Also, at least email is probably more environmentally friendly then manufacturing the paper, the ink, any other chemicals involved, and then shipping the stuff across country. It's really sad, when you think about it-- all that trouble just to deliver trash to my doorstep.
I know, that's not a novel thought; that's why they call it "junk mail". But it still strikes me funny whenever I really think about it. People almost literally manufacture trash and send it to your address against your wishes, just for you to throw it away without looking at it. What a waste. Not just a waste of materials and a waste of environmental resources, but what a waste of human effort.
Things like Orange Smoothie/other mods for Quake 3, etc, allowed people to stream live matches to the web so people could watch the match, truth be told... not all video games are exciting to watch, and this has to do with the lack designing the game and the games systems to do what traditional camera's do for televised sports.
Well you also have to realize that the televised sports aren't all that exciting to watch. They put in a lot of time, money, and effort into the production of the televised events. They have camera's all over the field with directors choosing the shot, when to do an instant replay, etc. They have a team of people just for putting that yellow line down on the football field to mark the first down. They hire experienced sportscasters who exist largely for the purpose of describing what's going to in such a way as to make it seem more interesting and exciting.
Even if video games were otherwise viable as a spectator sport, they probably wouldn't gain in popularity until someone really put in the work to professionally produce the events like a sporting event. And who's going to do that when, as you bring up, it's such a moving target? People keep playing newer games, and even a given game might get updates which change the gameplay, so the rules of the game keep changing. The platforms keep changing. By the time you developed the systems and procedures and expertise to cover one game, years would have passed and that game would be old news.
With most current professional sports, people have been playing that particular game for at least 100 years or so. Do you think today's popular video games will still be popular in 100 years?
While it's wonderful as a system, imposing it on other nations is often counterproductive
I think the real issue here is: you can't impose democracy on others. If you have a system of government imposed on you (esp. by external military force), then it is not chosen and therefore is not really democracy.
Kind of what I came in here to say. I was heading towards something more like, "The interstate highway system: democratic panacea, autocratic tool, or entertainment device? You decide!"
Yes, people use the Internet to get music and porn. People use the Internet to organize in some very great and powerfully democratic ways. People use the Internet to disseminate propaganda.
People similarly used to use the roads to guy out and buy music and porn. They drove to meetings and events for various political and social causes. They used roads to deliver newspapers and pamphlets filled with propaganda. Nobody blamed the roads.
That's not to say it's an uninteresting question: how have various innovations in transportation and communication changes culture, politics, and society? I'm sure hundreds of books could be written on the subject. But the thing is, to describe the social/cultural/political impact of the Internet, you almost have to write a hundred books. You can't just boil it down to some sensationalistic and simple question.
Who said democracy was pretty? Political philosophers have long criticized democracy for being equivalent to the "tyranny of the masses", i.e. we're all at the mercy of whatever most people want to do rather than what's sensible or right.
Actors as heads of state is democratic. Consolidation into factions is democratic. Invading countries inhabited by "foreigners" and torturing those "foreigners" is democratic. All these things are democratic as long as 51% of the people thought they were a good idea at the time.
What, you think mob rule is going to always work out in the most idealistic and altruistic way because you've labelled it "democracy"?
No, they don't. It's like Ted Stevens taking about the "tubes", or Oprah being very concerned about "over 9,000 penises". Lots of people, particularly those from older generations, have very little understanding of the technical and social workings of the Internet.
It's not the worst thing-- there are plenty of technical issues and social interaction in life that I don't understand. But then, I don't try to control those things.
Geeze, no, you're missing the point entirely. I didn't buy extra copies because it was too hard to reactivate. I'm saying that over the years of getting new systems with OEM copies, buying updating licenses for old machines, decommissioning old machines, needing fewer machines because of layoffs, etc. I have many more Windows XP licenses than I have Windows XP machines. And so my point was just to say that I'm definitely not a pirate. My aversion to activation is not from a desire to violate licensing terms. It's just to avoid running into stupid restrictions at inopportune times.
And yes, as I described I've had annoyances with windows activation. I've had worse problems with other programs that require activation. And because of all that, as a rule, I avoid products that require activation.
My point being, obviously, that activation may seem a little annoying, but some of these complaints about it really are a little overblown.
They seem overblown as long as everything is working properly and you have time to fix it, and assuming you really get such good responses from Microsoft. But then, lots of things that cause serious problems are fine so long as they all work the way they're supposed to. It's when something goes wrong that it's a problem, and I'd much rather my software vendors spend their time figuring out how to make my computer work well rather than figuring out how to remotely disable it (in ways that theoretically should be fine so long as nothing goes wrong).
So, as a policy, I don't use software that requires any kind of activation. I'm vocal about it, and I encourage others to take the same policy in the hopes that it might get some of this stupidity to stop.
And by the way the last time I dealt with Windows activation was about 3 years ago, and it took me about 45 minutes to get someone from Microsoft on the line and get things sorted out. Once that happened, I bought a Volume licensing copy of Windows XP (which explains why I don't have to activate Windows XP). Because of all the OEM versions and retail versions and upgrade licenses and volume licenses, I've probably bought about 3 licenses of Windows XP for every computer that I currently have running, so it's not like I'm looking for a free lunch.
You only activate it once, and it merely lets MS know that your copy is legit. If it were a monthly occurence then I might agree with you, but the sad fact is that most people would rather not pay for this OS.
Yeah, that's not so much the problem. The question is, at what point will it mysteriously think that I changed systems and ask me to activate again? When I change hardware? What hardware? How does the activation inhibit my ability to use imaging? If I use the volume-licensing edition, then I have to set up a server to handle activation/authentication on a regular basis? What happens if that server gets a wild hare and stop working properly?
Oh, I know, someone is going to respond saying, "Your stupid! This stuff works perfectly!" Yeah, and I've heard that before. I have yet to see a computer system that doesn't occasionally malfunction, and I put more trust in software that isn't specifically designed to malfunction under circumstances that I don't know.
I also use a few different Linux distributions, Mac OSX, and Windows on an almost daily basis, and I would agree that Windows 7 looks pretty good, all things considered. Vista was a real problem for, I don't know, a year or so, but they seem to have shaken most of the bugs out.
However, I have two bad things to say about them, and I think they're valid.
Activation: Personally, I avoid using any software that uses activation unless it's absolutely necessary, and even then I try to see if (as a legal customer) there's a way to circumvent it. When the practice of "activation" first started, I didn't worry too much about it, and as a result I ended up in a couple situations where products decided to stop working during a time when I couldn't afford to have them stop working. Now I just won't do it, especially not for something as vital as an operating system. If Microsoft would drop activation, I'd be more likely to upgrade. (yes, I buy all my software legally)
Why upgrade?: Ok, so I just said I'd be much more likely to upgrade, and that's true-- in that I pretty much refuse to upgrade from XP to a version of Windows that requires activation. On the other hand, I'm not aware of any feature in Windows Vista or Windows 7 that seem like they're worth a couple hundred dollars. At least not worth it to me.
I would also say (and I know lots of people will disagree) that from a user or user support standpoint, clean installs are preferable. Unless you know exactly what you have installed and what all your settings are, it's very hard to predict what might go wrong in an upgrade process. On the other hand, if you know exactly what you have installed and what all your settings are, then it probably won't be to hard to get everything back up to speed after a clean install anyway.
But even if you're not going to do a clean install (which I don't *always* do), it's a good practice to be prepared for a clean install. Keep backups of all your documents, and keep the original disks of all your software. If you make important changes to your settings that you won't necessarily remember, document those changes. For example, not only do I backup/etc on my Linux boxes, but I have a habit of keeping a backup on a separate box of only the files that I've customized, along with a package list of what's installed on each machine. I back up my full profile (regardless of OS) to make sure my personal settings are preserved.
The point is, if you're doing it right, a clean install shouldn't be too big of a deal. If you need to make the same customizations on lots of machines, come up with an imaging strategy.
You're still not addressing a problem in your logic. You're saying that spam can't be stopped by filters because lots of people don't use filters or don't use good filters, and lots of those people just click on any links that they're sent. Ok. Fine.
So if filters don't matter, then why are they constantly looking for new ways around filters? Why don't they just let their mail be easy to filter, and rely on all those people who aren't bother?
Or do you think maybe that spammers do care about filters? Because you're talking about my filters like they're *my* filters and no one else's. But I bet lots of people get their filters from others, from commercial vendors or publicly available sources. In any case, it's not like I'm such a genius to figure out that if a bunch of spam and only spam is coming from a single TLD, you block that TLD. It's not like my filters are going to be unique and irreplaceable.
I mean, seriously, if all spam suddenly came from the same TLD, are you really saying that would make it harder, and not easier, to sort/filter/block?
And if it needs an economic solution and no other solution will do, then aren't you just wasting your time by getting accreditation pulled from spam-friendly registrars? Won't that just shift business to some other spam-friendly registrar, since it doesn't remove the money-making opportunity?
No, I don't have a good solution, but then I'm not pretending to be some uber-genius who has all the answers. So far, spam seems to be an insoluble problem, and for the time being, the best we can hope for is to keep most of it out of our mailboxes. I think if you want to solve it, you'll have to re-engineer the Internet to have transactions be authenticated somehow and to disallow things like domain spoofing. But then you run into all sorts of other issues, both technical and social (e.g. privacy concerns, loss of anonymity).
Whether you use filters or not is completely irrelevant to the spammers, it matters about as much to them as what kind of car you drive.
You seem to think this idea is a big deal, but really, it doesn't seem like much of an argument. If spammers didn't care at all whether or not people filtered their mail out, and most people don't use filters anyway (as you claim), then why bother trying to make it hard to filter? Why would it be such a common practice (as you claim) to obfuscate the links?
It seems to me more like spammers are fighting and clawing to get into inboxes in spite of advanced filtering techniques. You say, "Spammers will continue to send out as much spam as possible because they get paid by how much money they raise for whomever is paying for their services." Well obviously they'll make less money if their spam makes it into fewer inboxes.
And who are these people who don't use any kind of spam filters? Most people that I know either use a commercial host (e.g. Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo) which uses spam filtering techniques by default, or else use their company address that is filtered by their company.
And some day, we will have to actually address the spam problem with something of true merit.
In short your assumptions seem to be based on your belief that either spammers care about you, or that the entire world will use your rules for approaching email.
Well I think they care somewhat about getting email into people's inboxes, or else why bother trying to get around filers? The entire world doesn't have to use my filters-- that's just the point. As soon as I can say, "kill anything with a.pillz address", all commercial spam filters can implement that rule very easily. Open source solutions can do the same. Public blacklists will have it easy. I don't have to update my filters and blacklists, since I can just use someone else's, and that person will have a very easy job.
$185k is not much money to spammers and their cohorts.
It's not nothing. Part of the reason spam is so prevalent is that it's ultimately cheap. Have them spend $185k on a bet that ICANN won't pull the plug when it becomes clear that it's a spam haven? Plus make it easier for people to filter you out and ignore you in the process?
Sorry, I get that you're angry at me for not seeing the problem, but if you see a genuine problem, you're going to have to explain it more clearly. Apparently I'm not too bright.
Still not seeing your point. The problems that you're describing-- domain name spoofing, open relays, zombie botnets, etc-- wouldn't be helped or hurt by the existence of the.pillz domain. If there were any TLDs that were only used for spam (or other illegitimate purposes) it would be irrelevant because spammers wouldn't actually bother to use those TLDs, or else it would be really helpful in that it would make them easy to find, block, etc.
I could put in a spam filter that said, "block any email that comes from.pillz, is relayed from.pillz, contains a link to a.pillz address, or even has '.pillz' anywhere in the body." In addition to that, I could set up my DNS to not give responses to.pillz addresses, or else route all of them to a page which said, "You shouldn't be going to these sites!"
But the reality is that spammers wouldn't bother with a TLD if it were exclusively or even dominantly illegitimate. It would make the whole thing too easy to detect.
I'm not sure I understand, but wouldn't it be great if spammers all started using.pillz or.softwarez domains? Then I could just block everything coming from those domains regardless of what their whois information says.
Unfortunately, I don't think we're going to be so lucky as to see spammers all put themselves under a unique TLD. But if they did, it'd probably be worth it for us all to start a collection and buy it for them.
Well I think you make a good point: for many sites, it's not particularly worth the effort to break the capatcha. On the other hand, it may be worth the effort for some sites, and it will be broken for the sake of those sites.
Once they've figured out how to break those, they might (possibly) be able to apply the same technique to everyone else with little overhead. But really, that's not even the point. If spammers can hack verification on major sites and get access to millions of free email addresses, then that's enough to worry about.
They didn't have to pull their music-- all they had to do was refuse to allow Apple to sell music without DRM, and they'd probably lose out to Amazon eventually. Did you notice that the "variable pricing" is taking effect at the same time that DRM is going away? That's because that was the trade: DRM for "variable pricing" (i.e. higher prices on some tracks)
All we need is something like bittorrent but that incorporates a payment system. OK, PayPal and/or google checkout would still be middlemen - but with a much smaller role and lower cost.
You'd need bittorrent, a site to offer/promote the trackers, and both of those would have to tie into a payment system. That site would also have to provide support to both the customers and the labels (or whoever was providing the music). For someone to provide all that, they're going to want a cut, and I would bet it'd be somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-20% of the sale price, which is supposedly about what Apple takes.
Both Apple and Amazon are pretty decent and efficient middlemen, and there isn't really anything stopping anyone else from competing, so long as the copyright holders are willing to license their intellectual property.
Except that apparently it is a problem, since as a US customer I'm not special enough to buy anything from the iTunes Canadian store.
There is *some* sense to this though. Distribution rights to copyrighted works are handled on a per-country basis, and sometimes the record label only has the right to distribute in one country-- or even if they have the rights to other countries, they don't want to go through all the legal, technical, and economic issues of distributing it globally. Because of that, they've only given Apple the rights to sell it in Canada, which means selling it in the US could constitute copyright violation.
It's just an unfortunate reality. I agree, these things don't always make all that much sense in the Internet age when you're talking about "buying" a digital copy of something online. If I'm in the US and I buy something from Apple's Canadian iTunes store, what's the status of that? Is it considered an act of importing that good from Canada? Is it Apple who imported it or me?
National lines get fuzzy online, and it's hard to say where a transaction takes place. Because of the weirdness, I'm not sure I blame Apple or the record companies for this sort of thing. You'd have to negotiate new trade agreements on a global scale to get these sorts of things worked out.
So I pirated the damn song. I literally tried to give these people my money.
I definitely sympathize with this. Frankly I don't think record companies or movie studios have much right to complain about piracy insofar as they refuse to make their products available and convenient. I related a story on Slashdot recently about wanting to watch a movie that had been released a couple of years ago. The movie was released to DVD and was available in the US (which is where I live). I went looking on my cable's pay-per-view, and it wasn't available there. I looked on iTunes, and it wasn't there either. I looked on Hulu and a couple similar sites, with no luck. There aren't any video rental places nearby and I didn't want to buy the thing, so I typed into Google, "Watch [movie name] online". I found several different sites that allowed me to watch it in a flash format (Youtube style).
Now I was willing to pay about $5 to watch the movie, but there wasn't anyone available to take that $5-- only people who were willing to provide the service for free. That's no way to run a business.
Frankly, it's kind of amazing what drives sales. Guitar Hero is one of the latest weird ones, but back when GTA: Vice City came out, all the songs from the soundtrack were big again. If Apple puts a song in a commercial, it's suddenly huge.
I wonder if record companies really hate that. I know that part of their business is tied up in marketing and the notion that you *have to* go through them if you want to get famous.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, at least email is probably more environmentally friendly then manufacturing the paper, the ink, any other chemicals involved, and then shipping the stuff across country. It's really sad, when you think about it-- all that trouble just to deliver trash to my doorstep.
I know, that's not a novel thought; that's why they call it "junk mail". But it still strikes me funny whenever I really think about it. People almost literally manufacture trash and send it to your address against your wishes, just for you to throw it away without looking at it. What a waste. Not just a waste of materials and a waste of environmental resources, but what a waste of human effort.
Things like Orange Smoothie/other mods for Quake 3, etc, allowed people to stream live matches to the web so people could watch the match, truth be told... not all video games are exciting to watch, and this has to do with the lack designing the game and the games systems to do what traditional camera's do for televised sports.
Well you also have to realize that the televised sports aren't all that exciting to watch. They put in a lot of time, money, and effort into the production of the televised events. They have camera's all over the field with directors choosing the shot, when to do an instant replay, etc. They have a team of people just for putting that yellow line down on the football field to mark the first down. They hire experienced sportscasters who exist largely for the purpose of describing what's going to in such a way as to make it seem more interesting and exciting.
Even if video games were otherwise viable as a spectator sport, they probably wouldn't gain in popularity until someone really put in the work to professionally produce the events like a sporting event. And who's going to do that when, as you bring up, it's such a moving target? People keep playing newer games, and even a given game might get updates which change the gameplay, so the rules of the game keep changing. The platforms keep changing. By the time you developed the systems and procedures and expertise to cover one game, years would have passed and that game would be old news.
With most current professional sports, people have been playing that particular game for at least 100 years or so. Do you think today's popular video games will still be popular in 100 years?
While it's wonderful as a system, imposing it on other nations is often counterproductive
I think the real issue here is: you can't impose democracy on others. If you have a system of government imposed on you (esp. by external military force), then it is not chosen and therefore is not really democracy.
Kind of what I came in here to say. I was heading towards something more like, "The interstate highway system: democratic panacea, autocratic tool, or entertainment device? You decide!"
Yes, people use the Internet to get music and porn. People use the Internet to organize in some very great and powerfully democratic ways. People use the Internet to disseminate propaganda.
People similarly used to use the roads to guy out and buy music and porn. They drove to meetings and events for various political and social causes. They used roads to deliver newspapers and pamphlets filled with propaganda. Nobody blamed the roads.
That's not to say it's an uninteresting question: how have various innovations in transportation and communication changes culture, politics, and society? I'm sure hundreds of books could be written on the subject. But the thing is, to describe the social/cultural/political impact of the Internet, you almost have to write a hundred books. You can't just boil it down to some sensationalistic and simple question.
Who said democracy was pretty? Political philosophers have long criticized democracy for being equivalent to the "tyranny of the masses", i.e. we're all at the mercy of whatever most people want to do rather than what's sensible or right.
Actors as heads of state is democratic. Consolidation into factions is democratic. Invading countries inhabited by "foreigners" and torturing those "foreigners" is democratic. All these things are democratic as long as 51% of the people thought they were a good idea at the time.
What, you think mob rule is going to always work out in the most idealistic and altruistic way because you've labelled it "democracy"?
the president and prime minister decide
And I assume that what you mean by that is, "whichever of these job titles that Putin holds is the one who decides."
They just don't understand the joke, do they?
No, they don't. It's like Ted Stevens taking about the "tubes", or Oprah being very concerned about "over 9,000 penises". Lots of people, particularly those from older generations, have very little understanding of the technical and social workings of the Internet.
It's not the worst thing-- there are plenty of technical issues and social interaction in life that I don't understand. But then, I don't try to control those things.
I think they're talking about that "Anonymous Coward" guy that posts here a lot. I hate that guy.
Geeze, no, you're missing the point entirely. I didn't buy extra copies because it was too hard to reactivate. I'm saying that over the years of getting new systems with OEM copies, buying updating licenses for old machines, decommissioning old machines, needing fewer machines because of layoffs, etc. I have many more Windows XP licenses than I have Windows XP machines. And so my point was just to say that I'm definitely not a pirate. My aversion to activation is not from a desire to violate licensing terms. It's just to avoid running into stupid restrictions at inopportune times.
And yes, as I described I've had annoyances with windows activation. I've had worse problems with other programs that require activation. And because of all that, as a rule, I avoid products that require activation.
I don't get it... How would that help Verizon sell you additional services?
My point being, obviously, that activation may seem a little annoying, but some of these complaints about it really are a little overblown.
They seem overblown as long as everything is working properly and you have time to fix it, and assuming you really get such good responses from Microsoft. But then, lots of things that cause serious problems are fine so long as they all work the way they're supposed to. It's when something goes wrong that it's a problem, and I'd much rather my software vendors spend their time figuring out how to make my computer work well rather than figuring out how to remotely disable it (in ways that theoretically should be fine so long as nothing goes wrong).
So, as a policy, I don't use software that requires any kind of activation. I'm vocal about it, and I encourage others to take the same policy in the hopes that it might get some of this stupidity to stop.
And by the way the last time I dealt with Windows activation was about 3 years ago, and it took me about 45 minutes to get someone from Microsoft on the line and get things sorted out. Once that happened, I bought a Volume licensing copy of Windows XP (which explains why I don't have to activate Windows XP). Because of all the OEM versions and retail versions and upgrade licenses and volume licenses, I've probably bought about 3 licenses of Windows XP for every computer that I currently have running, so it's not like I'm looking for a free lunch.
You only activate it once, and it merely lets MS know that your copy is legit. If it were a monthly occurence then I might agree with you, but the sad fact is that most people would rather not pay for this OS.
Yeah, that's not so much the problem. The question is, at what point will it mysteriously think that I changed systems and ask me to activate again? When I change hardware? What hardware? How does the activation inhibit my ability to use imaging? If I use the volume-licensing edition, then I have to set up a server to handle activation/authentication on a regular basis? What happens if that server gets a wild hare and stop working properly?
Oh, I know, someone is going to respond saying, "Your stupid! This stuff works perfectly!" Yeah, and I've heard that before. I have yet to see a computer system that doesn't occasionally malfunction, and I put more trust in software that isn't specifically designed to malfunction under circumstances that I don't know.
I also use a few different Linux distributions, Mac OSX, and Windows on an almost daily basis, and I would agree that Windows 7 looks pretty good, all things considered. Vista was a real problem for, I don't know, a year or so, but they seem to have shaken most of the bugs out.
However, I have two bad things to say about them, and I think they're valid.
I would also say (and I know lots of people will disagree) that from a user or user support standpoint, clean installs are preferable. Unless you know exactly what you have installed and what all your settings are, it's very hard to predict what might go wrong in an upgrade process. On the other hand, if you know exactly what you have installed and what all your settings are, then it probably won't be to hard to get everything back up to speed after a clean install anyway.
But even if you're not going to do a clean install (which I don't *always* do), it's a good practice to be prepared for a clean install. Keep backups of all your documents, and keep the original disks of all your software. If you make important changes to your settings that you won't necessarily remember, document those changes. For example, not only do I backup /etc on my Linux boxes, but I have a habit of keeping a backup on a separate box of only the files that I've customized, along with a package list of what's installed on each machine. I back up my full profile (regardless of OS) to make sure my personal settings are preserved.
The point is, if you're doing it right, a clean install shouldn't be too big of a deal. If you need to make the same customizations on lots of machines, come up with an imaging strategy.
I like this one.
You're still not addressing a problem in your logic. You're saying that spam can't be stopped by filters because lots of people don't use filters or don't use good filters, and lots of those people just click on any links that they're sent. Ok. Fine.
So if filters don't matter, then why are they constantly looking for new ways around filters? Why don't they just let their mail be easy to filter, and rely on all those people who aren't bother?
Or do you think maybe that spammers do care about filters? Because you're talking about my filters like they're *my* filters and no one else's. But I bet lots of people get their filters from others, from commercial vendors or publicly available sources. In any case, it's not like I'm such a genius to figure out that if a bunch of spam and only spam is coming from a single TLD, you block that TLD. It's not like my filters are going to be unique and irreplaceable.
I mean, seriously, if all spam suddenly came from the same TLD, are you really saying that would make it harder, and not easier, to sort/filter/block?
And if it needs an economic solution and no other solution will do, then aren't you just wasting your time by getting accreditation pulled from spam-friendly registrars? Won't that just shift business to some other spam-friendly registrar, since it doesn't remove the money-making opportunity?
No, I don't have a good solution, but then I'm not pretending to be some uber-genius who has all the answers. So far, spam seems to be an insoluble problem, and for the time being, the best we can hope for is to keep most of it out of our mailboxes. I think if you want to solve it, you'll have to re-engineer the Internet to have transactions be authenticated somehow and to disallow things like domain spoofing. But then you run into all sorts of other issues, both technical and social (e.g. privacy concerns, loss of anonymity).
Whether you use filters or not is completely irrelevant to the spammers, it matters about as much to them as what kind of car you drive.
You seem to think this idea is a big deal, but really, it doesn't seem like much of an argument. If spammers didn't care at all whether or not people filtered their mail out, and most people don't use filters anyway (as you claim), then why bother trying to make it hard to filter? Why would it be such a common practice (as you claim) to obfuscate the links?
It seems to me more like spammers are fighting and clawing to get into inboxes in spite of advanced filtering techniques. You say, "Spammers will continue to send out as much spam as possible because they get paid by how much money they raise for whomever is paying for their services." Well obviously they'll make less money if their spam makes it into fewer inboxes.
And who are these people who don't use any kind of spam filters? Most people that I know either use a commercial host (e.g. Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo) which uses spam filtering techniques by default, or else use their company address that is filtered by their company.
And some day, we will have to actually address the spam problem with something of true merit.
And what would that be? You have a solution?
In short your assumptions seem to be based on your belief that either spammers care about you, or that the entire world will use your rules for approaching email.
Well I think they care somewhat about getting email into people's inboxes, or else why bother trying to get around filers? The entire world doesn't have to use my filters-- that's just the point. As soon as I can say, "kill anything with a .pillz address", all commercial spam filters can implement that rule very easily. Open source solutions can do the same. Public blacklists will have it easy. I don't have to update my filters and blacklists, since I can just use someone else's, and that person will have a very easy job.
$185k is not much money to spammers and their cohorts.
It's not nothing. Part of the reason spam is so prevalent is that it's ultimately cheap. Have them spend $185k on a bet that ICANN won't pull the plug when it becomes clear that it's a spam haven? Plus make it easier for people to filter you out and ignore you in the process?
Sorry, I get that you're angry at me for not seeing the problem, but if you see a genuine problem, you're going to have to explain it more clearly. Apparently I'm not too bright.
Still not seeing your point. The problems that you're describing-- domain name spoofing, open relays, zombie botnets, etc-- wouldn't be helped or hurt by the existence of the .pillz domain. If there were any TLDs that were only used for spam (or other illegitimate purposes) it would be irrelevant because spammers wouldn't actually bother to use those TLDs, or else it would be really helpful in that it would make them easy to find, block, etc.
I could put in a spam filter that said, "block any email that comes from .pillz, is relayed from .pillz, contains a link to a .pillz address, or even has '.pillz' anywhere in the body." In addition to that, I could set up my DNS to not give responses to .pillz addresses, or else route all of them to a page which said, "You shouldn't be going to these sites!"
But the reality is that spammers wouldn't bother with a TLD if it were exclusively or even dominantly illegitimate. It would make the whole thing too easy to detect.
I'm not sure I understand, but wouldn't it be great if spammers all started using .pillz or .softwarez domains? Then I could just block everything coming from those domains regardless of what their whois information says.
Unfortunately, I don't think we're going to be so lucky as to see spammers all put themselves under a unique TLD. But if they did, it'd probably be worth it for us all to start a collection and buy it for them.
Well I think you make a good point: for many sites, it's not particularly worth the effort to break the capatcha. On the other hand, it may be worth the effort for some sites, and it will be broken for the sake of those sites.
Once they've figured out how to break those, they might (possibly) be able to apply the same technique to everyone else with little overhead. But really, that's not even the point. If spammers can hack verification on major sites and get access to millions of free email addresses, then that's enough to worry about.
They didn't have to pull their music-- all they had to do was refuse to allow Apple to sell music without DRM, and they'd probably lose out to Amazon eventually. Did you notice that the "variable pricing" is taking effect at the same time that DRM is going away? That's because that was the trade: DRM for "variable pricing" (i.e. higher prices on some tracks)
All we need is something like bittorrent but that incorporates a payment system. OK, PayPal and/or google checkout would still be middlemen - but with a much smaller role and lower cost.
You'd need bittorrent, a site to offer/promote the trackers, and both of those would have to tie into a payment system. That site would also have to provide support to both the customers and the labels (or whoever was providing the music). For someone to provide all that, they're going to want a cut, and I would bet it'd be somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-20% of the sale price, which is supposedly about what Apple takes.
Both Apple and Amazon are pretty decent and efficient middlemen, and there isn't really anything stopping anyone else from competing, so long as the copyright holders are willing to license their intellectual property.
Except that apparently it is a problem, since as a US customer I'm not special enough to buy anything from the iTunes Canadian store.
There is *some* sense to this though. Distribution rights to copyrighted works are handled on a per-country basis, and sometimes the record label only has the right to distribute in one country-- or even if they have the rights to other countries, they don't want to go through all the legal, technical, and economic issues of distributing it globally. Because of that, they've only given Apple the rights to sell it in Canada, which means selling it in the US could constitute copyright violation.
It's just an unfortunate reality. I agree, these things don't always make all that much sense in the Internet age when you're talking about "buying" a digital copy of something online. If I'm in the US and I buy something from Apple's Canadian iTunes store, what's the status of that? Is it considered an act of importing that good from Canada? Is it Apple who imported it or me?
National lines get fuzzy online, and it's hard to say where a transaction takes place. Because of the weirdness, I'm not sure I blame Apple or the record companies for this sort of thing. You'd have to negotiate new trade agreements on a global scale to get these sorts of things worked out.
So I pirated the damn song. I literally tried to give these people my money.
I definitely sympathize with this. Frankly I don't think record companies or movie studios have much right to complain about piracy insofar as they refuse to make their products available and convenient. I related a story on Slashdot recently about wanting to watch a movie that had been released a couple of years ago. The movie was released to DVD and was available in the US (which is where I live). I went looking on my cable's pay-per-view, and it wasn't available there. I looked on iTunes, and it wasn't there either. I looked on Hulu and a couple similar sites, with no luck. There aren't any video rental places nearby and I didn't want to buy the thing, so I typed into Google, "Watch [movie name] online". I found several different sites that allowed me to watch it in a flash format (Youtube style).
Now I was willing to pay about $5 to watch the movie, but there wasn't anyone available to take that $5-- only people who were willing to provide the service for free. That's no way to run a business.
Frankly, it's kind of amazing what drives sales. Guitar Hero is one of the latest weird ones, but back when GTA: Vice City came out, all the songs from the soundtrack were big again. If Apple puts a song in a commercial, it's suddenly huge.
I wonder if record companies really hate that. I know that part of their business is tied up in marketing and the notion that you *have to* go through them if you want to get famous.