I am looking at an astonishing sight. I visited MSN.com with Netscape 4.7x on Solaris/SPARC. What I got, is difficult to believe. I get a clean, text-only page. The fonts are the browser default, not a CSS-tweaked GIANT font that makes me feel like I'm in kindergarten. The graphics are minimal. The site is far more useable than before. I even have the old-school grey background, not white.;)
I also visited MSN.com using IE5.5/Win2K through a proxy that hides my User-Agent: header. In this case, I got the page you mentioned. So, no User-Agent -> browser upgrade. User-Agent indicating "foreign" platform -> text-only version. I confirmed this by specifying the Netscape/Solaris User-Agent on the Lynx command line (got the minimal graphics version).
Strangely enough, if I use Lynx (x86 Linux) directly, I get the browser-upgrade page.
All I seem to need, then, to get MSN the way I'd want it, is tofind a new proxy that can make IE pretend to be Netscape on Solaris, so I can escape the ActiveX/OLE/Javascript hell MSN has prepared for their captives. Oh rats, the rest of the site doesn't work this way... only the home page is available in a minimal version, it seems.
Of course, just like the workers at the CDC, I employ protective gear such as cookie and javascript filters when visiting hostile territory known to be infected. So don't worry. MSN failed to set me a cookie. I'll be just fine.:)
In order to reach popularity, the url for a site has to be really short.
Bullshit. On the contrary, your way of thinking LEADS to fucked companies. Short domain names have nothing to do with success. Flooz.com? eToys.com? VALinux.com? Need I go on?
Moral is:
get a REALLY short domain name, and deliver a good product and people will come. Fail on any of these 2 requirements, and you're a fucked company.
Wrong. Simply wrong. The aftermath of the internet bubble is littered with the carcasses of companies with excellent product, short easy name, high visibility and well-known among the public, and a fucked up business plan. Netscape comes immediately to mind....
An "open monopoly"? Come on. This is gobbledy-gook, senseless babbling.
They say Microsoft is threatened by open source because they are the current proprietary software monopoly. But MSFT's competitors - who are not the monopoly - are alleged to understand that "...in the end, there will be a monopoly again. The one-winner principle still applies. To them, the world will not change greatly whether open-source or proprietary software is running the world's computers. The end result will still be decreasing average costs, and the same barriers to entering the market will still apply."
But then they go on in the next paragraph and negate the previous paragraph's thesis: "What is different, however, is that in an open-source monopoly the barriers to participation and influence will disappear. This will be a different kind of monopoly... from which no vendor can be excluded from participating, including the big companies now joining the open-source movement."
Well then, where is the monopoly? Where is the "one winner"? Maybe programmers should stay away from logic, too.:)
Without the gov't "policing" us, it would be anarchy. And how does that help anyone? Law enforcement is just that.. it ENFORCES THE LAW. WITHOUT LAW THERE IS ANARCHY. The Supreme Court does it's job just fine. We may not always like a particular decision, but nonetheless it does it's job as it's supposed to
That's a pretty amazing statement. Your position is, as best I can tell, that as long as the Supreme Court is making decisions, the system - as far as the SC is concerned - is working properly. Never mind what the content of those decisions are. I can only think that you come to this conclusion by reasoning that, since the decisions of the Supreme Court are by definition definitive, questioning those decisions is pointless, since they are the final word regardless.
Your logic goes even more astray when you say:
The FBI tends to have more sofisticated testing techniques than most local police departments (those that aren't in major cities). For instance, the FBI runs programs to do research on decaying bodies and such (forensics). This research is provided to the police departments locally.
None of which implies that the FBI needs to have law enforcement authority. If the FBI is to offer this kind of expertise, they can do so and still leave the law enforcement to the police. Or, the police can take advantage of this expertise by hiring contractors, so the FBI is not even strictly required to exist to satisfy this need.
The FBI also hires psychologists, medical doctors, historians, etc... they are true professionals... a lot with masters and doctorates in their fields.
The police can hire the same professionals, and I expect would actually do so if the FBI did not exist.
Sergant Joe Shmoe ain't going to be able to figure out what a FBI agent with a doctorate in chemical biology can.
Not a very high opinion of police you have there. It never occured to you that maybe Sgt. Joe might realize that he needs to hire a biologist?
The FBI just has a lot of resources it can use and can request such things as tests of different stuff from the CDC and get FEMA involved if need be. No local police department can do that.
So, you are arguing that because FEMA and the CDC are unresponsive to requests from the police, we should empower a "uber" police department that FEMA and the CDC would respect. That's a very interesting suggestion.
I suggest that we instead rebuke FEMA and the CDC for making themselves so distant from the citizenry that they are supposed to serve, and that we take steps to make sure that they are responsive to the people of the nation who fund their existence.
IANAL, but this one won't hold up in court for a number of reasons, mostly it's a violation against the 4th Amendment -illegal search and seizure of private property.
"Enhancing the security of the internet" means "making it impossible to share mp3 files". Security has nothing to do with it, obviously, since the RIAA still needs to be able to hack into your computer to find out if they need to call the cops and have you arrested.
So who was the lobbyist in your classroom? Who was passing out the bribes^Wcampaign contributions? Who was doing the glad-handing in the Capitol foyer?
So, when the IBM or Hitachi mainframe blows a disk controller, I guess the entire business system that has been running for twenty years on the big machine in the glass-walled room, will have to be dismantled and replaced with an approved MS BackOffice solution running on certified PC hardware. IBM will be prohibited from selling a replacement part, yes?
Yeah. Right.
Then think of all the old government systems that would have to be upgrade to comply. But they'll probably exempt the government, like they always do.
The people responding to you seem to miss the irony of your comment.
Broad and dangerous legislation was just passed. It's called the USA Act, and it allows the police to hold people indefinitely without filing any charges, among other "broad and dangerous" things. If you think that the USA Act is not broad and dangerous, then maybe you deserve the SSSCA.
I don't understand what you mean by a "spam-friendly bank" or a "spam-friendly legal firm": you can't send spam through a bank or a legal firm, so it wouldn't make sense to bounce e-mail coming through one.
I'm glad you asked that question, because in fact, mail server addresses belonging to people who have no connection with spam, are in the RBL. They were unlucky enough to be the credit card company picked by a spammer to handle online transactions. Or perhaps they rented office space to a spammer. You really ought to go look at the archives for the rbl-nominate mailing list, and see what is being discussed there. Many of the MAPS contributors are seeking to cause deliberate collateral damage to people who never sent any spam, but who happen to be a spammer's banker, or provide some other business service to a spammer.
I said:
Did you know that IP blocks that have been on the RBL in the past, but have been long removed, are still largely useless because of ISPs that once upon a time installed local blocking rules based on RBL information, and never bothered to keep those rules up to date.
Then you said:
How is this MAPS fault? Any ISP that does this should know better.. Would it be a problem if I ran an ISP and blocked IPs on my own?
I never said it was MAPS fault. I never said ISPs couldn't block whatever they wanted to. I was responding your statement:
You said:
It is clear to me that if ISPs did not agree with MAPS' policies on what to block and with its history of questionable bans, then those ISPs wouldn't subscribe to MAPS.
My point was that there are ISPs that supposedly agreed with MAPS policies - that sites who clean up their act should get removed from the blacklist - but did not remove cleaned up sites from the backlist. Therefore, they did not, in fact, agree with MAPS policies, yet they used MAPS.
This is one of the reasons why MAPS began several years ago requiring a signed agreement for any AXFR or BGP access. People were keeping stale MAPS data active, contrary to MAPS goals. This was hurting MAPS, and still does.
I said:
The answer to this problem really has to be the oft-repeated "JUST HIT DELETE".
You said:
You've got to be joking.. this is a joke, right?
No, it's just shorthand for saying only the recipient is able to judge what is and is not spam, precisely because it is his inbox that it's sitting in, and his decision as to whether it is annoying or interesting. It is shorthand for "use filters".
Should an ISP filter its HTTP proxy to block sites that use pop-up ads? Hmmmm.... a lot of people are annoyed by those, and downloading them costs bandwidth, money, staff time to help hapless customers who call up with foistware removal problems, you name it.
So should they? What is the difference, really?
I need not point out that you can save a whole lot more money by doing the Sprint ION thing. Just don't take customers, if you aren't capable of running a customer service business efficiently.
But I understand that any time I receive any piece of unsolicited email it is because *I* supplied my email address to the spammer...
Oh boy, you caught shit for that. Nevertheless, you're right. I have two email addresses, one I want to use, and one that I do use. The one I want to use was ruined years ago by posting to Usenet with it, before there was a spam problem. Thanks to Google, that email address is permanently findable on the web, and may never be useable again.
However, my other email address gets no spam at all. I do not use it to post to Usenet. I do not use it to sign up for anything. I do not subscribe to public mailing lists with it, especially if there is an archive for that mailing list that is web-accessible. Friends get to know it, family gets to know it, and many other correspondents get to know it.
The second address gets no spam.
Only popular domains that everyone KNOWS host millions of email accounts, get probed with a dictionary list. Only giant mail domains are worth probing this way. The solution to dictionary spam, then, is LOTS OF DOMAINS, preferably several for each person. Do you hear me ICANN? (no, but.. whatever)
Free speech for everyone is all very well, but the galling thing is that most spam is *deceptive*, using falsified return information or deliberately implicating other innocent third parties.
Canter & Siegel, perhaps the most notorious Usenet spammers, did not hide their identity until people began attacking them directly. Spammers did not go underground until the anti-spam community decided to attach a cost to playing out in the open. Spam was easy to block before the anti-spam crowd raised the stakes and sent the spammers off to devise ways to make their messages evade detection.
Of course, after five or six years of escalation, it is hard to tell what has affected what, or how effective current measures are, relative to the past.
The EFF, like many other groups, is incorrectly stating that MAPS is the organization doing the actual blocking of packets, not the ISPs. It is clear to me that if ISPs did not agree with MAPS' policies on what to block and with its history of questionable bans, then those ISPs wouldn't subscribe to MAPS.
That is not clear to me at all. Did you know that IP blocks that have been on the RBL in the past, but have been long removed, are still largely useless because of ISPs that once upon a time installed local blocking rules based on RBL information, and never bothered to keep those rules up to date. MAPS policies state that once a mail site has cleaned up its act, it is to be removed from the RBL. So much for agreeing with policies.
(correct me if I'm wrong, but censorship applies only to gov'ts)
You're wrong. Censorship is denying another person the right or ability to speak their mind, regardless of who does it. In any case, censorship by governments is practiced all over the world, and is legal to varying degrees in most places, including the USA. Official censorship is regarded with the highest degree of suspicion, and the US public is afforded the greatest degree of protection from it by the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution. However, the government can still legally censor speech of private citizens in certain circumstances, such as when national security requires it. Why? Because other parts of the Constitution are just as important as the 1st Amendment, and also have to be respected.
As for legislation, illegal censorship prevents speech based on CONTENT. Legal restraint of speech, such as junk fax laws, prevents speech based on the METHOD of the speech.
The only problem with this line of reasoning, is that you cannot determine if something is spam without examining the CONTENT, whatever the method of transmission, be it fax or email.
Junk fax laws are on their face, prior restraint of speech. The lawmakers knew this, and so did the supporters of those laws. That's not to say they are a bad idea, but only that they impose prior restraint on speech (if they didn't they wouldn't be very effective!;). There's a balancing act that must be performed here, so that the 1st amendment is treaded upon as lightly as possible, while still addressing the problem. The legislators of anti-junk-fax laws decided that the costs of receiving the junk faxes was unfairly being borne mostly by the recipients, who have to pay for their paper and ink. But phone solicitation is not illegal because it uses no more resources than the recipient was already going to expend on having incoming phone service in the first place.
There's a similar significant difference between a junk fax and junk email, as there is betweeen junk faxes and phone solicitations. Most email users do not pay extra for incoming emails, especially in the US. They would pay the same amount for their internet service, whether they receive no spam, or thousands per month. This cost/benefit analysis MUST be part of any anti-spam legislation, just as it was for the anti-junk-fax legislation.
I believe the costs of prior restraint on email communications are much higher than the cost of leaving spam legal. The answer to this problem really has to be the oft-repeated "JUST HIT DELETE".
Even Canter & Siegel declined to fly an airplane into a building to get attention.
Get a little perspective, please.
They prevent me from using email like I
want to,...
The SMTP protocol prevents me from using email like I want to, for gods' sakes.
IP blocks that allow spam are like countries which sponsor turn a blind
eye to terrorism. If they refuse to stop their spammers, then their
citizens must suffer by not being able to send email.
If you're using an ISP that has been blocked due to allowing spam (or not helping to find the individuals who spam using the service), you can switch to another ISP that hasn't been blocked. You cannot use a spam-friendly ISP and expect to be able to send messages to users at other ISPs.
You cannot use a spam-friendly telephone company, and expect to be able to make phone calls to customers of other telephone companies.
You cannot use a spam-friendly bank, and expect to be able to wire money to customers of other banks.
You cannot use a spam-friendly legal firm, and expect to be able to sue clients of other legal firms.
90% of the spam could be eliminated by blocking port 25 access for individual (read "non-business") accounts.
90% of IIS worm incidents could be eliminated by blocking port 80 access for non-business accounts. You objected later in your post to the port 80 blocking. Why is port 25 any different?
If users were forced to go through their ISP's SMTP server, the ISPs would be able to quickly detect and shut down spammers. The spam-spew programs would not work as they would not be able to directly connect to their victims' SMTP servers.
They'd just use an open SSL proxy to tunnel through. CONNECT victim.host.com:25 HTTP/1.1. Boom, you're in. And the spam didn't even come from your ISP's netblock.
Slashdot Mirror
...it unlocks the full power of the PC and enables them to enjoy the best of what the digital world has to offer.
Didn't they say the same thing about Win9x?
When will my PC's potential be fully unlocked?
I am looking at an astonishing sight. I visited MSN.com with Netscape 4.7x on Solaris/SPARC. What I got, is difficult to believe. I get a clean, text-only page. The fonts are the browser default, not a CSS-tweaked GIANT font that makes me feel like I'm in kindergarten. The graphics are minimal. The site is far more useable than before. I even have the old-school grey background, not white. ;)
:)
I also visited MSN.com using IE5.5/Win2K through a proxy that hides my User-Agent: header. In this case, I got the page you mentioned. So, no User-Agent -> browser upgrade. User-Agent indicating "foreign" platform -> text-only version. I confirmed this by specifying the Netscape/Solaris User-Agent on the Lynx command line (got the minimal graphics version).
Strangely enough, if I use Lynx (x86 Linux) directly, I get the browser-upgrade page.
All I seem to need, then, to get MSN the way I'd want it, is tofind a new proxy that can make IE pretend to be Netscape on Solaris, so I can escape the ActiveX/OLE/Javascript hell MSN has prepared for their captives. Oh rats, the rest of the site doesn't work this way... only the home page is available in a minimal version, it seems.
Of course, just like the workers at the CDC, I employ protective gear such as cookie and javascript filters when visiting hostile territory known to be infected. So don't worry. MSN failed to set me a cookie. I'll be just fine.
As it is, M$ doesn't even need to respond, its 100% grade-A FUD.
Sauce, for the goose.
Whoever is modding the parent as flamebait, needs to have their irony detector serviced.
.....(Imagine if todays Mozilla would have been around when IE4 was new....)
Few people could afford 256Mb memory in 1996.
In order to reach popularity, the url for a site has to be really short.
Bullshit. On the contrary, your way of thinking LEADS to fucked companies. Short domain names have nothing to do with success. Flooz.com? eToys.com? VALinux.com? Need I go on?
Moral is:
get a REALLY short domain name, and deliver a good product and people will come. Fail on any of these 2 requirements, and you're a fucked company.
Wrong. Simply wrong. The aftermath of the internet bubble is littered with the carcasses of companies with excellent product, short easy name, high visibility and well-known among the public, and a fucked up business plan. Netscape comes immediately to mind....
And economists should stick to economics.
... from which no vendor can be excluded from participating, including the big companies now joining the open-source movement."
:)
An "open monopoly"? Come on. This is gobbledy-gook, senseless babbling.
They say Microsoft is threatened by open source because they are the current proprietary software monopoly. But MSFT's competitors - who are not the monopoly - are alleged to understand that "...in the end, there will be a monopoly again. The one-winner principle still applies. To them, the world will not change greatly whether open-source or proprietary software is running the world's computers. The end result will still be decreasing average costs, and the same barriers to entering the market will still apply."
But then they go on in the next paragraph and negate the previous paragraph's thesis: "What is different, however, is that in an open-source monopoly the barriers to participation and influence will disappear. This will be a different kind of monopoly
Well then, where is the monopoly? Where is the "one winner"? Maybe programmers should stay away from logic, too.
Without the gov't "policing" us, it would be anarchy. And how does that help anyone? Law enforcement is just that.. it ENFORCES THE LAW. WITHOUT LAW THERE IS ANARCHY. The Supreme Court does it's job just fine. We may not always like a particular decision, but nonetheless it does it's job as it's supposed to
That's a pretty amazing statement. Your position is, as best I can tell, that as long as the Supreme Court is making decisions, the system - as far as the SC is concerned - is working properly. Never mind what the content of those decisions are. I can only think that you come to this conclusion by reasoning that, since the decisions of the Supreme Court are by definition definitive, questioning those decisions is pointless, since they are the final word regardless.
Your logic goes even more astray when you say:
The FBI tends to have more sofisticated testing techniques than most local police departments (those that aren't in major cities). For instance, the FBI runs programs to do research on decaying bodies and such (forensics). This research is provided to the police departments locally.
None of which implies that the FBI needs to have law enforcement authority. If the FBI is to offer this kind of expertise, they can do so and still leave the law enforcement to the police. Or, the police can take advantage of this expertise by hiring contractors, so the FBI is not even strictly required to exist to satisfy this need.
The FBI also hires psychologists, medical doctors, historians, etc... they are true professionals... a lot with masters and doctorates in their fields.
The police can hire the same professionals, and I expect would actually do so if the FBI did not exist.
Sergant Joe Shmoe ain't going to be able to figure out what a FBI agent with a doctorate in chemical biology can.
Not a very high opinion of police you have there. It never occured to you that maybe Sgt. Joe might realize that he needs to hire a biologist?
The FBI just has a lot of resources it can use and can request such things as tests of different stuff from the CDC and get FEMA involved if need be. No local police department can do that.
So, you are arguing that because FEMA and the CDC are unresponsive to requests from the police, we should empower a "uber" police department that FEMA and the CDC would respect. That's a very interesting suggestion.
I suggest that we instead rebuke FEMA and the CDC for making themselves so distant from the citizenry that they are supposed to serve, and that we take steps to make sure that they are responsive to the people of the nation who fund their existence.
IANAL, but this one won't hold up in court for a number of reasons, mostly it's a violation against the 4th Amendment -illegal search and seizure of private property.
Who says it will ever go to court?
...with a bunch of people who've been waiting in line for over a month? They'll absolutely reek.
"Enhancing the security of the internet" means "making it impossible to share mp3 files". Security has nothing to do with it, obviously, since the RIAA still needs to be able to hack into your computer to find out if they need to call the cops and have you arrested.
Sarcasm can be pretty sarcastic, don't you think?
In a way, Congress is a lot like my class.
So who was the lobbyist in your classroom? Who was passing out the bribes^Wcampaign contributions? Who was doing the glad-handing in the Capitol foyer?
So, when the IBM or Hitachi mainframe blows a disk controller, I guess the entire business system that has been running for twenty years on the big machine in the glass-walled room, will have to be dismantled and replaced with an approved MS BackOffice solution running on certified PC hardware. IBM will be prohibited from selling a replacement part, yes?
Yeah. Right.
Then think of all the old government systems that would have to be upgrade to comply. But they'll probably exempt the government, like they always do.
The people responding to you seem to miss the irony of your comment.
Broad and dangerous legislation was just passed. It's called the USA Act, and it allows the police to hold people indefinitely without filing any charges, among other "broad and dangerous" things. If you think that the USA Act is not broad and dangerous, then maybe you deserve the SSSCA.
WinXP already has produced a colossal hole... in your wallet. Bwahahahaahahaha!!!!!!!!!!
Spam filtering saves recipient ISPs millions of dollars a year in hardware and network costs.
Reference, please? Sounds reasonable, but that is not enough. Do you know of a study that has been done?
I don't understand what you mean by a "spam-friendly bank" or a "spam-friendly legal firm": you can't send spam through a bank or a legal firm, so it wouldn't make sense to bounce e-mail coming through one.
I'm glad you asked that question, because in fact, mail server addresses belonging to people who have no connection with spam, are in the RBL. They were unlucky enough to be the credit card company picked by a spammer to handle online transactions. Or perhaps they rented office space to a spammer. You really ought to go look at the archives for the rbl-nominate mailing list, and see what is being discussed there. Many of the MAPS contributors are seeking to cause deliberate collateral damage to people who never sent any spam, but who happen to be a spammer's banker, or provide some other business service to a spammer.
I said:
Did you know that IP blocks that have been on the RBL in the past, but have been long removed, are still largely useless because of ISPs that once upon a time installed local blocking rules based on RBL information, and never bothered to keep those rules up to date.
Then you said:
How is this MAPS fault? Any ISP that does this should know better.. Would it be a problem if I ran an ISP and blocked IPs on my own?
I never said it was MAPS fault. I never said ISPs couldn't block whatever they wanted to. I was responding your statement:
You said:
It is clear to me that if ISPs did not agree with MAPS' policies on what to block and with its history of questionable bans, then those ISPs wouldn't subscribe to MAPS.
My point was that there are ISPs that supposedly agreed with MAPS policies - that sites who clean up their act should get removed from the blacklist - but did not remove cleaned up sites from the backlist. Therefore, they did not, in fact, agree with MAPS policies, yet they used MAPS.
This is one of the reasons why MAPS began several years ago requiring a signed agreement for any AXFR or BGP access. People were keeping stale MAPS data active, contrary to MAPS goals. This was hurting MAPS, and still does.
I said:
The answer to this problem really has to be the oft-repeated "JUST HIT DELETE".
You said:
You've got to be joking.. this is a joke, right?
No, it's just shorthand for saying only the recipient is able to judge what is and is not spam, precisely because it is his inbox that it's sitting in, and his decision as to whether it is annoying or interesting. It is shorthand for "use filters".
Should an ISP filter its HTTP proxy to block sites that use pop-up ads? Hmmmm.... a lot of people are annoyed by those, and downloading them costs bandwidth, money, staff time to help hapless customers who call up with foistware removal problems, you name it.
So should they? What is the difference, really?
I need not point out that you can save a whole lot more money by doing the Sprint ION thing. Just don't take customers, if you aren't capable of running a customer service business efficiently.
But I understand that any time I receive any piece of unsolicited email it is because *I* supplied my email address to the spammer ...
Oh boy, you caught shit for that. Nevertheless, you're right. I have two email addresses, one I want to use, and one that I do use. The one I want to use was ruined years ago by posting to Usenet with it, before there was a spam problem. Thanks to Google, that email address is permanently findable on the web, and may never be useable again.
However, my other email address gets no spam at all. I do not use it to post to Usenet. I do not use it to sign up for anything. I do not subscribe to public mailing lists with it, especially if there is an archive for that mailing list that is web-accessible. Friends get to know it, family gets to know it, and many other correspondents get to know it.
The second address gets no spam.
Only popular domains that everyone KNOWS host millions of email accounts, get probed with a dictionary list. Only giant mail domains are worth probing this way. The solution to dictionary spam, then, is LOTS OF DOMAINS, preferably several for each person. Do you hear me ICANN? (no, but.. whatever)
Free speech for everyone is all very well, but the galling thing is that most spam is *deceptive*, using falsified return information or deliberately implicating other innocent third parties.
Canter & Siegel, perhaps the most notorious Usenet spammers, did not hide their identity until people began attacking them directly. Spammers did not go underground until the anti-spam community decided to attach a cost to playing out in the open. Spam was easy to block before the anti-spam crowd raised the stakes and sent the spammers off to devise ways to make their messages evade detection.
Of course, after five or six years of escalation, it is hard to tell what has affected what, or how effective current measures are, relative to the past.
The EFF, like many other groups, is incorrectly stating that MAPS is the organization doing the actual blocking of packets, not the ISPs. It is clear to me that if ISPs did not agree with MAPS' policies on what to block and with its history of questionable bans, then those ISPs wouldn't subscribe to MAPS.
;). There's a balancing act that must be performed here, so that the 1st amendment is treaded upon as lightly as possible, while still addressing the problem. The legislators of anti-junk-fax laws decided that the costs of receiving the junk faxes was unfairly being borne mostly by the recipients, who have to pay for their paper and ink. But phone solicitation is not illegal because it uses no more resources than the recipient was already going to expend on having incoming phone service in the first place.
That is not clear to me at all. Did you know that IP blocks that have been on the RBL in the past, but have been long removed, are still largely useless because of ISPs that once upon a time installed local blocking rules based on RBL information, and never bothered to keep those rules up to date. MAPS policies state that once a mail site has cleaned up its act, it is to be removed from the RBL. So much for agreeing with policies.
(correct me if I'm wrong, but censorship applies only to gov'ts)
You're wrong. Censorship is denying another person the right or ability to speak their mind, regardless of who does it. In any case, censorship by governments is practiced all over the world, and is legal to varying degrees in most places, including the USA. Official censorship is regarded with the highest degree of suspicion, and the US public is afforded the greatest degree of protection from it by the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution. However, the government can still legally censor speech of private citizens in certain circumstances, such as when national security requires it. Why? Because other parts of the Constitution are just as important as the 1st Amendment, and also have to be respected.
As for legislation, illegal censorship prevents speech based on CONTENT. Legal restraint of speech, such as junk fax laws, prevents speech based on the METHOD of the speech.
The only problem with this line of reasoning, is that you cannot determine if something is spam without examining the CONTENT, whatever the method of transmission, be it fax or email.
Junk fax laws are on their face, prior restraint of speech. The lawmakers knew this, and so did the supporters of those laws. That's not to say they are a bad idea, but only that they impose prior restraint on speech (if they didn't they wouldn't be very effective!
There's a similar significant difference between a junk fax and junk email, as there is betweeen junk faxes and phone solicitations. Most email users do not pay extra for incoming emails, especially in the US. They would pay the same amount for their internet service, whether they receive no spam, or thousands per month. This cost/benefit analysis MUST be part of any anti-spam legislation, just as it was for the anti-junk-fax legislation.
I believe the costs of prior restraint on email communications are much higher than the cost of leaving spam legal. The answer to this problem really has to be the oft-repeated "JUST HIT DELETE".
Spammers are like terrorists.
...
Even Canter & Siegel declined to fly an airplane into a building to get attention.
Get a little perspective, please.
They prevent me from using email like I
want to,
The SMTP protocol prevents me from using email like I want to, for gods' sakes.
IP blocks that allow spam are like countries which sponsor turn a blind
eye to terrorism. If they refuse to stop their spammers, then their
citizens must suffer by not being able to send email.
Oh please. Grow up.
If you're using an ISP that has been blocked due to allowing spam (or not helping to find the individuals who spam using the service), you can switch to another ISP that hasn't been blocked. You cannot use a spam-friendly ISP and expect to be able to send messages to users at other ISPs.
You cannot use a spam-friendly telephone company, and expect to be able to make phone calls to customers of other telephone companies.
You cannot use a spam-friendly bank, and expect to be able to wire money to customers of other banks.
You cannot use a spam-friendly legal firm, and expect to be able to sue clients of other legal firms.
Need I go on?
90% of the spam could be eliminated by blocking port 25 access for individual (read "non-business") accounts.
90% of IIS worm incidents could be eliminated by blocking port 80 access for non-business accounts. You objected later in your post to the port 80 blocking. Why is port 25 any different?
If users were forced to go through their ISP's SMTP server, the ISPs would be able to quickly detect and shut down spammers. The spam-spew programs would not work as they would not be able to directly connect to their victims' SMTP servers.
They'd just use an open SSL proxy to tunnel through. CONNECT victim.host.com:25 HTTP/1.1. Boom, you're in. And the spam didn't even come from your ISP's netblock.