Letters We recently went to a party thrown by a typography firm. It was great, there was a limitless supply of barbecued beef and everything, so we won't hear a word against the industry. We were therefore very upset to learn that small businesses are harbouring pirated fonts, we even cried hot, inky tears. You were less sympathetic:

"Violations occur when a person sends a font to another person who does not have a licence for it. That often happens if someone is sending a document which needs a font which is not installed on the recipient's machine."

Oh, so now I am responsible for somebody using a Microsoft Office function and I should pay fines because some software maker decided to make this function available to the public ?

I suggest that the font makers take up the issue with the parties that are responsible in the first place : Microsoft, and maybe Adobe.

As for me, I already paid a license for my OS, and another for Office, so leave me alone. I refuse to take responsibility for a tool I didn't ask for being used by millions from whom I didn't ask a thing.

Pascal.

Working in design, I've often wondered about this. While we purchase licenses for fonts that we need to create new designs, we often receive artwork from other design houses which include fonts. Presumably we need licenses for each and every font that passes through our system like this. But then it gets a bit silly - do I really need a license for each font in a design which lands on my desk for thirty seconds for me to approve before passing on to the printer? Maybe that's indicative of the culture, but if the font houses are careless and come down heavy-handed, they risk alienating users and turning us off purchasing their product, just like the music industry has.

Perhap's we could make some extra cash by setting up a Typography Industry Ass. Of America to hunt down font sharers.

Next up, scammers are targeting domain name owners who might be interested in selling. A mere $99 will get you "appraisal software" to gauge the domain's value. Except it won't.

Mr. Leyden, The 'appraisal scam' as it is so well known in the domain community is nothing new. I don't believe it has ever been confirmed but it seems like there is probably only a few groups doing this constantly emailing owners feigning interested, asking for an appraisal and then disappearing. The more common method is to offer 2-3 accepted sources for appraisals, 1-2 well known ones such as Sedo and then a second or third which they themselves own which costs a lot less. Upon looking at the three sources the victim (presumably) chooses the least expensive one... theirs. And that is the classic appraisal scam. It has been around for many years and you should be able to easily find documentation of it. Regards,

Kevin Ohashi

I don't have a lot of sympathy for companies that run affiliate schemes and then open their innocent eyes wide and throw their hands in the air when someone spams/scams to bilk affiliate revenue. In my experience, those businesses almost never actually try to get rid of bad eggs - they do the minimum necessary for plausible deniability and rake in the laundered profits.

If you ask me, the very act of running an affiliate program makes you culpable. It's impossible to run one without knowing that people will take advantage of it, and it's impossible to run one that people can't take advantage of.

The companies using affiliate programs are no better than the spammers/scammers, and it's about time people started calling them on it.

All that just to get in the term "bad eggs" near Easter. For shame.

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.

The US military tested a new toy too.

You had better hope the U.S. military continues to step up to the plate.

With the mentally unstable leadership in China, N. Korea, Iran, etc. you can bet your ass the world is in big, big trouble as these fools gain more military technology and WMD.

God help us all...

We agree with one of your three sentences.

We often get accused that our own experiments, mostly with the English language, represent a threat to humanity too. We're cheered then, when the humourous bastardisations of others drop into our inbox. Witness the lovely term "fanwank" in this splendid screed against ex-Navy officer Lewis Page's take on the Iranian hostage crisis:

"She could easily blast gunboat-class opponents to wreckage from beyond the horizon."

Please! Spare us the jingoistic Clancy fanwank. Or are you aiming for el Reg's very own "Gotcha!" headline?

This isn't a military issue, it's politics. The Poor Bloody Infantry in the thick of it did the sensible thing and sat on their hands without turning it into a shooting war. Diplomats in expensive suits will sort it all out behind the scenes after a while, because they're the ones who kicked it off in the first place. No-one really thinks they were in the wrong place, no-one has anything to gain by anyone shooting anyone. Journos salivating over the size of our guns are barely one step up from those crying out to shoot some random arabs, or the other lot screaming for Satan's Lapdogs.

If I wanted this, I'd watch Fox News.

I find it hard though not to use this to twist the knife in Tony and his War On Terra.

I mean, the Iranians are only human, so they'll make mistakes, yeah?

And in the high tension of these times, they cannot afford to let one guilty party go, even though an innocent person could be held. And isn't the protection of the state worth the loss of the occasional innocent life?

Oh, yeah, forgot. These are only valid defenses when it is the police who've f*ked up. Sorry.

UK Home Secretary John Reid wants to get inside the heads of Japanese cartoon porn fans. Rather you than us, John.

Most of lolicon in most of the world is illegal anyway. And banned in most of the anime/manga community. Or to put it in better words: lolicon goes separately from most of manga/anime since it falls into ... even grayer legal zone than most of unpublished manga/anime distributed now in western world widely.

In the end, you know, it is easier to "protect our children from foreign menace" rather than "educate them about real world" thing.

As if we ever doubted that gov't would actually do anything to improve educational system or help parents (NOT with money - but e.g. with payed time off) to train their children. "Social" system they say... - but they never care to point what precisely "social" about it. "Monetary" - yes. But "social"... ?

Thought police, anyone? We should ban the bare imagination of all filth in all its beauty.

Luckily, there is great progress in brainscanning. Next up: PET+fMRI said to become mandatory in early detection of deviant behaviour. Hooray!!

-- Greetings Bertho

Bring back the Poll Tax! Or rather, bring in a Pole Tax. According to Gordon Brown, his tax hikes on small businesses are down to the wave of Polish and other immigration following recent accessions to the EU.

So when asked about the tax hike (15% over 2 years) on small businesses, Gordon answers with a comment about Managed Service Companies - a completely separate issue.

So as Paxo might say, ANSWER THE QUESTION !

Regards, Mike

Paxo on Jacko. There's an edition of Newsnight which would justify the licence fee in one fell swoop. Can't see it happening though, especially now the King of Pop will have a 50-foot colossal statue of himself, complete with laser beams, to defend himself with.

The laser beams are to blind the parents while he runs off with their kids?

No, no they're not. They're for shooting down UFOs, just ask Gary McKinnon. ®