"Certainly, a legal requirement that email headers be truthful would create a way to get at spammers, but it would do so at the price of anonymous online speech -- I'm not sure we're at the point yet of having to make that choice."
Having truthful headers doesn't mean throwing out anonymous email speech (online speech is broader than just email). One would have to use a service that offered to send email on a persons behalf. The key difference than the situation today is that I as a recipient would be free to block such email easily. Making the source of an email trustworthy would go a long way towards being able to do that; remember how successful black lists USED to be. I think that it is within the technical realm to accomplish this, I don't feel that legislation is required (or would even work).
The issue with spammers isn't getting them or putting them in jail, the issue is enabling the recipient to easily "throw away" junk in the snail mail tradition, though with email it's "Do not accept from X". I'm not interested in making it more expensive for spammers, I'm interested in being able to process my Inbox and be able to say "Email from spammer@acme.com is not acceptable, do not accept connections from them".
Does postal fraud require a "more complete transaction"? Not that that applies outside the US.
Why is it that there "have to be" laws specific to the internet? If a spammer sends an e-mail using forged headers, why doesn't the law go after him (or her) with good old-fashioned anti-fraud laws? Does the main failing of these kinds of old laws lie in ingorance that makes law enforcement unable or unwilling to enforce the laws without further clarification, or is something else going on here?
Godwin's answer here indicates to me he doesn't understand the implication of email headers that are truthful. If I know whom an email is from, I can easily choose to no longer receive email from said source. The reason SPAM is such a serious problem today it that it is nearly impossible to do that same thing due to falsified headers. It is certainly within the technical realm to address the problem of false headers, the only thing holding us back is agreeing how it should be done.
In the meantime, the powers that be should be using fraud as the tool to prosecute spammers, instead of waiting for new laws.
Registering a domain name is NOT buying property, it is rent! You do NOT own the domain. By registering a domain, you are entering a legal contract with the registrar.
That being said, I think just as folks have the right to privacy, folks as sellers making contracts (ie rental agreements) have the right to CHOOSE to do business only with known individuals. This is important: you're certainly free to do business anonymously, that does not mean anyone should be forced to do business with you anonymously.
I don't know about current machines, but Apple in the past has ordered "standard" parts from manufacturers with customized firmware. SCSI cards and ATI video boards come to mind, not to mention IDE drives.
Just because it looks standard doesn't mean it is.
"cars or refrigerators, which use only between one and two times their weight in fossil fuel"
This begs the question about the use of the other materials. How much water does a manufacturing a car take?
I doubt the veracity of this claim, more and more cars (and frigs for that matter) are including sophisticated electronic equipment approaching the level of a desktop PC.
No PROBLEM with viruses in pine, unless one considers the hundreds of virus-laden email messages one must constantly delete to be a problem. That's why I finally installed a virus scanner on the email gateway, despite the fact that none of the users were on W32. Now all I have to do is remember to clear out the quarantine maildir every once in a while.
Used to use Sophos to scan email coming into a qmail server. Switched to ClamAV a couple of months ago and have never regretted it.
I do think they deserve some support from the community, I'm considering what to do in my workplace. A mirror would be possible but the mirror terms are a little out of the ordinary.
If Microsoft had to provide the code with their "embrace and extend", then they'd lose the prime advantage of "embrace and extend", "nothing else works with it".
It's not a matter of wanting to use their code, it is a matter of preventing them from using others' code to maintain their monopoly.
Interesting, but neither case affects the main thrust of the sensationalism: "Private Child Data on Net, posted by moron".
In both cases, a person made an error in judgement. The relation of that person to their employer does not have an impact on their judgement, IMO; regular employees and consultants are both equally capable of making bad decisions.
Yes, it was bad that the data was posted. That the individual was outsourced is irrelevant.
As much as I feel the outsourcing trend is not a good move, both for my career path and the US industry in general, this 'news' neither adds nor subtracts from the debate.
It would be better titled:
"Idiot makes mistake, exposes private data to Net. Sound thrashing in progress."
gets the grease. I've seen it happen on several occassions where a request is repeated at every opportunity, even though it is continuously shot down by. Eventually either the parties giving the logical BOOM are missing in action or just get tired of saying "No, that's stupid because of XYZ" and fail to prevent the ensuing waste of time.
I would like direct feedback to advertisers. And yes, I'd like the results to follow what happened on the web: advertisers finally figured out few people fall for the ads.
I think the reason ads continue in TV and non-web media is that there is no direct feedback, tracking the effectiveness of a single commercial is nigh impossible. If they could track that, they'd realize how many dollars they're wasting.
My take on vendor lock in is not ideological, it's personal. I've been locked in and I didn't like it one bit. Now I've had a taste of what it means to NOT be locked in and I see no reason to allow lock in again.
To me, proprietary and monopoly are different shades of the same thing. And they both spell "I've got one vendor to deal with, and that's it".
Slashdot Mirror
"Certainly, a legal requirement that email headers be truthful would create a way to get at spammers, but it would do so at the price of anonymous online speech -- I'm not sure we're at the point yet of having to make that choice."
Having truthful headers doesn't mean throwing out anonymous email speech (online speech is broader than just email). One would have to use a service that offered to send email on a persons behalf. The key difference than the situation today is that I as a recipient would be free to block such email easily. Making the source of an email trustworthy would go a long way towards being able to do that; remember how successful black lists USED to be. I think that it is within the technical realm to accomplish this, I don't feel that legislation is required (or would even work).
The issue with spammers isn't getting them or putting them in jail, the issue is enabling the recipient to easily "throw away" junk in the snail mail tradition, though with email it's "Do not accept from X". I'm not interested in making it more expensive for spammers, I'm interested in being able to process my Inbox and be able to say "Email from spammer@acme.com is not acceptable, do not accept connections from them".
Does postal fraud require a "more complete transaction"? Not that that applies outside the US.
Godwin's answer here indicates to me he doesn't understand the implication of email headers that are truthful. If I know whom an email is from, I can easily choose to no longer receive email from said source. The reason SPAM is such a serious problem today it that it is nearly impossible to do that same thing due to falsified headers. It is certainly within the technical realm to address the problem of false headers, the only thing holding us back is agreeing how it should be done.
In the meantime, the powers that be should be using fraud as the tool to prosecute spammers, instead of waiting for new laws.
Registering a domain name is NOT buying property, it is rent! You do NOT own the domain. By registering a domain, you are entering a legal contract with the registrar.
That being said, I think just as folks have the right to privacy, folks as sellers making contracts (ie rental agreements) have the right to CHOOSE to do business only with known individuals. This is important: you're certainly free to do business anonymously, that does not mean anyone should be forced to do business with you anonymously.
I don't know about current machines, but Apple in the past has ordered "standard" parts from manufacturers with customized firmware. SCSI cards and ATI video boards come to mind, not to mention IDE drives.
Just because it looks standard doesn't mean it is.
1. GNU != Open Source
2. OS X != Open Source
"cars or refrigerators, which use only between one and two times their weight in fossil fuel"
This begs the question about the use of the other materials. How much water does a manufacturing a car take?
I doubt the veracity of this claim, more and more cars (and frigs for that matter) are including sophisticated electronic equipment approaching the level of a desktop PC.
No PROBLEM with viruses in pine, unless one considers the hundreds of virus-laden email messages one must constantly delete to be a problem. That's why I finally installed a virus scanner on the email gateway, despite the fact that none of the users were on W32. Now all I have to do is remember to clear out the quarantine maildir every once in a while.
Used to use Sophos to scan email coming into a qmail server. Switched to ClamAV a couple of months ago and have never regretted it.
I do think they deserve some support from the community, I'm considering what to do in my workplace. A mirror would be possible but the mirror terms are a little out of the ordinary.
Spoken like a true AC, you don't know shit about my setup so fuck off.
Why should I, as a DSL user, depend on my ISP's SMTP server?
I don't depend on their nameservers, either. I don't want anything from them except to have my packets passed up the line.
Why? Control. If I only use services I provide, I am responsible when they are broken and I CAN FIX THEM.
Labelling all SMTP servers on DSL lines as spam relays is really over the line.
If Microsoft had to provide the code with their "embrace and extend", then they'd lose the prime advantage of "embrace and extend", "nothing else works with it".
It's not a matter of wanting to use their code, it is a matter of preventing them from using others' code to maintain their monopoly.
Except that the implementation would have been free, as in source, for anyone to examine and incorporate to make their software interoperate.
Yeah, that GPL thing isn't worth much. Right.
Not to mention if a company can't handle picking an outsourced resource, they probably don't do a good job of screening applicants either.
Interesting, but neither case affects the main thrust of the sensationalism: "Private Child Data on Net, posted by moron".
In both cases, a person made an error in judgement. The relation of that person to their employer does not have an impact on their judgement, IMO; regular employees and consultants are both equally capable of making bad decisions.
Yes, it was bad that the data was posted. That the individual was outsourced is irrelevant.
As much as I feel the outsourcing trend is not a good move, both for my career path and the US industry in general, this 'news' neither adds nor subtracts from the debate.
It would be better titled:
"Idiot makes mistake, exposes private data to Net. Sound thrashing in progress."
gets the grease. I've seen it happen on several occassions where a request is repeated at every opportunity, even though it is continuously shot down by. Eventually either the parties giving the logical BOOM are missing in action or just get tired of saying "No, that's stupid because of XYZ" and fail to prevent the ensuing waste of time.
Sad, but true.
When will they learn? Yet another 'law' proposed to clear up that dirty old Internet.
Congress, please read: THE INTERNET EXTENDS WAY BEYOND US BORDERS.
Many scams are perpetrated from sites OUTSIDE the US, how do you think your proposed law helps?
Please stop bowing to the corporate masters!
Yes, I am a Citizen of the United States.
Well, he is ONLY four. :)
I bought Loderunner for the PS1 at a bargain bin. I originally played that on Ye Olde Apple ][ many moons ago, love this game!
Here's the scary part: My four year old son loves Loderunner, I'd say he plays it as much as Crash Team Racing.
The point: Good games are just that, no matter what their age.
And I expect my PSone system to die way before the game discs do, based on the number of dead CDROM drives I've seen over the years.
I would like direct feedback to advertisers. And yes, I'd like the results to follow what happened on the web: advertisers finally figured out few people fall for the ads.
:)
I think the reason ads continue in TV and non-web media is that there is no direct feedback, tracking the effectiveness of a single commercial is nigh impossible. If they could track that, they'd realize how many dollars they're wasting.
Or so one would like to think.
You run debian unstable and were suprised when it broke? You do understand what UNSTABLE means?!?
I would never consider running unstable for a serious server.
I like Gentoo on the desktop, but not for a "must be up and secure 24/7/365" server.
Portage works fine until it doesn't. Certain steps are being made to improve portage, especially in the security area.
Like I said, Gentoo is great but not quite ready yet. Another year and it may be.
I've considered Progeny and may make use of them. However, they are a stop gap as there is no path forward (kernel 2.6 and so on).
However, $5/machine/year is fine. RHEL is $179/machine/year. And that's really workstation, not intended by Redhat for server use.
Perhaps I should have stated more clearly I was talking SERVERS, not desktop.
My take on vendor lock in is not ideological, it's personal. I've been locked in and I didn't like it one bit. Now I've had a taste of what it means to NOT be locked in and I see no reason to allow lock in again.
To me, proprietary and monopoly are different shades of the same thing. And they both spell "I've got one vendor to deal with, and that's it".
Oh, if vendor lockin doesn't matter to you, good for you!
It certainly matters to me and a lot of other folks.