I’ve touched many times on the issue of spamming for political gain. Now here’s some further proof that the Republican Party is just as low-down as those people sending me Viagra spam: this spam email from the Republican National Committee arrived today.
This came in “over the transom” and is passed on in its entirety.
Internet Commons Congress 2004March 24-25, 2004, Outside Washington, DC
Scheduled Sessions/Participants: http://www.internationalunity.org/schedule.htmlhttp://www.internationalunity.org
http://www.nyfairuse.org/iccPlease forward this call to any other concerned parties you might know. Please visit the above links to register to attend and join in the fight to preserve the Internet commons.
Today our commons is under attack.
The attack is wide and pervasive. Even our right to own and use computers inside our homes and offices, is under attack.
The time has come to assemble and declare our rights. We call upon advocates and organizers, authors and cow-orkers, readers and singers, politicians and students, grandmothers and children of all ages, and all who support the right of free human beings to the free dissemination and use of information rendered to the commons for the benefit of the public, to join us at the Internet Commons Congress outside Washington DC on March 24 and 25, 2004.
We live in a time of vibrant prospects and shameful travesties, brought on as we confront the implications of a new and broader and greater empowerment in furtherance of our common wealth and in engagement in our common governance.
Today we possess:
- The Internet: the means to disseminate and make use of published information flexibly and powerfully, on a worldwide scale
- Computers: tools to process, select, combine, analyze and synthesize information at the digital and logical level, and
- Logical Freedom: the power to devise means of applying these tools through the free use and expression of logic in code
But today we also confront:
- attempts to create irrational and wildly artificial legal and regulatory trammels on new conventions, such as VoIP, in order to keep control of the world’s communication channels in the hands of old oligopolies, monopolies, and tyrannical governments
- an intransigent U.S. Federal Communications Commission, arrogating to itself an unprecedented authority to declare exclusive rights policy and to regulate the design of digital devices on that basis
- consolidated mass media and entrenched communications monopolies that subvert principles of the public interest with the willing concurrence of complaisant regulators and legislators
- elected representatives who have made plain their intention to enact a new exclusive right to factual information in databases
- forceful attempts in Europe to subvert the law banning patents on software, by patent establishment professionals and the large companies they serve
- specious arguments by public servants and privileged contractors for the supposed reliability of “new voting technology”
- attempts by the Bio-Medical Cartel and others to seize the fruits of logical, biological, medical, and pharmaceutical researches carried out at publically financed institutions of science and learning
- an already well advanced and well funded plan to impose a redesign of home computer hardware so that running software that you choose would be made impractical, and analyzing and processing information in the manner you choose would be made impossible; the new design, backed by laws such as the DMCA, would result in the emplacement of wiretap and remote control hardware and supporting software in every new low cost home computer sold in 2006
- massive ongoing and systematic violations of contract law and antitrust law and consumer protection law by Microsoft and its partners, by means of which most home users are left with no choice but to run Microsoft operating systems: most people are not offered any choice of operating system at point of sale of the hardware, and are therefore induced to employ systems that are difficult to use and easily parasitized, systems that are indeed so bad because Microsoft need not compete
- a hundred million dollar campaign of barratry and red-baiting conducted by SCO, acting as agent for the convicted monopolist Microsoft, to induce businesses and individuals to steer away from exercising free control of their logic devices, away in particular from GNU/Linux operating systems; the assault led by SCO is only one of many of similar scale
All these issues and more are part of a broad struggle by all the people, we who treasure our freedom and who wish to remain free to use our Net and our computers in all the ways that are both fit and just.
We call all ready advocates and concerned constituencies to assemble at the Internet Commons Congress this March 24 and 25, 2004. Here we will forge a bond in our common cause of information freedom, detail our missions and callings and summon each other to join in common cause.
Please click here for details regarding venue, schedule, logistics: http://www.nyfairuse.org/icc/
Registration for attendance is free: http://www.nyfairuse.org/icc/reg.xhtmlThose in attendance will issue calls for action, as shall we. We call all free citizens to join the struggle against englobulation of our Commons and our computers by the loose association and alliance of cartels, oligopolies, monopolies, and parts of governments, that seek to keep or take control of all the communications systems of the world.
At the moment New Yorkers for Fair Use knows of a few efforts which we will forward at the Congress:
- Continued Actions for Refunds: We hope to prepare materials to move the FTC, Congress of the USA folk, the Federal antitrust team, and the judge in the Microsoft case to consider effective action on the basis of gross violations of both the 1994/1995 consent decree, and the recent conviction of Microsoft. This effort needs several score affidavits dealing with anti-competitive practices at point of sale of low cost computer hardware.
- Education of Regulators and Legislators and Attorneys about Home Computer Hardware: We will explain and demonstrate the boot process today on untrammeled hardware and what the boot process would be like on Palladiated hardware, that is, hardware with hard DRM.
- Procurement Policy Education and Action: We seek to collect and analyze the grossly inequitable policies and procedures by which vendors of source secret softwares keep their special privileged position in the machine rooms and desktops of government agencies.
- Education of Regulators and Legislators and Judges about the Net: We will explain the fundamental principles which, for more than thirty years, have supported the psychic and moral and legal and engineering foundations of our Net. A popularly reported on issue directly connected with these principles is the “issue of Voice Over Internet Protocol”.
These four actions have been mentioned because organizations, tribes, and individuals from New York City have recently been working on these four efforts. We know that other efforts will also be carried forward at the Internet Commons Congress. Come and help!
—
New Yorkers for Fair Use
http://www.nyfairuse.org[CC] Counter-copyright: http://realmeasures.dyndns.org/cc
I reserve no rights restricting copying, modification or distribution of this incidentally recorded communication. Original authorship should be attributed reasonably, but only so far as such an expectation might hold for usual practice in ordinary social discourse to which one holds no claim of exclusive rights.
I’ve mentioned spam on this blog several times, noting that Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris in particular have been caught spamming.
Democrats are no less enthusiastic spammers, though, and now Wes Clark has joined the ranks of spammers, having hired Kintera, Inc. to broadcast his campaign messages unsolicited to voters at the recipients’ expense.
Usually the word “monoculture” refers to agriculture done the wrong way, with lots of identical plants living side by side. If a disease comes along that can infect one plant, it can infect them all, and a catastrophic epidemic results. We’ve seen many examples in the past, from Dutch Elm disease to the Irish Potato Famine. The wise farmer encourages diversity, so a disease that affects one plant doesn’t necessarily affect them all.
Slashdot points to an interesting article about monoculture in software. Most computers run Windows, and when a computer virus comes along that can exploit one of the many inherent vulnerabilities of that operating system, the results can bring whole networks to their knees.
It’s yet another argument against allowing monopolies to exist. Monopolies like Microsoft create a technological monoculture, leaving the whole economy vulnerable to an otherwise small flaw in a piece of software.
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:
All these measures are effective: they increase the spammer’s cost of doing business and put many spammers out of business permanently.
NPR’s John Ydstie did this interview with a spammer, allowing her to trot out the same tired lies that all the spammers tell. Here’s my irate response to NPR:
John Ydstie’s piece on spam was woefully inadequate. Apparently he only talked to spammers in researching the piece. Unfortunately spammers are, as a rule, notorious liars.“Permission-based marketing” is a misnomer. You can’t buy an opt-in list. If you bought the list, by definition, nobody opted in to your list. You took a FORMERLY opt-in list and used it for a purpose not agreed to by anyone on the list.
The spammer trots out the standard lie that “anyone can unsubscribe.” It can be demonstrated, and had been demonstrated over and over, that spammers use their so-called “unsubscribe” address not to DELETE email addresses, but rather to CONFIRM email addresses. Try this simple experiment: create an email account that nobody knows about. Don’t tell anyone about it and don’t email anyone from it. Then attempt to unsubscribe that “virgin” address from any spammer’s list. Watch the spam start rolling in to your new, “unsubscribed” account.
Betterly claims, as all spammers to, that they don’t send out sex-related or illegal emails. SOMEbody keeps sending me bestiality porn ads and penis enlargement schemes, daily, but none of the prominent spammers will admit to it. Hmm.
SpamCop, in particular, is chastised for not letting spammers “confront” complainers. Spammers really want to know who the complainers are. Sometimes they want to retaliate against complainers, by forging the complainer’s address on the From line of their spams, provoking thousands of angry complaints (a tactic known as a “Joe Job”). Mostly they want to “listwash,” that is, remove complainers from the list. That way the spammer can continue to spam, usually in violation of the Acceptable Use Policy of her Internet service provider, while squelching complaints. But the idea of complaining isn’t to edit the mailing list, it’s to get service providers to enforce their AUP and stop the spamming from their networks.
Questions John Ydstie should have asked Betterly:
- Why is spamming grounds for cancellation of service at every reputable Internet service provider?
- Why do spammers always forge the From header in their emails?
- Why do ISPs who shelter spammers go bankrupt so often?
- Why do so many spammers have serious criminal records?
Some basic reading for any journalist who wants to do a feature on spam:
I also recommend a counter-interview with Steve Linford, a prominent anti-spammer.
and that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is respectable: here’s a counterexample: a recently granted patent on swinging sideways on a swing. Just remember this the next time your tax dollars are used to enforce a software patent for Microsoft.
Just when you thought Katherine Harris couldn’t do any more damage, it turns out she’s not just a Republican who helped George W. Bush steal the Presidency, she’s a spammer, too. Figures… capitalists spam, and her buddy Jeb Bush spams too.
I’ve been having some fun in a Usnet discussion of spam recently. In response to some complaints that the Democrats and Republicans are getting into spamming, I noted that the Socialist Party does no such thing, and challenged other third-party folks to take a position on spam. Update 3/29/02: Speaking of Democrats and Republicans spamming, the Jeb Bush campaign spammed several hundred Democrats recently, according to the Miami Herald.
The list of reasons to repeal the DMCA is long, and now is longer: Google has been forced to remove all references to web site critical of the cult of Scientology on the grounds of alleged copyright infringement. The bizarre claims by the cult of Scientology that their religious beliefs are protected by copyright have been around a long time, and have never been tested in a court of law. Under the DMCA a mere allegation of infringement is sufficient to censor a web site on behalf of a corporation.
