Functional literacy in the urbanised areas of some developing countries is close to that in America, which is why typesetting and, increasingly, programming, is often outsourced to places like India. If you can get even low bandwidth Internet access working in rural areas, you have the potential to keep young people in their villages rather than in shanty towns, by providing them with a source of income.
Especially on a 1 inch screen. Doesn't it lose something if the female form gets rendered as 2 jpeg rectangles the size of a quarter? Unless you are into Picasso that is... It sounds a bit to me like those photo - rendering - using - teletype lineprinter files from the 70s that used to look something like Marilyn Munroe if you squinted at them from 50 yds away. Very clever, but is it worth the trouble?
I wouldn't put it quite that way, but I think users are a lot less ready to change interfaces than your average programmer realises.
Of course the car analogy cuts both ways. There is no standard for where the lights and windscreen wipers go, for example, and people seem to survive.
One enormous difference between the USA and most of Europe in cars has been the dominance of the automatic gearbox in the former and the dominance of the stick shift in the latter (last time I looked, less than 1% of European cars were automatic). But it looks to me like this may be about to change with the arrival of the sequential gearbox that has an automatic mode, which European manufacturers are starting to install in relatively cheap cars. In other words, the 'standard' might not be all Windows or all Linux, and 'progress' might mean that it isn't the worst of both worlds either.
What seems quite clear to me is that Linux is not going to worry MS in the desktop market as long as there are umpteen different Linux interfaces. (99% of users don't care about anything below the interface, which is why MS could effectively introduce a brand new operating system with the NT-XP product line without most people noticing.)
In this respect, I think Redhat 8's move to a unified interface makes sense. It would make more sense if other distos faolowed suit, but, for now, distros seem to want to distinguish themselves by having a unique interface. And, personally, I think there is too much gnome and not enough kde in their unified solution. Which, of course, is the problem with compromises...
The bottom line is that what seasoned Linux users want is probably not what Joe mouse user wants. Not quite sure what the route from here to there is though, as alienating all the existing users of your distro in the hope of picking up a load of new ones who have never heard of you doesn't sound like a great business plan either!
Can we ask him if, in stark turnover terms, he would be more afraid of people not being able to use the next generation of MS products on his company's products?
Customers have no trouble learning a new interface. They do it all the time.
Depends on the customer, depends on the application. 100 years ago, every car manufacturer put the sticks and pedals in a different place. Now they are standard worldwide. Do you think that a car with the brake to the right of the accelerator would sell well in 2003? Even if it was faster? How many accidents would it cause? Ever tried driving a righthand-drive car in heavy traffic after an overnight flight (or lhd if you normally drive rhd)?
Interface changes are no big deal for early adopters (like a lot of people on this site, I suspect). They are a big issue for occasional computer users, the elderly and a lot of other people who need to start using Linux if it is to compete on MS's own turf.
The biggest problems occur when a certain action causes one effect on the system you know and a completely different effect on the one you don't. In the case of switching from rhd to lhd cars, this meant I spent a week trying to use the window winder as the stick shift. In the case of one of our Windows customers, I eventually tracked his repeated X-session crashes to the fact he kept doing ctrl-alt-backspace to close windows in Mozilla, which apparently works just fine in IE...
but if you fancy having a go at explaining, fire away
Let's talk about the 2D version to keep things (slightly more) simple. Let's also assume that whatever weighted attributes we have can be boiled down to a single figure for the similarity between each pair of files, with, say, 1 for 'identical' and 0 for 'as different as it is possible to get'. The exciting bit is plotting this onto a piece of paper.
With 2 files it's easy: you end up with one in the top lefthand corner and one in the bottom righthand corner:-) With 3 files you end up with a triangle, with the length of each side decided by how different the files are from each other. As soon as you have four or more files to plot, the chances are that you can't display all the relationships perfectly in 2D space, so you have to start fudging - sorry - distributing the stress evenly across the matrix. And that's the bit that does my head in:-)
SPSS has a module that does this sort of thing, but what I really want is the algorithm. Do you have a library? A statistics department? The ideal from my point of view would be a worked example in a procedural language such as C.
Building nested hash tables in your spare time...
No, really, it's a lot more fun than what most of the people on/. get up to. The nice thing about perl hash tables is that they are easy to use (once you get your head around the syntax), incredibly fast, and they let you represent problems in ways that bear some resemblance to what I consider to be a 'natural' way of thinking about the problem. Cf C, where you seem to spend most of your time building low level data structures from scratch:-)
Someone mentioned the idea of moving stuff around in this kind of UI as activating physical memory (thus making it easier to find things again). As a psychologist, I'd buy that.
Guess what my first degree is in:-)
One would define one's own keys
Absolutely. My idea would be that you can pick attributes to define the position of files in 2 or 3D space, and other attributes to be displayed by colour, size, shape or whatever. And you would be able to wang the settings around as you go along, depending on what you are trying to do/find at the time.
So when do we start coding?;-) I could do most of a demo in Perl/Tk fairly easily - most of the file attributes that interest me are standard perl switches, and building nested hash tables is a hobby of mine. The tricky bit (for me) is converting the correlation matrix between files into a 2 or 3D scalogram. Are you still anywhere near a psychology department, and, if so, does anyone there have an algorithm for multidimensional scaling, Guttman Scalogram Analysis or similar?
It would be a pain if it was the only way to interact with the computer, just like only having a cute GUI is a pain, but I reckon it would be very handy on occasions where you want to look at similar things that the FS keeps a long way apart.
Say you want to compare.config files for some application in different home users' directories. With my dream system you would set differentation by leaf name high, and differentiation by pathname low, and, hey presto, they would all clump together. Ditto if you wanted to find all the core dumps scattered all over your hard disc. If you wanted to find out why your backup no longer fits on a CD, you would differentiate by size, and instantly spot the enormous log file that didn't get rotated, or whatever. And if you set differentiation by pathname high, you would have a traditional hierarchical filing system.
Haven't seen it. Screenshots? The nearest I have seen was that date rape film based on a Michael Crichton book, the name of which escapes me, and that involved avatars walking up and down corridors, which is just dumb.
The system I have been dreaming of for a while would be far more graphical (had a quick look at thebrain.com, it's still text with a few lines as far as I can see).
My dream system would enable you to specify file attributes such as size, path(s), name, type etc, as well as regex greps on the content, and then plot the filing system in 3D space, through which you could move with a joystick. You would be able to assign attributes to graphical features, eg make scripts cuboid, text files spherical, bigger files bigger on a logarithmic scale and so on. Related files would appear like solar systems, and by changing the importance of the file attributes you could change the way the files grouped.
Probably not what you'd want to use every day, but I'm sure I'd find a few mislaid files with such a system.
Specifically, how robust are those bits of chrome that attach the tea tray to the pudding basin? I've never seen one in the flesh, and it's hard to tell from the publicity shots, but I would be scared of snapping the thing off the first time I tried to clean the screen.
That doesn't tar the entire effort, does it? Don't fixate on the guys screwing up - there's a lot more guys that aren't screwing up.
I'm fixating on the system that blocked my IP address for no reason other than to get me to put pressure on my ISP (which I didn't, out of principle).
Before this, I had never heard of SPEWS, so my first contact with them was when they blocked my IP address. As cold calling methods go, I think I prefer spam:-)
I'm sure the people running the list are dear people with lovely families and a big cuddly dog, but the one little detail of using mafia tactics against me leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Sorry, but that's how it goes. I agree with most of what animal rights groups say, but they lost my support with the first nail bomb. Ditto a lot of single issue pressure groups.
What really impressed me about our IP block was how little difference it made. We had one complaint from one user on one of our domains. Given that this domain has 400 email addresses redirecting to 50 or so ISPs in 20 countries, this suggests that an awful lot of people aren't using SPEWS. And I think I know why:-)
Oh, now I see your problem. You seem to think people have a basic right to unfettered email.
Err no, I'm with you on this one. It's a business matter, and ISPs who block addresses for no good reason will end up losing customers. That's why the guy who is blocking me for threatening legal action (which I didn't, but there you go) hasn't the guts to block all.fr sites, despite the French government's landmark case against Yahoo. It's the logic of the school yard bully: you pick on the little guys and polish the shoes of the big guys.
The rights I was talking about concern what ISPs say about me to third parties, and I maintain that the content of a rejection message is subject to the same law as any other written communication. So block away, but please make sure the rejection message is factually accurate.
The result it gets in my case is that before, I was considering doing my bit to block spam, and now I won't, because the people who run RBLs seem more intent on hurting me than the spammers. And I reckon there are a lot of people like me. Is that how the system is supposed to work?
Making spammers work harder, keep opening new accounts, and changing ISPs is the strategy.
Yeah, I get that bit. So the result is that big ISPs won't touch them, which is good, and that they end up in server parks next door to me, which is inevitable, and that SPEWS blocks my mail because of my (very occasional) neighours, which is absurd. According to most of the people posting on the thread, the aim appears to get me to keep changing ISPs to put pressure on the ISPs. Except that my ISP has a pretty good reputation to start with, so where would they like me to go next? Verio? No server park can stop people renting a machine and spamming like mad until they get shut down. If they start spamming on Thanksgiving, it could take several days to shut them down.
I don't have a problem with blocking addresses. We have blocked one or two ourselves (to avoid getting several thousand copies of various viruses a day rather than to block spam). I don't have a problem with blocking IP ranges when all those IP addresses are administered by one company. I do have a big problem with blocking IP ranges when, to all intents and purposes, the IP addresses have nothing to do with each other. As far as I can tell, the only solution would be for me to take my server out of a park, lease a big pipe and buy my own IP range, which I can't afford to do at the moment.
[RBLs will never stop spam being profitable] you may be right!
So we've reached dynamic equilibrium. The spammers will keep wandering around the server parks, and my mail will keep getting blocked, in order to not deal with the problem of spam, and if I complain about the damage this does to my business it makes me slightly less popular than Osama Bin Laden. I'm glad this makes sense to someone.
Spammers keep spamming blocked addresses
So there goes another argument. If they keep spamming blocked addresses, RBLs don't reduce backbone bandwidth usage either.
If there were any decent ways to block spam without resorting to the netblock method, We would gladly use it
Cut off their income by billing people who respond to spam. Last time I suggested this, everyone said it couldn't be done, so please forgive the detail. All you need to do is build a database of spam messages (which already exist), extract the 'click here' addresses (about 3 lines of perl), scan the http log of the gateway your customers use (another 3 lines of perl), pick up the dynamic IP address of the machine requesting that page, find out which user it was and bill them.
I would start with three warnings followed by a bill of $5 a spam reply. For paying accounts, you debit their card. For free accounts, you close them after 3 violations. The point is that 99% of people will get the message after one warning, and certainly after one bill. Spam revenue plummets, game over.
Of course ISPs might not want to do this in case it upset their customers. It's much better upsetting my customers. But, as you appear to have conceded, this isn't about Joe Internet user, it's about reducing bandwidth for ISPs.
BTW, if RBLs are such a staggeringly great idea, you would expect ISPs that use them to be 2 to 3 times cheaper than those that don't, because their overheads are so much lower. Is this the case?
Good, so the problem is that you didn't read the initial posting. I never said anything about sueing people who block email. At all. Ever. Not even once.
If someone says you dress funny and smell of cod, there isn't much you can do about it.
Rubbish. If (and we are talking several levels of hypothetical here) someone publishes claims that I am a spammer, and if I am demonstrably not a spammer, and if as a result of this untrue allegation I lose business, I suspect that I have a pretty good case for sueing for at least the amount of business I lost.
But then you'll just end up on more personal blacklists
Keep talking, in terms of making RBLs look as ugly as possible to anyone reading this thread, you are doing a fantastic job. What you appear to be saying is that you have a God-given right to destroy anyone's reputation as part of your so far utterly unsuccessful crusade against spammers, and that if anyone complains about their company being damaged as a result, you and your mates are going to damage it even more, just to show who is boss. If we were talking about any subject other than spam, there would be 3,000/.ers complaining about this on a yro thread.
While I'm certainly not up on British law
Not sure where British law comes into it...
You went all C&C
What is C & C? You're the one with the lawyer, I've never considered sueing anyone in my life. You blocked because you can't read English, and, in the process, provide evidence to anyone wanting to attack RBLs that the blacklists are arbitrary, and often motivated by pettyminded vindictiveness rather than any concern about spam.
A legal case that might interest you
Why? I have never mentioned anyone sueing anyone over whether or not you can block email addresses. Which part of "You misread my original posting" are you struggling with?
While I'm here, I have to know, exactly how does blocking the whole of China put any pressure on anyone to do anything? The people in power will just get a.com address, it's the dissidents you are penalising, and what are they supposed to do, rise up and provoke regime change in the name of a spam-free world?
I can't do any of those things either when the problem is transient and the server park is basically clean. If I was hosted by Verio I could understand it, but anyone offering an smtp server to third parties can get caught from time to time.
OK, so spammers have to work 10x harder. How many times more cost and time effective is their set-up? As long as there is a margin in spam, people will continue to spam. The fact that spam is increasing suggests that it still pays. At what point are blocklists going to stop spam paying? I have a hunch that the answer is 'never'.
Turning off the blocklists would indeed be interesting, but, unless the spammers are completely stupid, I wouldn't expect it to have much immediate effect at all. Do they really continue to send to blocked addresses, long term?
Care to take back that threat of suing anyone who blocks you
See my last posting, or just show me where I said that in the first place. The point on which I would attack is the content of the rejection message, not the fact that the address is blocked. The difference between me and a spammer is that I can demonstrate that any rejection message associating our server with spam is false, and I can quote this very thread to show how damaging this allegation can be:-)
Better solutions
Sue the spammers, like AOL, or, if everyone really feels so strongly about the issue, as you claim, change the law.
Drug dealers living next door
If the police start harassing me or telling all the other neighbours that I am a drug dealer, I think you will find that the law is my friend. But, in any case, you are assuming that my server park is a den of iniquity. You have an IP address, check it out. How bad is their record? No-one can stop the first spam being sent, and, as far as I can tell, we spent a week answering angry emails from our clients because the sys admin at the server park went fishing for a couple of days.
I don't need to. All the discussions I have had on this subject suggest to me that the people in favour of this sort of solution really aren't worried about preserving other people's rights at all.
Thinking about this (and having visited your website), I'd be really interested in seeing you spell out your logic. You say that you permanently block people who threaten to sue. Presumably those are people who are spamming? In that case, I can believe that you are within your rights not to receive their mail. For that matter, I can believe you within your rights not to receive anyone's mail.
If I was going to sue anyone (which looks unlikely, since we have only had one very short-lived SPEWS-related problem in over a year), it would not be for refusing to receive my mail, it would be for sending rejection notices that tell people that I am a spammer, which I am not. Exactly what is your problem with that? Has any innocent party ever tried litigation on that basis? If companies can be sued for the content of their websites, I really can't see how spreading damaging lies by automated email can be an acceptable activity.
Of course in this case, you are blocking my domain because I dared to express a point of view (which the moderators don't seem to dislike too much) in a discussion forum, despite the fact that our company has never sent a single spam, and I have never actually threatened you or any other company with any form of litigation. Have you seen Minority Report? If so, you appear to have been cheering for the wrong guys:-) This is the sort of orwellian behaviour that would normally result in a shock-horror article for YRO...
That is to get you up off your butt and call the hosting company and scream bloody murder at them.
I know what the idea is, I just don't think that it is a fair way to proceed. If you have a problem with my server park sys admin, feel free to scream at him, don't threaten me in order to get me to do your work for you! In ethical terms, it's the same logic that says that kidnapping children to put pressure on the parents is a really neat idea.
The system works
I hate to sound slow, but why is spam increasing? Is it that the system doesn't work, or that so few people use it?
Ok hotshot, I've just added cyberporte.co.uk to our local RBL list and taken the liberty of posting a link (with a C&C warning) to your post on NANAE. Would you like the address of our attorney now....
This is great, you've just demonstrated that RBLs are not neutral, and are driven more by a desire to punish than to solve the problem. If I ever need to send an email from that domain, I'll use one of our other smtp servers, or that of one of my ISPs, or rent a clean one, or... the problem last time was that I didn't know how ineffective RBLs are. The one thing I'm not going to do is change my server park because someone on the other side of the world is on a quixotic crusade. It's not my battle, and I object to people trying to enlist me.
Why your netblock or address range has been rejected.
In our case, it is because one machine in our 16-bit IP range had been used for spam, so SPEWS blocked 65,000 machines, each of which is administered by a different person/company. How does jeopardising the existence of my company, whose smtp server is clean, help to fight against spam? Like I said, we can't just pick up a fairly full server and take it somewhere else, so there is no real economic pressure on the server park.
Joe Internet user is tired of spam
See n previous/. discussions about this, but the (statistically) average email address gets about 3 a day. Quite a lot of/.ers say they get very few spams, and many of those who do say that the annoyance value is pretty low. On the other hand, if you are trying to buy a skyscraper (real example) and you can't get emails from the estate agent, who happens to be in a different continent, that is extremely annoying, especially if there is absolutely no reason for blocking that particular server.
Any decent way to block spam
Err, if netblock is such a greeeeat system, how come spam is increasing? Am I missing something? If there is a consensus that spam is a major problem, legislate against it. I don't have a problem with that. I do have a problem with what mrneutron calls 'collateral damage', ie people damaging my reputation to get at someone else, especially when the system obviously isn't reducing the amount of spam sent globally.
Slashdot Mirror
Functional literacy in the urbanised areas of some developing countries is close to that in America, which is why typesetting and, increasingly, programming, is often outsourced to places like India. If you can get even low bandwidth Internet access working in rural areas, you have the potential to keep young people in their villages rather than in shanty towns, by providing them with a source of income.
Especially on a 1 inch screen. Doesn't it lose something if the female form gets rendered as 2 jpeg rectangles the size of a quarter? Unless you are into Picasso that is... It sounds a bit to me like those photo - rendering - using - teletype lineprinter files from the 70s that used to look something like Marilyn Munroe if you squinted at them from 50 yds away. Very clever, but is it worth the trouble?
I wouldn't put it quite that way, but I think users are a lot less ready to change interfaces than your average programmer realises.
Of course the car analogy cuts both ways. There is no standard for where the lights and windscreen wipers go, for example, and people seem to survive.
One enormous difference between the USA and most of Europe in cars has been the dominance of the automatic gearbox in the former and the dominance of the stick shift in the latter (last time I looked, less than 1% of European cars were automatic). But it looks to me like this may be about to change with the arrival of the sequential gearbox that has an automatic mode, which European manufacturers are starting to install in relatively cheap cars. In other words, the 'standard' might not be all Windows or all Linux, and 'progress' might mean that it isn't the worst of both worlds either.
What seems quite clear to me is that Linux is not going to worry MS in the desktop market as long as there are umpteen different Linux interfaces. (99% of users don't care about anything below the interface, which is why MS could effectively introduce a brand new operating system with the NT-XP product line without most people noticing.)
In this respect, I think Redhat 8's move to a unified interface makes sense. It would make more sense if other distos faolowed suit, but, for now, distros seem to want to distinguish themselves by having a unique interface. And, personally, I think there is too much gnome and not enough kde in their unified solution. Which, of course, is the problem with compromises...
The bottom line is that what seasoned Linux users want is probably not what Joe mouse user wants. Not quite sure what the route from here to there is though, as alienating all the existing users of your distro in the hope of picking up a load of new ones who have never heard of you doesn't sound like a great business plan either!
Can we ask him if, in stark turnover terms, he would be more afraid of people not being able to use the next generation of MS products on his company's products?
Customers have no trouble learning a new interface. They do it all the time.
Depends on the customer, depends on the application. 100 years ago, every car manufacturer put the sticks and pedals in a different place. Now they are standard worldwide. Do you think that a car with the brake to the right of the accelerator would sell well in 2003? Even if it was faster? How many accidents would it cause? Ever tried driving a righthand-drive car in heavy traffic after an overnight flight (or lhd if you normally drive rhd)?
Interface changes are no big deal for early adopters (like a lot of people on this site, I suspect). They are a big issue for occasional computer users, the elderly and a lot of other people who need to start using Linux if it is to compete on MS's own turf.
The biggest problems occur when a certain action causes one effect on the system you know and a completely different effect on the one you don't. In the case of switching from rhd to lhd cars, this meant I spent a week trying to use the window winder as the stick shift. In the case of one of our Windows customers, I eventually tracked his repeated X-session crashes to the fact he kept doing ctrl-alt-backspace to close windows in Mozilla, which apparently works just fine in IE...
The witty and humerous style of, say Douglas Adams would quickly become unbearable on something as big as LOTR.
If someone else had written it, maybe it wouldn't have been so long in the first place...
but if you fancy having a go at explaining, fire away
Let's talk about the 2D version to keep things (slightly more) simple. Let's also assume that whatever weighted attributes we have can be boiled down to a single figure for the similarity between each pair of files, with, say, 1 for 'identical' and 0 for 'as different as it is possible to get'. The exciting bit is plotting this onto a piece of paper.
With 2 files it's easy: you end up with one in the top lefthand corner and one in the bottom righthand corner :-) With 3 files you end up with a triangle, with the length of each side decided by how different the files are from each other. As soon as you have four or more files to plot, the chances are that you can't display all the relationships perfectly in 2D space, so you have to start fudging - sorry - distributing the stress evenly across the matrix. And that's the bit that does my head in :-)
SPSS has a module that does this sort of thing, but what I really want is the algorithm. Do you have a library? A statistics department? The ideal from my point of view would be a worked example in a procedural language such as C.
Building nested hash tables in your spare time...
No, really, it's a lot more fun than what most of the people on /. get up to. The nice thing about perl hash tables is that they are easy to use (once you get your head around the syntax), incredibly fast, and they let you represent problems in ways that bear some resemblance to what I consider to be a 'natural' way of thinking about the problem. Cf C, where you seem to spend most of your time building low level data structures from scratch :-)
Someone mentioned the idea of moving stuff around in this kind of UI as activating physical memory (thus making it easier to find things again). As a psychologist, I'd buy that.
Guess what my first degree is in :-)
One would define one's own keys
Absolutely. My idea would be that you can pick attributes to define the position of files in 2 or 3D space, and other attributes to be displayed by colour, size, shape or whatever. And you would be able to wang the settings around as you go along, depending on what you are trying to do/find at the time.
So when do we start coding? ;-) I could do most of a demo in Perl/Tk fairly easily - most of the file attributes that interest me are standard perl switches, and building nested hash tables is a hobby of mine. The tricky bit (for me) is converting the correlation matrix between files into a 2 or 3D scalogram. Are you still anywhere near a psychology department, and, if so, does anyone there have an algorithm for multidimensional scaling, Guttman Scalogram Analysis or similar?
I really want to see this film...
It would be a pain if it was the only way to interact with the computer, just like only having a cute GUI is a pain, but I reckon it would be very handy on occasions where you want to look at similar things that the FS keeps a long way apart.
Say you want to compare .config files for some application in different home users' directories. With my dream system you would set differentation by leaf name high, and differentiation by pathname low, and, hey presto, they would all clump together. Ditto if you wanted to find all the core dumps scattered all over your hard disc. If you wanted to find out why your backup no longer fits on a CD, you would differentiate by size, and instantly spot the enormous log file that didn't get rotated, or whatever. And if you set differentiation by pathname high, you would have a traditional hierarchical filing system.
In my dreams :-)
The book has to have been better than the film, cos it didn't have Demi Moore in it :-)
Haven't seen it. Screenshots? The nearest I have seen was that date rape film based on a Michael Crichton book, the name of which escapes me, and that involved avatars walking up and down corridors, which is just dumb.
The system I have been dreaming of for a while would be far more graphical (had a quick look at thebrain.com, it's still text with a few lines as far as I can see).
My dream system would enable you to specify file attributes such as size, path(s), name, type etc, as well as regex greps on the content, and then plot the filing system in 3D space, through which you could move with a joystick. You would be able to assign attributes to graphical features, eg make scripts cuboid, text files spherical, bigger files bigger on a logarithmic scale and so on. Related files would appear like solar systems, and by changing the importance of the file attributes you could change the way the files grouped.
Probably not what you'd want to use every day, but I'm sure I'd find a few mislaid files with such a system.
Specifically, how robust are those bits of chrome that attach the tea tray to the pudding basin? I've never seen one in the flesh, and it's hard to tell from the publicity shots, but I would be scared of snapping the thing off the first time I tried to clean the screen.
That doesn't tar the entire effort, does it? Don't fixate on the guys screwing up - there's a lot more guys that aren't screwing up.
I'm fixating on the system that blocked my IP address for no reason other than to get me to put pressure on my ISP (which I didn't, out of principle).
Before this, I had never heard of SPEWS, so my first contact with them was when they blocked my IP address. As cold calling methods go, I think I prefer spam :-)
I'm sure the people running the list are dear people with lovely families and a big cuddly dog, but the one little detail of using mafia tactics against me leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Sorry, but that's how it goes. I agree with most of what animal rights groups say, but they lost my support with the first nail bomb. Ditto a lot of single issue pressure groups.
What really impressed me about our IP block was how little difference it made. We had one complaint from one user on one of our domains. Given that this domain has 400 email addresses redirecting to 50 or so ISPs in 20 countries, this suggests that an awful lot of people aren't using SPEWS. And I think I know why :-)
Oh, now I see your problem. You seem to think people have a basic right to unfettered email.
Err no, I'm with you on this one. It's a business matter, and ISPs who block addresses for no good reason will end up losing customers. That's why the guy who is blocking me for threatening legal action (which I didn't, but there you go) hasn't the guts to block all .fr sites, despite the French government's landmark case against Yahoo. It's the logic of the school yard bully: you pick on the little guys and polish the shoes of the big guys.
The rights I was talking about concern what ISPs say about me to third parties, and I maintain that the content of a rejection message is subject to the same law as any other written communication. So block away, but please make sure the rejection message is factually accurate.
The result it gets in my case is that before, I was considering doing my bit to block spam, and now I won't, because the people who run RBLs seem more intent on hurting me than the spammers. And I reckon there are a lot of people like me. Is that how the system is supposed to work?
Making spammers work harder, keep opening new accounts, and changing ISPs is the strategy.
Yeah, I get that bit. So the result is that big ISPs won't touch them, which is good, and that they end up in server parks next door to me, which is inevitable, and that SPEWS blocks my mail because of my (very occasional) neighours, which is absurd. According to most of the people posting on the thread, the aim appears to get me to keep changing ISPs to put pressure on the ISPs. Except that my ISP has a pretty good reputation to start with, so where would they like me to go next? Verio? No server park can stop people renting a machine and spamming like mad until they get shut down. If they start spamming on Thanksgiving, it could take several days to shut them down.
I don't have a problem with blocking addresses. We have blocked one or two ourselves (to avoid getting several thousand copies of various viruses a day rather than to block spam). I don't have a problem with blocking IP ranges when all those IP addresses are administered by one company. I do have a big problem with blocking IP ranges when, to all intents and purposes, the IP addresses have nothing to do with each other. As far as I can tell, the only solution would be for me to take my server out of a park, lease a big pipe and buy my own IP range, which I can't afford to do at the moment.
[RBLs will never stop spam being profitable] you may be right!
So we've reached dynamic equilibrium. The spammers will keep wandering around the server parks, and my mail will keep getting blocked, in order to not deal with the problem of spam, and if I complain about the damage this does to my business it makes me slightly less popular than Osama Bin Laden. I'm glad this makes sense to someone.
Spammers keep spamming blocked addresses
So there goes another argument. If they keep spamming blocked addresses, RBLs don't reduce backbone bandwidth usage either.
If there were any decent ways to block spam without resorting to the netblock method, We would gladly use it
Cut off their income by billing people who respond to spam. Last time I suggested this, everyone said it couldn't be done, so please forgive the detail. All you need to do is build a database of spam messages (which already exist), extract the 'click here' addresses (about 3 lines of perl), scan the http log of the gateway your customers use (another 3 lines of perl), pick up the dynamic IP address of the machine requesting that page, find out which user it was and bill them.
I would start with three warnings followed by a bill of $5 a spam reply. For paying accounts, you debit their card. For free accounts, you close them after 3 violations. The point is that 99% of people will get the message after one warning, and certainly after one bill. Spam revenue plummets, game over.
Of course ISPs might not want to do this in case it upset their customers. It's much better upsetting my customers. But, as you appear to have conceded, this isn't about Joe Internet user, it's about reducing bandwidth for ISPs.
BTW, if RBLs are such a staggeringly great idea, you would expect ISPs that use them to be 2 to 3 times cheaper than those that don't, because their overheads are so much lower. Is this the case?
Bingo, That sir,was my point in first place...
Good, so the problem is that you didn't read the initial posting. I never said anything about sueing people who block email. At all. Ever. Not even once.
If someone says you dress funny and smell of cod, there isn't much you can do about it.
Rubbish. If (and we are talking several levels of hypothetical here) someone publishes claims that I am a spammer, and if I am demonstrably not a spammer, and if as a result of this untrue allegation I lose business, I suspect that I have a pretty good case for sueing for at least the amount of business I lost.
But then you'll just end up on more personal blacklists
Keep talking, in terms of making RBLs look as ugly as possible to anyone reading this thread, you are doing a fantastic job. What you appear to be saying is that you have a God-given right to destroy anyone's reputation as part of your so far utterly unsuccessful crusade against spammers, and that if anyone complains about their company being damaged as a result, you and your mates are going to damage it even more, just to show who is boss. If we were talking about any subject other than spam, there would be 3,000 /.ers complaining about this on a yro thread.
While I'm certainly not up on British law
Not sure where British law comes into it...
You went all C&C
What is C & C? You're the one with the lawyer, I've never considered sueing anyone in my life. You blocked because you can't read English, and, in the process, provide evidence to anyone wanting to attack RBLs that the blacklists are arbitrary, and often motivated by pettyminded vindictiveness rather than any concern about spam.
A legal case that might interest you
Why? I have never mentioned anyone sueing anyone over whether or not you can block email addresses. Which part of "You misread my original posting" are you struggling with?
While I'm here, I have to know, exactly how does blocking the whole of China put any pressure on anyone to do anything? The people in power will just get a .com address, it's the dissidents you are penalising, and what are they supposed to do, rise up and provoke regime change in the name of a spam-free world?
I can't do any of those things either when the problem is transient and the server park is basically clean. If I was hosted by Verio I could understand it, but anyone offering an smtp server to third parties can get caught from time to time.
OK, so spammers have to work 10x harder. How many times more cost and time effective is their set-up? As long as there is a margin in spam, people will continue to spam. The fact that spam is increasing suggests that it still pays. At what point are blocklists going to stop spam paying? I have a hunch that the answer is 'never'.
Turning off the blocklists would indeed be interesting, but, unless the spammers are completely stupid, I wouldn't expect it to have much immediate effect at all. Do they really continue to send to blocked addresses, long term?
Care to take back that threat of suing anyone who blocks you
See my last posting, or just show me where I said that in the first place. The point on which I would attack is the content of the rejection message, not the fact that the address is blocked. The difference between me and a spammer is that I can demonstrate that any rejection message associating our server with spam is false, and I can quote this very thread to show how damaging this allegation can be :-)
Better solutions
Sue the spammers, like AOL, or, if everyone really feels so strongly about the issue, as you claim, change the law.
Drug dealers living next door
If the police start harassing me or telling all the other neighbours that I am a drug dealer, I think you will find that the law is my friend. But, in any case, you are assuming that my server park is a den of iniquity. You have an IP address, check it out. How bad is their record? No-one can stop the first spam being sent, and, as far as I can tell, we spent a week answering angry emails from our clients because the sys admin at the server park went fishing for a couple of days.
I don't need to. All the discussions I have had on this subject suggest to me that the people in favour of this sort of solution really aren't worried about preserving other people's rights at all.
Thinking about this (and having visited your website), I'd be really interested in seeing you spell out your logic. You say that you permanently block people who threaten to sue. Presumably those are people who are spamming? In that case, I can believe that you are within your rights not to receive their mail. For that matter, I can believe you within your rights not to receive anyone's mail.
If I was going to sue anyone (which looks unlikely, since we have only had one very short-lived SPEWS-related problem in over a year), it would not be for refusing to receive my mail, it would be for sending rejection notices that tell people that I am a spammer, which I am not. Exactly what is your problem with that? Has any innocent party ever tried litigation on that basis? If companies can be sued for the content of their websites, I really can't see how spreading damaging lies by automated email can be an acceptable activity.
Of course in this case, you are blocking my domain because I dared to express a point of view (which the moderators don't seem to dislike too much) in a discussion forum, despite the fact that our company has never sent a single spam, and I have never actually threatened you or any other company with any form of litigation. Have you seen Minority Report? If so, you appear to have been cheering for the wrong guys :-) This is the sort of orwellian behaviour that would normally result in a shock-horror article for YRO...
That is to get you up off your butt and call the hosting company and scream bloody murder at them.
I know what the idea is, I just don't think that it is a fair way to proceed. If you have a problem with my server park sys admin, feel free to scream at him, don't threaten me in order to get me to do your work for you! In ethical terms, it's the same logic that says that kidnapping children to put pressure on the parents is a really neat idea.
The system works
I hate to sound slow, but why is spam increasing? Is it that the system doesn't work, or that so few people use it?
Ok hotshot, I've just added cyberporte.co.uk to our local RBL list and taken the liberty of posting a link (with a C&C warning) to your post on NANAE. Would you like the address of our attorney now....
This is great, you've just demonstrated that RBLs are not neutral, and are driven more by a desire to punish than to solve the problem. If I ever need to send an email from that domain, I'll use one of our other smtp servers, or that of one of my ISPs, or rent a clean one, or... the problem last time was that I didn't know how ineffective RBLs are. The one thing I'm not going to do is change my server park because someone on the other side of the world is on a quixotic crusade. It's not my battle, and I object to people trying to enlist me.
Why your netblock or address range has been rejected.
In our case, it is because one machine in our 16-bit IP range had been used for spam, so SPEWS blocked 65,000 machines, each of which is administered by a different person/company. How does jeopardising the existence of my company, whose smtp server is clean, help to fight against spam? Like I said, we can't just pick up a fairly full server and take it somewhere else, so there is no real economic pressure on the server park.
Joe Internet user is tired of spam
See n previous /. discussions about this, but the (statistically) average email address gets about 3 a day. Quite a lot of /.ers say they get very few spams, and many of those who do say that the annoyance value is pretty low. On the other hand, if you are trying to buy a skyscraper (real example) and you can't get emails from the estate agent, who happens to be in a different continent, that is extremely annoying, especially if there is absolutely no reason for blocking that particular server.
Any decent way to block spam
Err, if netblock is such a greeeeat system, how come spam is increasing? Am I missing something? If there is a consensus that spam is a major problem, legislate against it. I don't have a problem with that. I do have a problem with what mrneutron calls 'collateral damage', ie people damaging my reputation to get at someone else, especially when the system obviously isn't reducing the amount of spam sent globally.