My neighborhood is one of these new fibre-to-copper systems. So is everything else Ameritech (now SBC) was doing in the NW suburbs of Chicago. I'm less then 3 cable miles from the switch (I used to have ISDN), but nobody can do DSL without putting a DSLAM in the vault. This is a little underground room that is packed full of gear - in comes fibre and out goes copper.
Here is one link that I found: http://www.samnet.net/pageDSLFAQ.cfm. I am sure there are plenty more. Basically, you don't get DSL in newer construction areas because there is no copper to the CO.
I have cable (Comcast) at home, but there are *no* other choices.
I think another issue here entirely is what other laws did this guy break?
OK, he is guilty of being an ass. He got some people to install something they shouldn't have. But, last I looked that wasn't illegal.
So, we can either say he did nothing wrong or we can find a law he broke. I suspect there was some real searching going on for something this guy did they could prosecute him for. And, maybe, they stopped when they found something really, really bad rather than looking for a parking violation.
Yes, calling him a cyberterrorist is a bit of a stretch, but really, what other laws did this person break? He didn't abuse the 911 system - his victims did. Can't be charged with that.
He distributed a virus - last I heard there wasn't any law against that, except maybe something in the PATRIOT act. Is the FBI trying to track down the MyDoom author? Not all that hard - what would they charge him with? Probably being a cyberterrorist.
I think the problem here is that everyone agrees that this person needs to be put away and fined. But I don't believe there is any specific law - outside of the PATRIOT act that makes this illegal.
The problem here is that he very likely didn't break *any* other laws.
Let that sink in for a minute. Where is there a law against getting someone else to dial 911 repeatedly in a prankish manner? If you do this without using a computer - just a bit of social engineering - who gets in trouble? Certainly not the instigator. The guy with the phone in his hand is where the buck stops.
The problem here is that Dixon here did something that is reprehensible, evil and with the potential to cause lots of harm. But, since he did it with a computer, there are darn few laws that they could use to convict him of anything.
Why do you feel this way? You obviously have some hangups. I'm not gay, but I advocate for homosexuals because the feelings they experience are no different from the feelings that men and women experience in a romantic context:
If the gay lifestyle is a valid choice and you advocate for them, why haven't you tried it out? How can you voice an opinion about this without having personally experienced it?
Sounds like someone living in Kansas talking about fresh oysters.
DSL is for old-style phone systems only. The minute they put in a fibre-to-copper box in your neighborhood you cannot have DSL any longer. There isn't a lot of conversion going on, but new subdivisions and expanding rural areas get this. It is cheap to do and eliminates a lot of copper going from the CO to the neighborhood.
Cable is dependent on two-way communications through the system. This means a "newer" system or requires an upgrade to get it to work. With satellite competition and people screaming about high cable TV costs, this seriously limits their desire to upgrade a working analog system to service semi-rural areas with Internet access.
So, I would expect DSL to be shrinking in suburban and rural areas and cable to only upgrade where there are lots of people that want pay-per-view digital cable systems.
The problem is that if you have an issue with a warez board and it is registered to N.B. at N.B. in the country of N.B., you are kinda stuck when it comes to serving them with a lawsuit.
Yes, I have had to participate in this kind of thing. The hosting company's attitude is "this is the Internet and laws don't count here".
Register.com's policy is "too bad, so sad". They accept false information in defiance of their stated policy.
With an address we could have saved over $5000 in legal fees to "discover" this person.
What I keep seeing here and on other sites is a fundamental lack of understanding of what the RIAA and "record labels" do, why they exist and why they will continue to exist. I keep seeing things about how the RIAA has a flawed business model, that it is tied to distributing physical media and since this is no longer necessary, they will eventually disappear.
Well, there are two important things that need to be considered first. The main point - which addresses MUDDA is the idea of "artist management".
For the most part, in this country we have seen examples over and over again of artists "making it big" and either through their own mismanagement or being taken by others end up with nothing. The artists that can both perform and manage their business effectively are few and far between. I believe there are fundamentally different skills required, so a good business manager may not make a very good singer/songwriter/performer/etc.
The primary thing that the "record label" does isn't so much personal finance management for the artist, but manages the "business" of being a performer. This involves promotion, booking venues, sponsors and so on. One of the main reasons the "label" takes so much is that a lot of this activity is done before the first "big hit". If it never comes, then a lot was spent without anything in return.
Eliminating the "label" is certainly possible - you end up with lots of greedy business managers instead of having them all under one roof. Also, the promotional model changes a bit. Instead of signing on a number of artists with the hope that 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 makes it big, a manager basically says to come back when you have some money to pay. Today, this is how a lot of authors end up. Steven King doesn't have a lot of trouble finding a manager, but if you aren't known you aren't going to get someone to take your book to a publisher. You try yourself and maybe it gets published, maybe not.
Of course, this means that artists that have wads of money to start with can promote their stuff. We have all seen this in other areas, where some rich guy buys a magazine and can publish whatever he wants to. Usually goes bust in a while, but not always. It transforms it into an elitist club that only the wealthy can play at. I'm sure you know of at least one magazine like this.
Now MUDDA could provide promotional services for "their" artists. How does this make them any different from a record label? The big different 50 years ago was the ability to produce and ship records. Now, I am not sure I see the difference at all. Both fulfill the same function.
Then there is the second point. Why do artists need promotion at all? Isn't all this advertising just a waste of time because people will eventually find out about new artists on the Internet?
Yeah. Sure. At some point in the future where the words "digital divide" have passed into history. Important clue - not everybody that buys music is online. More importantly, not everyone is able to be online. For one reason or another, lots of folks don't have a full-time broadband connection at home or office. How do you reach these people? Offline promotion.
A lot of music is bought "on impulse", maybe after hearing it on the radio or playing in a mall. How did that happen? Promotion. Radio stations play what they are paid to play.
So, somebody has to continue to do the promotion of music. If an artist doesn't, their market penetration will be that of Gentoo vs. Windows. Will it be the artist doing that promotion directly? I doubt it very much.
Verizon started there "can you here me" campaign to fend off the bad PR that happened when they got sued by a woman's family after she died. She was in a single-vehicle accident and her Verizon cell phone was in a no-coverage area.
As far as I know, Verizon hasn't changed anything, just their advertising. All of their maps now say that a solid color indicating coverage is not an indication of actual coverage in any specific area.
In Chicago people can't seem to agree who has the worst service. If Cingular is going GSM (rather than the TDMA they have been with), that might be good news for them. But almost universally in Chicago there are significant holes and places where you can get a channel from 2:00 AM to about 4:30 AM and that is it.
I don't see anything other than hype about service and nothing to back it up. When you call any of the companies they know nothing about their service and are often less than forthcoming about rate plans that aren't the special of the week.
What you are going to see is the mobile companies chasing after customers with lower prices. The WalMart of pricing - with the service to match. Since nobody talks about phone SERVICE, the only thing to compete on will be price.
This means we will see lower prices, worse service, worse coverage for rural areas and the big markets will be saturated with low-cost plans.
We might see some hardware consolidation - because only the really big players are going to be able to afford to stay in the game.
The answer for you, and those who believe like you, is to simply not use Adobe products any longer. Better yet, I would suggest you not use any products that use product activation. Refuse to touch computers using Windows and insist that only pirated versions or free software be used in your presence.
Product activation is here because people have consistently decided they would rather not pay for software and wanted to use it anyway. This is the reward for that position.
Can it be cracked? Sure, today. If the piracy continues, you can bet there will be something stronger in place in a few years. How about something keyed to your fingerprint? How about "web services" where you don't get the application, just access to it? Don't like that, huh?
Let me assure you that is the road the pirates, warez d00ds and others have put us on. They want something for nothing and today they have it. Investors, stockholders, and like folks don't like that. In their minds this means that people are using the products without paying. No matter how much the "technical" people whine about impact on customers and how it is all usesless anyway, product activation is here to stay. Subscriptions are coming. Web services are coming.
Don't like it? You have a choice. Refuse to work with "activated" software (seriously career limiting), find a niche where you can use only free software, or get your friends to stop using "free" copies of what should be paid for.
In the 80's after several rounds of copy protection (a completely different sort of thing) nearly all companies backed off. Partly because the world moved on, away from the Apple II where it was generally assumed you could sell two or three copies of anything - it was posted nationwide that fast.
Well, here we are again with 0-day cracks and software purchased with stolen credit cards online. Financial consultants are telling software companies they have to DO SOMETHING about this RIGHT NOW or they are going down the tubes. Product activation is something they can do RIGHT NOW.
The problem isn't casual copying. If you make a copy for a friend, that's advertising. If you post a copy on a web page for 10,000 people to download, that is a problem. The problem they are trying to solve.
If this problem isn't solved, venture capitalists and other investors simply won't consider software a reasonable place to invest. Too little return, too much risk. Funding disappears from software and ends up with biotech. Or something else - anything but software.
This is everybody's problem, because even the largest companies have to show investors they are being responsible with money. Allowing rampant piracy (or theft of software) isn't being responsible. Why would you buy stock in an irresponsible company?
The problem isn't the ISP blocking "their" traffic - it is the ISP blocking other people's traffic. Usually without informing their customers that said blocking is occurring.
This results in their customers not receiving email. The decision that the sender of that email wasn't legitimate has been removed from the user and the sender and placed in the hands of some anonymous third party.
In general, the ISP answer to blocking complaints is they simply use the list and do not control the content of it. The blocking list provider - if contactable - claims they just make up the list and the use of it is outside of their control. This means nobody is accountable for blocking.
The problem with this sort of censorship - and it is indeed censorship - is the user never hears about it. When a business is blocked they quickly discover that blocking has made email unreliable for communications with customers. They can either abandon email for important stuff or they can try to convince the blockers that their commercial use of email is valid. This is extremely difficult. Why? Spammers use email - if you use email commercially, then you might be a spammer. If you get blocked and claim you were blocked in error, you might be lying. Spammers lie, so anything you say can be considered to be a lie. Why should anyone unblock a spammer?
Either email can be used for commercial purposes, or it cannot. Anti-spam folks want to ban all commercial use of email.
Wrong. They do not want you to give them money. They get paid by someone contracting for their services. They get paid even if nobody ever opens the email. They get paid after the server is shut down that takes orders. They get paid no matter what.
First, you would have to find who pays them. Sometimes, that isn't the only link in the chain and you have to go further through multiple subcontractors. It is a lot more complicated than you think.
You miss the point - why do you connect the company selling a product with the spammer advertising it?
Often, there is an advertising company that charges $1500 or so to "advertise" your product for you. They then pay subcontractors to actually send it.
Also, often the company with the product gets told the advertising company's list is 100% opt-in. Then, they turn it over to subs with "send this to your list - any list" and include these email addresses...
Until you make "spam" illegal to send out, you will never stop this. Advertisers absolutely believe they are selling a legal product that there is demand for. And there is - or you wouldn't be getting any spam.
The "anti-spam crowd" are those that firmly believe that email is for their personal communications only. Any commercial use violates the terms of how the Internet was created and that is exclusively for the benefit of the user community. After all, the US taxpayers (and Al Gore) created it - it should be free of all commercial interests.
So, if a company sends an email newsletter they are spamming. If it has an advertisement in it, it is evil spam and must be stopped.
What a lot of people have suggested (and some have implemented) is to whitelist their incoming email. If you aren't on the list, they aren't interested.
Unfortunately, that does precisely what the anti-spam crowd wants. It makes email useful for friend-to-friend note-passing and useless for anything else. Why put your email address on a business card when nobody can send you email?
Absolutely, the spammers have to be dealt with. But "whitelisting" all email traffic isn't the solution. Neither is treating any email sent for any commercial purpose as SPAM.
Most of the spam I get comes directly from cable and DSL customers. I think we are going to see some new trends:
- Make $100 by sending a million emails from home.
- This kind of proxy that lets "contractors" use other people's machines.
Mainframe operations is usually broken down into three distinct areas: console, tape and printer. Tape and printer areas are pretty simple - when something needs a tape mounted, you go and get it from the rack and put it in the drive. Printer stuff is about the same - change paper, special forms for special jobs and so on. The advantage with a mainframe printer these days is sheet and roll fed laser printers that run over 120 pages a minute. Takes a lot of paper.
Needless to say, tape and printer work isn't really all that skilled or high paying.
Console operators are where the skills come in. You need to understand what is happening with the machine and be able to notice things that need attention. Mostly, it isn't doing anything except watching some messages scroll by.
Not much of the "watching" part can be automated because it is all "exception" driven. There is nothing to do until something unexpected happens. Mostly, I agree there is nothing to do. Then a user calls up wondering why the test system is down. They can't restart it (no authorization), so the console operator gets to.
A lot of what is left these days is because mainframe systems have security built in and built around the idea that the "console" and other hardware is physically secure. It isn't that there is a lot to do, but there are things that can only be done there.
You define commercial use as providing services for not-for-profit indivduals web surfing. Fine.
I define commercial use as trying to sell a product on the Internet and communicate with customers. You send one single email to an unconfirmed email address and you can be blocked for days. Do that enough and you are out of business.
I wish the Internet could be a commerce-free zone sometimes. But it is an incredibly easy way to communicate with people and offer products and services to them. However, the spam blockers want to make sure that email cannot be used to send anything that is considered to be "unsolicited". If it has the word "sale" in it, it must be unsolicited - who would ask for something like that from a friend?
You purchase something and we send a confirmation to the email address supplied. If it happens to be a joker that gave us a "spamtrap" address, we're blocked. Don't bother saying it doesn't work that way - we just got unblocked from that happening.
The legal problems come from one simple thing - there is nobody that is responsible. We were blocked (wrongly) a while back by some cowboy with a list. The problem is the list is compiled by anonymous sources and the "list administrator can be *very* difficult to find.
OK, so you find the list administrator. So what? They did not actively "do" anything at all. They did not block your mail. The ISP using the list did. However, the ISP is just using a list that someone else compiled - they cannot change it and are usually extremely reluctant to override it - that might make them responsible.
So, the legal issue is pretty simple once you understand it. We would *love* to sue the people that have wrongly blocked us - we don't spam and the list people that we have just dealt with understand that. But it took four days to get unlisted.
Suing is pointless and any reasonable attorney will tell you that once they understand the situation. You might find someone to take your money for a while if they are sufficiently clueless. But there isn't anybody, anywhere to sue.
The goal of the blockers is to eliminate commercial use of the Internet. If they can't convince you of that, they will just block enough email to make doing business via email impractical. We lost four days of being able to respond to many customers. What would you do if you bought something and didn't get confirmation for four days? I'll tell you our customers are not happy at all and most think we're cheats. Lots of credit card chargebacks coming.
We have to move away from relying on an unreliable communication media (email) just to stay in any form of business at all.
Spam blocking makes email unreliable. The way it is implemented is generally broad-brush and affects a lot more than just blocking some spam.
If you are blocked, you aren't getting off in a reasonable time, at least reasonable for the Internet. It might be reasonable for a 1850's pony express route.
The goal of most spam blockers is to eliminate commercial use of the Internet. This is the only way they can succeed. Any commercial use of the Internet is going to involve some level of what these people claim to be "unsolicited" email. And, once you send that you are a spammer.
Oh, and don't forget. If you claim not to be a spammer and put every effort into not spamming anyone the result is simply that you are lying. You can't prove you don't spam and everyone knows spammers lie. If everything you say is a lie, what is the point of discussing anything?
Yeah, I'm bitter. We got unblocked yesterday. We don't spam, but plenty of customers are wondering why we were silent for four days. Some just want their money back now.
The problem with the Internet today is that people think they can do this kind of stuff (exploits, electronic theft, DoS, etc.) and get away with it completely. There are almost no consequences today.
What that means is that we can just sit around and wait until someone else does this - the tools are there. Nobody is doing anything to prevent more attacks. If this guy had shown one little tiny bit of sense he wouldn't have been caught.
As far as "prevention" is concerned, sure - some people are thinking up clever ways to prevent an attack from having major consequences. Great. How about putting some consequences behind doing this sort of thing?
In the 1920's and 1930's after people had enough of the "wild west", bank robberies and mob hits in the US the police found a way to deter such things and it is mostly still working today. Unfortunately, what was required was INCREDIBLY brutal by today's standards. Count the bullet holes in Bonnie and Clyde's car sometime. Is this what it is going to take?
I have to argue that the current "spam fighters" are a collection of people with a clearly anti-business agenda.
OK, if you are an individual and you want only to get email from people you specifically authorize, fine - spam blocking or whitelisting is going to work for you. But, remember - if you ask for help with a product and they email a reply back to you - you aren't going to get it.
But, if you are a business that is trying to send email to customers, people requesting information and support and so forth, you are going to find there are semi-anonymous third parties blocking your email to these people. People that have requested information or purchased something that you have a business need to communicate with.
Spam blocking has taken on a life of its own. While a lot of the lists are automated in some fashion, there are more that if someone decides your ISP (or netblock provider) is spam-friendly there is no recourse. You aren't sending email to anyone that subscribes to their service. Period. No recourse in many cases. You can always switch netblock providers or just get another T1.
This is absurd on the face of it and is clearly something that people find actionable. This isn't a "solution" or anything of the sort. Spam blocking is an excuse to decommericialize the Internet and there are people that believe it should be that way. "No way you're going to make money on my Internet." According to many of the "operators" of these spam-blocking lists, it is the responsibility of every person to insure the decommercialization of the Internet. Until the Internet is business-free, there will always be ads and spam. This then justifies whatever means there are available for eliminating commercial enterprises from using the Internet.
Oh, and try to find someone to sue - SPEWS is intentionally set up in a fashion so the people behind it are both distributed and anonymous. There are no responsible parties. If no one is responsible, then how can this be reliable in any way? But, more and more organizations and ISP's are subscribing to various lists like this because they think they have a responsibility to protect their customers.
For my company, we are completely unable to use any sort of blocking - we have to answer inquiries from customers no matter where they originate from or what keywords (like "sell" or "credit") might appear in them. Yes, we sell a software product on the Internet. While I would like to de-commercialize the Internet just as much as other people would, sadly someone has not decommercialized housing, food and clothing.
Yes, there is a right way to handle spam - make it cost money. Every other advertising vehicle, from web banners and pop-ups to bulk mail in your mailbox costs money. Spam email doesn't.
The solution today is to let ISP charge for mail being sent out. A very, very tiny amount of money would go a long way to eliminate the problem. Oh, and yes - there needs to be a clear precident that use of an open relay to bounce mail is a theft of service with a minimum $10,000 fine.
Spam is a problem, but I don't think for a moment blocking email is a solution to it.
Almost - we were recently blocked and the "operator" of the blocking list (not SPEWS) just about got served papers. They listed us because of how our IP address was once used. Wonderful. Then, the "operator" was out of town and PacBell implemented their list as the "main" filter for their mail. Of course, this resulted in a deluge of complaints. Because this is a "hobby" for the operator, nobody was around to answer the phone, faxes, FedEx'd letters, etc.
Finally, after about a week of not being able to respond to tech support inquiries and such we got ahold of the operator and it was fixed.
The impact was fairly limited, but I assure you blocking a business and intefering with their revenue is a very serious business. We were certainlying willing to "go to the mat" over this - because capitulation in any form says you're wrong on some level.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is one link that I found: http://www.samnet.net/pageDSLFAQ.cfm. I am sure there are plenty more. Basically, you don't get DSL in newer construction areas because there is no copper to the CO.
I have cable (Comcast) at home, but there are *no* other choices.
OK, he is guilty of being an ass. He got some people to install something they shouldn't have. But, last I looked that wasn't illegal.
So, we can either say he did nothing wrong or we can find a law he broke. I suspect there was some real searching going on for something this guy did they could prosecute him for. And, maybe, they stopped when they found something really, really bad rather than looking for a parking violation.
He distributed a virus - last I heard there wasn't any law against that, except maybe something in the PATRIOT act. Is the FBI trying to track down the MyDoom author? Not all that hard - what would they charge him with? Probably being a cyberterrorist.
I think the problem here is that everyone agrees that this person needs to be put away and fined. But I don't believe there is any specific law - outside of the PATRIOT act that makes this illegal.
Let that sink in for a minute. Where is there a law against getting someone else to dial 911 repeatedly in a prankish manner? If you do this without using a computer - just a bit of social engineering - who gets in trouble? Certainly not the instigator. The guy with the phone in his hand is where the buck stops.
The problem here is that Dixon here did something that is reprehensible, evil and with the potential to cause lots of harm. But, since he did it with a computer, there are darn few laws that they could use to convict him of anything.
If the gay lifestyle is a valid choice and you advocate for them, why haven't you tried it out? How can you voice an opinion about this without having personally experienced it?
Sounds like someone living in Kansas talking about fresh oysters.
Cable is dependent on two-way communications through the system. This means a "newer" system or requires an upgrade to get it to work. With satellite competition and people screaming about high cable TV costs, this seriously limits their desire to upgrade a working analog system to service semi-rural areas with Internet access.
So, I would expect DSL to be shrinking in suburban and rural areas and cable to only upgrade where there are lots of people that want pay-per-view digital cable systems.
The problem is that if you have an issue with a warez board and it is registered to N.B. at N.B. in the country of N.B., you are kinda stuck when it comes to serving them with a lawsuit.
Yes, I have had to participate in this kind of thing. The hosting company's attitude is "this is the Internet and laws don't count here".
Register.com's policy is "too bad, so sad". They accept false information in defiance of their stated policy.
With an address we could have saved over $5000 in legal fees to "discover" this person.
What I keep seeing here and on other sites is a fundamental lack of understanding of what the RIAA and "record labels" do, why they exist and why they will continue to exist. I keep seeing things about how the RIAA has a flawed business model, that it is tied to distributing physical media and since this is no longer necessary, they will eventually disappear.
Well, there are two important things that need to be considered first. The main point - which addresses MUDDA is the idea of "artist management".
For the most part, in this country we have seen examples over and over again of artists "making it big" and either through their own mismanagement or being taken by others end up with nothing. The artists that can both perform and manage their business effectively are few and far between. I believe there are fundamentally different skills required, so a good business manager may not make a very good singer/songwriter/performer/etc.
The primary thing that the "record label" does isn't so much personal finance management for the artist, but manages the "business" of being a performer. This involves promotion, booking venues, sponsors and so on. One of the main reasons the "label" takes so much is that a lot of this activity is done before the first "big hit". If it never comes, then a lot was spent without anything in return.
Eliminating the "label" is certainly possible - you end up with lots of greedy business managers instead of having them all under one roof. Also, the promotional model changes a bit. Instead of signing on a number of artists with the hope that 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 makes it big, a manager basically says to come back when you have some money to pay. Today, this is how a lot of authors end up. Steven King doesn't have a lot of trouble finding a manager, but if you aren't known you aren't going to get someone to take your book to a publisher. You try yourself and maybe it gets published, maybe not.
Of course, this means that artists that have wads of money to start with can promote their stuff. We have all seen this in other areas, where some rich guy buys a magazine and can publish whatever he wants to. Usually goes bust in a while, but not always. It transforms it into an elitist club that only the wealthy can play at. I'm sure you know of at least one magazine like this.
Now MUDDA could provide promotional services for "their" artists. How does this make them any different from a record label? The big different 50 years ago was the ability to produce and ship records. Now, I am not sure I see the difference at all. Both fulfill the same function.
Then there is the second point. Why do artists need promotion at all? Isn't all this advertising just a waste of time because people will eventually find out about new artists on the Internet?
Yeah. Sure. At some point in the future where the words "digital divide" have passed into history. Important clue - not everybody that buys music is online. More importantly, not everyone is able to be online. For one reason or another, lots of folks don't have a full-time broadband connection at home or office. How do you reach these people? Offline promotion.
A lot of music is bought "on impulse", maybe after hearing it on the radio or playing in a mall. How did that happen? Promotion. Radio stations play what they are paid to play.
So, somebody has to continue to do the promotion of music. If an artist doesn't, their market penetration will be that of Gentoo vs. Windows. Will it be the artist doing that promotion directly? I doubt it very much.
Verizon started there "can you here me" campaign to fend off the bad PR that happened when they got sued by a woman's family after she died. She was in a single-vehicle accident and her Verizon cell phone was in a no-coverage area.
As far as I know, Verizon hasn't changed anything, just their advertising. All of their maps now say that a solid color indicating coverage is not an indication of actual coverage in any specific area.
In Chicago people can't seem to agree who has the worst service. If Cingular is going GSM (rather than the TDMA they have been with), that might be good news for them. But almost universally in Chicago there are significant holes and places where you can get a channel from 2:00 AM to about 4:30 AM and that is it.
I don't see anything other than hype about service and nothing to back it up. When you call any of the companies they know nothing about their service and are often less than forthcoming about rate plans that aren't the special of the week.
What you are going to see is the mobile companies chasing after customers with lower prices. The WalMart of pricing - with the service to match. Since nobody talks about phone SERVICE, the only thing to compete on will be price.
This means we will see lower prices, worse service, worse coverage for rural areas and the big markets will be saturated with low-cost plans.
We might see some hardware consolidation - because only the really big players are going to be able to afford to stay in the game.
The answer for you, and those who believe like you, is to simply not use Adobe products any longer. Better yet, I would suggest you not use any products that use product activation. Refuse to touch computers using Windows and insist that only pirated versions or free software be used in your presence.
Product activation is here because people have consistently decided they would rather not pay for software and wanted to use it anyway. This is the reward for that position.
Can it be cracked? Sure, today. If the piracy continues, you can bet there will be something stronger in place in a few years. How about something keyed to your fingerprint? How about "web services" where you don't get the application, just access to it? Don't like that, huh?
Let me assure you that is the road the pirates, warez d00ds and others have put us on. They want something for nothing and today they have it. Investors, stockholders, and like folks don't like that. In their minds this means that people are using the products without paying. No matter how much the "technical" people whine about impact on customers and how it is all usesless anyway, product activation is here to stay. Subscriptions are coming. Web services are coming.
Don't like it? You have a choice. Refuse to work with "activated" software (seriously career limiting), find a niche where you can use only free software, or get your friends to stop using "free" copies of what should be paid for.
In the 80's after several rounds of copy protection (a completely different sort of thing) nearly all companies backed off. Partly because the world moved on, away from the Apple II where it was generally assumed you could sell two or three copies of anything - it was posted nationwide that fast.
Well, here we are again with 0-day cracks and software purchased with stolen credit cards online. Financial consultants are telling software companies they have to DO SOMETHING about this RIGHT NOW or they are going down the tubes. Product activation is something they can do RIGHT NOW.
The problem isn't casual copying. If you make a copy for a friend, that's advertising. If you post a copy on a web page for 10,000 people to download, that is a problem. The problem they are trying to solve.
If this problem isn't solved, venture capitalists and other investors simply won't consider software a reasonable place to invest. Too little return, too much risk. Funding disappears from software and ends up with biotech. Or something else - anything but software.
This is everybody's problem, because even the largest companies have to show investors they are being responsible with money. Allowing rampant piracy (or theft of software) isn't being responsible. Why would you buy stock in an irresponsible company?
This results in their customers not receiving email. The decision that the sender of that email wasn't legitimate has been removed from the user and the sender and placed in the hands of some anonymous third party.
In general, the ISP answer to blocking complaints is they simply use the list and do not control the content of it. The blocking list provider - if contactable - claims they just make up the list and the use of it is outside of their control. This means nobody is accountable for blocking.
The problem with this sort of censorship - and it is indeed censorship - is the user never hears about it. When a business is blocked they quickly discover that blocking has made email unreliable for communications with customers. They can either abandon email for important stuff or they can try to convince the blockers that their commercial use of email is valid. This is extremely difficult. Why? Spammers use email - if you use email commercially, then you might be a spammer. If you get blocked and claim you were blocked in error, you might be lying. Spammers lie, so anything you say can be considered to be a lie. Why should anyone unblock a spammer?
Either email can be used for commercial purposes, or it cannot. Anti-spam folks want to ban all commercial use of email.
First, you would have to find who pays them. Sometimes, that isn't the only link in the chain and you have to go further through multiple subcontractors. It is a lot more complicated than you think.
Often, there is an advertising company that charges $1500 or so to "advertise" your product for you. They then pay subcontractors to actually send it.
Also, often the company with the product gets told the advertising company's list is 100% opt-in. Then, they turn it over to subs with "send this to your list - any list" and include these email addresses...
Until you make "spam" illegal to send out, you will never stop this. Advertisers absolutely believe they are selling a legal product that there is demand for. And there is - or you wouldn't be getting any spam.
Maybe everyone is anti-spam. Probably even.
The "anti-spam crowd" are those that firmly believe that email is for their personal communications only. Any commercial use violates the terms of how the Internet was created and that is exclusively for the benefit of the user community. After all, the US taxpayers (and Al Gore) created it - it should be free of all commercial interests.
So, if a company sends an email newsletter they are spamming. If it has an advertisement in it, it is evil spam and must be stopped.
What a lot of people have suggested (and some have implemented) is to whitelist their incoming email. If you aren't on the list, they aren't interested.
Unfortunately, that does precisely what the anti-spam crowd wants. It makes email useful for friend-to-friend note-passing and useless for anything else. Why put your email address on a business card when nobody can send you email?
Absolutely, the spammers have to be dealt with. But "whitelisting" all email traffic isn't the solution. Neither is treating any email sent for any commercial purpose as SPAM.
Most of the spam I get comes directly from cable and DSL customers. I think we are going to see some new trends:
- Make $100 by sending a million emails from home.
- This kind of proxy that lets "contractors" use other people's machines.
This is a different kind of bounty for spam.
Needless to say, tape and printer work isn't really all that skilled or high paying.
Console operators are where the skills come in. You need to understand what is happening with the machine and be able to notice things that need attention. Mostly, it isn't doing anything except watching some messages scroll by.
Not much of the "watching" part can be automated because it is all "exception" driven. There is nothing to do until something unexpected happens. Mostly, I agree there is nothing to do. Then a user calls up wondering why the test system is down. They can't restart it (no authorization), so the console operator gets to.
A lot of what is left these days is because mainframe systems have security built in and built around the idea that the "console" and other hardware is physically secure. It isn't that there is a lot to do, but there are things that can only be done there.
You define commercial use as providing services for not-for-profit indivduals web surfing. Fine.
I define commercial use as trying to sell a product on the Internet and communicate with customers. You send one single email to an unconfirmed email address and you can be blocked for days. Do that enough and you are out of business.
I wish the Internet could be a commerce-free zone sometimes. But it is an incredibly easy way to communicate with people and offer products and services to them. However, the spam blockers want to make sure that email cannot be used to send anything that is considered to be "unsolicited". If it has the word "sale" in it, it must be unsolicited - who would ask for something like that from a friend?
You purchase something and we send a confirmation to the email address supplied. If it happens to be a joker that gave us a "spamtrap" address, we're blocked. Don't bother saying it doesn't work that way - we just got unblocked from that happening.
The legal problems come from one simple thing - there is nobody that is responsible. We were blocked (wrongly) a while back by some cowboy with a list. The problem is the list is compiled by anonymous sources and the "list administrator can be *very* difficult to find.
OK, so you find the list administrator. So what? They did not actively "do" anything at all. They did not block your mail. The ISP using the list did. However, the ISP is just using a list that someone else compiled - they cannot change it and are usually extremely reluctant to override it - that might make them responsible.
So, the legal issue is pretty simple once you understand it. We would *love* to sue the people that have wrongly blocked us - we don't spam and the list people that we have just dealt with understand that. But it took four days to get unlisted.
Suing is pointless and any reasonable attorney will tell you that once they understand the situation. You might find someone to take your money for a while if they are sufficiently clueless. But there isn't anybody, anywhere to sue.
The goal of the blockers is to eliminate commercial use of the Internet. If they can't convince you of that, they will just block enough email to make doing business via email impractical. We lost four days of being able to respond to many customers. What would you do if you bought something and didn't get confirmation for four days? I'll tell you our customers are not happy at all and most think we're cheats. Lots of credit card chargebacks coming.
We have to move away from relying on an unreliable communication media (email) just to stay in any form of business at all.
Bitter? Heck yes!
Spam blocking makes email unreliable. The way it is implemented is generally broad-brush and affects a lot more than just blocking some spam.
If you are blocked, you aren't getting off in a reasonable time, at least reasonable for the Internet. It might be reasonable for a 1850's pony express route.
The goal of most spam blockers is to eliminate commercial use of the Internet. This is the only way they can succeed. Any commercial use of the Internet is going to involve some level of what these people claim to be "unsolicited" email. And, once you send that you are a spammer.
Oh, and don't forget. If you claim not to be a spammer and put every effort into not spamming anyone the result is simply that you are lying. You can't prove you don't spam and everyone knows spammers lie. If everything you say is a lie, what is the point of discussing anything?
Yeah, I'm bitter. We got unblocked yesterday. We don't spam, but plenty of customers are wondering why we were silent for four days. Some just want their money back now.
What that means is that we can just sit around and wait until someone else does this - the tools are there. Nobody is doing anything to prevent more attacks. If this guy had shown one little tiny bit of sense he wouldn't have been caught.
As far as "prevention" is concerned, sure - some people are thinking up clever ways to prevent an attack from having major consequences. Great. How about putting some consequences behind doing this sort of thing?
In the 1920's and 1930's after people had enough of the "wild west", bank robberies and mob hits in the US the police found a way to deter such things and it is mostly still working today. Unfortunately, what was required was INCREDIBLY brutal by today's standards. Count the bullet holes in Bonnie and Clyde's car sometime. Is this what it is going to take?
OK, if you are an individual and you want only to get email from people you specifically authorize, fine - spam blocking or whitelisting is going to work for you. But, remember - if you ask for help with a product and they email a reply back to you - you aren't going to get it.
But, if you are a business that is trying to send email to customers, people requesting information and support and so forth, you are going to find there are semi-anonymous third parties blocking your email to these people. People that have requested information or purchased something that you have a business need to communicate with.
Spam blocking has taken on a life of its own. While a lot of the lists are automated in some fashion, there are more that if someone decides your ISP (or netblock provider) is spam-friendly there is no recourse. You aren't sending email to anyone that subscribes to their service. Period. No recourse in many cases. You can always switch netblock providers or just get another T1.
This is absurd on the face of it and is clearly something that people find actionable. This isn't a "solution" or anything of the sort. Spam blocking is an excuse to decommericialize the Internet and there are people that believe it should be that way. "No way you're going to make money on my Internet." According to many of the "operators" of these spam-blocking lists, it is the responsibility of every person to insure the decommercialization of the Internet. Until the Internet is business-free, there will always be ads and spam. This then justifies whatever means there are available for eliminating commercial enterprises from using the Internet.
Oh, and try to find someone to sue - SPEWS is intentionally set up in a fashion so the people behind it are both distributed and anonymous. There are no responsible parties. If no one is responsible, then how can this be reliable in any way? But, more and more organizations and ISP's are subscribing to various lists like this because they think they have a responsibility to protect their customers.
For my company, we are completely unable to use any sort of blocking - we have to answer inquiries from customers no matter where they originate from or what keywords (like "sell" or "credit") might appear in them. Yes, we sell a software product on the Internet. While I would like to de-commercialize the Internet just as much as other people would, sadly someone has not decommercialized housing, food and clothing.
Yes, there is a right way to handle spam - make it cost money. Every other advertising vehicle, from web banners and pop-ups to bulk mail in your mailbox costs money. Spam email doesn't.
The solution today is to let ISP charge for mail being sent out. A very, very tiny amount of money would go a long way to eliminate the problem. Oh, and yes - there needs to be a clear precident that use of an open relay to bounce mail is a theft of service with a minimum $10,000 fine.
Spam is a problem, but I don't think for a moment blocking email is a solution to it.
Finally, after about a week of not being able to respond to tech support inquiries and such we got ahold of the operator and it was fixed.
The impact was fairly limited, but I assure you blocking a business and intefering with their revenue is a very serious business. We were certainlying willing to "go to the mat" over this - because capitulation in any form says you're wrong on some level.