Giant pirate dumps cartoon lover on MySpace

Sticking with the domain name boiler room, a bunch of bankers are petitioning ICANN for a new domain extension just for online finance. Check out that neat s-eggway. Sorry.

.safe and .sure are about as much that as any democratic people's republic is democratic, a republic or there for its people. Still, millions will fall for it. What register would be used to determine who's valid and who's not? I'd not trust any foreign government to do that, and I'm not a USoA citizen, so that includes their government. The obvious counterattack by the phishers will be to register their own bank somewhere. Who's to know it's a fake bank then?

Next up: another expose about how fragile and spoofable DNS really is. Who is the joker who came up with this idea? I wouldn't be surprised if he believes the internet is a collection of tubes too.

We're having our eggs crafted especially from 100 per cent Spam® for Easter. Security academics still have no idea what to do about it, so we're going to eat it.

Spam is an economic problem, and no non-economic solution is really going to do anything about it. So do you know anyone who could handle a business plan for an alternative economic model?

You said: "Which is why those outside the profession favour hiring a bunch of programmer-detectives and a couple of trained assassins instead. ®"

OK, where do I contribute? Every penny counts! :-)

If only we could do this. (*SIGH*)

"those outside the profession favour hiring a bunch of programmer-detectives and a couple of trained assassins instead."

There's another option (or several). One creates an explicit "right of private action" against spammers, similar to the "junk fax law" in the US which ended the deluge of junk faxes which threatened to destroy the usefulness of fax for business purposes.

Another penalizes an ISP which has multiple repeat offenders using their service, either by isolating them from the Internet, or charging the ISP with "spam servicing fees" equivalent to ten times the cost of the bandwidth used by equivalent-sized ISPs who do not harbor spammers.

Of course, my business will enjoy quite a boom if you go with the trained assassin option; I'm available evenings and weekends. Cruel and unusual methods normally cost extra, but I'm prepared to waive the surcharges when spammers are the targets.

"Simpson's next effort, to be released soon, is working on a way to automate a way for senders to tell the receiving server that a message is not actually spam. It makes false positives a non-issue," he says.

Oh how that made me laugh ! The whole point of email is that you generally have no prior 'contract' with senders, thus you cannot have pre-arranged 'codes' or 'keys' that the sender can use to signify genuine mail. Thus, the recipient has to trust the unknown sender to be telling the truth, just like ... well smtp where you have to trust the sender to be telling the truth about the message originator. And we all know how truthful spammers are !

I don't think there is any way to fix smtp, but IM2000 looks interesting as it shifts the cost of sending mail onto the originator - see http://www.im2000.org/

Also of interest : http://homepages.tesco.net./~J.deBoynePollard/FGA/smtp-anti-ubm-dont-work.html > http://homepages.tesco.net./~J.deBoynePollard/FGA/smtp-spf-is-harmful.html

When midget troubadour Paul Simon sang Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover, he somehow neglected to prophesise the coming of Web 2.0, preferring the unhelpfully unspecific advice along the lines of "make a new plan" and "get yourself free".

No matter, since teens are dumping each other all over the shop without his sage-like wisdom. On MySpace.

There's an article from the February 14, 2007 Wall Street Journal, "Moving On: Its not u ... :( High-Tech Breakups Are Quick But Inflict a Special Pain Getting Even on ihateher.com." The abstract can be found by going www.wsj.com and searching for "ihateher.com." Or, just google for "ihateher.com" and "wall street."

Ihateher.com* is much, much smaller than myspace of course, but if you tell a story another person can't delete you from their friends list and erase your story.

* Disclaimer: I run it. (wouldn't want to get on the bad side of Vulture Central)

John Perkins

We saw a documentary on the BBC over the weekend about a strange cultish Church group in the US. Their websites include godhatessweden.com. Sweden doesn't care; it's got lots of internet.

Guy,

Great article about Stokab. It is absolutely correct that Stokab's fibre is amazing. What is even more amazing is that they do have fibre in the archipelago too! Several of the larger islands have ADSL provided by a half-idealistic operator over Stokab's fibre backbone. The incumbent operator, Telia, is not present however.

The WiMax experiment is a bit strange, though, and it is surprising why Stokab forgot all its earlier thinking and principles, especially since they have the fibre. One reason is that there was extra governemt funding to find for the project. Unfortunately, this means right now that the ongoing projects in the archipelago have indirectly been stopped due to these painful WiMax experiments.

The saviour for those that can not get ADSL in the archipelago is now rather 3G/HSDPA, which has really good coverage, again partly thanks to the fibre. For Wimax, there is however no operator providing the service. It is just an expensive demo with tax money.

BR

::Gustaf

(Was one of the founders of the operator mentioned above but not active any more due to too much other work)

In London every school has a fibre running between 2-100MBs, none of them use more than 10MBs. The core switches are 125GBs monsters That's is a huge amount of bandwidth waiting to be turned into a revenue stream.

WiMax runnning from these fibre endpoint (i.e Schools) is already in trials and pretty much mandated by the BSF program (as backed by Intel and Cisco).

So great idea Guy, but it seems 'the market' and TB got there first.