online crime

[Al_U_Card]

He is so good looking that it would put us all to shame....(At least that is what Dr. Todd said as to why his avatar doesn't show either... :P

[jillybean]

This is totally off topic but I tried to edit my last post - I had changed a sentence and left an awkward word, and when I clicked "edit" it only brought up the "quote" I had used and nothing I had typed.

 

Is there a special trick to this?

Doesn't your text appear beneath the quote?

[cherdano]

I have always used web mail, so I don't have to pay attention to viruses, works very well for me.

 

I am surviving with microsoft, and no anti virus at all. when I get a virus somehow, I just check for the specific cleaner on anti-virus sites.

So, yours are probably one of the millions of computers that has been hijacked to send out these spam emails, and you don't even know it.

You need a mail server for that, I could be beeing spied actually (I don't care with this computer), but I ain't sending trash mails.

No you don't, if you catch a virus it will send the spam emails on its own.

[JoAnneM]

This is totally off topic but I tried to edit my last post - I had changed a sentence and left an awkward word, and when I clicked "edit" it only brought up the "quote" I had used and nothing I had typed.

 

Is there a special trick to this?

Doesn't your text appear beneath the quote?

No, not in edit mode. That is what I said.

[Elianna]

Looks great on my (older) iphone!

 

I didn't even have to enlarge it to read, just held the phone sideways.

 

I too love my iPhone.

[Al_U_Card]

Looks great on my (older) iphone!

 

I didn't even have to enlarge it to read, just held the phone sideways.

 

I too love my iPhone.

Then why don't you marry it? :lol:

[barmar]

0.1/mail would be fun. How do you do it? How do you deal with zombies? Right now they set up their own mailserver that does relays, and a mail client that does generation; if they have to pay for email, they'll just put in enough extra hack code to get the user's email address and send as that user.

Right. If we had an infrastructure for securely exacting payment from the responsible party, it could also be used as a mechanism to prevent fraudulent mail in the first place. There wouldn't be a need for the actual payment.

 

Then again, when money is on the line there's more incentive to implement this infrastructure and make it work well. There are already electronic signature systems for email, but they're not used much for the types of messages we're talking about. As a result, users can't depend on them to authenticate mail.

[helene_t]

0.1/mail would be fun.  How do you do it?  How do you deal with zombies?  Right now they set up their own mailserver that does relays, and a mail client that does generation; if they have to pay for email, they'll just put in enough extra hack code to get the user's email address and send as that user.

Right. If we had an infrastructure for securely exacting payment from the responsible party, it could also be used as a mechanism to prevent fraudulent mail in the first place. There wouldn't be a need for the actual payment.

It is possible that securing micropayment would be (at least) as big a challenge as preventing computers from being turned into spammer zombies.

 

But even without zombies, spam is still a problem. The best way to prevent this is by taxing email - if you define "spam" as mail with a utility (for the sender) of less than 0.1 cent (and that would IMHO be a reasonable definition) then a 0.1 tax is the way to eliminate it. Again, assuming the tax can be collected in a safe way.

[Fluffy]

Instead of giving the money to the goverment, I would rather give it to the guy who received the email (a part has to go to the money regulation authority of course).

 

 

This might be avaible when digital signatures are most secure, and you cnan really certify who is using a computer at a time, with digital fingerprint readers on computers or something like.

[matmat]

This might be avaible when digital signatures are most secure, and you cnan really certify who is using a computer at a time, with digital fingerprint readers on computers or something like.

hehe... just another reason criminals will continue cutting off fingers :)

[mycroft]

As I said before, any payment - any payment at all - on every email kills RSS feeds and high-volume mailing lists.

 

And by high-volume, we're talking 200 people or so. The Bridge-Laws Mailing List had 50 individual posters last month, and by SWAG, another 50 who just read, and didn't post (either because they don't, or because nothing in November interested them). 739 messages total. 73 900 emails (give or take 40 000). $73.90 somebody has to pay - just for the month. And I bet most of you have never heard of that mailing list, even though you're all bridge players!

 

I used to be on the ASL ML, same thing there - and maybe two of you know what Advanced Squad Leader is, never mind that there's a mailing list for it.

 

If things this obscure are rattling up $1000/year bills, they're dying. Automatically. And there are Not-Obscure mailing lists, with email counts 10, 100 times as big (one that come to mind right away are linux-kernel (5000+ members, 200-300 messages a *day*) and debian-user (1500 members, 2500 messages a month)). 0.1c/email = $10000/month.

 

How big can an RSS feed get? Every CNN story, sent to (let's be really conservative) 20 000 people (it wouldn't surprise me if that's off by an order of magnitude)? Remember, that's $20/story. What, 100 stories/updates a day? Anybody got a spare $50 000+ a month to play with? Neither does CNN. Bye-bye RSS feed.

 

And to the internet, there's little difference between gobbledygook like "/dev/sdb1 /srv/img0 ext3 noatime,nodev,nosuid 0 2" and "Make Pneis Now!", when it's sent to 5000 users at a time. So how do we tell what is "legitimate" and what is "spam"?

[Elianna]

Looks great on my (older) iphone!

 

I didn't even have to enlarge it to read, just held the phone sideways.

 

I too love my iPhone.

Then why don't you marry it? :D

This wound up in the wrong place, I don't know why.

 

Thank you for being so kind to point it out in a nice, polite way. I really appreciate the civility of people on the forums, they're such nice people. Makes me really want to meet them in person.

[barmar]

As I said before, any payment - any payment at all - on every email kills RSS feeds and high-volume mailing lists.

I understand your point about mailing lists, but what does this have to do with RSS feeds? They're not sent out as email. They're just specially-formatted web pages, which your feed reader downloads from the server.

 

Maybe you're confused because a number of mail readers offer the ability to view RSS feeds. They're just making it appear as if they're email, they aren't really.

 

Going back to mailing lists, they'd probably have to charge their subscribers. So instead of the BLML operators paying $70/mo to send out the messages, each subscriber would have to pay $0.70/mo to receive it. They'd probably have to set the rate based on typical number of messages. That way, if the list starts spamming, the list operator would have to pay for the excess over the normal, expected number of messages.

 

The other solution is to switch from a mailing list to an online forum.

[helene_t]

As I said before, any payment - any payment at all - on every email kills RSS feeds and high-volume mailing lists.

You would waive the 0.1 c fee from mails with the digital signature of one of your friends, including mailing lists to which you have actively decided to subscribe.

 

(Alternatively, pay a 1.2 c annual subscription fee when you sign up for it).

[Al_U_Card]

Looks great on my (older) iphone!

 

I didn't even have to enlarge it to read, just held the phone sideways.

 

I too love my iPhone.

Then why don't you marry it? ;)

This wound up in the wrong place, I don't know why.

 

Thank you for being so kind to point it out in a nice, polite way. I really appreciate the civility of people on the forums, they're such nice people. Makes me really want to meet them in person.

Ode to Elianna

 

Should we have the opportunity to meet

I'll try not to be impolite or not sweet

Political correctness is not my long suit

But humour is trump and funny to boot.

Despite my good looks and dashing charm

I'll avoid doing your sensibilities harm

For love is indeed a many splendoured thing

To whose usefulness I will always cling

No matter the invective thrown my way

True to myself, I'll always stay.

 

Be well ♥

[mycroft]

Thanks barmar. RSS has always been to me a solution looking for a problem, and in my "I'm a tech geek but that doesn't equate to 'cool' or 'new' = 'good'" attitude to life I've never bothered to learn about them. "Be notified when someone adds to this"? Do I *need* another distraction? No, I'll just go when I have some time, and see what's changed. So I got that very wrong. Sorry.

 

As a old net.newser (not quite old enough to have lived through the Great Renaming, but the fallout was still happening), online forums (sorry to say) suck. Royally. Partner-passed-an-SOS-XX level suck. Threads fork, and on news or in MLs the forks thread themselves. On online forums, you can't tell which sub-conversation you're discussing. Oh and killfiles. MISS KILLFILES. Killfiles lower blood pressure (and thread heat), they do. Plus, my mail/news reader tells me which articles in the thread I've read/not read, and I don't have to find it (something that no "go to first unread message" has ever managed to do on a forum) - and, of course, if I don't have enough context in the message, I can just "go back one message in thread" and work it out (see above).

 

Also: private mailing lists. So-called "flocked" or "members-only" web forums are so not the same thing.