appropriate for a general/. crowd:-) For the record, I have also posted this to bugreporter.apple.com just in case they were in the dark about it.
Well, if default settings in OS X made Lance Ulanoff excited, this is going to give him wet dreams... SecurityFocus's Bugtraq mailing list just posted this. The message seems to indicate other exploits exist but were not mentioned. The exploit in question appears to deal with Apple's ISO 9660 file system implementation. No word on whether "Max" alerted Apple or anyone outside of the Bugtraq mailing list though.
this guys facts seem solid, but his attitude makes it difficult to take him seriously.
I took him a lot more seriously than Lance. Wanna know why? It's not because I am biased toward the Mac (Which I freely admit), but because his page is devoid of advertising.
That's right, he's not trying to sell me something through a banner ad. His writing is personal conviction, not whoring for ad money. The PCMag article is surrounded by hundreds of links trying to sell you something, various banners and a flash ad. The intention is simple, piss off a bunch of mac users to get them to stop by and maybe buy something on their way out.
BTW, his attitude is very tame compared to what you'll get back from most die-hard mac users.
Re:Are you lying? or just misinformed
on
Cringley on E-voting
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· Score: 2, Informative
The Civil Rights Commission found no one who was unfairly denied the right to vote despite it being in their institutional and personal interest to do so.
That's funny, because this link says they found "it was widespread voter disenfranchisement, not the dead-heat contest, that was the extraordinary feature in the Florida election. The disenfranchisement was not isolated or episodic. And state officials failed to fulfill their duties in a manner that would prevent this disenfranchisement."
So I ask you AC, are you lying or just misinformed?
My only question is how MS is going to make money from this by charging less per song, if even Apple is only breaking even on iTMS. A monthly subscription fee maybe? Who knows, we'll have to wait and see.
Who says they want to make money? That is secondary to crushing the competition at Microsoft:-) Here's how it will work...
1) Microsoft builds half-ass online music store and ties it to the OS.
2) Needing content, Microsoft enters into a contract with all the major record labels. Labels will be guaranteed a percentage of each sale.
3) Give songs away for free! Thus screwing the record labels and making 'pirating' the songs legal as long as you do it on your Microsoft operating system!
Doesn't sound so far fetched to me. They did it with the source code for Explorer, right?;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Could you please direct me to the article of the constitution that grants immunity to 70 year old criminals? Thank you.
No, but I can direct you to
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" - US Constitution Article 1 Section 8
which was intended to grant immunity from 70 year old copyrights.
Fuck CNN, they have no respectability anymore.
I lost all respect for CNN when they actually proposed it may be possible to clone Elvis from a lock of his hair. That would be impossible because there is nothing but mitochondrial DNA in hair. The slightest bit of fact checking would have told them this much. Yet they ran it as a story and in the text gutter along the bottom of their newscast as a genuine possibility.
In regard to the current topic, perhaps it was someone's personal pipe dream to clone him and reset the already illegitimately long copyright clock on his works. If copyright law had the same time limitations put in place by the 1790 Copyright Act, then a) all of Elvis' work would be public domain by now, and b) I would have some sympathy for the MPAA on this issue. As it stands though, neither of the above is true.
Shapeshifter is kinda like Kaleidoscope, but for OS X. You might need to build your own walnut panel theme though, since it's fairly new.
I do not believe in supporting any bussiness model thats sole purpose is to annoy me. PERIOD.
Why are you telling us? Tell AT&T, Pepsi, Honda, etc. How did Fox and Friends get CBS to pull "The Reagans"? They encouraged everyone to flame the companies sponsoring the show. That is what needs to be done here. Every /.er who dislikes the idea should flame every company on that list and tell them you will never buy their products again if they follow through with this. Not only that, but you'll tell all your friends and family not to buy their products too. Not only that, but you will create urban legends to scare people you don't even know away from their products. "Hey man, did you hear about the glue they were using in Pepsi caps? I heard..."
If the ads annoy you, just e-mail their customer service department or wherever with a polite request that they stop using the ads. See where that gets us.
On their opt-in mailing list I would imagine. Here's an idea, post the links to the ads in a +5 insightful and get every /.er to download the files five or six times each. When their server self destructs under the load and their bandwidth bill arrives, they'll probably can the idea entirely. ;-)
NASA was interviewing professionals they were figuring on sending to Mars. The touchy part was that only one guy could go and it would be a one way trip.
The interviewer asked the first applicant, an engineer, how much he wanted to be paid for going.
"One million dollars," the engineer answered. "And I want to donate it all to my alma mater--Rice University."
The next applicant was a doctor, and the interviewer asked him the same question.
"Two millions dollars," the doctor said. "I want to give a million to my family and leave the other million for the advancement of medical research."
The last applicant was a lawyer. When asked how much money he wanted, he whispered in the interviewer's ear, "Three million dollars."
"Why so much more than the others?" the interviewer asked.
The lawyer replied, "You give me three million, I'll give you one million, I'll keep a million, and we'll send the engineer."
But the really insidious side effect is that, according to the news at least (and you can beleive *everything* you read on the news) kiddie-porn peddlers have been using P2P networks to distribute their wares; if this is true, the RIAA's attempts to control all of this will drive well-intentioned programmers to make it even easier for *these* people to hide.
And none of these child pornographers use email, usenet, www, ftp, the US Postal Service or any other method of transport to distribute their wares, do they? Now, please follow that train of thought to your 'logical' conclusion and decide if that is the kind of nation you want to live in.
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. - Arthur Schopenhauer
Anonymity and stopping SPAM may, unfortunately, be mutually exclusive goals.... Any thoughts?
Yes, they would be mutually exclusive. If spammers can generate disposable keys, then you might as well be filtering by the from header. I've been shouting this myself lately. Verisign has a fairly in depth whitepaper on the subject. This seems to be the most obvious answer, and more likely to actually succeed than all the hash cash/taxation schemes I've heard people kicking around.
Easy access to the asteroids ($trillion apiece in ore!) I'll bite. Which ore is this, exactly? Dilithium? Here's a homework assignment: after you realistically estimate the cost of mining an asteroid and shipping it back here, tell us which asteroidal element could be mined profitably. And please don't try and pretend that humanity hasn't invented recycling.
Mine? Who said anything about mining? Find an asteroid full of ore, blow a small chunk of it off and drop it into the atmosphere! ;-) And this could garner the all important DOD attention needed to get anything going in this country too. Who needs nukes when we can just drop a big rock on your head :-P
Patents.
Just like they stopped cheap AIDS drugs in South America, right? :-) Besides, any Slashdotter will tell you software/internet patents are ridiculous and unenforceable. Patent the hyperlink? Yeah, right. Just try to collect.
'There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore,' Carly Fiorina, chief executive for Hewlett-Packard Co.
I wonder if she'll still feel the same way when all those overseas workers decide to form their own company and put her out of business with their cheaper products. When everything is outsourced, what is going to stop them from starting their own company without an American CEO?
the first thing we should do is put an end to zombied machines by getting everybody to secure their machines such that them being usable for spammers
Kinda hard to do when most people are running Windows and design decisions, rather than bugs, are what leave Windows users most vulnerable.
once a key exists and is verified, it is assumed to be valid and non-spam email?
Once a message is verified by the email client software as having been signed by the attached public key, it then checks the blacklist to see if that key belongs to a spammer. If it is blacklisted, it gets marked as spam and dealt with accordingly.
1) What is to stop these zombied machines from simply examining a system and making use of the email encryption scheme available? If a spammer got hold of somebody else's valid key and used it maliciously, the email would be accepted as valid. Also, how can the victim of such misuse prove it was a malicious spyware-type program or worm that sent itself to the world rather than them sitting at a computer?
Stolen private keys would be something I would classify as a usability problem. It has always been a potential risk when using public key encryption. To put the question into perspective though, I think OS X 10.3 would handle this quite gracefully. On OS X you have a keychain. You can decide what applications are allowed to access specific keys. When set up correctly, your private email key resides on your keychain and is only accessible by your keychain aware email client software (Mail.app). Trying to access it with any other software fails. So if along comes the worm du jour, the only way it is going to sign messages with your key is through Mail.app. Surely when you see Mail.app launch itself and begin sending ten thousand emails an hour, you will know something is up. Require a password before accessing the key and no message gets sent unless the spammer can beat that. Barrier after barrier exists to stop a determined spammer. If a spammer beats that kind of redundancy, you've got bigger problems than a blacklisted key that might cost a couple of bucks to replace.
2) If a service such as SpamCop is used to report keys that should be blacklisted, how long would wide public support exist if they had to prove themselves innocent if something went wrong? Remember, this isn't like an email address where I could get a new one for free and with fairly minimal hassle; this is something I paid money for, money that while it may be small, is still my money and I wouldn't take kindly to having it taken away from me. Especially if I really didn't do anything wrong.
In many cases, we know who the spammers are already. Blocking their spam is so extremely hard though because we are trying to block based on where, rather than who. Again though, this is a usability problem. It isn't something that is unsolvable. If Microsoft would put money into making their s/mime simple and bulletproof and widely used instead of blowing it on computational schemes... besides, if my key was compromised, I would worry more about who could now read my private messages.
Assuming everything worked great, might it not also work too great? What about legitimate businesses with opt-in email listing? How could they not be marked as spam in the system?
If I opted-in, why would I report it as spam? The blacklist would be fed by end users, and validated by the people who manage it.
And how do we feel about things we agree to even if we don't like? I am reminded of comments previous about spyware and how most of the time they basically say they're going to install it in your EULA. What if a spam clause is put in instead? Is this spam or not?
If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck... :-) But you do bring up a good point. Assuming section 5c on page 163 of the EULA holds up in court... List managers have no idea what t
I think the devil, as always, would be in the details. How would one get a public key?
You would generate it on your own machine. You can't trust a key pair that you don't generate yourself. From there, the public key is sent to a Certificate Authority (CA). The CA receives your Certificate Signing Request(CSR), and performs some test to validate your identity (small charge, validating the address you provide against the card companies billing address for instance)
I think this might only lead to the rise of disposable keys: a spammer would fire off a day's worth of spam, and then throw out the soon-to-be-useless key just as it starts hitting the blacklists.
But there's the rub, as soon as the key hits the blacklist, all spam sent under that key is disposed of for everyone receiving it. Spam in the morning, key blacklisted shortly thereafter, everyone checking email at lunch is spam free. When I say disposable keys I'm thinking said spammer generates 100000 keys for 100000 email messages. This is the 'perfect' defense against the blacklist. But generating 100000 keys takes a good deal of horsepower, and with a small monetary charge, some deep pockets. Key reuse will be forced on them. The 'economies of scale' collapse. And again, since they are being charged a small fee, finding them should be easier. They could use a stolen credit card number, but that's wire fraud. Spamming may be legal in plenty of places around the world, but I don't know of many locales that look too kindly on wire fraud :-)
Computation microcharges, according to my calculations, couldn't be distributed among zombies.
Have you ever looked at Seti@home's numbers? There are mountains of wasted cycles out there. All you need is one worm.
Presumably, the receiver of the email would issue a challenge and it would be up to the sender to respond.
What happens should the sender be unable to respond. Example, I'm up futzing with a computer problem until I'm exhausted and give up. I send a message to customer service at 3am. I disconnect, go to bed and customer service gets my message at 8am. I'm asleep, the computer is off, and customer service bounces me as spam because I'm not online. Scenario two. I'm a retail salesman and being a good salesman I collect the email addresses of my clients that would like to hear about big sales. Well, three days after the sale started, client number 800 finally gets his notification, because 1-799 didn't whitelist me. And that assumes that my message didn't get bounced because of some built in timeout, give up trying to validate sender after 2 days? Sounds reasonable. IMHO, microcharges seem fraught with major flaws and would be easily circumvented by the spammers they are meant to inconvenience. Encryption does none of that. If you don't spam, you buy one key and never worry about it again. All messages are received, and it is up to the client to sort them out with the help of the blacklists.
If most/all worldwide network traffic goes encrypted, the Feds (or any country's system of government for that matter) will $#!+ bricks, outlaw/criminalize *ALL* non-approved use of encryption (even rot13), and quite possibly pull the plug on the Internet to prevent unauthorized encryption use.
A right you are afraid to exercise is no right at all :-) Besides, I don't see that there would be a whole lot they could do about it. Trying to outlaw encryption didn't work too well the first time around. It was the US Government's Napster. They tried to crush it like a bug, but it crushed like a packet of ketchup. They need to get their brain wrapped around the fact that if they can look at it, so can the bad guys (whether that be other governments, organized crime, Terrorists(TM), or other equally 'bad' people).
There has to be a way to stop email spam without using encryption....
I take it that means you think the plan will work?
Alternatively, institute a microcharge on email -- be it monetary or computational -- to disrupt the economies of scale.
Spam is coming from zombied hosts these days, computational charges will be distributed to the point that they are useless. Monetary charges will destroy mailing lists like the numerous developer lists I subscribe to.
I believe there is a way to stop spam without any government intervention. We can make it so that spamming only costs the spammer money. I believe the widespread use of encryption would eliminate spam completely.
For the sake of argument consider that everyone does use encryption with all of their email messages. Now, instead of worrying about where the email came from, all people like Brightmail and Spamcop have to worry about is who the email came from. Receive spam and report it for blacklisting. Send spam, have your public key blacklisted. Get blacklisted and anyone who decides to trust their list filters your message straight to the trash.
In this scenario, if you receive an unsigned message, it is probably spam. Anyone respectable will sign, and everyone in your address book can be filtered to the 'good' inbox whether they sign or not. Unsigned spam won't be read. Spammers, knowing this, are going to be left trying to generate disposable keys. A small charge by the folks who certify the keys would then force them to reuse their keys, because generating the hundreds of thousands of keys needed to give each message a signature with a disposable key would be far too expensive for them. The speed at which we could blacklist keys in combination with the per key charge would reach a point where the 'economics of scale' no longer apply. Spam would disappear because it would no longer be profitable. Locating the spammer for prosecution would be easier too, since we could trace the payment for the keys.
And of course, this all would have the added benefit of keeping all of our private email guarded by a warm fuzzy blanket of strong encryption.
Would anyone here like to tear down my theory? If so, please avoid the obvious. The obvious being that not everybody uses encryption, Joe Sixpack could never figure out encryption, etc. Those are usability problems. What I would like to know is if I am overlooking a problem with the solution itself.
I don't use the Mac, but I can't imagine that to be true: document and email macro viruses?
I don't use MS Office, so maybe I'm wrong... Wasn't MS Office for the Mac changed a long time ago to not execute macros automatically. I think you at least get a dialog these days.
As for the hard to imagine part... I guess Windows will do that to you. I've been using the Mac OS daily for nearly 7 years now, and I've never had a virus infect any of my systems. Viruses simply are not a problem on the Macintosh platform. I personally find it hard to imagine fearing infection just trying to update a system on the first day of use. Seriously, is that just anti-MS propaganda or prudent advice?
Can you explain how forming a union would have saved our jobs from going to India? Seems to me that as soon as companies got any inkling that a union might form, they would immediately send the work offshore at an even faster pace. And doing so would be against US Labor laws. It's illegal for employers to threaten to shut down their businesses or to fire employees or take away benefits if workers form a union.
It isn't just an MP3 player. I couldn't see spending $180 on a MP3 player alone. I'd rather get a walkman and listen to FM/CDs for 30 bucks. However, on my $400 iPod, I can use it to wake me in the morning, backup important files and boot a copy of OS X Server. Can your $180 MP3 player do that?
The best way to lose an addiction is to start another one. I find sex is very good to ween you off of anything - just get laid a lot.
I think I've been out of the loop for a while... 420 == sex? When did that start?
Umm, anyway, the real answer to your caffeine addiction is pretty obvious. Sue the cola makers for not putting a warning label on their Deadly Addictive Product(TM)! Caffeine has been linked to heart disease, the #1 killer in America. Heck, the Surgeon General only had statistical correlation between cigarettes and lung cancer (#2). Think of the punitive damages! If people can sue Oscar Mayer for making them fat (thus increasing their risk of heart disease), certainly you can sue Coke for increasing your risk to heart disease and giving you headaches and brown teeth! Just think of how much better the whole world would be then! $3 for one 12 ounce can of soda, you know, to protect our children.
Go ahead, mod me down. I've got karma to burn :-)
I wish editors would reject stories that are just blatently biased, or at least reserve the right to re-summarize story submissions.
You've got me, I'm definitely biased. I think Apple is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
However, on the note of editorializing, who says they don't? My submission was exactly like my post except it used the 'monkey boy dance' line rather than 'wet dreams' line. I felt it was more appropriate for a general /. crowd :-) For the record, I have also posted this to bugreporter.apple.com just in case they were in the dark about it.
Well, if default settings in OS X made Lance Ulanoff excited, this is going to give him wet dreams... SecurityFocus's Bugtraq mailing list just posted this. The message seems to indicate other exploits exist but were not mentioned. The exploit in question appears to deal with Apple's ISO 9660 file system implementation. No word on whether "Max" alerted Apple or anyone outside of the Bugtraq mailing list though.
this guys facts seem solid, but his attitude makes it difficult to take him seriously.
I took him a lot more seriously than Lance. Wanna know why? It's not because I am biased toward the Mac (Which I freely admit), but because his page is devoid of advertising.
That's right, he's not trying to sell me something through a banner ad. His writing is personal conviction, not whoring for ad money. The PCMag article is surrounded by hundreds of links trying to sell you something, various banners and a flash ad. The intention is simple, piss off a bunch of mac users to get them to stop by and maybe buy something on their way out.
BTW, his attitude is very tame compared to what you'll get back from most die-hard mac users.
The Civil Rights Commission found no one who was unfairly denied the right to vote despite it being in their institutional and personal interest to do so.
That's funny, because this link says they found "it was widespread voter disenfranchisement, not the dead-heat contest, that was the extraordinary feature in the Florida election. The disenfranchisement was not isolated or episodic. And state officials failed to fulfill their duties in a manner that would prevent this disenfranchisement."
So I ask you AC, are you lying or just misinformed?
So does this mean they aren't going to be charging me an extra quarter per blank cd now?
My only question is how MS is going to make money from this by charging less per song, if even Apple is only breaking even on iTMS. A monthly subscription fee maybe? Who knows, we'll have to wait and see.
Who says they want to make money? That is secondary to crushing the competition at Microsoft :-) Here's how it will work...
1) Microsoft builds half-ass online music store and ties it to the OS.
2) Needing content, Microsoft enters into a contract with all the major record labels. Labels will be guaranteed a percentage of each sale.
3) Give songs away for free! Thus screwing the record labels and making 'pirating' the songs legal as long as you do it on your Microsoft operating system!
Doesn't sound so far fetched to me. They did it with the source code for Explorer, right? ;-)