What you get when my brain crashes…

Check-box reply

Found on Seen On Slash:

Your post advocates a

(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we’ll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don’t care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else’s career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
(x) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don’t want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x) Sorry dude, but I don’t think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you’re a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I’m going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

I don’t know why I find these things funny, but I do.

The Night was Dark and Still

I ran across this the other day - an old story fragment I had written long ago.

The night was dark and still, but they could still see the figures dancing.  Like shadows, they seemed to melt into the very darkness that created them.  Yet still there was no sound, and that perhaps was the most disturbing fact of all.  The light of the fire seemed only to annoy them, as they danced around the borders of the light.  The flickering light seemed to dance along with the shadows themselves, engaging in a terrifying display of the power and terror of the forest.

Still, they kept the fire burning, and as long as there was light, the shadows seemed to stay at bay.  So all through the night, at least one person was awake to feed the fire, and ensure the safety of the others.  But there was little that could have been done, if the shadows had chosen to attack.  They called with their silent voices, taunting and teasing.  They made no sound, but it was impossible not to hear them.  Even their vague, dark shapes spoke to you, holding your attention until the last moment, when you realized that the fire had almost burned out, and the shadows were almost upon you.  But always they released you, only to taunt you again when the fire grew bright.

Those who slept were no better off than those who were awake.  They stirred frequently in their sleep, and sometimes moaned as if they had seen horrors untold.  In their restless dreams, the shadows had no fire to fear, and they danced and called without fear.  Sleep brought no rest.

Suddenly, the silence of the night was shattered by an ear-piercing wail.  All were awake instantly, some in a state of confusion, others in a state of fear and panic.  But all states of emotion were driven away by the second wail, louder than the first, bellowing into the night and echoing off the trees and the infinite shadows.  The sound spoke of death, of pain, of terror, of hopelessness, of futility, of fear, and of hate, all at the same time.  The very sound of it seemed to beat at your eardrums, confusing you as if you had been struck in the head.  The sound continued until it became almost unbearable to hear, and then it stopped as suddenly as it began, and the forest was silent again.

The silence was almost as bad as the wail, for a short time.  No one was able to move or make so much as a whisper to break the terrifying silence.  But there was no need to.  So slowly and softly that it was almost unnoticeable, the normal sounds of the forest resumed.  The crickets began to chirp again, the tree frogs began to sing again, and finally, birds could be heard singing praise to the light which was forming in the east.  Dawn had finally come.

News from the Not-To-Distant Future

From a Slashdot comment on the story “Big Six UK ISPs Capitulate To Music Industry“:

BBC News April 2nd 2010
ISPs have detected a massive spike in encrypted activity on the internet. Indecipherable “SSL” packets have increased in volume massively in recent months. This trend is seen as “disturbing” in the words of one child protection group.

Protests from expats living in Russia, China and Iran is more muted relative to earlier episodes. One comment received from an expat in Iran states “We used to get bothered by all this, but frankly, it’s so much better over here that we really don’t care anymore.”

“There could be anything being sent in these encrypted streams. Anything at all, and we have no way of knowing it”, said Angela Termagantine, spokesperson for Protecting the Innocent. “There’s little doubt that lurid, disgusting and atrocious images of naked children are being transmitted in these clandestine packets of information. Something Must Be Done.”

Police spokesman Robert Peeler warned the public that very sinister developments have given us cause to believe that a vast network of Terrorists are transmitting plans to bring terror and mayhem to Britain’s streets. “It is likely that this flood of inscruitible data is the precursor to an outright Terrorist assault, if not an invasion , on British citizens.” Police believe that ssl may be a code word for terrorist cells, possibly referring to a passage, or passages from the Koran. Peeler added, “We are working with leaders in the Muslim community to reach young people and other members of the community in an effort to identify the sources of these sinister “ssl” packets.”

When news broke of the recent surge and its potentially sinister meaning, traffic at Tabloid News and Gossip sites spiked as millions of Britons swarmed to read titillating speculation about what may be concealed in the encrypted traffic. “People love this stuff, right.” said editor of the Scandal on Sunday Andy Tartuffe. “I mean, you throw in a bit of nookie, bit of scandel, bit of how’s your father, people go right for it, know wha’ I mean? ” When it was suggested his publication by be sensationalizing the potential content of the traffic surge he retorted, ” Look, it’s all porn right! There’s dirty buggers out there doing dirty deeds and my readers what to hear all about it.” “Especially the kiddie stuff, right. Get’s ‘em right rilled up! Big seller.” he added as he drove away in his BMW with an unidentified young woman.

The Home Office has dismissed protests from network and computer professionals that SSL is a much used and needed protocol on the internet, and has moved ahead with plans to outlaw encrypted data on British networks. “We have to stop this sort of thing”, said the Home Office Minister, “Saying that it has legitimate uses, or that only a small fraction of the transmitted material may be illegal is frankly a load of rubbish. If you have nothing to hide, you have no reason to be using these services. Any sensible person can see that.”

In addition to banning SSL traffic and previous legislation mandating the handover of encryption keys, the government plans to have monitoring software installed on all internet connected devices in the country. “When you think about it, it’s a small price to pay for the safety of you and your children.” said the Prime Minister this afternoon. “We have overwhelming public support on this”, he added, citing private party telephone polls.

Someone else responded immediately with:

It’s scary when one can barely tell satire from real world events. It’s too real.

Yes, it is scary.

Sousveillance

This is encouraging:

Now a countervailing storyline is starting to get some traction in real life: the increasing citizen use of technology to “watch from below.” The practice has been called “sousveillance,” a word that comes the French word “sous” (from below) with the word “viller” (to watch). Instead of Big Brother using a panopticon of surveillance to exercise total, unquestioned control, the commoners are using cheap, portable technologies to monitor and publicize the behavior of Power. The commons is sprouting its own eyes – and its own means of self-defense, political organizing and reclamation of democracy.

In contrast to the usual abuses of government authority and surveillance I usually write about here, this is like a breath of fresh air - and something I think is very good. If a government can monitor its people, the people aught to be able to monitor the government.

An Internet Intervention

Very funny personifications of all the big, popular websites:

Internet Intervention

You may need to watch it a few times to “get” all of the references, of course.