This should be clarified. Gathering connection data vs. gathering "all traffic data" is a whole different story, both technically and ethically.
It certainly is, and while maybe not every politician involved understands the distinction, I think it's explained reasonably well in the summary, right at the beginning of the consultation document:
Citizens increasingly perform daily activities and transactions using electronic
communications networks and services. These communications generate so-called
'traffic data' possibly including details about time, place and numbers used for fixed and
mobile voice services, faxes, e-mails, SMS and other use of the Internet.
The key phrase here is "generate", indicating that the communications generate traffic data, they don't constitute it. While we should be wary of covert attempts to spy also on traffic contents, this doesn't seem to be a case of such.
Because sometimes, you don't even need connection logs for billing (consider "flatrate" connections, for example).
Or, you run a free service of some kind, sending no bills at all. What about e-mail between students at different universities; should university mail server logs be retained as well under this regime? What about mail within the same university, or mail between staff members of the same company? The logs usually end up in the same files on the company mail server whether the mail is internal or external, and all their network provider sees is a stream of IP packets.
It's like asking the power utility to make a note in their logs every time somebody switches on or off an electrical appliance in their home. I think that information might be just as useful in the fight against terrorism as two-year old traffic data is. If I can't get any sense out of all the junk mail sent to me by people I have never heard of, how could anybody else?
The consultation document itself uses the term "traffic data", but nowhere do I see an explicit indication that this refers to the contents of messages. Instead, they seem to be talking about retaining connection logs also after they have been used for billing purposes. As far as I know, operators don't generally retain message contents merely for billing.
Nice chart, but it's not very specific. In particular, I'm concerned about "an abuse reporting standard". Deploying any sort of standard in this area requires ISP cooperation, and I haven't seen much of that. As a complainant, I expect useful feedback from the ISP (Was it one of your users? What was done about it?) on every complaint, or I won't send any complaints at all. Why should I spend my time watching over someone else's customers, when I'm not even told whether my reports are read?
They ought to pay their own watchdogs, and leave me out of it (and sending me an autoreply with detailed instructions for how to send a complaint to their abuse desk, in response to me having just sent a complaint to their abuse desk, is plain rude).
And, sending a complaint to the ISP controlling the offending IP address in no way requires the envelope sender address to be authenticated by SPF or any other means. Authentication is nice, but botching forwarding in the process isn't a good compromise to me.
Who could have imagined, spammers actually adapting their methods to what recent developments in technology allows them to do? Wasn't the idea that every legit user should upgrade their e-mail software to something new, leaving spammers to pound sand..?
I'm not at all impressed by statements that SPF or whatever is just one of many changes needed before we will get rid of junk e-mail. Give us the whole plan at once and let us scrutinize it in detail before deciding whether to employ it; don't hint at a potentially infinite number of steps, disclosed one by one, that need to be taken (each step at substantial cost to the Internet community) before we will eventually reach non-spam nirvana.
Sender Permitted From: It breaks forwarding, we can work around that by rewriting sender addresses at each MTA, but regular users can still send e-mail, and so can the spammers.
Accept only digitally signed messages: We make it really easy to send signed mail, so that not even your grandmother will be left out. Don't worry about the spammers getting a free ride off your labour by using the same tools; they have learned to sign their ads before you start filtering out unsigned messages.
Replace SMTP: Sure, but with what; CMTP (Complex Mail Transfer Protocol)? Will it allow the transmission of mail? Then it will allow the transmission of junk mail, too.
Have the sender pay CPU time for each message: Granted, this probably will cut down on the amount of mail you get, in particular from the vast majority of poor senders out there. Those who have a business incentive to invest in computing power, or won't hesitate to steal CPU time from others, won't suffer as much, but they constitute a minority, just like the spammers do. Remember, it's just one small step towards... something.
Require that no mail must contain the word "viagra" (or any other word in an arbitrarily defined dictionary): Care to put that in an RFC, so that we can have also the MUA refuse to send a message with banned content? I guess spammers will be happy to use precisely those banned words, in order not to have their mail delivered to anybody.
In short, you can add as many components to your junk mail prevention system as you like, but it's not going to get you one bit closer to your goal, unless you focus on what really distinguishes unwanted mail from wanted mail, and invent a mechanism for automatically telling the two apart. Any other step will be a pointless distraction, as it merely begs to be circumvented.
Isn't anyone worried that it may soon be illegal to have a file with a name like a copyrighted work?
No. Regardless of what you call your file, its actual contents would most likely be protected by copyright too; it doesn't have to be a famous movie. You seem to be suggesting that the same filename could never be used for two files with different contents, in which case you would need a filename about the length of the file itself to guarantee uniqueness.
I know, politicians and lawyers don't understand information theory, but the day there is a law saying that files can't have names, they will be given "alphabetic identifiers" instead. Everybody happy now? Rinse and repeat.
the letters are sent out automatically to people who are flagged during their internet robots' scans across the internet
I suppose the robot scans HTTP servers too, not just FTP. Does it check for the existance of robots.txt in case they have been banned from a particular server? Not that I would expect it to, but I'd include it in my blacklist of misbehaving robots and refuse future requests from their IP addresses. I might allow them to see some file names, but not retrieve the files themselves...
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for X-Files1.21b.tar.gz (115245 bytes)
You are doing an ASCII transfer of what is supposedly a binary file. Various combinations of 0x0A and 0x0D in the binary are not guaranteed to survive that kind of treatment intact (in ASCII transfers, line breaks are represented as CR LF regardless of the representation used locally at either end of the transmission).
I'd expect a slightly more complicated plot, something like Shuttle! with Leslie Nielsen and William Shatner, but I bet something sufficiently close to it has already been done...
A more serious point being, when you have been doing groundbreaking stuff for a few years and still find it exciting, those who once admired your achievements now see you more like someone shoveling dirt for them. Maybe that's actually the same thing.
Better tell the cops so they don't rough-up anyone with a laptop.
As long as you are inside the city limits, you should be ok. However, will they have to enclose Philadelphia in a Faraday's cage in order to prevent the signal from leaking across administrative boundaries, or cite the federal law against signal theft to anybody trespassing on urban WiFi spectrum in a nearby forest, especially after the city has closed for the night?
And I won't even discuss the legal ramifications of accidentally providing WiFi access across a state or national boundary...
the shuttle and all the current launches are administered from remote locations, rather than immediately next to the launch pad
I guess they need to maintain at least some ground staff near the launch pad, if not the entire launch control center. Or, will the shuttle crew have to employ public transport to get to Florida by themselves? "Don't forget the shuttle keys, boys, or the delay will be visible on your next paycheck! By the way, can you deliver these drawings to an address in Miami before you take off?"
If they had gradually moved the blockhouse further and further away from the pad, rather than switched from 1,400 feet to 1,400 miles between two successive launches, nobody would be able to call that "the end of an era".
belonging to the Pacific Internet Australia 210.23.120.0/19 network
Oops, that should be the 210.23.128.0/19 network, of course. My typo.
According to whois.apnic.net, spam and security complaints pertaining to that Pacific Internet Australia network can be sent to <abuse@pacific.net.au>. According to the Pacific Internet Email AUP, unsolicited bulk e-mail constitutes abuse, and there is no obvious exception made for political campaigns as far as I can see. Maybe Australian law permits network providers to enforce stricter terms on their customers than the terms implied by the law itself? I don't live in Australia, so it will be up to the Australians to find out (if the junk mail was indeed distributed using Pacific Internet resources).
One of the keystones of the campaign is a website run by "volunteers", and which therefore slips under the AEC requirements for revealing campaign donations. The site is hosted on Tim Howard's Net Harbour servers. (rentrort.netharbour.com.au)
According to the article, Net Harbour also did the spamming. Thanks for spelling out the domain name, netharbour.com.au which translates to [210.23.135.54], belonging to the Pacific Internet Australia 210.23.120.0/19 network. I don't know whether the campaign was mailed out using that IP address too, but it appears have made it into a few broad blacklists already.
If you don't want to receive "legal" junk e-mail, use a blacklist or two. Maybe we should create a blacklist specifically for political spammers? Sure, we do recognize their freedom under the law to annoy their neighbours, and we do so by awarding them their very own, exclusive blacklist, not to be confused with mere open proxies. We can even afford to list them manually, to make sure there is no mistake.
While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, trivial statements of fact shouldn't be... I can accept tweaking fictional artwork to suit the taste of the audience, but when they start complaining about your presentation of facts, I think it's time to start looking for another audience rather than mess with the facts. In this case, it would be better to provide no map at all, than to actively support the belief system of the audience. What next, should political maps available on the Web be "customized" according to the jurisdiction of the HTTP client IP address?
Actually Russia and Cuba are separated by International waters.
How much of international waters can you squeeze into the 2.5 mile strait that separates the Diomede Islands from each other? Ok, it's not a land boundary, but a maritime one, so maybe it doesn't count anyway. Now look for a weird case in Malaysia, two parts of the same country divided by international waters (somewhat like Hawaii and mainland USA), each sharing land boundaries with two other countries (not at all like Hawaii)...
I haven't seen the Microsoft India map, so I can't tell what they should have done, but with multiple countries disputing the political status of various territories, is there any way you can draw a political map that doesn't offend anyone? Some maps specifically point out which territories are disputed, trying to take a "neutral" stance between the conflicting parties, but will they still stir up emotions for merely recognizing the conflict? Is the solution really to present different "facts" to different audiences?
Among the school books I have saved is a world atlas, printed around 1970. Long after I left school, I found a small note on the African map pointing out that South-West Africa (today Namibia) was "illegally occupied by South Africa" or something to that effect, and I was a bit surprised by the strong language. In the same atlas, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were depicted as just any other republic of the USSR. It turned out that the atlas was printed in Berlin, by an East German publisher (though entirely in Swedish). When I first studied American maps of Europe, I saw a similar note about the Soviet annexation of the Baltic republics not being recognized by the United States.
No matter how or where you turn, one man's fact will be somebody else's myth. Good thing governments don't get to define where the coastlines are, or physical maps would be politically biased too.
Using AI to "figure that stuff out" is also a form of protocol, albeit on a higher level than simply encoding the video using PAL or NTSC (I doubt the communication officers ever need to get involved with such mundane tasks as selecting a false-colour palette to represent the signals from a ship designed by aliens using infrared as their primary means of vision, but it has to be done of course).
Problem is, both ships may have equally sophisticated technology (and skilled officers), only their default modes are mutually incompatible. If both systems try simultaneously to adapt to the default mode of the other party, they may easily enter a deadlock state. They may agree that the party initiating contact is also responsible for adapting their communication mode, or that the receivers are adapted at each end, but either way, such an agreement itself constitutes a form of protocol.
We have already made attempts to communicate with alien life forms, without knowing the capabilities of the recipients, when transmitting signals from the Arecibo radio telescope and encoding images on the Voyager discs. The protocol is described along with the message itself, using a language based on what we believe to be universal knowledge (mathematics and the laws of physics). We can only hope the recipients will understand that language (if they can receive the radio signals, or recover the Voyager probe intact from space, I think they stand a good chance of success). It remains to be seen whether they will respond using our suggested format, or encode their message according to their own preferences, to be figured out by us.
I hope they will use plain text rather than HTML, but it may be a good idea if they include a copy of what they received from us, just in case our 641st-century descendants manage to delete the copies we have saved, or the response is picked up by the Interstellar Wiretapping Agency.
Remote sensing technologies, used to indicate the presence of living bodies onboard an approaching spaceship, as well as the composition of their alien atmosphere. What do we have? X-rays and spectroscopy, both dependent on electromagnetic radiation and a clear line of vision, and we still wrap christmas presents in paper for a surprise effect... Give the kid a tricorder, and there will be no point in wrapping any more gifts for him!
Also, I love the work they have done on galactic standardization, allowing instant video and audio communication between species that have hardly ever met before. What protocol do they use to agree on frame rate, aspect ratio and colour coding? Not to mention their translation and interpretation services. Someone ought to explain their identification of weapons signatures too; do different munitions have some kind of encoding or does the identification rely on their physical properties only?
Because this particular T. Kennedy is not the person they are looking for does not mean that there isn't a T. Kennedy that they ARE looking for.
Were looking for, you mean? If it took the senator three weeks to get the name "T. Kennedy" off the list, doesn't that mean that the suspected terrorist by that name is no longer being looked for? Or, did they simply change the listing to read "T. Kennedy, except senator Ted Kennedy, Massachusetts"?
It reminds me of the anti-spam measures blocking entire domains from sending mail, then making exceptions for individual legit senders one by one, until everybody is cleared and the blocking has been rendered ineffective (thanks to joe-jobs).
Blacklisting passengers by initial and last name only sounds pretty crude, but may work to some extent if false positives can be resolved quickly. Whitelisting famous people by initial and last name only is plain stupid. They should have kept "T. Kennedy" listed and used the senator's ordeals as an argument for improving the screening process instead. A security fence with random holes in it is worse than no fence at all, because it provides no security while pretending it does.
I think graffiti is art, provided that it's only put on public property
I think your point that graffiti is an artform has merit, but I fail to see how that relates to who owns the canvas. Artwork or not, I reserve the right to decide how to decorate my property. Public property is property owned jointly by the public in general, and it's up to the public to decide how to have it painted.
If Michelangelo had painted my ceiling without my permission, I'd wonder what the guy was trying to sell and blacklist his ISP in retaliation.
The FCC may well decide that (if the law permits them to), but it won't help a lot until you submit also your IP address to the Do Not Call list (assuming it accepts the address format). Eventually, the list will be too cumbersome to use for legit marketers, because they won't know what addresses to look out for.
In Sweden, we had a related problem for a few years, when the law mandated opt-in for advertising via fax but opt-out for "other communication channels" (e-mail wasn't specifically mentioned, but supposedly belonged in the "other" category). Now, if somebody had all their e-mail automatically forwarded to a fax machine, could they hold a marketer liable for unknowingly starting a fax printout? Conversely, would it be allowed to send unsolicited fax ads to a fax-receiving computer merely storing any inbound messages for optional printout later?
These situations were only discussed theoretically, never tried in a real dispute, and now the law has been amended to require opt-in also for e-mail. We get as much spam as before, but I hear fewer people calling for fixing that law now, so I guess the change has done some good at least...
if we start seeing people getting offensive voice mail spam the push on congress/FBI/etc. to put a stop to it will increase exponentially
And any government action against "offensive voice mail spam" will be carefully crafted (with the help of other spammers) to deal with "offensive voice mail spam" only, and not, for instance, "offensive voice mail" that isn't spam, "offensive voice spam" that isn't mail, "offensive mail spam" that isn't voice, or "voice mail spam" that isn't offensive. Trust me. We have been there, done that. Politicians can be selective, when they have powerful lobbyists designing their windows of perspective for them. On the other hand, random civil rights nobody ever heard of will be stomped on as collateral damage.
The Do Not Call list only applies to phone numbers.
But not to IP addresses, e-mail addresses, amateur radio callsigns, snail mail addresses, social security numbers, credit card numbers, passport numbers...
The Do Not Call list law really should be changed to fix this loophole.
Loophole? How? The list covers exactly one kind of number (the phone number); you hope to add one more (the IP address) and claim this modest change to amount to "closing" a loophole. What about all the other kinds of numbers or addresses, either used for communication today or potentially tomorrow?
The law is designed specifically for telephone numbers. Let's say it were instead designed to deal with individuals wanting to avoid advertising using any communication channel, be it POTS, VoIP, radio, fax or whatever. Would you submit all your contact info to a Do Not Contact list for the marketers to do the screening?
"I have submitted my cable TV subscriber number to the Do Not Contact list, but I still receive commercial broadcasts over the cable; now where do I file a complaint?"
When you want to plug the hole around your umbrella that is called the "sky" for letting in rain sideways, it's time to go underground.
Voice recognition adds a whole new dimension to the problem...
That's because you use content-based filtering, which I think is a bad idea anyway. Address-based filtering (blacklisting) is less flexible in terms of what it can do, but is also less prone to circumvention, as spammers can't design their IP addresses as easily as their message content.
Of course, if every voice message comes in over the same IP address, then you can't filter on that particular address, but then you should ask your VoIP operator to provide you with some reliable identifier for the sender instead. If you tolerate your operator essentially relaying anonymous calls to you, I suppose you get what you pay for...
Compared to what other providers of similar services?
Ive been a subscriber for 3 years and have not recived a single sales call.
When I started receiving junk e-mail around 1995, I had been using e-mail for some ten years already. My great experience of a spam-free past did absolutely nothing to reduce the amount of junk I received later; it rather became more annoying to me in comparison.
Note that the article warns about future rather than past or present advertising. Your experience may be comforting to you, but it doesn't sound very relevant.
If somebody decides to sue Linux for copyright infringement, who defends it?
"Linux" is neither a natural person nor a corporate entity, and can therefore not be a party in a lawsuit. You need a defendant to sue. That defendant could be Linus Torvalds, any contributor of code, a commercial vendor distributing Linux software, or just any John Doe merely suspected of having seen a penguin on television without paying for cable service. Point is, each defendant will have his/her own defense depending on the specific charges, and any verdict will therefore be fairly limited in scope.
You simply can't sue an abstract object like a software distribution (or a physical object for that matter) with a catchy name and expect a "guilty" verdict to spell disaster for anybody somehow involved with that object. If any court finds a problem anywhere in Linux, I'm sure the community will work to resolve the issue as soon as possible. So far, Linux has withstood more thorough scrutiny than most commercial software will ever see.
Slashdot Mirror
It certainly is, and while maybe not every politician involved understands the distinction, I think it's explained reasonably well in the summary, right at the beginning of the consultation document:
The key phrase here is "generate", indicating that the communications generate traffic data, they don't constitute it. While we should be wary of covert attempts to spy also on traffic contents, this doesn't seem to be a case of such.
Or, you run a free service of some kind, sending no bills at all. What about e-mail between students at different universities; should university mail server logs be retained as well under this regime? What about mail within the same university, or mail between staff members of the same company? The logs usually end up in the same files on the company mail server whether the mail is internal or external, and all their network provider sees is a stream of IP packets.
It's like asking the power utility to make a note in their logs every time somebody switches on or off an electrical appliance in their home. I think that information might be just as useful in the fight against terrorism as two-year old traffic data is. If I can't get any sense out of all the junk mail sent to me by people I have never heard of, how could anybody else?
The consultation document itself uses the term "traffic data", but nowhere do I see an explicit indication that this refers to the contents of messages. Instead, they seem to be talking about retaining connection logs also after they have been used for billing purposes. As far as I know, operators don't generally retain message contents merely for billing.
Nice chart, but it's not very specific. In particular, I'm concerned about "an abuse reporting standard". Deploying any sort of standard in this area requires ISP cooperation, and I haven't seen much of that. As a complainant, I expect useful feedback from the ISP (Was it one of your users? What was done about it?) on every complaint, or I won't send any complaints at all. Why should I spend my time watching over someone else's customers, when I'm not even told whether my reports are read?
They ought to pay their own watchdogs, and leave me out of it (and sending me an autoreply with detailed instructions for how to send a complaint to their abuse desk, in response to me having just sent a complaint to their abuse desk, is plain rude).
And, sending a complaint to the ISP controlling the offending IP address in no way requires the envelope sender address to be authenticated by SPF or any other means. Authentication is nice, but botching forwarding in the process isn't a good compromise to me.
Who could have imagined, spammers actually adapting their methods to what recent developments in technology allows them to do? Wasn't the idea that every legit user should upgrade their e-mail software to something new, leaving spammers to pound sand..?
I'm not at all impressed by statements that SPF or whatever is just one of many changes needed before we will get rid of junk e-mail. Give us the whole plan at once and let us scrutinize it in detail before deciding whether to employ it; don't hint at a potentially infinite number of steps, disclosed one by one, that need to be taken (each step at substantial cost to the Internet community) before we will eventually reach non-spam nirvana.
Sender Permitted From: It breaks forwarding, we can work around that by rewriting sender addresses at each MTA, but regular users can still send e-mail, and so can the spammers.
Accept only digitally signed messages: We make it really easy to send signed mail, so that not even your grandmother will be left out. Don't worry about the spammers getting a free ride off your labour by using the same tools; they have learned to sign their ads before you start filtering out unsigned messages.
Replace SMTP: Sure, but with what; CMTP (Complex Mail Transfer Protocol)? Will it allow the transmission of mail? Then it will allow the transmission of junk mail, too.
Have the sender pay CPU time for each message: Granted, this probably will cut down on the amount of mail you get, in particular from the vast majority of poor senders out there. Those who have a business incentive to invest in computing power, or won't hesitate to steal CPU time from others, won't suffer as much, but they constitute a minority, just like the spammers do. Remember, it's just one small step towards... something.
Require that no mail must contain the word "viagra" (or any other word in an arbitrarily defined dictionary): Care to put that in an RFC, so that we can have also the MUA refuse to send a message with banned content? I guess spammers will be happy to use precisely those banned words, in order not to have their mail delivered to anybody.
In short, you can add as many components to your junk mail prevention system as you like, but it's not going to get you one bit closer to your goal, unless you focus on what really distinguishes unwanted mail from wanted mail, and invent a mechanism for automatically telling the two apart. Any other step will be a pointless distraction, as it merely begs to be circumvented.
No. Regardless of what you call your file, its actual contents would most likely be protected by copyright too; it doesn't have to be a famous movie. You seem to be suggesting that the same filename could never be used for two files with different contents, in which case you would need a filename about the length of the file itself to guarantee uniqueness.
I know, politicians and lawyers don't understand information theory, but the day there is a law saying that files can't have names, they will be given "alphabetic identifiers" instead. Everybody happy now? Rinse and repeat.
I suppose the robot scans HTTP servers too, not just FTP. Does it check for the existance of robots.txt in case they have been banned from a particular server? Not that I would expect it to, but I'd include it in my blacklist of misbehaving robots and refuse future requests from their IP addresses. I might allow them to see some file names, but not retrieve the files themselves...
You are doing an ASCII transfer of what is supposedly a binary file. Various combinations of 0x0A and 0x0D in the binary are not guaranteed to survive that kind of treatment intact (in ASCII transfers, line breaks are represented as CR LF regardless of the representation used locally at either end of the transmission).
I'd expect a slightly more complicated plot, something like Shuttle! with Leslie Nielsen and William Shatner, but I bet something sufficiently close to it has already been done...
A more serious point being, when you have been doing groundbreaking stuff for a few years and still find it exciting, those who once admired your achievements now see you more like someone shoveling dirt for them. Maybe that's actually the same thing.
As long as you are inside the city limits, you should be ok. However, will they have to enclose Philadelphia in a Faraday's cage in order to prevent the signal from leaking across administrative boundaries, or cite the federal law against signal theft to anybody trespassing on urban WiFi spectrum in a nearby forest, especially after the city has closed for the night?
And I won't even discuss the legal ramifications of accidentally providing WiFi access across a state or national boundary...
I guess they need to maintain at least some ground staff near the launch pad, if not the entire launch control center. Or, will the shuttle crew have to employ public transport to get to Florida by themselves? "Don't forget the shuttle keys, boys, or the delay will be visible on your next paycheck! By the way, can you deliver these drawings to an address in Miami before you take off?"
If they had gradually moved the blockhouse further and further away from the pad, rather than switched from 1,400 feet to 1,400 miles between two successive launches, nobody would be able to call that "the end of an era".
Oops, that should be the 210.23.128.0/19 network, of course. My typo.
According to whois.apnic.net, spam and security complaints pertaining to that Pacific Internet Australia network can be sent to <abuse@pacific.net.au>. According to the Pacific Internet Email AUP, unsolicited bulk e-mail constitutes abuse, and there is no obvious exception made for political campaigns as far as I can see. Maybe Australian law permits network providers to enforce stricter terms on their customers than the terms implied by the law itself? I don't live in Australia, so it will be up to the Australians to find out (if the junk mail was indeed distributed using Pacific Internet resources).
According to the article, Net Harbour also did the spamming. Thanks for spelling out the domain name, netharbour.com.au which translates to [210.23.135.54], belonging to the Pacific Internet Australia 210.23.120.0/19 network. I don't know whether the campaign was mailed out using that IP address too, but it appears have made it into a few broad blacklists already.
If you don't want to receive "legal" junk e-mail, use a blacklist or two. Maybe we should create a blacklist specifically for political spammers? Sure, we do recognize their freedom under the law to annoy their neighbours, and we do so by awarding them their very own, exclusive blacklist, not to be confused with mere open proxies. We can even afford to list them manually, to make sure there is no mistake.
While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, trivial statements of fact shouldn't be... I can accept tweaking fictional artwork to suit the taste of the audience, but when they start complaining about your presentation of facts, I think it's time to start looking for another audience rather than mess with the facts. In this case, it would be better to provide no map at all, than to actively support the belief system of the audience. What next, should political maps available on the Web be "customized" according to the jurisdiction of the HTTP client IP address?
How much of international waters can you squeeze into the 2.5 mile strait that separates the Diomede Islands from each other? Ok, it's not a land boundary, but a maritime one, so maybe it doesn't count anyway. Now look for a weird case in Malaysia, two parts of the same country divided by international waters (somewhat like Hawaii and mainland USA), each sharing land boundaries with two other countries (not at all like Hawaii)...
I haven't seen the Microsoft India map, so I can't tell what they should have done, but with multiple countries disputing the political status of various territories, is there any way you can draw a political map that doesn't offend anyone? Some maps specifically point out which territories are disputed, trying to take a "neutral" stance between the conflicting parties, but will they still stir up emotions for merely recognizing the conflict? Is the solution really to present different "facts" to different audiences?
Among the school books I have saved is a world atlas, printed around 1970. Long after I left school, I found a small note on the African map pointing out that South-West Africa (today Namibia) was "illegally occupied by South Africa" or something to that effect, and I was a bit surprised by the strong language. In the same atlas, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were depicted as just any other republic of the USSR. It turned out that the atlas was printed in Berlin, by an East German publisher (though entirely in Swedish). When I first studied American maps of Europe, I saw a similar note about the Soviet annexation of the Baltic republics not being recognized by the United States.
No matter how or where you turn, one man's fact will be somebody else's myth. Good thing governments don't get to define where the coastlines are, or physical maps would be politically biased too.
Using AI to "figure that stuff out" is also a form of protocol, albeit on a higher level than simply encoding the video using PAL or NTSC (I doubt the communication officers ever need to get involved with such mundane tasks as selecting a false-colour palette to represent the signals from a ship designed by aliens using infrared as their primary means of vision, but it has to be done of course).
Problem is, both ships may have equally sophisticated technology (and skilled officers), only their default modes are mutually incompatible. If both systems try simultaneously to adapt to the default mode of the other party, they may easily enter a deadlock state. They may agree that the party initiating contact is also responsible for adapting their communication mode, or that the receivers are adapted at each end, but either way, such an agreement itself constitutes a form of protocol.
We have already made attempts to communicate with alien life forms, without knowing the capabilities of the recipients, when transmitting signals from the Arecibo radio telescope and encoding images on the Voyager discs. The protocol is described along with the message itself, using a language based on what we believe to be universal knowledge (mathematics and the laws of physics). We can only hope the recipients will understand that language (if they can receive the radio signals, or recover the Voyager probe intact from space, I think they stand a good chance of success). It remains to be seen whether they will respond using our suggested format, or encode their message according to their own preferences, to be figured out by us.
I hope they will use plain text rather than HTML, but it may be a good idea if they include a copy of what they received from us, just in case our 641st-century descendants manage to delete the copies we have saved, or the response is picked up by the Interstellar Wiretapping Agency.
Remote sensing technologies, used to indicate the presence of living bodies onboard an approaching spaceship, as well as the composition of their alien atmosphere. What do we have? X-rays and spectroscopy, both dependent on electromagnetic radiation and a clear line of vision, and we still wrap christmas presents in paper for a surprise effect... Give the kid a tricorder, and there will be no point in wrapping any more gifts for him!
Also, I love the work they have done on galactic standardization, allowing instant video and audio communication between species that have hardly ever met before. What protocol do they use to agree on frame rate, aspect ratio and colour coding? Not to mention their translation and interpretation services. Someone ought to explain their identification of weapons signatures too; do different munitions have some kind of encoding or does the identification rely on their physical properties only?
Were looking for, you mean? If it took the senator three weeks to get the name "T. Kennedy" off the list, doesn't that mean that the suspected terrorist by that name is no longer being looked for? Or, did they simply change the listing to read "T. Kennedy, except senator Ted Kennedy, Massachusetts"?
It reminds me of the anti-spam measures blocking entire domains from sending mail, then making exceptions for individual legit senders one by one, until everybody is cleared and the blocking has been rendered ineffective (thanks to joe-jobs).
Blacklisting passengers by initial and last name only sounds pretty crude, but may work to some extent if false positives can be resolved quickly. Whitelisting famous people by initial and last name only is plain stupid. They should have kept "T. Kennedy" listed and used the senator's ordeals as an argument for improving the screening process instead. A security fence with random holes in it is worse than no fence at all, because it provides no security while pretending it does.
I think your point that graffiti is an artform has merit, but I fail to see how that relates to who owns the canvas. Artwork or not, I reserve the right to decide how to decorate my property. Public property is property owned jointly by the public in general, and it's up to the public to decide how to have it painted.
If Michelangelo had painted my ceiling without my permission, I'd wonder what the guy was trying to sell and blacklist his ISP in retaliation.
The FCC may well decide that (if the law permits them to), but it won't help a lot until you submit also your IP address to the Do Not Call list (assuming it accepts the address format). Eventually, the list will be too cumbersome to use for legit marketers, because they won't know what addresses to look out for.
In Sweden, we had a related problem for a few years, when the law mandated opt-in for advertising via fax but opt-out for "other communication channels" (e-mail wasn't specifically mentioned, but supposedly belonged in the "other" category). Now, if somebody had all their e-mail automatically forwarded to a fax machine, could they hold a marketer liable for unknowingly starting a fax printout? Conversely, would it be allowed to send unsolicited fax ads to a fax-receiving computer merely storing any inbound messages for optional printout later?
These situations were only discussed theoretically, never tried in a real dispute, and now the law has been amended to require opt-in also for e-mail. We get as much spam as before, but I hear fewer people calling for fixing that law now, so I guess the change has done some good at least...
And any government action against "offensive voice mail spam" will be carefully crafted (with the help of other spammers) to deal with "offensive voice mail spam" only, and not, for instance, "offensive voice mail" that isn't spam, "offensive voice spam" that isn't mail, "offensive mail spam" that isn't voice, or "voice mail spam" that isn't offensive. Trust me. We have been there, done that. Politicians can be selective, when they have powerful lobbyists designing their windows of perspective for them. On the other hand, random civil rights nobody ever heard of will be stomped on as collateral damage.
But not to IP addresses, e-mail addresses, amateur radio callsigns, snail mail addresses, social security numbers, credit card numbers, passport numbers...
Loophole? How? The list covers exactly one kind of number (the phone number); you hope to add one more (the IP address) and claim this modest change to amount to "closing" a loophole. What about all the other kinds of numbers or addresses, either used for communication today or potentially tomorrow?
The law is designed specifically for telephone numbers. Let's say it were instead designed to deal with individuals wanting to avoid advertising using any communication channel, be it POTS, VoIP, radio, fax or whatever. Would you submit all your contact info to a Do Not Contact list for the marketers to do the screening?
"I have submitted my cable TV subscriber number to the Do Not Contact list, but I still receive commercial broadcasts over the cable; now where do I file a complaint?"
When you want to plug the hole around your umbrella that is called the "sky" for letting in rain sideways, it's time to go underground.
That's because you use content-based filtering, which I think is a bad idea anyway. Address-based filtering (blacklisting) is less flexible in terms of what it can do, but is also less prone to circumvention, as spammers can't design their IP addresses as easily as their message content.
Of course, if every voice message comes in over the same IP address, then you can't filter on that particular address, but then you should ask your VoIP operator to provide you with some reliable identifier for the sender instead. If you tolerate your operator essentially relaying anonymous calls to you, I suppose you get what you pay for...
Compared to what other providers of similar services?
When I started receiving junk e-mail around 1995, I had been using e-mail for some ten years already. My great experience of a spam-free past did absolutely nothing to reduce the amount of junk I received later; it rather became more annoying to me in comparison.
Note that the article warns about future rather than past or present advertising. Your experience may be comforting to you, but it doesn't sound very relevant.
"Linux" is neither a natural person nor a corporate entity, and can therefore not be a party in a lawsuit. You need a defendant to sue. That defendant could be Linus Torvalds, any contributor of code, a commercial vendor distributing Linux software, or just any John Doe merely suspected of having seen a penguin on television without paying for cable service. Point is, each defendant will have his/her own defense depending on the specific charges, and any verdict will therefore be fairly limited in scope.
You simply can't sue an abstract object like a software distribution (or a physical object for that matter) with a catchy name and expect a "guilty" verdict to spell disaster for anybody somehow involved with that object. If any court finds a problem anywhere in Linux, I'm sure the community will work to resolve the issue as soon as possible. So far, Linux has withstood more thorough scrutiny than most commercial software will ever see.