Thank you for a an informative and insightful opinion. The actions of the RIAA stir a lot of emotions -- ranging from distaste to profound hatred -- and it's refreshing to read an opinion based around facts instead of emotions. Trying to understand the "real" situation is important to me and your write-up helped with that understanding.
I wasn't confusing any part of the transaction frankly. Yes, the server knows who that message was supposed to be sent to and it knows the server that is attempting to send it. What it doesn't know is who else will be receiving the message.
It's easy to ensure that there's nothing of value in the message itself, header or body. Yes the server knows for sure who that one copy is going to. That's not a lot of information in a system which is supposed to correlate between a large number of recipients.
If the spammer stupidly puts the recipient list in the message, or asks the SMTP server to deliver the message to multiple recipients then the algorithm might have something to go on.
My point though is that it's easy to avoid revealing that information, leaving the server with the only option of comparing all messages and trying to match them up by similarity. A daunting task for a large busy mail server.
> How exactly is a message supposed to get somewhere if it doesn't have the recipient info?
The recipient info is provided separately to the SMTP server during the message transaction using the 'RCPT TO' command. The message itself doesn't need to contain any information about the recipient, just like when you send a bcc or receive a spam which doesn't appear to be addressed to you at all. My original statement was simply that the spammers don't need to include recipient info in the message itself.
The main problem I can see is that even if this system works it is easily circumvented. The big assumption is that you can identify the recipients of a particular message, but spammers can easily ensure that information isn't easily obtained.
First they can ensure that the message itself doesn't contain any recipient info (a big bcc basically).
Then they avoid batching recipients based on their domain so he SMTP server can't tell who else is receiving the message.
The only way to derive the recipients now is to compare all messages against all others in order to match them up. So they hash every message and combine those with identical hashes.
But putting a little unique text in each message during transmission foils that.
I know you guys are right and all, but this is more of a fun factoid than some sort of scientific claim. Yeah, the sun is bigger, and has magnetic fields and winds and has tons more mass and everything, but as an amateur astronomer (very amateur), I still find it fascinating just how large the thing has become since exploding only a few weeks ago. That it's larger than the "visible" sun is, to me, just wild -- even if it is nothing but a huge bubble with very little substance.
> But some lawmakers think it is a hassle to expect people to re-register their phone numbers every five years
I'd like to know who seriously thinks re-registering every five years is a hassle. I registered five years ago and I'll renew the registration before it expires soon. Big f**king deal. I saw this story several weeks ago with a similar sensational headline which implies the whole system will auto-destruct soon. Both times I felt misled by the reporters, not by the governments list.
This is not news. This is not funny. This is not even mildly interesting. Check the Firehose again editors -- there must be a few tidbits in there that don't go against your personal beliefs and would make better stories to put up front than this lame pos.
Hey now, that kind of rational thinking will get you thrown out of the party! The ticket to entry here is an overblown opinion based entirely on data you've imagined using only a headline as your guide.
I agree completely, that's not your responsibility. I also agree that if someone changes the site out from underneath a link you provided that's not your responsibility either. My only point is that, as far as LiveJournal is concerned, you're the one who is going to have to explain it to the cops if they come. That's all their policy is saying. Not guilt, not your fault, just you're the one who's going to have to work it out with the authorities, not them.
As far as whether linking to any content whatsoever should ever be illegal, well that's another issue and is outside the scope of this article and LiveJournals policy. That's an issue between citizens and their governments. My point was never to try to define *that* boundary.
If you really believe that the sorts of sites you're likely to link to are the sort that might land you in trouble with the law, I wouldn't blame you for not wanting to link to them. Hell, I wouldn't link to them either.
But if you're seriously worried that somehow an old link will come back to haunt you, remember that things like records of domain ownership changes, your dated journal entries, cached copies of the web, etc. would all clearly show what happened. All this concern about some nightmare scenario seems way overblown.
By the way, you must realize that if a cached copy somewhere could be used to implicate you, then a cached copy would also exonerate you as well since there would be copies of the original site that you actually linked to as well.
Why do you have to erase caches? LiveJournal would just want the links off of their own site, which you can easily comply with. This issue isn't about you being responsible for your links existence in history, it's about you being responsible for the present.
Yeah, but the legal system isn't actually blind, they do actually look at context. If your link is surrounded by text that says stuff like "My wife and I just had our baby and we found the cutest site! Check it out at www.cutebabies.com. Be sure to check out page 3 where you can find pictures of our little Jessica-Amber -- it's under the Oh-no-she-didn't! category!", then I bet the judge, hell even the cops will probably think "WTF? Does this guy know what's on that site?" and LJ will simply ask you to remove the link and threaten you with suspension or cancellation if you don't. And, given the scenario you described, I bet you'd be more than happy to take down a link like that.
For those who prefer their reading material in story form, here's another way of looking at it:
EvilKenny72: Hey Sheryl69, I made a cool site, link to it in your blog!
Sheryl69: Ok strange person, I like friends!
EvilKenny72 changes his site to an illegal movie download site
LiveJournal: Sheryl69, we have complaints that you are providing a link to an illegal download site. If you don't remove the link immediately your account will be terminated. Thank you for using LiveJournal.
Sheryl69: OMG! How did that happen! I'm so sorry, it's gone now, I don't know how that happened I swear.
FBI: EvilKenny72, you own a website containing illegal content, we'd like to talk to you right now.
I think that something like that is highly unlikely ("convince them to link to your site" just for the sake of pranking them? seriously? how does that really work out in reality). I can see that it is plausible regardless of how unlikely though. However, I don't think the outcome of a situation like that is that you get your account canceled. I think you get your account canceled when the government breathes down LJs neck, and I think that only happens if the person who pranked you put up something extremely bad themselves, in which case I'm pretty sure they're going to get more than a warning from LJ -- they're going to get prosecuted by the government.
You can be responsible for the content you link to by being accountable to your government (yeah, I'm no fan either, but there they are) if you violate a law. If you point people to a site where they can hook up with other men who like diddling kiddies and providing a link like that is illegal in your country, then I think it's reasonable for LiveJournal to say that they'll close your account if they're required to under those circumstances and that they'll probably provide your identity to your government as well if they're required to.
Other than that I doubt they give a shit. They don't care if you link to some porn site -- why would they? They just want to cover their asses, they just want you to know that if you break a law like that they're not going to stand behind you.
Honestly, I don't see it. How could you get ToS'd maliciously? They only said that you were responsible for sites you link directly to, not that you are responsible for every site they in turn link to. Being that it's only sites you link to yourself, I think this seems like a reasonable CYA policy. You should be responsible for sites you link to, you're the one sending your readers there. I doubt that means they'd (necessarily) throw you off the service (unless you'd linked to something really egregious, though I'm not sure what that'd even be). But if you direct people to a site that's illegal and the feds come knocking, why shouldn't you have to be the one to answer the door?
I think you're right that there could be many causes, but given the problems in the recent past with Sony's batteries (the problem of them having metal fragments in them causing internal shorts and subsequent flame-outs), I don't think it's too much of a stretch to start out assuming the battery might be the source of the problem.
Would over-temperature detection/shutoff prevent those shorts from destroying the battery, or is it a purely internal thing such that it would continue even if you took the battery out once it started to heat up?
Nobody has even posted the patent for us to read, a couple of people speculate that this is nothing more than auto-completion, and some Slashdot readers start screaming "prior art! prior art!"
I went to the company's website and watched their demo, it doesn't appear that their product is simply auto-completion. It seems to be context-sensitive completion and I suspect that plays an important role in what they're claiming.
Maybe it is a stupidly obvious patent and maybe it isn't. Reading a few opinions about what the patent might involve and getting all worked up over that speculation serves no purpose at all. But, as the parent put it, that's par for the course.
I think you're somewhat correct that the agency has a right to say who its spokesperson is, but I think what you're missing is that this suppresses the credibility of statements made by professionals. As a reader, I would certainly give more weight to a statement about, say, bridge safety in an article which quotes an NHTSA engineer than one which quotes "anonymous sources."
There are far too many people on the internet spouting all sorts of opinions on subjects which they may not even have any education or experience in. Asking those who do have the credentials to hide them can't be a good thing.
Those are good points, but I guess I still feel that it's closer to the retailer end of your Aspirin analogy than the pharmaceutical end -- a manufacturer may only sell each bottle for a dollar or so, but they sell so many and they only have to test their product in batches in order to reasonably assure safety.
For Google selling ads that even a mom-and-pop car dealer can afford to buy there's just no way they can reasonably screen those ads without charging a significant fee (much more than $10 imo) to cover the costs of the phone calls, research, training, benefits, employees, salaries, etc. for those people hired just to do ad verification.
I wish that problems like this didn't happen, but the reality is that they do and that the laws seem to put the burden on the victim to take action against the perpetrator (and largely for good reason) instead of expecting some greater entity to stop it from ever happening in the first place. I realize that when it's practical the "system" can and does expect broad prevention, but I don't believe it's practical in this case for Google to do what they're asking.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for a an informative and insightful opinion. The actions of the RIAA stir a lot of emotions -- ranging from distaste to profound hatred -- and it's refreshing to read an opinion based around facts instead of emotions. Trying to understand the "real" situation is important to me and your write-up helped with that understanding.
I wasn't confusing any part of the transaction frankly. Yes, the server knows who that message was supposed to be sent to and it knows the server that is attempting to send it. What it doesn't know is who else will be receiving the message.
It's easy to ensure that there's nothing of value in the message itself, header or body. Yes the server knows for sure who that one copy is going to. That's not a lot of information in a system which is supposed to correlate between a large number of recipients.
If the spammer stupidly puts the recipient list in the message, or asks the SMTP server to deliver the message to multiple recipients then the algorithm might have something to go on.
My point though is that it's easy to avoid revealing that information, leaving the server with the only option of comparing all messages and trying to match them up by similarity. A daunting task for a large busy mail server.
> How exactly is a message supposed to get somewhere if it doesn't have the recipient info?
The recipient info is provided separately to the SMTP server during the message transaction using the 'RCPT TO' command. The message itself doesn't need to contain any information about the recipient, just like when you send a bcc or receive a spam which doesn't appear to be addressed to you at all. My original statement was simply that the spammers don't need to include recipient info in the message itself.
The main problem I can see is that even if this system works it is easily circumvented. The big assumption is that you can identify the recipients of a particular message, but spammers can easily ensure that information isn't easily obtained.
First they can ensure that the message itself doesn't contain any recipient info (a big bcc basically).
Then they avoid batching recipients based on their domain so he SMTP server can't tell who else is receiving the message.
The only way to derive the recipients now is to compare all messages against all others in order
to match them up. So they hash every message and combine those with identical hashes.
But putting a little unique text in each message during transmission foils that.
Spammers: 1 New weapons: 0
I know you guys are right and all, but this is more of a fun factoid than some sort of scientific claim. Yeah, the sun is bigger, and has magnetic fields and winds and has tons more mass and everything, but as an amateur astronomer (very amateur), I still find it fascinating just how large the thing has become since exploding only a few weeks ago. That it's larger than the "visible" sun is, to me, just wild -- even if it is nothing but a huge bubble with very little substance.
> But some lawmakers think it is a hassle to expect people to re-register their phone numbers every five years
I'd like to know who seriously thinks re-registering every five years is a hassle. I registered five years ago and I'll renew the registration before it expires soon. Big f**king deal. I saw this story several weeks ago with a similar sensational headline which implies the whole system will auto-destruct soon. Both times I felt misled by the reporters, not by the governments list.
This is not news. This is not funny. This is not even mildly interesting. Check the Firehose again editors -- there must be a few tidbits in there that don't go against your personal beliefs and would make better stories to put up front than this lame pos.
Hey now, that kind of rational thinking will get you thrown out of the party! The ticket to entry here is an overblown opinion based entirely on data you've imagined using only a headline as your guide.
I agree completely, that's not your responsibility. I also agree that if someone changes the site out from underneath a link you provided that's not your responsibility either. My only point is that, as far as LiveJournal is concerned, you're the one who is going to have to explain it to the cops if they come. That's all their policy is saying. Not guilt, not your fault, just you're the one who's going to have to work it out with the authorities, not them.
As far as whether linking to any content whatsoever should ever be illegal, well that's another issue and is outside the scope of this article and LiveJournals policy. That's an issue between citizens and their governments. My point was never to try to define *that* boundary.
If you really believe that the sorts of sites you're likely to link to are the sort that might land you in trouble with the law, I wouldn't blame you for not wanting to link to them. Hell, I wouldn't link to them either.
But if you're seriously worried that somehow an old link will come back to haunt you, remember that things like records of domain ownership changes, your dated journal entries, cached copies of the web, etc. would all clearly show what happened. All this concern about some nightmare scenario seems way overblown.
By the way, you must realize that if a cached copy somewhere could be used to implicate you, then a cached copy would also exonerate you as well since there would be copies of the original site that you actually linked to as well.
Why do you have to erase caches? LiveJournal would just want the links off of their own site, which you can easily comply with. This issue isn't about you being responsible for your links existence in history, it's about you being responsible for the present.
Yeah, but the legal system isn't actually blind, they do actually look at context. If your link is surrounded by text that says stuff like "My wife and I just had our baby and we found the cutest site! Check it out at www.cutebabies.com. Be sure to check out page 3 where you can find pictures of our little Jessica-Amber -- it's under the Oh-no-she-didn't! category!", then I bet the judge, hell even the cops will probably think "WTF? Does this guy know what's on that site?" and LJ will simply ask you to remove the link and threaten you with suspension or cancellation if you don't. And, given the scenario you described, I bet you'd be more than happy to take down a link like that.
For those who prefer their reading material in story form, here's another way of looking at it:
EvilKenny72: Hey Sheryl69, I made a cool site, link to it in your blog!
Sheryl69: Ok strange person, I like friends!
EvilKenny72 changes his site to an illegal movie download site
LiveJournal: Sheryl69, we have complaints that you are providing a link to an illegal download site. If you don't remove the link immediately your account will be terminated. Thank you for using LiveJournal.
Sheryl69: OMG! How did that happen! I'm so sorry, it's gone now, I don't know how that happened I swear.
FBI: EvilKenny72, you own a website containing illegal content, we'd like to talk to you right now.
EvilKenny72: D'oh!
I think that something like that is highly unlikely ("convince them to link to your site" just for the sake of pranking them? seriously? how does that really work out in reality). I can see that it is plausible regardless of how unlikely though. However, I don't think the outcome of a situation like that is that you get your account canceled. I think you get your account canceled when the government breathes down LJs neck, and I think that only happens if the person who pranked you put up something extremely bad themselves, in which case I'm pretty sure they're going to get more than a warning from LJ -- they're going to get prosecuted by the government.
You can be responsible for the content you link to by being accountable to your government (yeah, I'm no fan either, but there they are) if you violate a law. If you point people to a site where they can hook up with other men who like diddling kiddies and providing a link like that is illegal in your country, then I think it's reasonable for LiveJournal to say that they'll close your account if they're required to under those circumstances and that they'll probably provide your identity to your government as well if they're required to.
Other than that I doubt they give a shit. They don't care if you link to some porn site -- why would they? They just want to cover their asses, they just want you to know that if you break a law like that they're not going to stand behind you.
Honestly, I don't see it. How could you get ToS'd maliciously? They only said that you were responsible for sites you link directly to, not that you are responsible for every site they in turn link to. Being that it's only sites you link to yourself, I think this seems like a reasonable CYA policy. You should be responsible for sites you link to, you're the one sending your readers there. I doubt that means they'd (necessarily) throw you off the service (unless you'd linked to something really egregious, though I'm not sure what that'd even be). But if you direct people to a site that's illegal and the feds come knocking, why shouldn't you have to be the one to answer the door?
I think you're right that there could be many causes, but given the problems in the recent past with Sony's batteries (the problem of them having metal fragments in them causing internal shorts and subsequent flame-outs), I don't think it's too much of a stretch to start out assuming the battery might be the source of the problem.
Would over-temperature detection/shutoff prevent those shorts from destroying the battery, or is it a purely internal thing such that it would continue even if you took the battery out once it started to heat up?
Sorry, I just couldn't resist :) The Wiki article you pointed to is an interesting read though, I certainly wasn't aware of the "logical" definition.
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedantry
I searched Google and came up with this example of Pryor art:
0 /Rp1.jpg
http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/b/b
Nobody has even posted the patent for us to read, a couple of people speculate that this is nothing more than auto-completion, and some Slashdot readers start screaming "prior art! prior art!"
I went to the company's website and watched their demo, it doesn't appear that their product is simply auto-completion. It seems to be context-sensitive completion and I suspect that plays an important role in what they're claiming.
Maybe it is a stupidly obvious patent and maybe it isn't. Reading a few opinions about what the patent might involve and getting all worked up over that speculation serves no purpose at all. But, as the parent put it, that's par for the course.
Here's an article with some counter-points to this theory.
I think you're somewhat correct that the agency has a right to say who its spokesperson is, but I think what you're missing is that this suppresses the credibility of statements made by professionals. As a reader, I would certainly give more weight to a statement about, say, bridge safety in an article which quotes an NHTSA engineer than one which quotes "anonymous sources."
There are far too many people on the internet spouting all sorts of opinions on subjects which they may not even have any education or experience in. Asking those who do have the credentials to hide them can't be a good thing.
Those are good points, but I guess I still feel that it's closer to the retailer end of your Aspirin analogy than the pharmaceutical end -- a manufacturer may only sell each bottle for a dollar or so, but they sell so many and they only have to test their product in batches in order to reasonably assure safety.
For Google selling ads that even a mom-and-pop car dealer can afford to buy there's just no way they can reasonably screen those ads without charging a significant fee (much more than $10 imo) to cover the costs of the phone calls, research, training, benefits, employees, salaries, etc. for those people hired just to do ad verification.
I wish that problems like this didn't happen, but the reality is that they do and that the laws seem to put the burden on the victim to take action against the perpetrator (and largely for good reason) instead of expecting some greater entity to stop it from ever happening in the first place. I realize that when it's practical the "system" can and does expect broad prevention, but I don't believe it's practical in this case for Google to do what they're asking.