You are describing good examples of why some people see anti-spam laws as potentially dangerous - and at least unworkable.
The internet and email were originally designed to let anyone send a message to anyone - no ifs, ands or buts.
Now commercial interests have caused the legal machinery to cut away at this design.
They sell the laws as helping *you*, but it is really to reduce the burden of spam on large corporate and government networks.
In other words, corporations - through their appointed representatives (parliament) - are saying "yeah, we find the internet you guys designed to be very useful - except for this freedom to email thing, and this freedom to share files thing, and... and... and..."
Pretty soon it wont be the internet anymore.
So please dont fall for these ridiculous anti-spam legal measures that are not being made to help *you*.
Spam is a problem you can and should be able to deal with yourself - its an issue of code.
For more information, please see www.toad.com, cause John Gilmore has thought alot about this stuff and has an interesting pre-alpha personal anti-spam project in the works called grokmail.
Product names do not have to be descriptive, but they should be permitted to be descriptive
if that's what the creator wants.
For example, I might write a book, say about hosting auctions on ebay, and I might want to call
it ebay helper. Should I need permission to do this?
Software or web pages should be no different. If they are specifically made to work with someone
else's publically available!! api's, and there's no perception that the product is
manufactured or sanctioned by that someone else, where's the problem?
If I have software called Linux Commander, do you really think
its part of the kernel?
And your Sun comparison is way off. The direct analogy would be
Solaris modifier
Or, it would have been analagous if the M$ targets were calling their software
Microsoft modifier
In other words, to refute your first sentence, absolutely nobody
I know would think that "Windows Backup", presented in
an appropriate manner, was produced or sanctioned by M$
Said another way, don't you think the intention of the targets
is a relevant question in this case? - are they trying to give
the impression of being a Microsoft product?
Start with a FreeBSD server running Pine.
Everyone accesses their mail through Pine.
Before you start complaining, remember that, in 1991, at university, any drunk sophomore could work with pine without a problem. It's not eye candy, but it's simple and works with very little admin.
Exec will add an address book nicknamed "Master Addresses".
Users will be config'd to access "Master Addresses" when they need to look up addresses.
Users can be permitted to add to and change the master address file; users and exec will automatically see the new data when they access it.
If users are on a different server, no problem, you can access a remote address book on an IMAP server -- but, this is a Pine concept and will not work with other mail clients.
BONUS - if everyone switches to ssh and pine to access their email, they have fully accessible "webmail" - no need for squirrelmail.
and it's all free
The point is, its been going on for years. Let's move the slashdot minds away from re-invented eye-candy, towards the creation of new free tools - cores, bios, bandwidth/spectrum.
Slashdot Mirror
the system is automated
please see, for example, British Pathe Selects Optibase for Archive Management System
You are describing good examples of why some people see anti-spam laws as potentially dangerous - and at least unworkable.
... and ... and ..."
The internet and email were originally designed to let anyone send a message to anyone - no ifs, ands or buts.
Now commercial interests have caused the legal machinery to cut away at this design.
They sell the laws as helping *you*, but it is really to reduce the burden of spam on large corporate and government networks.
In other words, corporations - through their appointed representatives (parliament) - are saying "yeah, we find the internet you guys designed to be very useful - except for this freedom to email thing, and this freedom to share files thing, and
Pretty soon it wont be the internet anymore.
So please dont fall for these ridiculous anti-spam legal measures that are not being made to help *you*.
Spam is a problem you can and should be able to deal with yourself - its an issue of code.
For more information, please see www.toad.com, cause John Gilmore has thought alot about this stuff and has an interesting pre-alpha personal anti-spam project in the works called grokmail.
I think you make a dangerous recommendation.
Product names do not have to be descriptive, but they should be permitted to be descriptive if that's what the creator wants.
For example, I might write a book, say about hosting auctions on ebay, and I might want to call
it ebay helper. Should I need permission to do this?
Software or web pages should be no different. If they are specifically made to work with someone
else's publically available!! api's, and there's no perception that the product is
manufactured or sanctioned by that someone else, where's the problem?
If I have software called Linux Commander, do you really think
its part of the kernel?
And your Sun comparison is way off. The direct analogy would be
Solaris modifier
Or, it would have been analagous if the M$ targets were calling their software
Microsoft modifier
In other words, to refute your first sentence, absolutely nobody
I know would think that "Windows Backup", presented in
an appropriate manner, was produced or sanctioned by M$
Said another way, don't you think the intention of the targets
is a relevant question in this case? - are they trying to give
the impression of being a Microsoft product?
Start with a FreeBSD server running Pine.
Everyone accesses their mail through Pine.
Before you start complaining, remember that, in 1991, at university, any drunk sophomore could work with pine without a problem. It's not eye candy, but it's simple and works with very little admin.
Exec will add an address book nicknamed "Master Addresses".
Users will be config'd to access "Master Addresses" when they need to look up addresses.
Users can be permitted to add to and change the master address file; users and exec will automatically see the new data when they access it.
If users are on a different server, no problem, you can access a remote address book on an IMAP server -- but, this is a Pine concept and will not work with other mail clients.
BONUS - if everyone switches to ssh and pine to access their email, they have fully accessible "webmail" - no need for squirrelmail.
and it's all free
The point is, its been going on for years. Let's move the slashdot minds away from re-invented eye-candy, towards the creation of new free tools - cores, bios, bandwidth/spectrum.
so many projects reinventing the same wheel
in this case, i-ve already got pine and ldap
simple tools that work well and don-t need to be reinvented to be "feature-rich"
and, anyway, why is something so good becuase its done "without a server"?
were all servents, or should be, and whats the harm in extra computing power and bandwidth when its all so cheap
lets drop our interest in these highprofile highfalutin projects and go where the action should be, openbios, open spectrum, and opencores
telnet yoursite.com yada yada cat >>www/htdocs/liggity/privly/dontcomenear.txt ctrl-d logout