Not only that - they're explicitly copying the comments onto their web pages, and if they're too lazy to take the time to cut&paste the non-address parts, they should simply not post the comments at all, or at least only post the fraction of comments for which they're willing to take the time. Better to ignore comments than violate their privacy promises.
If they want to cop out and say they're too lazy, fine, but saying that they're too lazy and will therefore break their promises gives them their own page in Al Franken's book "Lies, and the Lying Liars who tell them". I mean, think of what this will do to their reputation - how will you trust a bunch of tax-collecting vice narcs not to violate your privacy when you're narcing on somebody who might not be paying their liquor taxes? Next thing you know it'll be the Census Bureau that takes the data they promised to keep private for 75 years and gives it to the Army to round up the Japanese on your block. (Oh, wait, they've done that....)
I've been a customer of pobox.com for probably seven years now. It's a mail forwarding service that originally started in a dorm room and grew into a business - mail to bill dot stewart at pobox dot com forwards to me@my-isp.example.com, and I can change it any time I change ISPs. When I send mail to somebody, the IP address isn't pobox.com's servers - it's whatever IP I'm connecting from, whether that's my home DSL, or my DSL provider's smtp relay, or my office's firewall smtp relay, or my mailbox/shell provider's relays, or my dialup provider's relay if I'm on the road.
pobox.com doesn't know any of these IP addresses, so if they *do* advertise SPF records for *@pobox.com, anybody who listens to SPF will reject me, and probably most of their other customers. It's fine for them on the input direction - blocking forged aol mail, for instance - but even that prevents you from sending mail From: you@yahoogroups.com when you want the replies to go to your yahoo address, not your real address, which can be important if you're sending to people with dubious Microsoft mail systems that might ignore Reply-To: or people who don't pay attention to message bodies that say 'Please reply to my yahoogroups address, not my work address" (like your mother-in-law on aol.)
For someone like Karl, I'd expect that the risk is that if you're using a dialup connection that requires you to use _their_ SMTP relay, or if you're on a hotel broadband connection that hijacks SMTP, you'd risk having some people block your mail. Hopefully SPF-using SMTP servers do so noisily and not silently...
RLX made Transmeta blade servers in 2002 - I don't know if they've updated them for the new Efficeon chips this year or not. It was a really good choice for the blade-server market, because the theoretical advantages of high-density low-floor-space machines often lose out to the power and air-conditioning needs if you pack too many space-heater CPUs in a box.
Of course, if what you really want is a quiet desktop, there's a lot to be said for running a single-processor quiet X-Windows screen on your desktop, and if you need more CPU, stick a server in the basement next to the furnace.
Via makes a range of mini-itx boards using their low-power x86 system-on-a-chip clones. You'll often see them in Shuttle Barebones systems. The slower ones tend to be fanless, though the faster ones do need fans. Most of them have built-in graphics on the motherboard, which is nice from a power perspective - it's not blazingly fast gamer-box video-producer stuff, but it's perfectly adequate otherwise, and you save the space, heat, power consumption, and slot usage that a faster graphics card would use.
Or you can get a used laptop from eBay or a local used-computer dealer. Power use is low, size is small, operating system support is easy to figure out, and they theoretically have built-in UPSs, though used laptop batteries are often pretty dead. Prop them up for good airflow to avoid heat problems.
I realize it's probably not _that_ critical, since you can always burn more CD-ROMs, at a whopping 15 cents US each (or what is it? $1 CDN after the music tax?), but how long do CD-Rs last for this kind of work? Months? Weeks?
There seems to be a copy of Doug Gwyn's Adventure Shell here. It seems to date from 1986, back when we actually used text to communicate with Unix machines.
You are in a directory. A stairway called.. leads up. There are files here.
What's this "empty space on a disk" you're talking about?:-) Maybe dump/restore has gotten faster, and it certainly helps if you've defragged your source disk before copying, but normally copying files is slower because it's much more complex and has to bounce around the disk a lot more, while dd can just rip right along without slowing down. (As somebody else mentioned, you do want to use large blocks with dd, of course.) Norton Ghost does have some extra functionality on Windows, dealing with the !(#W(@!# Registry settings, which aren't always friendly to exact copying, but on Unixes that's a lot less of a problem.
The article didn't mention a thing about region codes, and neither did the downloadable manual for the AMW product. Does this mean that the models sold in the US only play US region-coded DVDs? Or does it mean they ignore the silly DVD-CCA stuff and let you watch anything?
It looks like Funai is licensed, and AMW doesn't look like it is but perhaps that's not the right name to give it.
My TV doesn't seem to have S-Video, so composite's probably fine, though I'll have to check again before buying anything.
Boxleitner: What happen? Ivanova: Somebody set up us the Slashdot! RedShirtGuy: We get signal RedShirtGuy: Main Screen Turn On Boxleitner: It's You! CowboyNeal: How are you gentleman! CowboyNeal: All Your Base Are Belong To Us!
I'd easily believe that 50% of your email bandwidth is spam. I'd also easily believe that 50% or more of the bytes handled by your email server are spam - even if you also handle DNS on it, and maybe if you server user web pages from it, since most user web pages don't really get read that often.
However, I'd be extremely skeptical about an assertion that your users use your ISP as their primary network connectivity (i.e. where they access the web) and you're still getting 50% of your inbound bandwidth as spam. If your users aren't using your network for their basic access (either via dial or DSL), and also aren't publishing lots of web pages, then that's different - you're a specialty player. Lots of small ISPs are, and having to pay for bandwidth to receive spam sucks, but the net's bandwidth as a whole is largely web traffic.
I couldn't tell if the ISP you run was open-rsc.org (a highly specialized site) or vrx (couldn't tell what it does, since it says it does "everything") or somewhere else. Nice grow-lights, though.
When I'm working, I really don't like being interrupted. We've got an internal IM system at work which some of the people use; it's mainly useful when we've got 3-hour training conference calls and you want to converse with someone without filling up the whole screen with Outlook.
About six or seven years ago, we got my mother-in-law a computer and an AOL account. She's non-technical to the point that she needs to have her kids change batteries for her, and her VCR no longer works well enough to blink 12:00, and it took her a while to realize that the celebrity news AOL was showing her comes from somewhere outside her PC, which is why the phone doesn't work when she's on AOL (:-), but once we got over that hurdle it was absolutely the right service for her.
She gets her celebrity news, she can send Instant Messages to her friends, she can send email to my wife and her brother but usually can't remember how to send it to me, it's less passive than TV, and it lets her be lots more social, and after she retired she was starting to feel pretty isolated, especially since she's not all that mobile. So it's a good thing, and she's sufficiently immune to saccharin overdoses that she misses all those online greeting cards people used to send.
Would I recommend it for my side of the family? Not a chance! My mother hasn't replaced the MacOS 7.x 68030 Macintosh she and Dad used (he died about five years ago), but it does email, browsing, and letter-writing just fine, and she's perfectly willing to try new technology if there's a good reason for it, and she's got a small local ISP that can actually have a live intelligent human being answer questions if she needs support, plus my sister lives nearby and can go kick the printer a few extra times if it's stubborn. She did get a bigger monitor and had my sister set the thing to the biggest print should could run, though - much easier on real machines than AOL. My younger brother eventually got something with modern graphics on it, so I don't think he's still telnetting to a real computer to do email much any more. My sisters have mostly downgraded from Macs to newer faster Wintel boxes, but that was mostly because their kids needed Games. For the most part, they all use real ISPs, though one sister might be on a cable modem now.
Sure, I also find it annoying when some spammer has a GoDaddy privacy-protecting address, or is registered with email contact address: SkriptKiddie@hotmail.com, snail-mail 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, phone 1-900-spam-you. But "valid" addresses don't solve that problem - one spammer I traced yesterday has a street address that's identical to The Company Corporation, which for the last 105 years has been the canonical simple low-priced way to set up a Delaware corporation, and their phone number was an answering service somewhere. You can hunt them down, seize their assets (a manila folder in one of The Company Corporation's file cabinets) and have John Ashcroft burn it at the stake at high noon and all that means is that the spammer needs to spend another $100-500 to set up a new corporation for the next time they get busted, along with a couple more $25/month ISP accounts.
But the real purposes of the whois information are working contact information when you're system's broken or spewing. Phone numbers are helpful because if your DNS or email is broken, then sending you email often doesn't work. Street address information is useful if the registrar wants to send you paper bills, but that doesn't need to be public.
ICANN has been pressing for whois information to require True Names, ICBM addresses, and Subpoena-delivery addresses because they want anybody to be able to drag you into court over domain name trademark issues, and if there's no way to determine _your_ legal jurisdiction, somebody might try to sue them or the registries or registrars instead, plus different jurisdictions have different rules about trademarks. (Remember that the only IP that ICANN cares about is Intellectual Property, not Internet Protocol.) But that's just tough - they could just as well make a rule that says that you need to provide a working email address, and that if you don't respond within X days, they can give away your domain name to any reasonable-sounding claimant, and tell you what court or arbitrator to go to if you want it back.
RIAA and MPAA are pushing ICANN to include True Names and legal jurisdictions because they want to sue your ass if anybody thinks about sharing music on anything you own. The US Department of Homeland Security wants the whois records to include your blood type, DNA records, retina scans, fingerprints, and US Not-Known-To-Be-A-Terrorist-Or-Democrat-Yet permission slip, because John Ashcroft wants to be able to burn *you* at the stake and not just your domain name contract, just in case your web site has pictures of that Department of Justice statue with the bare breasts that he covered up. Lots of other people have reasons they'd like to get your marketing information from your whois records.
But that's not what domain names are about. Domain names are about giving ways for you to publish information on the Internet where people can find it, and to provide contact information for people who you want to be able to reach you. They're a technical tool for doing that, and whois records are a technical tool for maintaining them. They can be an important privacy tool if you want privacy, or an important publicity tool if you want publicity. If you want to publish your political rants on "www.federalist-papers.org" the way the original authors pseudonymously published theirs on dead trees, that's a critical part of freedom of speech. If you want to publish your Falun Gong religious rants on the net and not have the Chinese government censor your or hunt you down and throw you in jail, or hunt down the people who read them, that's your right too.
Privacy is much more important that stopping spammers, annoying as they are. Stop spammers with technical tools, or stop spammers by changing the economics that lets some of them profit, or stop spammers with baseball bats for all I care, but don't say it's ok to mess with our civil rights as collateral damage.
Rule #1: Spammers always Lie. Rule#2: Spammers are Stupid
You're not going to sell this CD to Alan Ralsky or his ilk, the professional Florida ROKSO members or the newer mafiosi who run their own harvesters (you'll leave attractive-nuisance web pages around for them:-) This kind of product is designed for the Gullible Bottom-Feeder spammers, the anklebiters who think they'll Make Money Fast by buying a CD from the big professional spammers. That means they'll either see your ads and believe them, or they won't, but they won't have the clue about how to ask around for other spammers who've bought your fine product and are now in jail or court or bankruptcy or buried in paper junkmail or keep getting their single-wide trailer windows broken, plus you'll have had fun taking them for $39 and any other optional services you've sold them, like "bullet-proof hosting" and "spam-free bulk email delivery ISP services".
For the slightly brighter potential spammers, word may get around faster (e.g. it shows up in Google next to your ad), but that's ok - any meme that says buying cheap spamware is dangerous is a Good Meme. The problem is making sure that *you* are hard to trace, because the guy in the singlewide trailer may have a doublewide baseball bat, and the slightly brighter spammer may have a kid brother who's a 31337 Skr14t K1dD13 who can annoy you as well.
The other problem, of course, is how to reach your potential customer base, other than by spamming... Google's a start.
Crypto is overkill. Many popular email systems, such as Sendmail, support email addresses of the form username+tag@domain.com or username-tag@domain.com, which let you give a different email address to everyone, and if you've got your own domain name or subdomain at your ISP, you can use tag@yoursubdomain.domain.com. Some email ISPs, like fastmail.fm, automatically translate formats, so you can tell someone tag@username.domain.com even if they get confused by plus signs.
You can be open-minded and only discard mail from tags that get abused, or paranoid and only accept mail from tags you've specifically whitelisted. You can be obvious about the tags - betty@veronica.archie.com, or subtle about them - orggl@veronica.archie.com is "betty" in rot13, or cryptographic (use tags with the correct hash, so you can robo-check them, or longer tags with elliptic-curve signatures), or creative (Annalee Newitz uses a different username at techsploitation.com on each of her newspaper columns). And of course you can seed your web pages with spammer bait, so any person or machine that sends mail to stupidharvester@username.domain.com gets blacklisted.
My comment about crypto being overkill comes from a perspective of ten years of hanging out with the Cypherpunks, and doing crypto for years before that. There are other ways crypto can be useful - Adam Back's Hashcash work (and Microsoft's recent Penny Black stuff), Digital Signatures on email to reduce forgery, or simply requiring all email to you to be digitally signed or encrypted or both because that's too much work for most spammers. You could use it to build traceability, but that's not always good, and making it mandatory, centralized, and universal is very very bad from a civil liberties perspective as well as probably unworkable.
You're using more network bits reading Slashdot than you are receiving spam. You're using far more bits if you read significant quantities of web pages with graphics on them, or download music. An ISP that only provides email and not connectivity obviously has their storage costs and incoming bandwidth costs doubled or tripled by spammers (after any blocking they do), and their bandwidth from mailboxes to customers may be doubled or not depending on whether they provide spam-discard features, but they pass all that cost along to their customers (that's you), and email is a relatively small fraction of most general-purpose ISPs' total costs (whether they outsource email to specialists or do their own.)
The problem isn't the extra $2-$4/month that might represent the cost of spam. That's less than six minutes of my salary per month. I probably don't spend six minutes per day dealing with spam - but I spend a *lot* more than six minutes per month between deleting the stuff and maintaining my filters and being pissed off at stupid spammers and having the volume of spam interfere with seeing my most important email quickly.
The spammer said he used relays and such - the spam may look like it's coming from Korea, but that's just where the misadministered proxy is, with the real host in India. And it may look like that the respond-to address is in China, but that may just be forwarding back to the host in India. That way, the publicly-visible side can get burned without losing his main resource.
Of course, "Rule #1" is "Spammers Always Lie", so "India" may really be somewhere else. On the other hand, India and China have had heavily regulated telecom markets and histories of corrupt business/bureaucracy practice, so while it may be a bit difficult to do high-bandwidth highly-reliable communications there, you can still get bulletproofness is the hosting center's manager's brother is politically connected and pays off the right people.
Many people have multiple email addresses - some that they use for internal applications, some that they give out to everybody. Politicians aren't much different, except that important politicians get large quantities of mail that their staff handles or ignores for them.
With paper mail, that means that letters with money attached get attention, letters with large amounts of money attached get personal attention, letters without money attached get counted or weighed and may get read by the staff if the subject is interesting or timely. Mail that takes more work to send gets more attention - it's how you tell "grassroots" from "Astroturf". Handwritten mail that appears to be unique gets more attention than identically-worded mail from the National Rifle Association or Gun Banners Incorporated, and either one of them get more attention than pre-printed postcards with some special interest's message. Telegrams cost money, so also get more attention; faxes are cheap and easier to automate, so they get less.
Email requires much less effort to send, even if it's not spam, so there tends to be more of it. Therefore, politicians who do use email for their work keep separate addresses from the public side, which may only get autorespondered, or may get robo-sorted, or may sometimes get scanned for Subject: lines by staff, but rarely gets read by the politician.
It's not uncommon in the US for people to filter out whitehouse.gov addresses from mailing lists, just to prevent annoying someone who has a staff that goes psycho about perceived threats, real or not. Some spammers filter out all of.gov, others don't.
1,000,000,000:1 bogus addresses definitely would. But even 10:1 is can make a major dent, if you use it to block email from any address that hits N of your bogus addresses within X period of time. You have to be a bit careful not to block mail from real ISPs that have bad customers (or virus-0wned customers, most likely), but at least that puts technical limits on what tools the spammers can use, and makes them easier to trace.
You get extra points if some fraction of the bogus addresses you feed harvester programs let you trace the spammer's sources, e.g. feeding addresses like 001002003004@mydomain.com to a web request from 1.2.3.4.
Most spamware buyers are in no position to complain about poor quality lists of email addresses - after all, they're just going to use them to sell poor quality penis-enlargement pills, or bogus get-rich-quick scams. If only 25% of the addresses are valid, that just means that the price per valid address was 4 times as high as advertised, which on these CDs is usually still cheaper than doing their own web-spidering.
Besides, anybody who gives spammers bogus addresses is doing a public service:-)
Normally, you wouldn't expect a product like this to be very good, and you'd expect it to have lots of bad addresses, as well as mostly containing addresses of people who don't want to receive spam. But in this case, having a high fraction of actual duplicate addresses seems to be the kind of bogusness that some purchaser could take to court, claiming fraud, because the product claims to have 10 million addresses and only has 6 million plus repeats, and because the seller is known and identifiable, as opposed to some random entity on the net.
Normal filters won't remove fluorides, or salt, or soluable calcium compounds - they mainly take out particulates and gasses, and they're usually pretty good on chlorine, which you really want to get rid of. Some reverse osmosis things might affect fluorides, but water softeners probably won't, though they'll replace the calcium with sodium, which isn't a good idea for drinking water (though it's great for wash water.) I've never heard of a water department adding vitamins - that would be extremely expensive as well as medically dangerous; they can do it with fluorides because the material is basically free, though the equipment isn't.
Fluoridating water is a terribly stupid drug delivery method - it's extremely variable in the dosage it delivers, and doesn't adjust its random dosage based on different individuals' needs - children growing new teeth need it more than old people who have to worry about osteoporosis. If you need fluorides, you can either use toothpaste to deliver it to the outside of your teeth, where it's useful, or take it in pills which are also cheap.
Fluoridation is a heavily propaganda-based business, and we've got politicians here in California like Jackie Speier who insist that every town water system MUST MUST MUST force its users to take this drug whether they want it or not, though of course she's adamantly opposed to letting us take many of the drugs we do want to take. That's not to say that anti-fluoridation isn't _also_ heavily propaganda-based, just because it's a Commie Plot against Our Precious Bodily Fluids. But it's basically bad science and bad medicine.
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If they want to cop out and say they're too lazy, fine, but saying that they're too lazy and will therefore break their promises gives them their own page in Al Franken's book "Lies, and the Lying Liars who tell them". I mean, think of what this will do to their reputation - how will you trust a bunch of tax-collecting vice narcs not to violate your privacy when you're narcing on somebody who might not be paying their liquor taxes? Next thing you know it'll be the Census Bureau that takes the data they promised to keep private for 75 years and gives it to the Army to round up the Japanese on your block. (Oh, wait, they've done that....)
pobox.com doesn't know any of these IP addresses, so if they *do* advertise SPF records for *@pobox.com, anybody who listens to SPF will reject me, and probably most of their other customers. It's fine for them on the input direction - blocking forged aol mail, for instance - but even that prevents you from sending mail From: you@yahoogroups.com when you want the replies to go to your yahoo address, not your real address, which can be important if you're sending to people with dubious Microsoft mail systems that might ignore Reply-To: or people who don't pay attention to message bodies that say 'Please reply to my yahoogroups address, not my work address" (like your mother-in-law on aol.)
For someone like Karl, I'd expect that the risk is that if you're using a dialup connection that requires you to use _their_ SMTP relay, or if you're on a hotel broadband connection that hijacks SMTP, you'd risk having some people block your mail. Hopefully SPF-using SMTP servers do so noisily and not silently...
12 billion dollars for Google, though? Yowza.
I meant to say that Soekris makes some low-cost boards, etc.
Of course, if what you really want is a quiet desktop, there's a lot to be said for running a single-processor quiet X-Windows screen on your desktop, and if you need more CPU, stick a server in the basement next to the furnace.
If you're looking for a much lower-end solution (e.g. you're running a web server on your DSL line), makes some low-cost little boards, one of which can support laptop hard drives. No graphics, supports a variety of Linux and *BSD operating systems.
Or you can get a used laptop from eBay or a local used-computer dealer. Power use is low, size is small, operating system support is easy to figure out, and they theoretically have built-in UPSs, though used laptop batteries are often pretty dead. Prop them up for good airflow to avoid heat problems.
I realize it's probably not _that_ critical, since you can always burn more CD-ROMs, at a whopping 15 cents US each (or what is it? $1 CDN after the music tax?), but how long do CD-Rs last for this kind of work? Months? Weeks?
You are in a directory. A stairway called .. leads up. There are files here.
Get foo.
Throw foo at
What's this "empty space on a disk" you're talking about? :-) Maybe dump/restore has gotten faster,
and it certainly helps if you've defragged your source disk before copying, but normally copying files is slower because it's much more complex and has to bounce around the disk a lot more, while dd can just rip right along without slowing down. (As somebody else mentioned, you do want to use large blocks with dd, of course.) Norton Ghost does have some extra functionality on Windows, dealing with the !(#W(@!# Registry settings, which aren't always friendly to exact copying, but on Unixes that's a lot less of a problem.
It looks like Funai is licensed, and AMW doesn't look like it is but perhaps that's not the right name to give it.
My TV doesn't seem to have S-Video, so composite's probably fine, though I'll have to check again before buying anything.
However, I'd be extremely skeptical about an assertion that your users use your ISP as their primary network connectivity (i.e. where they access the web) and you're still getting 50% of your inbound bandwidth as spam. If your users aren't using your network for their basic access (either via dial or DSL), and also aren't publishing lots of web pages, then that's different - you're a specialty player. Lots of small ISPs are, and having to pay for bandwidth to receive spam sucks, but the net's bandwidth as a whole is largely web traffic.
I couldn't tell if the ISP you run was open-rsc.org (a highly specialized site) or vrx (couldn't tell what it does, since it says it does "everything") or somewhere else. Nice grow-lights, though.
When I'm working, I really don't like being interrupted. We've got an internal IM system at work which some of the people use; it's mainly useful when we've got 3-hour training conference calls and you want to converse with someone without filling up the whole screen with Outlook.
... on the other hand, is an English invention.
She gets her celebrity news, she can send Instant Messages to her friends, she can send email to my wife and her brother but usually can't remember how to send it to me, it's less passive than TV, and it lets her be lots more social, and after she retired she was starting to feel pretty isolated, especially since she's not all that mobile. So it's a good thing, and she's sufficiently immune to saccharin overdoses that she misses all those online greeting cards people used to send.
Would I recommend it for my side of the family? Not a chance! My mother hasn't replaced the MacOS 7.x 68030 Macintosh she and Dad used (he died about five years ago), but it does email, browsing, and letter-writing just fine, and she's perfectly willing to try new technology if there's a good reason for it, and she's got a small local ISP that can actually have a live intelligent human being answer questions if she needs support, plus my sister lives nearby and can go kick the printer a few extra times if it's stubborn. She did get a bigger monitor and had my sister set the thing to the biggest print should could run, though - much easier on real machines than AOL. My younger brother eventually got something with modern graphics on it, so I don't think he's still telnetting to a real computer to do email much any more. My sisters have mostly downgraded from Macs to newer faster Wintel boxes, but that was mostly because their kids needed Games. For the most part, they all use real ISPs, though one sister might be on a cable modem now.
But the real purposes of the whois information are working contact information when you're system's broken or spewing. Phone numbers are helpful because if your DNS or email is broken, then sending you email often doesn't work. Street address information is useful if the registrar wants to send you paper bills, but that doesn't need to be public.
ICANN has been pressing for whois information to require True Names, ICBM addresses, and Subpoena-delivery addresses because they want anybody to be able to drag you into court over domain name trademark issues, and if there's no way to determine _your_ legal jurisdiction, somebody might try to sue them or the registries or registrars instead, plus different jurisdictions have different rules about trademarks. (Remember that the only IP that ICANN cares about is Intellectual Property, not Internet Protocol.) But that's just tough - they could just as well make a rule that says that you need to provide a working email address, and that if you don't respond within X days, they can give away your domain name to any reasonable-sounding claimant, and tell you what court or arbitrator to go to if you want it back.
RIAA and MPAA are pushing ICANN to include True Names and legal jurisdictions because they want to sue your ass if anybody thinks about sharing music on anything you own. The US Department of Homeland Security wants the whois records to include your blood type, DNA records, retina scans, fingerprints, and US Not-Known-To-Be-A-Terrorist-Or-Democrat-Yet permission slip, because John Ashcroft wants to be able to burn *you* at the stake and not just your domain name contract, just in case your web site has pictures of that Department of Justice statue with the bare breasts that he covered up. Lots of other people have reasons they'd like to get your marketing information from your whois records.
But that's not what domain names are about. Domain names are about giving ways for you to publish information on the Internet where people can find it, and to provide contact information for people who you want to be able to reach you. They're a technical tool for doing that, and whois records are a technical tool for maintaining them. They can be an important privacy tool if you want privacy, or an important publicity tool if you want publicity. If you want to publish your political rants on "www.federalist-papers.org" the way the original authors pseudonymously published theirs on dead trees, that's a critical part of freedom of speech. If you want to publish your Falun Gong religious rants on the net and not have the Chinese government censor your or hunt you down and throw you in jail, or hunt down the people who read them, that's your right too.
Privacy is much more important that stopping spammers, annoying as they are. Stop spammers with technical tools, or stop spammers by changing the economics that lets some of them profit, or stop spammers with baseball bats for all I care, but don't say it's ok to mess with our civil rights as collateral damage.
You're not going to sell this CD to Alan Ralsky or his ilk, the professional Florida ROKSO members or the newer mafiosi who run their own harvesters (you'll leave attractive-nuisance web pages around for them :-) This kind of product is designed for the Gullible Bottom-Feeder spammers, the anklebiters who think they'll Make Money Fast by buying a CD from the big professional spammers. That means they'll either see your ads and believe them, or they won't, but they won't have the clue about how to ask around for other spammers who've bought your fine product and are now in jail or court or bankruptcy or buried in paper junkmail or keep getting their single-wide trailer windows broken, plus you'll have had fun taking them for $39 and any other optional services you've sold them, like "bullet-proof hosting" and "spam-free bulk email delivery ISP services" .
For the slightly brighter potential spammers, word may get around faster (e.g. it shows up in Google next to your ad), but that's ok - any meme that says buying cheap spamware is dangerous is a Good Meme. The problem is making sure that *you* are hard to trace, because the guy in the singlewide trailer may have a doublewide baseball bat, and the slightly brighter spammer may have a kid brother who's a 31337 Skr14t K1dD13 who can annoy you as well.
The other problem, of course, is how to reach your potential customer base, other than by spamming... Google's a start.
You can be open-minded and only discard mail from tags that get abused, or paranoid and only accept mail from tags you've specifically whitelisted. You can be obvious about the tags - betty@veronica.archie.com, or subtle about them - orggl@veronica.archie.com is "betty" in rot13, or cryptographic (use tags with the correct hash, so you can robo-check them, or longer tags with elliptic-curve signatures), or creative (Annalee Newitz uses a different username at techsploitation.com on each of her newspaper columns). And of course you can seed your web pages with spammer bait, so any person or machine that sends mail to stupidharvester@username.domain.com gets blacklisted.
My comment about crypto being overkill comes from a perspective of ten years of hanging out with the Cypherpunks, and doing crypto for years before that. There are other ways crypto can be useful - Adam Back's Hashcash work (and Microsoft's recent Penny Black stuff), Digital Signatures on email to reduce forgery, or simply requiring all email to you to be digitally signed or encrypted or both because that's too much work for most spammers. You could use it to build traceability, but that's not always good, and making it mandatory, centralized, and universal is very very bad from a civil liberties perspective as well as probably unworkable.
The problem isn't the extra $2-$4/month that might represent the cost of spam. That's less than six minutes of my salary per month. I probably don't spend six minutes per day dealing with spam - but I spend a *lot* more than six minutes per month between deleting the stuff and maintaining my filters and being pissed off at stupid spammers and having the volume of spam interfere with seeing my most important email quickly.
Of course, "Rule #1" is "Spammers Always Lie", so "India" may really be somewhere else. On the other hand, India and China have had heavily regulated telecom markets and histories of corrupt business/bureaucracy practice, so while it may be a bit difficult to do high-bandwidth highly-reliable communications there, you can still get bulletproofness is the hosting center's manager's brother is politically connected and pays off the right people.
With paper mail, that means that letters with money attached get attention, letters with large amounts of money attached get personal attention, letters without money attached get counted or weighed and may get read by the staff if the subject is interesting or timely. Mail that takes more work to send gets more attention - it's how you tell "grassroots" from "Astroturf". Handwritten mail that appears to be unique gets more attention than identically-worded mail from the National Rifle Association or Gun Banners Incorporated, and either one of them get more attention than pre-printed postcards with some special interest's message. Telegrams cost money, so also get more attention; faxes are cheap and easier to automate, so they get less.
Email requires much less effort to send, even if it's not spam, so there tends to be more of it. Therefore, politicians who do use email for their work keep separate addresses from the public side, which may only get autorespondered, or may get robo-sorted, or may sometimes get scanned for Subject: lines by staff, but rarely gets read by the politician.
It's not uncommon in the US for people to filter out whitehouse.gov addresses from mailing lists, just to prevent annoying someone who has a staff that goes psycho about perceived threats, real or not. Some spammers filter out all of .gov, others don't.
You get extra points if some fraction of the bogus addresses you feed harvester programs let you trace the spammer's sources, e.g. feeding addresses like 001002003004@mydomain.com to a web request from 1.2.3.4.
Besides, anybody who gives spammers bogus addresses is doing a public service :-)
Normally, you wouldn't expect a product like this to be very good, and you'd expect it to have lots of bad addresses, as well as mostly containing addresses of people who don't want to receive spam. But in this case, having a high fraction of actual duplicate addresses seems to be the kind of bogusness that some purchaser could take to court, claiming fraud, because the product claims to have 10 million addresses and only has 6 million plus repeats, and because the seller is known and identifiable, as opposed to some random entity on the net.
Fluoridating water is a terribly stupid drug delivery method - it's extremely variable in the dosage it delivers, and doesn't adjust its random dosage based on different individuals' needs - children growing new teeth need it more than old people who have to worry about osteoporosis. If you need fluorides, you can either use toothpaste to deliver it to the outside of your teeth, where it's useful, or take it in pills which are also cheap.
Fluoridation is a heavily propaganda-based business, and we've got politicians here in California like Jackie Speier who insist that every town water system MUST MUST MUST force its users to take this drug whether they want it or not, though of course she's adamantly opposed to letting us take many of the drugs we do want to take. That's not to say that anti-fluoridation isn't _also_ heavily propaganda-based, just because it's a Commie Plot against Our Precious Bodily Fluids. But it's basically bad science and bad medicine.