This guy is doing the Cliff's Notes versions of great recent science fiction short stories. Go read the stories instead- same extrapolations, but also with the injections of SensaWunda that good fiction gives us. With science fiction, these sorts of ideas are just the throwaway background decorations- he's just added a date.
Would you feel good about having to wear a nametag anytime you're in public? How about one that is only machine readable, but all police have that machine? With these cameras you've lost a major form of privacy- the privacy of remaining silent in public.
Unless I'm in a small town (see the essay below), I can expect to go about in public all day without telling anyone who I am, where I'm going, or what I'm doing. I can avoid people or places where I'm known. Others only get a snapshot of my life, with no personally identifiable information and only some quickly fading memories of my appearance and actions.
With these cameras I'm now wearing the equivalent of a machine readable nametag- with a little work they'll know who I am and everything I've been doing ("little work" averaged over the next 15 years: right now it's hard to immediately link face scans to names, in 5-10 years it'll be trivial. Darn You, Moore's Law! (And with cheap storage what will keep them from retroactively datamining what they've been storing for years? It may already be too late, and 'P-Day' has already arrived- a day where most camera info is stored, not deleted, so that when the technology catches up they'll be able to follow you around from that day onward. Concept heard from Brad Templeon) That is a significant change in the amount of privacy I have in public.
"People often ask why a loss of privacy -- as would come from increased surveillance, TV cameras on all the street corners and a national ID card -- is a restriction on freedom.
"Some wonder it because they have fallen for the old fallacy that if you are innocent, you have nothing to hide. Some wonder it because there is already a lot of monitoring in society, particularly in our credit card transactions, and the walls have not come tumbling down.
"Some welcome it, feeling that the extra surveillance will cut down on crime, and provide some increased level of safety or imagined safety.
"But the truth is that invasions of privacy invade our freedoms quite directly. This is true even if the surveillance isn't abused by the watchers, even though history shows that it always is.
"When we feel watched, we feel less free. We censor ourselves and our actions. Sometimes in little ways, sometimes in big ones.
"We all know this. We all know the exhilarating freedom we felt when we first left home, out from under the watchful eye of our parents. Alone, unwatched, we could finally be ourselves, or even be new selves. Some people experience this even when they move to a new town. Some feel themselves reducing to their old, censored self during Thanksgiving dinner.
"Yet the mainstream will never fear monitoring that much, just as it is more comfortable with censorship. What civil rights protect is not the majority, but the fringe. The fringe is usually feared by the majority, and most subject to its oppression.
essay continues...
150,000% penalty = too risky to fight
on
A Look Inside the BSA
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· Score: 3, Insightful
With penalties this high no one except the largest companies can fight it- and that's wrong. You'll fight a traffic ticket because you can afford to lose. What if the original ticket was $100,000, with a "negotiated" fine of $1,000? This is extortion, not a negotiation- you'll accept whatever the court says because you cannot risk losing. Not to mention if *you* had to show that you didn't speed, even a little bit, and lack of evidence = proof of guilt. Extraordinary fines should require extraordinary proof, but instead the BSA has you do all the work, and even if you are entirely innocent you can still get hit.
Or, are the BSA members willing to accept the same rules for their own activities? Would they accept a Software Consulting Association that can send audit letters out checking for late payments to consultants? If you've paid a consultant more than 30 days late, you get fined $200k. Or an Hourly Workers Association- you have to prove you've never underpaid hourly workers, or its $50k. How about a Pricing Gun Mistake Association- if the grocery store misprices an item, you get $600. Not double the difference, or 10x, but 1,000x for each instance.
No, they wouldn't, because the rules that the BSA use wouldn't work if applied to all of society. Unless a mistake can cause extraordinary harm, you don't usually get to treat mistakes like a felony! What makes the BSA so special? Earlier people wrote about OSHA- at least that affects life and health. We tend to allow bigger fines for that. But is software piracy that much worse than discharging toxic substances into waterways (max fine $125,000)? Misbranding a drug in interstate commerce (max fine $100,000)? Violating the Sherman Antitrust Act (the fine listed in Section 3571 (d) is "not more than the greater of twice the gross gain or twice the gross loss" caused by the conduct...)?
In this Slashdot / Salon / LATimes coverage we saw Microsoft / BSA vs the LA School District, where "hundreds" of unlicensed copies were found. the threat was $150,000 fine for each copy of a $100 per license product. ($100 at best. 1/3 was MSDOS, and schools get very good rates). They "negotiate" down to a $300,000 total fine, and the school district probably felt very grateful for this kindness of the BSA.
This is a 150,000% fine negotiated down to a 1,000% fine. (or 1,500x down to 10x). How does the BSA get to levy fines so out of proportion to actual damages? Yes, illegal copies are a crime (as is speeding), but the LAUSD wasn't running a mass piracy operation. Assuming that "hundreds" = 500 copies found, then the LAUSD had found roughly 1 copy per school, or 1 copy per 120 employees. The BSA got to treat the LAUSD as if it had found widespread felonious behavior rather than a few years worth of a few people deliberately or mistakenly making copies. No proof of bad intentions needed.
After a recent overseas trip I tried to use my passport (not yet put away) as my primary ID. I found that stores had database hissy fits when I tried to return items- bought on a credit card before the trip- and they wanted an ID. They don't have fields for anything except a driver's licence. Two stores couldn't recredit my card, all they could do was offer the amount on a store gift card. Another store required two managers to sign off on accepting the passport.
I fell sorry for anyone who actually needs to avoid using their driver's licence as an ID. Who might need this?
victims of ID theft where the DL # is tied to fraud (you don't just have to clear it up with the big 3 credit agencies- stores will maintain their own databases of bad accounts, licences, etc and it can be impossible to clean them up (one person I know ended up getting a new licence number because of this).)
people worried about stalkers who don't want to spread their DL info to multiple store databases
this is why Canter'nSiegel should be a curse word
on
How Google Saved USENET
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· Score: 4, Funny
I argue that there isn't a better way to do discussions:
Usenet is blazingly fast: text-only has that advantage. Works well for a 14.4 and a T1- good for more towns, not just the DSL'ed ones.
simultaneously local and international
It isn't dependent on one company's bandwidth or financial health.
less susceptible to censorship
a group doesn't have to be online at the same time (unlike chat), and threads can contain many layers of discussions without getting confusing (unlike mailing lists). The discussions can be complex, with room for step-by-step instructions or line-by-line critiques. There is time to stop and think about answers, and the discussion threads persist.
Looking at the history, the first big Usenet spams came at exactly the wrong time- and it badly twisted the subsequent development of the Web.
Spam hurt Usenet by ruining it as a tourist destination right as mass tourism to the Web began. Long-time Usenet users couldn't recommend it to new Internet users ( "Really its a great place, just ignore the trash and the noise and don't give your name because you'll get a zillion ugly mails afterward" doesn't work as tourist advice). And for existing users, reading Usenet meant wading through muck, and then with address harvesting starting, a muck filled mailbox. Between this and the constant interruption of irrelevant ads, people were driven out, the extra traffic made Usenet a burden to ISPs, old users went elsewhere, new users never came. While the rest of the web exploded, Usenet started its long fade.
Arguing alternate history here, but if mass Spam had hit much earlier or later, the damage wouldn't have been as bad, both to Usenet or to the Web overall. Had it been much earlier, perhaps the cancelbots and other technology responses to spam would've been well developed by the time the mass tourism started. "let's ignore the problem and go somewhere else" isn't a solution when there is no 'else' to go to. Had it been much later, higher adoption rates for Usenet (as a % of all Web demand) would mean companies would need to take the Usenet model into account: people might've expected/demanded better spam solutions, more cross-website communications, and less walled-gardens. People would've been less likely to accept 'the only protection you'll get is to stop posting and come to our walled-garden web discussion group' as a solution. Ditto with the loss of shell accounts and open relays.
If you go the IC route, make sure you can show that you actually are an IC not an employee. The IRS has been auditing more tiny businesses recently (in San Jose, for example, they've tripled the number of agents dedicated to this), and it can get ugly if they think you/your "employer" misclassified your status. And employers' motivations for calling you an ICc aren't always pure.
There is a standard 20 question list, and you'll have to prove that you are classified correctly. Important questions include:
"...For the following questions, a "yes" answer means the worker is an employee.
1. Does the principal provide instructions to the worker about when, where, and how he or she is to perform the work?...
7. Does the principal set the work hours and schedule?
8. Does the worker devote substantially full time to the business of the principal?..."
"For the following questions, a "yes" answer means the worker is an independent contractor...
...19. Does the worker provide services for more than one firm at a time?
20. Does the worker make his or her services available to the general public? "
The EFF is coming out against non-spammers getting the spammer treatment. The EFF has to hold this position to be consistent with earlier cases like...
1. Not forcing adults to read filtered content because children could read it, or
2. Not having entire email servers seized because one recipient is under investigation.
This doesn't mean that the EFF wants to stop investigations or force children to see porn, but that it is sensitive to certain types of collateral damage, even for the best of reasons.
The EFF person who posted earlier states that Spam is Evil for all the reasons discussed in this thread. He also wrote in his collection of essays on spam that being against a solution can get one labeled as pro-spam. So the EFF had to be quite aware that their position would them money / supporters, but they did it anyways. Willingness to anger supporters on one case is a good sign, because it means not weakening your principles for popularity. These are the same principles that make the EFF fight for 2600 , and Felten, and other DVD cases , and many other cases on such tiny topics as anonymity, satire, whether hacking=terrorism, encryption, reverse engineering... some of which will need to go to the Supreme Court, costing $$$. I'd rather have them dedicated to principles and sometimes make me angry than see them go for keeping everyone happy. (and I'm sure they didn't like losing Adobe's money while they support Sklyarov. )
Candid Cameras: new art forms and dangers
on
Ubiquitous Surveillance
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· Score: 2, Informative
I agree with Brad Templeton's email essay on why this type of surveillance is dangerous:
"...Mr. Barrett is not alone in wondering why some people are so concerned about their privacy. While many are aware of the tremendous prices that some have paid in oppressive (and even non-oppresive) states due to lack of privacy and surveilance, most people pragmatically feel that these oppressive regimes are either in the past, or not an issue for those in the free world, not when compared to safety from crime.
"There is a great hidden cost to surveilance, however, and it is a cost paid by everyone. When we feel we are being watched we, feel less free. We censor ourselves, and refrain from otherwise perfectly legal activities, when we feel that our activities might be being watched, or worse, recorded either for the government or for the general public, or worst of all, our mothers.
"I include our mothers because I expect all of us understand the freedom one feels away from even our own families. Not that we're doing anything wrong. Just that when we're watched we want to meet other's expectations.
"In other words, we're all a bit shy.
"Cameras everywhere make us feel our public lives are being documented. We've never minded the random strangers who might see us on the urban street. We do mind the idea that goverments and companies and others might be making systematic recordings. When we are watched we are not free to be ourselves.
"That doesn't shut down what everybody approves of, but it does chill the counterculture, and those ready to explore. These explorers are vital to a healthy society.
"Oddly, this happens even if the cameras aren't on, or if what they see is only available to "trusted" officials.
barratry
n. creating legal business by stirring up disputes and quarrels, generally for the benefit of the lawyer who sees fees in the matter. Barratry is illegal in all states and subject to criminal punishment and/or discipline by the state bar, but there must be a showing that the resulting lawsuit was totally groundless. There is a lot of border-line barratry in which attorneys, in the name of being tough or protecting the client, fail to seek avenues for settlement of disputes or will not tell the client he/she has no legitimate claim.
Salon / LATimes / Slashdot covered Microsoft's use of the BSA against schools. With the Los Angeles Unified School District, where "hundreds" of unlicensed copies were found, the BSA starts with the threat of a $150,000 fine for each copy of a $100 per license product. ($100 at best. 1/3 of the software found was MSDOS- in 1996 what would that be worth- and schools get those up to 90% discounts, so its unlikely any software would've cost the district more than $100). They "negotiate" down to a $300,000 total fine, and the school district probably felt very grateful for this kindness of the BSA.
This is a 150,000% fine negotiated down to a 1,000% fine. (or 1,500x down to 10x) How does the BSA get to levy fines so out of proportion to actual damages? Is software piracy that much worse than discharging toxic substances into waterways (max fine $125,000)? Misbranding a drug in interstate commerce (max fine $100,000)? Violating the Sherman Antitrust Act (the fine listed in Section 3571 (d) is "not more than the greater of twice the gross gain or twice the gross loss" caused by the conduct...)?
Assuming that "hundreds" = 500 copies found, then the LAUSD had found roughly 1 copy per school, or 1 copy per 120 employees ( it has 60k employees total). The BSA got to treat the LAUSD as if it had found widespread felonious behavior rather than a few years worth of a few people deliberately or mistakenly making copies. That is too much power for one relatively small group (sure, $3 billion sounds like a lot, but per capita that's only $30/ working adult). Extraordinary fines should require extraordinary proof, but instead the BSA has you do all the work, and unless you are completely clean, you're faced with that 1,000x fine.
Put another way: if local traffic courts had $100,000 tickets for speeding, you'd feel grateful if the court "reduced" the fine to $666. But should the original ticket be so high? Most people would have to accept whatever the court says, because the original penalty makes it almost impossible to fight- you'll fight a ticket if you can accept the possibility of failure- with the original penalty so high, that risk cannot be taken. Not to mention if *you* had to show that you didn't speed, even a little bit, and lack of evidence = proof of guilt.
The BSA's power fails the Categorical Imperative test (i.e. only set rules for yourself that you'd be willing to accept as rules for everyone). Imagine if every association had the BSA's power. Failure to pay overtime can be worth hundreds to an employee. So lets have unions get the power to force self-audits for overtime, with $400k fines per violation. Or not paying a consultant on time... I think $200k is an appropriate fine, and half should go to that consultant, of course.
Yes, it might be a stalling tactic, but it also might be that Adobe is backed into a corner and the EFF can help them reason their way out of it. If Adobe can find an out Dmitri will get home sooner, and his getting home sooner won't affect the 3 DCMA cases already ongoing. Dmitri's arrest now shows how bad the DCMA really is, but his staying in jail won't add to the effect: Corley/2600 or Felten's cases are far more likely to reach the Supreme Court first.
The EFF is obviously willing to fight hard and long on cases (Bernstein is what, 7 years so far?), and they really don't like the DCMA (Felten is an offensive strike, for example), so if they're trying to negotiate early on maybe there's a reason for it. Have someone go to them and find out why- perhaps it is something they can't say on the record.
I was just at their open house two weeks ago, and have known some EFF people for years: the EFF is filled with a mix of people, including many non-lawyers, now and in the past. Still, they have to have lawyers, and the lawyers will be visible, because it takes lawyers to prepare and argue cases before courts, which is how, ultimately, the DCMA (and CDA, and etc,etc.) have been or will be defeated.
With LA, the BSA starts with the threat of a $150,000 fine for each copy of a $100 per licence product. (and $100 is on the high side: 1. looks like 1/3 of the software was MSDOS- what would that be worth in 1996? 2. That 90% education discount) They "negotiate" down to a $300,000 total fine, and the school district probably felt very grateful for this kindness of the BSA.
This is a 150,000% fine negotiated down to a 1,000% fine. (or 1,500x down to 10x) How does the BSA get to levy fines so out of proportion to actual damages? Put another way: if local traffic courts had $100,000 tickets for speeding, you'd feel grateful if the court "reduced" the fine to $666. But should the original ticket be so high?
Is software piracy that much worse than discharging toxic substances into waterways (max fine $125,000)? Misbranding a drug in interstate commerce (max fine $100,000)? Violating the Sherman Antitrust Act (the fine listed in Section 3571 (d) is "not more than the greater of twice the gross gain or twice the gross loss" caused by the conduct...)?
Yes, illegal copies are a crime (as is speeding), but the LAUSD wasn't running a mass piracy operation. Assuming that "hundreds" = 500 copies found, then the LAUSD had found roughly 1 copy per school, or 1 copy per 120 employees ( it has 60k employees total). The BSA got to treat the LAUSD as if it had found widespread felonious behavior rather than a few years worth of a few people deliberately or mistakenly making copies. That is too much power for one relatively small group.
Or perhaps we should give every association the same level of power. We should, for example, have a Software Consulting Association that can send audit letters out checking for late payments to consultants. If you've paid a consultant more than 30 days late, you get fined $300k...
So there isn't a difference between police being able to look at you in public and for them to be able to identify you? I can see it now...
Welcome to Hermano Grande, FL...
Tourism 2002: While here, the police request you carry an identifying device. Only the police and other crimefighters can read it. You have a choice of RFID, contactless smartcard or barcode bracelet/anklet. Its For Safety!(tm) [Only required in Public Places. Bracelet free, others $25/day rental fee. Waterproof versions $15 extra. Do not store where signal could be degraded. 40 bit encryption extra. Cars, restaurants are public. Hotel rooms are public if they have balconies- check before removing device]
Tourism 2003: Welcome to our 'Your Vacation the way You Want It' services. We recommend tourist services that meet your needs. Does the meal you're about to order meets your Health Insurance's guidelines? Will that hotel hit you budget a little too hard? [A service of the Fraud Prevention division of the police. Remember, going over your credit limit or cholesterol limit costs you, your Health and Credit Maintenance Organization and all of us- that's why its a misdemeanor offense. Restaurant-permission overrides must be purchased in advance from your HACMO.]
Tourism 2004: Welcome to 'Location Based Tourism' services. A partnership of local merchants, your cellphone company, and the Tourist & Children Safety Division. It prevents 2Similar2Criminal(tm) people from approaching you AND offers you valuable discounts at nearby stores. Its fully private- the offers go to you alone! Merchants only have a credit & criminal rating profile and your first name! (Local residents only see your criminal rating.) 5% merchant discount if we fail to greet you by your first name! [Your Registered Wireless Device must be on at all times. No Shoes, No Shirt, No Sufficient Credit Rating, No Service. Children under 14 opt-out fee $15/day (Cannot be used by adults- sets credit rating to zero). In the rare event of a false positive 2S2C, the YesReallyI'mSafe RFID is $75/day + $75 for background check. It only takes 3 hours and we'll do it automatically for you before you leave the downtown precinct]
Tourism 2006: Hermano Grande, FL recommends the following for your vacation: Goshen "Peanut Capital of the World" Alabama, Belzoni "Catfish Capital of the World" Mississippi. [if you think this is in error, are just passing through, or if you come to Hermano Grande for business, YesReallyI'mSolvent RFIDs available for $100/day. Please have 2+ local contacts email their ProofofLocalContact 1 week in advance. Special rates available for family visits. Local resident must guarantee MinimumDailyTouri$m with credit card]
With open source programming one is saying "Here is how I'd build a machine that builds a bridge. First we're going to define types of wood..." It's a conversation- open source means "What do you think?" is the last line of each program. Not much different than an Ayn Rand 'each person talks for 40 pages at a time' conversation.
Spam ruined a once-vibrant free speech space and badly twisted the subsequent development of the Web. Telemarketers and junk mail, however irritating, haven't done this.
Usenet was (is) the largest and most diverse set of discussion groups- thousands of topics, a world-wide user base, sent by an decently-efficient non-centralized protocol. While ads weren't tolerated (for good reasons, history shows), business people functioning as experts and advisers had been welcomed.
And then the first spammer advertisers started on Usenet. It was like a community center housed in a high-school; spammers discovered the school-wide PA system. The first few interruptions could be ignored, but the constant broadcast of irrelevant ads drove people out, and the extra traffic made Usenet a burden to ISPs. Reading Usenet meant wading through muck. And when address harvesting started, posting meant a spam filled mailbox. Long-time Usenet users couldn't recommend it to new Internet users ( "Really its a great place, just ignore the trash and the noise and don't give your name because you'll get a zillion ugly mails afterward" doesn't work as tourist advice). New users went elsewhere, and while the rest of the web exploded, Usenet started its long fade.
What's the damage? Huge:
Less free speech- If your public speech today meant you'd get 50 telemarketing calls tomorrow, you'd think twice before talking. Spam punished free speech on Usenet, and its a much quieter place than it could've been.
More walled gardens, less open spaces- Had Usenet been much larger, more companies would've taken the Usenet model into account and would've expected cross-website communications.
Loss / reduction of the open-relay, "route-around censorship," decentralized model of the Internet (only partially restored in new P2P tech). Alternate history here, but higher Usenet demand might've led to earlier and better anti-spam technologies. People would've been less likely to accept 'the only protection you'll get is to stop posting and come to our walled-garden discussion group' as a solution. Ditto with the loss of shell accounts and open relays.
Slowing development of a better technology- less demand= less development. See the Feb 2000 Slashdot discussion for more. Why is Usenet better? Compared to most websites Usenet is blazingly fast: text-only has that advantage (excluding binary groups / files, and even there you choose to download them). Works well for a 14.4 and a T1- good for more towns, not just the DSL'ed ones. It isn't dependent on one company's bandwidth or financial health. People who ask and answer questions don't have to be online at the same time (unlike chat), and threads can contain many layers of discussions without getting confusing (unlike mailing lists). The discussions can be complex, with room for step-by-step instructions or line-by-line critiques. There is time to stop and think about answers, and the discussion threads persist.
Increased use of less-effective technologies- chat, mailing lists and website based discussions used when Usenet would be a better forum (see above for why).
Focus on ads as revenue model rather than sponsorships or other. Again alternate history, but the Usenet model did include commercial speech as expert advice. . A history of solid, on-topic contributions gave a good reputation to the business person and to the business name listed in their signature. This could've developed into a model where people would reward highly-ranked advice by giving it wider coverage (an Ender's Game model of sorts). This coverage would be a form of advertising, but more targeted (gardening advice in rec.gardens...), less intrusive, and far more private.
and get rid of this one-sided law. So far the DCMA backers are winning- especially the war of words. How many articles take the DCMA as given and talk about fair use as '...alleged "fair use" rights...' as if fair use was invented last year? (If you see writing that that, send them a rebuttal with links to well-written legal arguments. Without the links they won't believe you, I've found.)
The fight is expensive and ultimately will be won or lost in court. From what I know talking to people in the EFF, each court level can take hundreds of thousands of $$, or more, in legal expenses. This would be above and beyond the normal expenses of running a non-profit.
If you can, donate stock- the IRS offers matching grants on donations of appreciated stock. (in some sense: you get to deduct the appreciated value without capital gains, so its worth more than if you sold stock and donated money.)
Another neat bit of history here: in the tcp-ip digest #12 we get the birth of modern email and web address formats...
From: decvax!watmath!bstempleton at Berkeley
Subject: standard net address
... It seems to me that userid@site.forwarder is much more sensible than userid.site@forwarder. (this is a simple change that had better not take more than 1 minute to implement in any already written code - or else the code was badly done)
at sign is found rarely in userids, and almost never on the arpanet, if at all. Dot is found commonly. It seems to make sense to say, you want to join our net, here is a format for your site name, instead of "here is a format for your userid names"
Aside from all that userid@location is much more readable than userid.location if you ask me...
If the goal is to win the War of the Inbox, we can't lump all types of "RANCID" [Really ANnoying Classes of Inbox Data] "BAD MEATS" [Bothersome Ads, Datamining, Mass Email And Telecommunications Spam] together as "Spam." We've got to conceptually separate them out into well-defined categories, as fighting the many kinds of BAD MEATS requires a variety of weapons and strategies. Treat them all like spam and we'll build a lovely Maginot Line of anti-Spam measures.
Spam: Bulk email from a stranger. Solved mostly with technology and a little bit by laws. By emphasizing method (bulk), not content, we can use technology to block spam, and courts are likely to uphold our rights to do so. Blocks or bans on content (1), non-bulk email (2), or email from a pre-existing business relationship (3) are likely to fail and could make the problem much worse.
Non-bulk email, or email from entities who aren't strangers: not spam, however annoying. Generally solved with boycotts, public ridicule, and questions about ethics "Would you accept 'technically I didn't lie' from an employee? Then why should we the public accept it?" (As for 'friendly' email, replies of "By forwarding this email to me you give me permission to think you're an idiot. There is no virus. Timmy hates postcards. You can't send angelic blessings as an attachment, and if I wanted that joke I'd go to rec.humor.funny-the-1st-time-20-repetitions-ago.")
Laws: Even on spam not a good idea- ineffective at best. Dishonest spam & spammers (forged headers, etc.) don't care about existing US laws- they break laws on contracts ('no spamming' ISP contracts), theft (stolen credit cards to pay for accounts), identity fraud, spam (California requires "ADV," in the subject line...), and more already. And domestic laws can't stop a fundamentally international problem. Even worse, if US laws only ban dishonest spam then honest (think DMA) spam is legitimized. And banning commercial speech won't make it because of the Constitution, which protects commercial speech much more than some people might think. Thus, bad idea to focus on...
(1) Content: Political or religious messages can still be spam, and any speech, commercial or not, has to be really, really bad before the Supreme Court will even start to think about unprotecting it. You'd have to prove Spam-speech is equivalent to "'fire!' in a crowded theater" or "riot right now" speech. Unlikely. Instead, focus on...
(2) "Bulk" because bulk is what causes damages. One bounced email: no problem. 100,000: big problem. Courts are likely to find that individually written emails, however annoying, aren't going to cause the damages of bulk - people just can't write that many in a day. Courts won't like punishing a person who wrote one letter ("Hi, I saw an article about you, you might be interested in my software..." is an unsolicited commercial email. Laws that ban it won't last very long.). "Bulk" makes a better brightline. If a spammer is caught breaking an ISP's contract, and claims the emails weren't bulk, easy perjury... Judge: "4 emails with boilerplate text after the first sentence. This isn't bulk?" Exceptionally stupid Spammer: "No." And also focus on
(3) "From a stranger" for two reasons. One- its easier to prove that bulk email from strangers is inherently a burden. Email from all 200 businesses you do know: irritating but not impossible to deal with, maybe not worth curbing speech. Email from some of the 29.9998 million businesses you don't know (opt-outable or not): bad. Two- if you voluntarily gave your email address out, courts might rule that caveat emptor trumps "punish them because their email annoys me."
It gets worse... the machines are programmed to hang up if a human "Hello, this is J.D... Hello? Hello?" answers. If you find the message on your machine and call to complain, the business can claim that a real live sales person left it- and you can't easily prove them wrong. Quite the elegant solution in an evil sort of way for the 'problem' that these prerecorded messages are illegal in the U.S., with a penalty of $500 or more per use given in the law.
(Years ago sales machines would call and not let go of the line even after a hang up. A few people were hurt- couldn't call out to 911/emergency lines- and Congress banned this type of prerecorded message except under very limited circumstances (with consent or for emergencies, etc). That the spamming machine doesn't play to a live person doesn't make it legal- your a.m. cannot give consent, so messages to it are always illegal.)
I had my chance to speak up, but I wasn't feeling very magnanimous that day:)
And anyways, what kind of connotations do they want with their name? Yeah, sure, the gekkonidae are fast, agile, and can climb any obstacle, but for reptiles they're really, really noisy. Much better the connotations of family Chamaleonidae, known for fragility in captivity, imitation, 'conspicuous ornamentation', and... well...
...They're good at catching bugs... and doesn't "Elly" or "Elea" or "Leonid" sound much better? (or Chum or Susy or Rutabaga or really just about anything else?) Where is SuSE's sense of esthetics? Come one, it sounds like "eek!" Why would anyone want something that sounds like...oh. never mind.
The media will need examples of prior art from reputable sources... In his ejournal Dan Gillmor quotes from two letters, each giving at least one example of pre-1997 affiliate programs. These include:
PC Flowers & Gifts (Oct. 1994)
AutoWeb (1995)
"A good number of programs--including CDNow..." (pre June 1997)
EdSoft and more (1995)
(The first three came from Daniel Gray, who looks like an expert on affiliate programs. The last came from Cuesta Technologies, which has been building affiliate programs for their clients since 1995. The letters are on Feb 28 and Feb 26 of the ejournal.)
A quick Altavista search for 95-96 all-online affiliate programs didn't turn up too much, although many pages were 404'd. (Alexa might have archived them, but Alexa is now owned by you know who...hmmm, good idea buying up the major source of archived web page prior art) Here are a couple of them, one for an electronics manufacturer, the other a directory and ads service page:
"...Keystone Electronics is pleased to announce that we have expanded our distributor referral program to include opportunities generated by our website (www.keyelco.com). Internet sales referrals will now be forwarded via e-mail to distributors who have established website hyperlinks with Keystone's website."
"...We also have a referral program so you can make easy 15% commissions on any YellowNET purchase made by someone referred from your site. You can purchase any of our services individually or as a package. "
In bulk it's $0.60/lb, it has just about everything (except vitamin C; other more expensive brands do have C), and evidently (I've never tried it) tastes like a way-too-nutritious biscuit/cracker.
A few more hints for taking care of your primates. Be sure it's the old-world monkey formula and suppliment it with fresh fruit and other treats- not too many treats, or they won't want to eat the chow. Remember that if there is little or no sunlight exposure, give extra vitamin D.
Aside from the problem of states regulating an inherently international problem, this bill fails in several key areas: Bulk is the issue, not content. Focusing on "commercial" email ignores religious, political, or nonprofit (RPN) bulk email. What about spam for web pages with political content that include a link to a bumper-sticker store. Illegal? Without the link, somehow less annoying?
Discriminating against "commercial" speech will be unconstitutional. Spam about Zeus: OK. Spam for a book about Zeus: illegal? Spam is nasty horrible stuff, but can you persuade the Supreme Court that spam is yelling "fire" in a theater? Inciting imminent riots? Obscene with no artistic, scientific, or political value? That's the hurdle. Better to focus on feasible solutions. However...
Better tech is the only realistic solution to spam, but this type of bill could hypothetically make some anti-spam technology less effective or even illegal. Already there are some emerging solutions to catch bulk email as bulk mail (compared to "mail from a bad address" blocking or "mail with the wrong words" filtering) and catch it at the ISP level. What happens if a RPN organization complains that 1. their spam is legal and 2. their spam has more protection than commercial speech? If content is what matters, does RPN spam, which is somehow less evil than comm. spam, get more protection against ISP level filtering?
This law only gets the really stupid and naive spammers, who generally don't spam very much and more than once. They pay someone to run their ad (with a real phone # and address); they get a thousand nasty calls; they give up and go back to their classified ads or whatever they were doing before. The person they hired to do the computer work is long gone. Sure, ignorance & no excuse and all that, but you've only stopped 0.01 percent of the spam. The satisfaction of watching them pay will last about as long as it takes you to get back to your inbox.
Real spammers hide their tracks, hijack resources, change mail-drops frequently, use offshore credit card processing, and if they're really into it move everything out of the country. And if they're in the U.S., they're probably already violating the law. Why would they care about new laws? Laws already violated include:
Anti-theft (they use stolen credit cards to pay for their one-time-use ISP accounts).
Contract law (they probably signed and/or agreed online to not spam at that ISP).
Identity fraud (unauthorized use of a domain name, damage to reputation. See the flowers.com case).
Anti-theft again (resources stolen from the hijacked domain name. flowers.com again).
Anti-spam law (California has an ADV: law already. That's more than 1/8th of U.S. email addresses. Has anyone seen more "ADV:"'s? If spammers cared, more would be used).
And as others have written, this topic isn't a state issue, as state lines are essentially invisible to the internet. State standards for internet tech would be as useful as state standards for TV and radio signals, cell phones or electrical equipment.
We really, really don't want legislators fiddling with internet standards right now, no more than I'd want my (wonderful person but can't program a VCR) grandmother to insist on "helping" me in fixing the innards of my computer. Good intentions don't cause competence, and with legislators good intentions can be bought with a few donations and a sob story. Let them think that they helped with spam, and next thing you know they'll want to help with other things. library filters. ipv6. dsl vs cable modems. things they don't understand but by gosh a new law should fix everything. Call them in if the technology fails. It hasn't.
The Sky Road and Cassini are in alternative universes. Without spoilers: the dust jacket summary of Sky Road gives a strong hint. If you've read both, some discussions on rec.art.sf.written might cover the divergence.
MacLeod posts on Usenet, including rasw, and writes about his own beliefs. I found them interesting if for no other reason than few writers are able to have multiple economic systems in a book without making one evil. That he can write without the good/evil split is a sign of strong talent.
Slashdot Mirror
with authors like
Unless I'm in a small town (see the essay below), I can expect to go about in public all day without telling anyone who I am, where I'm going, or what I'm doing. I can avoid people or places where I'm known. Others only get a snapshot of my life, with no personally identifiable information and only some quickly fading memories of my appearance and actions.
With these cameras I'm now wearing the equivalent of a machine readable nametag- with a little work they'll know who I am and everything I've been doing ("little work" averaged over the next 15 years: right now it's hard to immediately link face scans to names, in 5-10 years it'll be trivial. Darn You, Moore's Law! (And with cheap storage what will keep them from retroactively datamining what they've been storing for years? It may already be too late, and 'P-Day' has already arrived- a day where most camera info is stored, not deleted, so that when the technology catches up they'll be able to follow you around from that day onward. Concept heard from Brad Templeon) That is a significant change in the amount of privacy I have in public.
Brad has a great essay "A Watched Populace Never Boils" on why this type of surveillance is dangerous:
"People often ask why a loss of privacy -- as would come from increased surveillance, TV cameras on all the street corners and a national ID card -- is a restriction on freedom.
"Some wonder it because they have fallen for the old fallacy that if you are innocent, you have nothing to hide. Some wonder it because there is already a lot of monitoring in society, particularly in our credit card transactions, and the walls have not come tumbling down.
"Some welcome it, feeling that the extra surveillance will cut down on crime, and provide some increased level of safety or imagined safety.
"But the truth is that invasions of privacy invade our freedoms quite directly. This is true even if the surveillance isn't abused by the watchers, even though history shows that it always is.
"When we feel watched, we feel less free. We censor ourselves and our actions. Sometimes in little ways, sometimes in big ones.
"We all know this. We all know the exhilarating freedom we felt when we first left home, out from under the watchful eye of our parents. Alone, unwatched, we could finally be ourselves, or even be new selves. Some people experience this even when they move to a new town. Some feel themselves reducing to their old, censored self during Thanksgiving dinner.
"Yet the mainstream will never fear monitoring that much, just as it is more comfortable with censorship. What civil rights protect is not the majority, but the fringe. The fringe is usually feared by the majority, and most subject to its oppression.
essay continues...
Or, are the BSA members willing to accept the same rules for their own activities? Would they accept a Software Consulting Association that can send audit letters out checking for late payments to consultants? If you've paid a consultant more than 30 days late, you get fined $200k. Or an Hourly Workers Association- you have to prove you've never underpaid hourly workers, or its $50k. How about a Pricing Gun Mistake Association- if the grocery store misprices an item, you get $600. Not double the difference, or 10x, but 1,000x for each instance.
No, they wouldn't, because the rules that the BSA use wouldn't work if applied to all of society. Unless a mistake can cause extraordinary harm, you don't usually get to treat mistakes like a felony! What makes the BSA so special? Earlier people wrote about OSHA- at least that affects life and health. We tend to allow bigger fines for that. But is software piracy that much worse than discharging toxic substances into waterways (max fine $125,000)? Misbranding a drug in interstate commerce (max fine $100,000)? Violating the Sherman Antitrust Act (the fine listed in Section 3571 (d) is "not more than the greater of twice the gross gain or twice the gross loss" caused by the conduct...)?
In this Slashdot / Salon / LATimes coverage we saw Microsoft / BSA vs the LA School District, where "hundreds" of unlicensed copies were found. the threat was $150,000 fine for each copy of a $100 per license product. ($100 at best. 1/3 was MSDOS, and schools get very good rates). They "negotiate" down to a $300,000 total fine, and the school district probably felt very grateful for this kindness of the BSA.
This is a 150,000% fine negotiated down to a 1,000% fine. (or 1,500x down to 10x). How does the BSA get to levy fines so out of proportion to actual damages? Yes, illegal copies are a crime (as is speeding), but the LAUSD wasn't running a mass piracy operation. Assuming that "hundreds" = 500 copies found, then the LAUSD had found roughly 1 copy per school, or 1 copy per 120 employees. The BSA got to treat the LAUSD as if it had found widespread felonious behavior rather than a few years worth of a few people deliberately or mistakenly making copies. No proof of bad intentions needed.
I fell sorry for anyone who actually needs to avoid using their driver's licence as an ID. Who might need this?
Looking at the history, the first big Usenet spams came at exactly the wrong time- and it badly twisted the subsequent development of the Web.
Spam hurt Usenet by ruining it as a tourist destination right as mass tourism to the Web began. Long-time Usenet users couldn't recommend it to new Internet users ( "Really its a great place, just ignore the trash and the noise and don't give your name because you'll get a zillion ugly mails afterward" doesn't work as tourist advice). And for existing users, reading Usenet meant wading through muck, and then with address harvesting starting, a muck filled mailbox. Between this and the constant interruption of irrelevant ads, people were driven out, the extra traffic made Usenet a burden to ISPs, old users went elsewhere, new users never came. While the rest of the web exploded, Usenet started its long fade.
Arguing alternate history here, but if mass Spam had hit much earlier or later, the damage wouldn't have been as bad, both to Usenet or to the Web overall. Had it been much earlier, perhaps the cancelbots and other technology responses to spam would've been well developed by the time the mass tourism started. "let's ignore the problem and go somewhere else" isn't a solution when there is no 'else' to go to. Had it been much later, higher adoption rates for Usenet (as a % of all Web demand) would mean companies would need to take the Usenet model into account: people might've expected/demanded better spam solutions, more cross-website communications, and less walled-gardens. People would've been less likely to accept 'the only protection you'll get is to stop posting and come to our walled-garden web discussion group' as a solution. Ditto with the loss of shell accounts and open relays.
There is a standard 20 question list, and you'll have to prove that you are classified correctly. Important questions include:
"...For the following questions, a "yes" answer means the worker is an employee.
- 1. Does the principal provide instructions to the worker about when, where, and how he or she is to perform the work?
... - 7. Does the principal set the work hours and schedule?
- 8. Does the worker devote substantially full time to the business of the principal?..."
"For the following questions, a "yes" answer means the worker is an independent contractor...1. Not forcing adults to read filtered content because children could read it, or
2. Not having entire email servers seized because one recipient is under investigation.
This doesn't mean that the EFF wants to stop investigations or force children to see porn, but that it is sensitive to certain types of collateral damage, even for the best of reasons.
The EFF person who posted earlier states that Spam is Evil for all the reasons discussed in this thread. He also wrote in his collection of essays on spam that being against a solution can get one labeled as pro-spam. So the EFF had to be quite aware that their position would them money / supporters, but they did it anyways. Willingness to anger supporters on one case is a good sign, because it means not weakening your principles for popularity. These are the same principles that make the EFF fight for 2600 , and Felten, and other DVD cases , and many other cases on such tiny topics as anonymity, satire, whether hacking=terrorism, encryption, reverse engineering... some of which will need to go to the Supreme Court, costing $$$. I'd rather have them dedicated to principles and sometimes make me angry than see them go for keeping everyone happy. (and I'm sure they didn't like losing Adobe's money while they support Sklyarov. )
I agree with Brad Templeton's email essay on why this type of surveillance is dangerous:
"...Mr. Barrett is not alone in wondering why some people are so concerned about their privacy. While many are aware of the tremendous prices that some have paid in oppressive (and even non-oppresive) states due to lack of privacy and surveilance, most people pragmatically feel that these oppressive regimes are either in the past, or not an issue for those in the free world, not when compared to safety from crime.
"There is a great hidden cost to surveilance, however, and it is a cost paid by everyone. When we feel we are being watched we, feel less free. We censor ourselves, and refrain from otherwise perfectly legal activities, when we feel that our activities might be being watched, or worse, recorded either for the government or for the general public, or worst of all, our mothers.
"I include our mothers because I expect all of us understand the freedom one feels away from even our own families. Not that we're doing anything wrong. Just that when we're watched we want to meet other's expectations.
"In other words, we're all a bit shy.
"Cameras everywhere make us feel our public lives are being documented. We've never minded the random strangers who might see us on the urban street. We do mind the idea that goverments and companies and others might be making systematic recordings. When we are watched we are not free to be ourselves.
"That doesn't shut down what everybody approves of, but it does chill the counterculture, and those ready to explore. These explorers are vital to a healthy society.
"Oddly, this happens even if the cameras aren't on, or if what they see is only available to "trusted" officials.
barratry
n. creating legal business by stirring up disputes and quarrels, generally for the benefit of the lawyer who sees fees in the matter. Barratry is illegal in all states and subject to criminal punishment and/or discipline by the state bar, but there must be a showing that the resulting lawsuit was totally groundless. There is a lot of border-line barratry in which attorneys, in the name of being tough or protecting the client, fail to seek avenues for settlement of disputes or will not tell the client he/she has no legitimate claim.
This is a 150,000% fine negotiated down to a 1,000% fine. (or 1,500x down to 10x) How does the BSA get to levy fines so out of proportion to actual damages? Is software piracy that much worse than discharging toxic substances into waterways (max fine $125,000)? Misbranding a drug in interstate commerce (max fine $100,000)? Violating the Sherman Antitrust Act (the fine listed in Section 3571 (d) is "not more than the greater of twice the gross gain or twice the gross loss" caused by the conduct...)?
Assuming that "hundreds" = 500 copies found, then the LAUSD had found roughly 1 copy per school, or 1 copy per 120 employees ( it has 60k employees total). The BSA got to treat the LAUSD as if it had found widespread felonious behavior rather than a few years worth of a few people deliberately or mistakenly making copies. That is too much power for one relatively small group (sure, $3 billion sounds like a lot, but per capita that's only $30/ working adult). Extraordinary fines should require extraordinary proof, but instead the BSA has you do all the work, and unless you are completely clean, you're faced with that 1,000x fine.
Put another way: if local traffic courts had $100,000 tickets for speeding, you'd feel grateful if the court "reduced" the fine to $666. But should the original ticket be so high? Most people would have to accept whatever the court says, because the original penalty makes it almost impossible to fight- you'll fight a ticket if you can accept the possibility of failure- with the original penalty so high, that risk cannot be taken. Not to mention if *you* had to show that you didn't speed, even a little bit, and lack of evidence = proof of guilt.
The BSA's power fails the Categorical Imperative test (i.e. only set rules for yourself that you'd be willing to accept as rules for everyone). Imagine if every association had the BSA's power. Failure to pay overtime can be worth hundreds to an employee. So lets have unions get the power to force self-audits for overtime, with $400k fines per violation. Or not paying a consultant on time... I think $200k is an appropriate fine, and half should go to that consultant, of course.
The EFF is obviously willing to fight hard and long on cases (Bernstein is what, 7 years so far?), and they really don't like the DCMA (Felten is an offensive strike, for example), so if they're trying to negotiate early on maybe there's a reason for it. Have someone go to them and find out why- perhaps it is something they can't say on the record.
I was just at their open house two weeks ago, and have known some EFF people for years: the EFF is filled with a mix of people, including many non-lawyers, now and in the past. Still, they have to have lawyers, and the lawyers will be visible, because it takes lawyers to prepare and argue cases before courts, which is how, ultimately, the DCMA (and CDA, and etc,etc.) have been or will be defeated.
This is a 150,000% fine negotiated down to a 1,000% fine. (or 1,500x down to 10x) How does the BSA get to levy fines so out of proportion to actual damages? Put another way: if local traffic courts had $100,000 tickets for speeding, you'd feel grateful if the court "reduced" the fine to $666. But should the original ticket be so high?
Is software piracy that much worse than discharging toxic substances into waterways (max fine $125,000)? Misbranding a drug in interstate commerce (max fine $100,000)? Violating the Sherman Antitrust Act (the fine listed in Section 3571 (d) is "not more than the greater of twice the gross gain or twice the gross loss" caused by the conduct...)?
Yes, illegal copies are a crime (as is speeding), but the LAUSD wasn't running a mass piracy operation. Assuming that "hundreds" = 500 copies found, then the LAUSD had found roughly 1 copy per school, or 1 copy per 120 employees ( it has 60k employees total). The BSA got to treat the LAUSD as if it had found widespread felonious behavior rather than a few years worth of a few people deliberately or mistakenly making copies. That is too much power for one relatively small group.
Or perhaps we should give every association the same level of power. We should, for example, have a Software Consulting Association that can send audit letters out checking for late payments to consultants. If you've paid a consultant more than 30 days late, you get fined $300k...
Welcome to Hermano Grande, FL...
Tourism 2002: While here, the police request you carry an identifying device. Only the police and other crimefighters can read it. You have a choice of RFID, contactless smartcard or barcode bracelet /anklet. Its For Safety!(tm) [Only required in Public Places. Bracelet free, others $25/day rental fee. Waterproof versions $15 extra. Do not store where signal could be degraded. 40 bit encryption extra. Cars, restaurants are public. Hotel rooms are public if they have balconies- check before removing device]
Tourism 2003: Welcome to our 'Your Vacation the way You Want It' services. We recommend tourist services that meet your needs. Does the meal you're about to order meets your Health Insurance's guidelines? Will that hotel hit you budget a little too hard? [A service of the Fraud Prevention division of the police. Remember, going over your credit limit or cholesterol limit costs you, your Health and Credit Maintenance Organization and all of us- that's why its a misdemeanor offense. Restaurant-permission overrides must be purchased in advance from your HACMO.]
Tourism 2004: Welcome to 'Location Based Tourism' services. A partnership of local merchants, your cellphone company, and the Tourist & Children Safety Division. It prevents 2Similar2Criminal(tm) people from approaching you AND offers you valuable discounts at nearby stores. Its fully private- the offers go to you alone! Merchants only have a credit & criminal rating profile and your first name! (Local residents only see your criminal rating.) 5% merchant discount if we fail to greet you by your first name! [Your Registered Wireless Device must be on at all times. No Shoes, No Shirt, No Sufficient Credit Rating, No Service. Children under 14 opt-out fee $15/day (Cannot be used by adults- sets credit rating to zero). In the rare event of a false positive 2S2C, the YesReallyI'mSafe RFID is $75/day + $75 for background check. It only takes 3 hours and we'll do it automatically for you before you leave the downtown precinct]
Tourism 2006: Hermano Grande, FL recommends the following for your vacation: Goshen "Peanut Capital of the World" Alabama, Belzoni "Catfish Capital of the World" Mississippi. [if you think this is in error, are just passing through, or if you come to Hermano Grande for business, YesReallyI'mSolvent RFIDs available for $100/day. Please have 2+ local contacts email their ProofofLocalContact 1 week in advance. Special rates available for family visits. Local resident must guarantee MinimumDailyTouri$m with credit card]
With open source programming one is saying "Here is how I'd build a machine that builds a bridge. First we're going to define types of wood..." It's a conversation- open source means "What do you think?" is the last line of each program. Not much different than an Ayn Rand 'each person talks for 40 pages at a time' conversation.
Usenet was (is) the largest and most diverse set of discussion groups- thousands of topics, a world-wide user base, sent by an decently-efficient non-centralized protocol. While ads weren't tolerated (for good reasons, history shows), business people functioning as experts and advisers had been welcomed.
And then the first spammer advertisers started on Usenet. It was like a community center housed in a high-school; spammers discovered the school-wide PA system. The first few interruptions could be ignored, but the constant broadcast of irrelevant ads drove people out, and the extra traffic made Usenet a burden to ISPs. Reading Usenet meant wading through muck. And when address harvesting started, posting meant a spam filled mailbox. Long-time Usenet users couldn't recommend it to new Internet users ( "Really its a great place, just ignore the trash and the noise and don't give your name because you'll get a zillion ugly mails afterward" doesn't work as tourist advice). New users went elsewhere, and while the rest of the web exploded, Usenet started its long fade.
What's the damage? Huge:
Less free speech- If your public speech today meant you'd get 50 telemarketing calls tomorrow, you'd think twice before talking. Spam punished free speech on Usenet, and its a much quieter place than it could've been.
More walled gardens, less open spaces- Had Usenet been much larger, more companies would've taken the Usenet model into account and would've expected cross-website communications.
Loss / reduction of the open-relay, "route-around censorship," decentralized model of the Internet (only partially restored in new P2P tech). Alternate history here, but higher Usenet demand might've led to earlier and better anti-spam technologies. People would've been less likely to accept 'the only protection you'll get is to stop posting and come to our walled-garden discussion group' as a solution. Ditto with the loss of shell accounts and open relays.
Slowing development of a better technology- less demand= less development. See the Feb 2000 Slashdot discussion for more. Why is Usenet better? Compared to most websites Usenet is blazingly fast: text-only has that advantage (excluding binary groups / files, and even there you choose to download them). Works well for a 14.4 and a T1- good for more towns, not just the DSL'ed ones. It isn't dependent on one company's bandwidth or financial health. People who ask and answer questions don't have to be online at the same time (unlike chat), and threads can contain many layers of discussions without getting confusing (unlike mailing lists). The discussions can be complex, with room for step-by-step instructions or line-by-line critiques. There is time to stop and think about answers, and the discussion threads persist.
Increased use of less-effective technologies- chat, mailing lists and website based discussions used when Usenet would be a better forum (see above for why).
Focus on ads as revenue model rather than sponsorships or other. Again alternate history, but the Usenet model did include commercial speech as expert advice. . A history of solid, on-topic contributions gave a good reputation to the business person and to the business name listed in their signature. This could've developed into a model where people would reward highly-ranked advice by giving it wider coverage (an Ender's Game model of sorts). This coverage would be a form of advertising, but more targeted (gardening advice in rec.gardens...), less intrusive, and far more private.
The fight is expensive and ultimately will be won or lost in court. From what I know talking to people in the EFF, each court level can take hundreds of thousands of $$, or more, in legal expenses. This would be above and beyond the normal expenses of running a non-profit.
If you can, donate stock- the IRS offers matching grants on donations of appreciated stock. (in some sense: you get to deduct the appreciated value without capital gains, so its worth more than if you sold stock and donated money.)
From: decvax!watmath!bstempleton at Berkeley
Subject: standard net address
... It seems to me that userid@site.forwarder is much more sensible than userid.site@forwarder. (this is a simple change that had better not take more than 1 minute to implement in any already written code - or else the code was badly done)
at sign is found rarely in userids, and almost never on the arpanet, if at all. Dot is found commonly. It seems to make sense to say, you want to join our net, here is a format for your site name, instead of "here is a format for your userid names"
Aside from all that userid@location is much more readable than userid.location if you ask me...
Spam: Bulk email from a stranger. Solved mostly with technology and a little bit by laws. By emphasizing method (bulk), not content, we can use technology to block spam, and courts are likely to uphold our rights to do so. Blocks or bans on content (1), non-bulk email (2), or email from a pre-existing business relationship (3) are likely to fail and could make the problem much worse.
Non-bulk email, or email from entities who aren't strangers: not spam, however annoying. Generally solved with boycotts, public ridicule, and questions about ethics "Would you accept 'technically I didn't lie' from an employee? Then why should we the public accept it?" (As for 'friendly' email, replies of "By forwarding this email to me you give me permission to think you're an idiot. There is no virus. Timmy hates postcards. You can't send angelic blessings as an attachment, and if I wanted that joke I'd go to rec.humor.funny-the-1st-time-20-repetitions-ago.")
Laws: Even on spam not a good idea- ineffective at best. Dishonest spam & spammers (forged headers, etc.) don't care about existing US laws- they break laws on contracts ('no spamming' ISP contracts), theft (stolen credit cards to pay for accounts), identity fraud, spam (California requires "ADV," in the subject line...), and more already. And domestic laws can't stop a fundamentally international problem. Even worse, if US laws only ban dishonest spam then honest (think DMA) spam is legitimized. And banning commercial speech won't make it because of the Constitution, which protects commercial speech much more than some people might think. Thus, bad idea to focus on...
(1) Content: Political or religious messages can still be spam, and any speech, commercial or not, has to be really, really bad before the Supreme Court will even start to think about unprotecting it. You'd have to prove Spam-speech is equivalent to "'fire!' in a crowded theater" or "riot right now" speech. Unlikely. Instead, focus on...
(2) "Bulk" because bulk is what causes damages. One bounced email: no problem. 100,000: big problem. Courts are likely to find that individually written emails, however annoying, aren't going to cause the damages of bulk - people just can't write that many in a day. Courts won't like punishing a person who wrote one letter ("Hi, I saw an article about you, you might be interested in my software..." is an unsolicited commercial email. Laws that ban it won't last very long.). "Bulk" makes a better brightline. If a spammer is caught breaking an ISP's contract, and claims the emails weren't bulk, easy perjury... Judge: "4 emails with boilerplate text after the first sentence. This isn't bulk?" Exceptionally stupid Spammer: "No." And also focus on
(3) "From a stranger" for two reasons. One- its easier to prove that bulk email from strangers is inherently a burden. Email from all 200 businesses you do know: irritating but not impossible to deal with, maybe not worth curbing speech. Email from some of the 29.9998 million businesses you don't know (opt-outable or not): bad. Two- if you voluntarily gave your email address out, courts might rule that caveat emptor trumps "punish them because their email annoys me."
(Years ago sales machines would call and not let go of the line even after a hang up. A few people were hurt- couldn't call out to 911/emergency lines- and Congress banned this type of prerecorded message except under very limited circumstances (with consent or for emergencies, etc). That the spamming machine doesn't play to a live person doesn't make it legal- your a.m. cannot give consent, so messages to it are always illegal.)
And anyways, what kind of connotations do they want with their name? Yeah, sure, the gekkonidae are fast, agile, and can climb any obstacle, but for reptiles they're really, really noisy. Much better the connotations of family Chamaleonidae, known for fragility in captivity, imitation, 'conspicuous ornamentation', and... well...
...They're good at catching bugs... and doesn't "Elly" or "Elea" or "Leonid" sound much better? (or Chum or Susy or Rutabaga or really just about anything else?) Where is SuSE's sense of esthetics? Come one, it sounds like "eek!" Why would anyone want something that sounds like...oh. never mind.
(The first three came from Daniel Gray, who looks like an expert on affiliate programs. The last came from Cuesta Technologies, which has been building affiliate programs for their clients since 1995. The letters are on Feb 28 and Feb 26 of the ejournal.)
"...Keystone Electronics is pleased to announce that we have expanded our distributor referral program to include opportunities generated by our website (www.keyelco.com). Internet sales referrals will now be forwarded via e-mail to distributors who have established website hyperlinks with Keystone's website."
"...We also have a referral program so you can make easy 15% commissions on any YellowNET purchase made by someone referred from your site. You can purchase any of our services individually or as a package. "
A few more hints for taking care of your primates. Be sure it's the old-world monkey formula and suppliment it with fresh fruit and other treats- not too many treats, or they won't want to eat the chow. Remember that if there is little or no sunlight exposure, give extra vitamin D.
Bulk is the issue, not content. Focusing on "commercial" email ignores religious, political, or nonprofit (RPN) bulk email. What about spam for web pages with political content that include a link to a bumper-sticker store. Illegal? Without the link, somehow less annoying?
Discriminating against "commercial" speech will be unconstitutional. Spam about Zeus: OK. Spam for a book about Zeus: illegal? Spam is nasty horrible stuff, but can you persuade the Supreme Court that spam is yelling "fire" in a theater? Inciting imminent riots? Obscene with no artistic, scientific, or political value? That's the hurdle. Better to focus on feasible solutions. However...
Better tech is the only realistic solution to spam, but this type of bill could hypothetically make some anti-spam technology less effective or even illegal. Already there are some emerging solutions to catch bulk email as bulk mail (compared to "mail from a bad address" blocking or "mail with the wrong words" filtering) and catch it at the ISP level. What happens if a RPN organization complains that 1. their spam is legal and 2. their spam has more protection than commercial speech? If content is what matters, does RPN spam, which is somehow less evil than comm. spam, get more protection against ISP level filtering?
This law only gets the really stupid and naive spammers, who generally don't spam very much and more than once. They pay someone to run their ad (with a real phone # and address); they get a thousand nasty calls; they give up and go back to their classified ads or whatever they were doing before. The person they hired to do the computer work is long gone. Sure, ignorance & no excuse and all that, but you've only stopped 0.01 percent of the spam. The satisfaction of watching them pay will last about as long as it takes you to get back to your inbox.
Real spammers hide their tracks, hijack resources, change mail-drops frequently, use offshore credit card processing, and if they're really into it move everything out of the country. And if they're in the U.S., they're probably already violating the law. Why would they care about new laws? Laws already violated include:
And as others have written, this topic isn't a state issue, as state lines are essentially invisible to the internet. State standards for internet tech would be as useful as state standards for TV and radio signals, cell phones or electrical equipment.
We really, really don't want legislators fiddling with internet standards right now, no more than I'd want my (wonderful person but can't program a VCR) grandmother to insist on "helping" me in fixing the innards of my computer. Good intentions don't cause competence, and with legislators good intentions can be bought with a few donations and a sob story. Let them think that they helped with spam, and next thing you know they'll want to help with other things. library filters. ipv6. dsl vs cable modems. things they don't understand but by gosh a new law should fix everything. Call them in if the technology fails. It hasn't.
MacLeod posts on Usenet, including rasw, and writes about his own beliefs. I found them interesting if for no other reason than few writers are able to have multiple economic systems in a book without making one evil. That he can write without the good/evil split is a sign of strong talent.