It might be nice for there to be a DMCA-like takedown process for virus-infected computers. Right now, ISPs have no interst in taking down users who can't keep control of their computers, but maybe it's time they should.
The assumption that only spammers hate blackholes and want them down is near-sighted. You're missing the fact that every single one of the blacklists also hit colateral damage targets, legit systems that have a near-impossible time proving they're not spammers. It could be those admins who want the blacklists down too...
Never.
Fact is, for a blacklist to have any credibity it has to come from a central source. If it doesn't, then how are you going to authenticate the real blacklist from a fake claiming to be the blacklist but actually blocking legit ISPs and letting spammers by.
P2P isn't the solution to everything.
I think the bottomline failure in the "War on Spam" is that there's no central "root of trust" authority in the e-mail system... that is, no sactioning body regulating the use of e-mail in the way that we can have regulations about use of the PTSN that actually stick.
What I think is going to need to happen eventually is that e-mail is goin gto have to become a closed-system where ISPs have to pay to gain admission and risk ejection if the fail to control the Spam or other abuses coming out from their sources.
The fact is, any time you have an open unregulated communication system, the lowlifes are gonna be the ones who take it over...
The analogy here is a military escort with orders to prevent somebody from falling into enemy hands having to shoot the person they were supposed to be protecting to foil a kidnapping. Yeah, the protected person didn't fall into enemy hands, but it isn't exactly successful protection and it's just as bad as if the enemy did the shooting...
But, do you really like that it's Versign doing this for you?
Assuming you use IE, MSN already provided this service to you. Verisign has just exploited the DNS system to make their service come up in situations where MSN's used to come up. Other browser developers could have designed their own responses to the "NXDOMAIN" signal, but now Verisign has stopped returning "NXDOMAIN" and instead returns a redirect to their own site...
That's what really rubs people the wrong way. Instead of returning the error code that people thought they could depend on, they're returning a redirect to a service you didn't ask for. Yeah, it's a pretty good service on its merits if they tried to sell it to you... but instead they're forcing it on some people who were happy with MSN's service or happy with the traditional error...
If power is out on a major college's campus, police and fire respond automatically anyway. Besides, most colleges have their own backup power systems aside from the main grid.
How do you know that your cell provider isn't already using VoIP to route the calls through its own systems? GSM/CDMA/TDMA are just the protocol from cell phone to tower(s)... and if the call is already in digital form...
Yep, the idea is to route the within-campus calls locally, and only give the PTSN the calls that need to head off campus. The advantage of the univerisites doing it themselves (whether it's VoIP or just a PBX) is that the school can route local calls to the local phone monopoly, but can hand long-distance calls directly to the long-distance carrier of choice to bypass the ILEC and save even more.
The problem is that the cost associated with such services deters use. If a presently pay-per-ride mass transit system were made free, its costs would go up because there'd be more people using it.
It's easier to roll phone service into tuition to save billing costs because very few college students choose not to use any phone service. Not quite such an easy sell with mass transit and taxes... I don't live within walking distance of a subway system where I sit.
In a college campus situation, a lot of calls are within the campus exchange itself where there's no need for routing it through the PTSN, and plenty of bandwidth available between the buildings.
When it comes off-campus calls, a lot of those calls are long distance, which can head out over the university's huge bandwidth pipe to the Internet (or maybe even Internet2 or another academic-only network) to a more appropriate entry point into the PTSN to save long distance charges.
The remainder are local calls which aren't too expensive anyway.
So, it makes perfect since for schools to boot out the local phone monopoly and provide their own phone service to students. The only downside I see is the high costs of a VoIP phone, but once those start getting mass produced that should drop too.
It was Network Solutions (a company that was absorbed by Verisign) that created the concept of paying for domain names in the first place... there was a day when domains were free to the end users.
Capping will also start to go away as the mass-market P2P programs start getting killed off by the RIAA/MPAA... the less people with massive uploads, the less need to cap that.
More or less, that's what most successful ISPs are doing. They have varying levels of service where you basically prepay for the total downloads you plan on doing for the month. If you exceed your quota rate, you're throttled (slowed down, not stopped) until enough time passes to get you back on the right side of the line.
All I know is that I'm on a cable modem that's advertized at 1.5 Mbps, but am clocking in at somewhere between 2.2 and 2.7 Mbps whenever I download something measurable from my own server elsewhere...
You can still stay in the top 10% even if throttled... just because you're going slower than everyone else just means it'll take you longer to get the same files, not that you're going to be denied the files.
Yep... if you surf like a normal user you take your Internet in bursts. So, give the fastest instant velocities to them, and throttle down the biggest hogs. Everybody pays the same, everybody gets the same speed.
Yes, but who's creating 10 GB of content per month without owning a business? If you really need that much outbound, you're better off renting a $99/mo. webserver...
I didn't say there are no taxes on a phone bill, I just said that "Regulatory Programs Fee" isn't one of them, and there are a whole lot of other bogus fees put onto a phone bill. It's like that IDT ad where they rag about another phone company charging a fee for their property taxes... that's just an excuse to get the word "tax" into what's truely a "fee".
It also seriously undermines the whole point of the ISO. The idea is to create standards that everybody will use so that we can communicate with each other. If there's a price with such systems, then clearly somebody will balk at the price and create an alturnate, and then somebody will think any price is too high and we'll get a GNU/Whatever version of the same thing.
If the ISO starts treating its standards as IP, then ISO standards will cease to have value.
And that's where you come of as the kind of fool the marketing people love...
The FCC doesn't order anybody to put a "Regualtory Programs Fee" onto their bills. Such fees with names like that are created by the companies when they're saying "We're hiking our rates because the government is making us do X...", as a way of trying to get their customers to complain to the govenment to drop the regulations requirng X. It's like your grocery store putting a $1.50 fee on the bottom of every receipt marked "Refrigeration Energy Fee" because the government requires that meat and dairy products be kept cold and the local power company is raising rates again, regaurdless of what's or how much is being purchased. There's no direct relationship between the ammount of fees collected and the real costs of doing what the fee is supposedly for.
It's really not that the regulations being put on Vonage are that obscene, they're just the basic thing a normal phone company are always asked to do. But, since Vonage is now being treated like a real phone company, it seems like it's decided its now going to start charging nickel-and-dime nonsense fees like a real phone company does.
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It might be nice for there to be a DMCA-like takedown process for virus-infected computers. Right now, ISPs have no interst in taking down users who can't keep control of their computers, but maybe it's time they should.
Until Freenet gets overloaded with fake blacklists that make it hard to tell who's who and what's what...
The assumption that only spammers hate blackholes and want them down is near-sighted. You're missing the fact that every single one of the blacklists also hit colateral damage targets, legit systems that have a near-impossible time proving they're not spammers. It could be those admins who want the blacklists down too...
Never. Fact is, for a blacklist to have any credibity it has to come from a central source. If it doesn't, then how are you going to authenticate the real blacklist from a fake claiming to be the blacklist but actually blocking legit ISPs and letting spammers by. P2P isn't the solution to everything.
I think the bottomline failure in the "War on Spam" is that there's no central "root of trust" authority in the e-mail system... that is, no sactioning body regulating the use of e-mail in the way that we can have regulations about use of the PTSN that actually stick.
What I think is going to need to happen eventually is that e-mail is goin gto have to become a closed-system where ISPs have to pay to gain admission and risk ejection if the fail to control the Spam or other abuses coming out from their sources.
The fact is, any time you have an open unregulated communication system, the lowlifes are gonna be the ones who take it over...
The analogy here is a military escort with orders to prevent somebody from falling into enemy hands having to shoot the person they were supposed to be protecting to foil a kidnapping. Yeah, the protected person didn't fall into enemy hands, but it isn't exactly successful protection and it's just as bad as if the enemy did the shooting...
But, do you really like that it's Versign doing this for you? Assuming you use IE, MSN already provided this service to you. Verisign has just exploited the DNS system to make their service come up in situations where MSN's used to come up. Other browser developers could have designed their own responses to the "NXDOMAIN" signal, but now Verisign has stopped returning "NXDOMAIN" and instead returns a redirect to their own site... That's what really rubs people the wrong way. Instead of returning the error code that people thought they could depend on, they're returning a redirect to a service you didn't ask for. Yeah, it's a pretty good service on its merits if they tried to sell it to you... but instead they're forcing it on some people who were happy with MSN's service or happy with the traditional error...
If power is out on a major college's campus, police and fire respond automatically anyway. Besides, most colleges have their own backup power systems aside from the main grid.
How do you know that your cell provider isn't already using VoIP to route the calls through its own systems? GSM/CDMA/TDMA are just the protocol from cell phone to tower(s)... and if the call is already in digital form...
Yep, the idea is to route the within-campus calls locally, and only give the PTSN the calls that need to head off campus. The advantage of the univerisites doing it themselves (whether it's VoIP or just a PBX) is that the school can route local calls to the local phone monopoly, but can hand long-distance calls directly to the long-distance carrier of choice to bypass the ILEC and save even more.
The problem is that the cost associated with such services deters use. If a presently pay-per-ride mass transit system were made free, its costs would go up because there'd be more people using it.
It's easier to roll phone service into tuition to save billing costs because very few college students choose not to use any phone service. Not quite such an easy sell with mass transit and taxes... I don't live within walking distance of a subway system where I sit.
Free, with purchase of $150,000 degree program.
In a college campus situation, a lot of calls are within the campus exchange itself where there's no need for routing it through the PTSN, and plenty of bandwidth available between the buildings.
When it comes off-campus calls, a lot of those calls are long distance, which can head out over the university's huge bandwidth pipe to the Internet (or maybe even Internet2 or another academic-only network) to a more appropriate entry point into the PTSN to save long distance charges.
The remainder are local calls which aren't too expensive anyway.
So, it makes perfect since for schools to boot out the local phone monopoly and provide their own phone service to students. The only downside I see is the high costs of a VoIP phone, but once those start getting mass produced that should drop too.
True... but Verisign has done it and got away with it before on less important TLDs.
It was Network Solutions (a company that was absorbed by Verisign) that created the concept of paying for domain names in the first place... there was a day when domains were free to the end users.
Other TLDs such as .cc have wild card site that trys to sell any domain that's unregistered.
Your contract also says that they can change next month's TOS just by e-mailing you before the new month starts...
Capping will also start to go away as the mass-market P2P programs start getting killed off by the RIAA/MPAA... the less people with massive uploads, the less need to cap that.
More or less, that's what most successful ISPs are doing. They have varying levels of service where you basically prepay for the total downloads you plan on doing for the month. If you exceed your quota rate, you're throttled (slowed down, not stopped) until enough time passes to get you back on the right side of the line.
All I know is that I'm on a cable modem that's advertized at 1.5 Mbps, but am clocking in at somewhere between 2.2 and 2.7 Mbps whenever I download something measurable from my own server elsewhere...
You can still stay in the top 10% even if throttled... just because you're going slower than everyone else just means it'll take you longer to get the same files, not that you're going to be denied the files.
Yep... if you surf like a normal user you take your Internet in bursts. So, give the fastest instant velocities to them, and throttle down the biggest hogs. Everybody pays the same, everybody gets the same speed.
Remember, speed is an average...
Yes, but who's creating 10 GB of content per month without owning a business? If you really need that much outbound, you're better off renting a $99/mo. webserver...
I didn't say there are no taxes on a phone bill, I just said that "Regulatory Programs Fee" isn't one of them, and there are a whole lot of other bogus fees put onto a phone bill. It's like that IDT ad where they rag about another phone company charging a fee for their property taxes... that's just an excuse to get the word "tax" into what's truely a "fee".
It also seriously undermines the whole point of the ISO. The idea is to create standards that everybody will use so that we can communicate with each other. If there's a price with such systems, then clearly somebody will balk at the price and create an alturnate, and then somebody will think any price is too high and we'll get a GNU/Whatever version of the same thing.
If the ISO starts treating its standards as IP, then ISO standards will cease to have value.
And that's where you come of as the kind of fool the marketing people love...
The FCC doesn't order anybody to put a "Regualtory Programs Fee" onto their bills. Such fees with names like that are created by the companies when they're saying "We're hiking our rates because the government is making us do X...", as a way of trying to get their customers to complain to the govenment to drop the regulations requirng X. It's like your grocery store putting a $1.50 fee on the bottom of every receipt marked "Refrigeration Energy Fee" because the government requires that meat and dairy products be kept cold and the local power company is raising rates again, regaurdless of what's or how much is being purchased. There's no direct relationship between the ammount of fees collected and the real costs of doing what the fee is supposedly for.
It's really not that the regulations being put on Vonage are that obscene, they're just the basic thing a normal phone company are always asked to do. But, since Vonage is now being treated like a real phone company, it seems like it's decided its now going to start charging nickel-and-dime nonsense fees like a real phone company does.