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September 25, 2003
The Joy Of Tech (TM)
I've never been much of a fan of web comics other than Dilbert, and of course that's really only a web comic if like me you're too cheap to buy a newspaper. After an hour or so browsing around and laughing out loud, though, I think The Joy of Tech by Nitrozac and Snaggy has changed my mind.
I'd have to assume that either Nitrozac or Snaggy is a big Macintosh fan, as quite a lot of the strips have that characteristic Apple-booster smugness to them. Plus the site is plastered with iPod adverts and some of the characters work in an Apple store, so perhaps a Great Detective level of observation and deduction isn't required. However, even the anti-Linux cartoons are handled with a certain gentleness: Linux Guru in a can has to be my favourite of this type, with risks of installing Linux a close second. If you've ever got a bit tired of the hypocrisy on places like Slashdot, wanna play some games may ring a bell, too.
For Mac people, though, they don't rag on the Microsoft keiretsu too much (other than the deep dislike they've apparently taken to the "Dude, you're getting a Dell" guy in multiple cartoons, all of which might be funnier to me if the ads had ever run outside North America). This is good because it apparently leaves them plenty of mental energy to get a few digs in at Steve Jobs and of course Apple boosters in general.
Away from the "my computer's better than your computer" genre, there's a lot of really funny stuff: Star Wars, spam, cats, DNS, coffee, marriage, you name it.
Go there, read them all, PayPal them a few bucks. You'll enjoy it.
Posted by Ian at 9:09 PM in Humour | Comments (2) | Permalink
September 23, 2003
New UK Anti-Spam Regulations
There is a continual flurry of secondary legislation being laid before the UK parliament every day it is in session. Most of it, like the The Tonnage Tax (Training Requirement) (Amendment) Regulations 2003 (Statutory Instrument 2003 No. 2320), is of interest to very few of us. An exception to this general rule might be The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003, laid before parliament on the 18th of September and coming into force on December 11th.
The 22 pages of new regulations, explanatory text and schedules are the government's implementation into UK law of the EC Directive on privacy and electronic communications (2002/58/EC, PDF link). They replace earlier regulations from 1999 and 2000, and cover a whole collection of issues from the right to have an un-itemized telephone bill if you want one to what looks like a moderately sensible "do not call" system for telephone and fax to be run by the new Office of Communications (OFCOM), hopefully a more effective system than the current Telephone Preference Service. On the other hand, as OFCOM won't even start operations until the end of 2003, I'm not holding my breath.
Regulation 6 is interesting because underneath the opaque drafting language it is talking about cookies: if you want to store a cookie on someone's computer, you now need to ask permission at least on the first occasion. Unfortunately, "stored" is not defined, so this regulation probably applies as much to the (relatively harmless) session cookies stored only in your browser as opposed to the persistent kind stored on your hard disk that are presumably the real target of the legislation.
The headline provisions in the new regulations, though, are contained in regulations 22 and 23. The DTI press release spins these as "New Moves to Hammer Spammers", but others have been less kind: Spamhaus, for example, say "Britain Bungles Anti-spam Law" [URL removed 20051030: article has been removed].
A quick summary of the main points of regulations 22 and 23 as I understand them follows:
- The regulations address e-mail to living individuals only; e-mail to something other than a natural person is explicitly not addressed. As the Internet is notoriously somewhere where no-one knows your age, gender or even species, it is essentially impossible to tell for sure whether a given e-mail address represents a living individual or not. To an ethical sender of e-mail, this simply means assuming that all addresses are those of individuals and proceeding accordingly. The flip-side danger that some see here is that this may provide plausible deniability or even a legal defence for an e-mailer to continue to send mail as before on the basis that they "thought" the addresses were those of businesses rather than individuals. Certainly, it sounds like open season on addresses like
sales@example.co.uk, with things likeian@example.co.ukbeing well into in the weasel zone. - The regulations only cover e-mail sent for "direct marketing purposes". That may mean that other kinds of unsolicited e-mail, such as political or religious entreaties, are not covered.
- Mobile phone text messages are treated as e-mail. This sounds like good news as there are essentially no technical measures available on current mobile phones for spam suppression.
- To send e-mail to someone, you normally require explicit prior consent and to provide "a valid address" for unsubscription. "Address" not being defined, this would hopefully include unsubscription web links but that's not clear from the wording. Certainly such things are much more convenient for both sender and recipient than manual processing of unsubscription e-mail, so it would be a pity to say the least if the regulations outlawed them.
- Without explicit prior consent, you can still send e-mail to your own customers where you collected their e-mail as part of the sale as long as you are sending e-mail only about your own "similar" products and services. You must allow the customer to say "no" initially, and with each subsequent communication.
- Faking sender information is an offence.
So, this all sounds like good news for users as far as it goes: it's less clear whether it goes far enough. A bigger problem in the short term is that the usual estimate is that 90% of spam received in the UK comes from outside, mainly from the USA, and that a UK regulation by its nature can therefore have little effect on the total volume of spam received by users here. In the longer term, I can't see any international legal framework addressing the problems of unsolicited bulk email until everyone has had a few years of experience with the more local variety.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and none of the above should be taken as legal opinion; if you need advice, you should talk to a professional.
[Updated 20031007 to point to the official HMSO page for the new regulations now that it exists.]
Posted by Ian at 11:23 PM in Spam | Comments (2) | Permalink
September 22, 2003
Spam: "Why Can't You Just..."
Along with computer viruses, spam (however defined) is becoming a significant barrier to actually getting things done with these computer things. Almost everyone would love it if there was an easy solution to the problems spam causes: either a technical solution or a non-technical (legal or social) one would do.
I don't believe there is a single simple solution to the spam problem, but that's a topic for another day. However, there are plenty of people who know enough about spam to want it out of their inbox, but not enough to know why this is a (very) hard problem. When someone says "Why can't you just...", following up with a superficially attractive but ultimately doomed scheme, it's probably not because they are stupid but more likely because this is a complex field that they don't fully understand, even if they use e-mail dozens of times every day. This is as true for most "technical" users as for the often reviled politicians looking for solutions in this area: I've seen the "why can't you just charge a penny for every email; most people won't care but spammers will be bankrupted" suggestion more than once in a technical forum, although anyone who knows how e-mail actually works would spill their beer laughing over the idea.
This kind of "why can't you just" issue has a lot in common with other hard technical problems. At the extreme, if you've ever had to explain to someone why perpetual motion, squaring the circle or compressing random data are (provably) impossible, you'll know that it can be quite hard to put across the idea that it isn't only a particular scheme that won't work, but that there are whole classes of approach which are known to be fruitless, no matter how much you try various possibilities at a detailed level.
Although it's mainly a humorous dig at the more wild-eyed and technically inept authors of Final Ultimate Solutions to the Spam Problem (FUSSPs), the list in "You Might Be An Anti-Spam Kook If..." makes some serious points as well, particularly at the level of pointing out that certain classes of solution won't work, mostly because of the scale and anarchic nature of the Internet along with the profound difficulty facing any scheme that attempts to impose order. Also, every list item is phrased in such a way as to make you think about why the statement given deserves to be labelled as "kooky". So, it's both funny and educational.
Here are just a couple of examples I particularly liked. You Might Be An Anti-Spam Kook If...
- despite having invented the FUSSP, you not only don't know the difference between the SMTP envelope and SMTP headers but doubt there is such a thing as the SMTP envelope because email doesn't involve paper
- all you need to do to get the FUSSP implemented and deployed is to publish an RFC or get a law passed
- the FUSSP won't be effective until it has been deployed at more than 60% of SMTP servers and that's not a problem
So, the next time someone says "Why Can't You Just...", or for that matter the next time you find yourself inventing the FUSSP, it might be worth referring to "You Might Be An Anti-Spam Kook If...".
Thanks to Boing Boing for the original link.