Another socialist blog

You don’t often hear me agreeing with the Libertarian Party, but once in a while they’re absolutely right, and they’re right about Rush Limbaugh:

“One thing we don’t hear from American politicians very often is silence,” said Joe Seehusen, Libertarian Party executive director. “By refusing to criticize Rush Limbaugh, every drug warrior has just been exposed as a shameless, despicable hypocrite.

“And that’s good news, because the next time they do speak up, there’ll be no reason for anyone to listen.”

The revelation that Limbaugh had become addicted to painkillers — drugs he is accused of procuring illegally from his Palm Beach housekeeper — has caused a media sensation ever since the megastar’s shocking, on-air confession last week.

As the Limbaugh saga continues, here’s an important question for Americans to ask, Libertarians say: Why are all the drug warriors suddenly so silent?

“Republican and Democratic politicians have written laws that have condemned more than 400,000 Americans to prison for committing the same ‘crime’ as Rush Limbaugh,” Seehusen pointed out. “If this pill-popping pontificator deserves a get-out-of-jail-free card, these drug warriors had better explain why.”

To that, I can only add that Limbaugh is one of those hypocrites. Like the Republicans and Democrats, Rush Limbaugh has been making a career of demanding that drug users should all go to prison:

Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. And the laws are good because we know what happens to people in societies and neighborhoods which become consumed by them. And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up. — Rush Limbaugh, October 5, 1995

I agree with Eric Lee when he says that activists and trade unionists should be concerned about the spam problem. If email becomes unusable, we will be much less able to get our own message out, but the rich will still have ways of getting their own propaganda in front of the public.

Spamming, the sending of unsolicited bulk email, is quintessentially capitalistic: a public resource (the Internet) is used to produce private profit. Socialize the costs, privatize the profits—that’s what capitalism is all about. And for a small number of big spammers, it’s big business.

I don’t think that Lee’s suggeste tactics are all that likely to “actually work,” though, if we define a working tactic as one that reduces the total load of spam on the network. Filtering of spam after it arrives, whether at the server or the email client, does nothing to inconvenience the spammer. We, however, suffer even if we don’t have to read the spam: the network slows down, the mail server gets busier and slower, and eventually the monthly bill goes up to pay for increased capacity.

The concept of a multi-layered defense is a good one, though. The following defenses can all be used at once for real effectiveness:

• Boycott spammers. Never, ever buy anything that has been advertised via spam. Make sure your friends understand why they should do the same. Spam is no longer the sole province of sleazy pornographers—it’s used by sleazy mainstream businesses more and more. If they don’t get sales, they’ll quit spamming.
• Boycott the Internet service providers (ISPs) who harbor spammers. Reputable ISPs all have a policy that strictly prohibits spamming. So spammers have to find a spam-friendly provider to stay in business. These spam havens are only interested in making money, and the community be damned. If the legitimate customers flock to the competition, the spam hosts will see that spam is bad business. If you stay with a provider that has a pro-spam reputation, you’re prolonging the problem. Unfortunately some large ISPs, e.g. Pacific Bell, are spam-friendly.
• Insist that your ISP block email from spam-friendly networks. Wait a minute, didn’t he just say that filtering was no good? Yes, but blocking is different. It’s possible to set up the server to refuse to accept email from any particular area of the Internet. If the spammer is in that blocked-out area, he doesn’t get a chance to transmit his spam to our server. Thus the network isn’t slowed down, and our server doesn’t waste time processing junk email. There are several public lists of spam-friendly networks, and using several of them in layers provides a good degree of protection. (This server currently uses nine different public blocking lists.)
• The most successful of these lists is SPEWS, which has a simple but very effective policy about listing networks: first, they list only the spammer’s own network address. If the ISP doesn’t do the right thing and kick the spammer off the network, SPEWS increases the listing to include adjacent network addresses. And the listed space just keeps getting bigger and bigger until the spammers are gone. What starts out as the spammer’s problem very quickly becomes the ISP’s problem, as the other customer start to scream that their legitimate email is getting blocked by recipients who use SPEWS. Customers pay to get connected, not DISconnected, and the ISP knows this. There is a long history of spammers losing their Internet access because of blocking lists.
• Report the spam you get. Reputable ISPs don’t host spammers, but they don’t always know there’s a spammer on their network unless they get complaints from the public. It’s hard to know whom to complain to, because the spammers forge the email in an effort to divert complaints. The From line is always bogus, the various other headers are almost all bogus as well, even the web site advertised in the email may be several jumps away from the spammer’s real web site. Fortunately, there is SpamCop, a service that analyzes your spam and can tell you where to send that complaint—it even composes a polite complaint letter for you, and mails it. I’ve reported half a dozen spams while I’ve been typing this email.

All these measures are effective: they increase the spammer’s cost of doing business and put many spammers out of business permanently.

Internal memos leaked from the Diebold corporation are proving a continuing embarrassment to the company. So much so that they are using the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) to censor the documents.

According to Why War?, “These memos indicate that Diebold, which counts the votes in 37 states, knowingly created an electronic system which allows anyone with access to the machines to add and delete votes without detection.” My favorite excerpt:

I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded. Will someone please explain this so that I have the information to give the auditor instead of standing here “looking dumb”.