CAN I BE OF ASSISTANCE?
Shut it!

Why We Still Need The Comments On Slashdot

Every ten minutes or so, it seems, someone proposes a scheme for ridding the world of spam. That's the email kind, not the tasty dead-burnt-animal-in-a-tin kind.

The only problem is that in almost every case, the person proposing this magical solution knows absolutely nothing about how email actually works. Having helped set up an ISP, having written a mailserver of my own (used internally for several years, but long since abandoned), and being responsible for four mailservers right now, I have learnt at least a little bit.

And here are two of the things I have learned:

One, your proposal has been suggested before. Probably before you even knew what the Internet was.

Two, the reason that you have never heard it discussed and so think it is wonderfully original and clever is that it won't work, can't work, is impossible to implement, and that all of this is immediately obvious to anyone with the faintest idea about the actual implementation of the global email system.

The latest dumb idea comes from Microsoft, a Premium Dumb Idea Providerâ„¢, their friends at Yahoo (Google Ate Our Lunchâ„¢), and is presented by The New York Times (We Suck, But You Have To Register Anywayâ„¢).

I could go into a lengthy and entertaining-only-to-geeks rant about why this latest proposal is utterly dumbfoundingly wrong-headed and at the same time one of the purest examples of corporate greed to surface in years - they want you to pay for email - but one of the posters at Slashdot has saved me the trouble:

Your company advocates a

(x) technical ( ) legislative (x) 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
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) 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
(x) 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
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(x) 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
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) 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
(x) 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
(x) Sending email should be free
(x) 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:

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

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:00 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Yay!

The computers at work actually co-operated today, which means I get my "time off". Thursday, Friday and Monday are all mine.

I'm going to see if I can get some of that "sleep" stuff too.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:57 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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What Kind Of Hentai Dating Sim Character Are You?


Feminine
What's your sexual appeal?
brought to you by Quizilla

(Thanks to innocent annika.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:43 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Dial-A-President

Via Daniel Drezner, here's another of those Which U.S. Presidential Candidate Are You thingies.

This one is much better constructed than the last, because it didn't give me Howard Dean.

What?

Oh.

1. Lieberman 100%
2. Bush 96%
3. Edwards 91%
4. Kerry 87%
5. Howard "Someone had to come fifth" Dean 80%
6. Kucinich 64%

It's a bit odd to see Kucinich there, but considering the remaining options (Clark and Sharpton) it's hard to argue.

Update: Whoops, Jim found it first.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:54 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Good News Everyone!

If I don't blow up all the computers tomorrow, I will be getting something known as time off. I think I actually had some of this once before... Yes! See here and here and also here.

The one day off I had last year will be followed up with three days this year! Yay!

Oh, and it's still raining.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:06 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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It's Alive!

Crawled up to the supermarket just now. My house is located in a pocket of peace and tranquility in a very busy area, but it's a long way from the shops. If you took a compass and transcribed a circle centered on my house with a radius of just under a mile, you'd hit a whole bunch of shopping centres, but inside that circle - nada.

But! Mars and Snickers bars 40% off! Buy! Buy! Also Bounty, but they didn't have none. Also didn't have no Tropical Frosty Fruits, a subject on which I have ranted previously.

And the bakery was out of cheese and bacon danishes, which are my new favourite snack/meal-type-thingy. They're always out of the cheese and bacon ones, and they always have the cheese and tomato and cheese and spinach ones left over. Do they learn?

Well, evidently not.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:29 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Maburaho

Okay, so this guy can only use magic eight times before he turns into dust and blows away. And in the first four episodes, he's used magic, let's see, one, two, three times.

Given that AnimeNfo says that this is a 24-part series, I see a little problem looming for our hero...

Update: Episode 12, and he just turned into dust and blew away. Well, I wasn't wrong.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:38 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Still No Chocolate

Still dead.

Just blogging to let you know that I'm fine, just dead. Nothing serious.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:28 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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