While there is little that can said in favor of spam, the rabid anti-spam crowd is often doing more of a disservice than a service.
My company was recently blocked because of an incorrect identification of an IP address as dialup. This took 7 days to resolve because the person responsible was out of town. So, for seven days we could not send mail to some customers that had purchased our products and could not respond to some tech support inquiries.
Damn right we were going to sue. Not because we couldn't "spam" people, but because the blocking was interfering in our business communications and the "operator" of the "service" that was blocking us was utterly unreachable.
We finally did get it resolved, but it took a while. This might be a way to deal with open relays. It is NOT a way to deal with anything else and it there needs to clear understanding of the potential liabilities to blocking email.
All this talk about search warrants and such is just absurd. What the BSA does is file a lawsuit and then get the Federal Marshals to enforce the discovery provisions of the lawsuit. There aren't any police involved at all.
There isn't any "government" involved in this at all. It is just a lawsuit and your only hope of settling is to pay up. And, since it is an organization of lobbists and lawyers, you're not going to be able to fight it, either.
We better hope they don't succeed in getting this as a criminal penalty (like illegal use of music) or then you will have police coming in to check out your software licenses.
Yes - someone was arrested in Chicago for "illegal use of music". This might have been a copyright violation, but somebody found a way to criminalize it. As long as the BSA just files suit, you can't go to jail - just go broke.
The problem isn't that people are trying to "steal" from MPAA, the DVD Consortium and so forth, but that these people want to have their hands in OUR pockets.
When they decided that we could "buy" products and still have no control over their use, this became silly. Intellectual property is one thing, but how about property rights?
If I buy a book, I can do anything with it, except copy it. If I buy a DVD I can do less than I can with a book. This is progress? Look at where things are going. Will it stop with DVD's? No, it hasn't stopped there already. You can now buy a "music player" that the manufacturer has booby-trapped so that some functionality can be disabled remotely. What???
I just want my physical property to be "mine" and to have control over it. If someone wants to rent me the rights to read a book but no other rights over it, I expect to pay less than I would for buying the book.
As someone that works for the company that would almost certainly be supplying the "map" for this, it is entirely possible and way, way too easy.
The major cost of a navigation system today isn't the computer or the map but the LCD display. Eliminate that and you have a box that you could sell in massive quantities for $200-$400 US. We charge about $150 for the map data CD for a country, but if we knew we were getting a bunch of sales something could probably be done there, too.
This is another intervention of the government into private lives of citizens through the use of technology. While it probably won't kill anyone if it gets done, it certainly doesn't improve anyone's freedom either.
It is much safer for everyone if we have no freedom and the government controls everthing. I think I am willing to give up a little safety (or the perception of it) for some freedom. How about you?
The utility on download.com is CD-R Diagnostic available from CD-ROM Productions. An excellent tool for analyzing, inspecting and recovering data from CD-R and CD-RW media. No, it doesn't analyze your drive, just the media.
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My company was recently blocked because of an incorrect identification of an IP address as dialup. This took 7 days to resolve because the person responsible was out of town. So, for seven days we could not send mail to some customers that had purchased our products and could not respond to some tech support inquiries.
Damn right we were going to sue. Not because we couldn't "spam" people, but because the blocking was interfering in our business communications and the "operator" of the "service" that was blocking us was utterly unreachable.
We finally did get it resolved, but it took a while. This might be a way to deal with open relays. It is NOT a way to deal with anything else and it there needs to clear understanding of the potential liabilities to blocking email.
There isn't any "government" involved in this at all. It is just a lawsuit and your only hope of settling is to pay up. And, since it is an organization of lobbists and lawyers, you're not going to be able to fight it, either.
We better hope they don't succeed in getting this as a criminal penalty (like illegal use of music) or then you will have police coming in to check out your software licenses.
Yes - someone was arrested in Chicago for "illegal use of music". This might have been a copyright violation, but somebody found a way to criminalize it. As long as the BSA just files suit, you can't go to jail - just go broke.
When they decided that we could "buy" products and still have no control over their use, this became silly. Intellectual property is one thing, but how about property rights?
If I buy a book, I can do anything with it, except copy it. If I buy a DVD I can do less than I can with a book. This is progress? Look at where things are going. Will it stop with DVD's? No, it hasn't stopped there already. You can now buy a "music player" that the manufacturer has booby-trapped so that some functionality can be disabled remotely. What???
I just want my physical property to be "mine" and to have control over it. If someone wants to rent me the rights to read a book but no other rights over it, I expect to pay less than I would for buying the book.
The major cost of a navigation system today isn't the computer or the map but the LCD display. Eliminate that and you have a box that you could sell in massive quantities for $200-$400 US. We charge about $150 for the map data CD for a country, but if we knew we were getting a bunch of sales something could probably be done there, too.
This is another intervention of the government into private lives of citizens through the use of technology. While it probably won't kill anyone if it gets done, it certainly doesn't improve anyone's freedom either.
It is much safer for everyone if we have no freedom and the government controls everthing. I think I am willing to give up a little safety (or the perception of it) for some freedom. How about you?
The utility on download.com is CD-R Diagnostic available from CD-ROM Productions. An excellent tool for analyzing, inspecting and recovering data from CD-R and CD-RW media. No, it doesn't analyze your drive, just the media.