taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Spam: The EFF are a great organisation — damn, I even helped set up an organisation based on its goals in Ireland, back in the day! But this white paper is shockingly clueless.

(Note: this posting has been updated. Original left intact, but there’s an update below worth noting.)

For example:

Spam Assassin, a popular program that does ad hoc pattern matching, assigns ‘points’ to various features of an email to determine whether it is spam. … One of the major problems with this system is that messages from certain countries — like China, for example — can be blocked purely on the basis of where they come from and what language they’re in. The implications for free speech here are very troubling indeed: … thus anti-spam technology unintentionally works as a political censorship mechanism.

SpamAssassin does not give points for country of origin, or language the message arrives in, unless the user explicitly either (a) adds rules from an external source, or (b) modifies the ‘ok_languages’ setting in their configuration, from the default, to specify that they do not want to receive messages in particular languages. No country- or language-blocking happens by default. This is by design.

It’s a shame that the authors felt the need to outright fabricate a danger, here.

The white paper features more broad generalisations about ’spam filters’, mostly using unsubstantiated friend-of-a-friend stories, without detailed data. And I do know that there have been cases of MoveOn.org, at least, being a source of UBE, in the past — so it’s not valid to claim that this is all a ‘free speech’ issue; political UBE is still spam.

They need to realise there’s a lot of very smart, very reasonable anti-spammers out there, and most of us agree with the rest of their goals, except for their spam position. This is hurting them.

Still, it appears they’re finally getting a clue about requiring subscription requests be confirmed using closed-loop opt-in, so that’s good. More political newsletters, and political campaigns, need to get this clue — just because it’s political speech does not mean it’s not spam. (I have several thousand political spams in my spam folder — most from that German anti-immigration virus from earlier this year.)

Note that Rod is unsure if they’re practicing what they preach…

Update: Annalee Newitz has been in touch, and pointed out that the white paper in fact says ‘mails … can be blocked’, rather than ‘are blocked’ based on country of origin. In other words, it’s purely a matter of this being possible, rather than the default, and that administrators apply these customisations.

In addition, she notes that the conclusions recommend that ISPs and administrators of spam blocking systems allow end users to control their own filtering settings, saying ‘If a user wants to block all mail from China, great. If a sysadmin does it for a bunch of users without permission, then that is a problem in our opinion.’

So I agree with that. Misdirected outrage hereby turned off ;)

(Mind you, I still think they need to work more with the reasonable anti-spammers… and fix that unconfirmed sign-up that Rod mentioned, if it’s really still unconfirmed!)

Tags: country, default, eff, example, language, organisation, paper, source, spam, speech

Patents: I haven’t been blogging much, as I’ve got the damn flu. I thought I was clear after a minor bout, then it came back around again for another run… urgh. Now I’m all hot, confused, achy, and (due to it affecting my ears and therefore sense of balance) clumsy. Damn you, influenza virus! :(

But there’s some good news — NoSoftwarePatents.com has opened, with a nice, clean, clear website full of excellent content. Not only does it cover the usual list of basics, with good examples like FFII’s web-shop example, it goes into more detail about parallels; here’s a great one:

Patents on software are just as wrong as expanding the patent system to literature. With patents on story elements, no movie could be published without having to firstly check whether there is any general idea in the storyline that someone patented during the last 20 years. Here’s an example: At first sight, Dirty Dancing and Titanic are two very distinct movies. However, if there were patents on story elements, then the makers of Dirty Dancing could have sued the studio of Titanic. Both movies have a scene in which a poor boy takes a rich girl from a party of her social peers to a dancing party of his group, and she enjoys it. Dirty Dancing came out only nine years before Titanic, so any patent would still have been in force. No one knows whether James Cameron had that Dirty Dancing scene in mind as he wrote the Titanic script. Maybe Cameron never saw Dirty Dancing but the patent (if it existed) could be used against him anyway.

That’s exactly the right parallel to make! Software patents cover the tens to hundreds of little algorithms you need to put together to make a software product, and comparing an algorithm in a software product to a scene concept in a movie, illustrates that nicely.

Each page has a little quote from heavy-hitters like Bill Gates, Oracle, Deutsche Bank, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, etc., coming out against swpats. There’s also a section dealing with the disinformation that the other side has been putting out.

Next time you need to send a URL over to educate someone about this issue, this is the one to reach for.

Some news on the EU Software Patents Directive — IDA eGovernment News reports that ‘the formal approval of the draft Directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions by the EU Competitiveness Council has been postponed due to translation delays’, and notes that ‘on 6/10/2004, the Parliament’s Internal Market Committee selected former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard to draw up its response.’ It goes on:

Unsurprisingly, the appointment of Mr Rocard — an outspoken adversary of software patents — was welcomed by opponents of the proposed directive and criticised by its supporters. That Michel Rocard is taking over the dossier reflects the fact that the wider economic, infrastructural and social implications for Europe are now seen more clearly. Also, in the Council a learning process has begun, and it will be supported by the Parliament’s move, Mr Holger Blasum of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure told journalists. On the oher hand, Francisco Mingorance of the Business Software Alliance pointed out that Mr Rocard hasn’t shown any sympathy to the directive in the past. We can only hope he will be sufficiently open to the view of persons and groups which have a different opinion, he said.

Well, that sounds like good news to me ;)

Tags: damn, dancing, dirty, example, party, patent, patents, scene, software, story, titanic

News: Selves and Others is a site that cropped up a couple of months ago, tracking the output of many of the left’s strongest voices, for example:

• George Monbiot
• Sidney Blumenthal
• Seymour Hersh
• Greg Palast
• Tariq Ali

Well, one feature they were missing was RSS feeds, allowing users to track new articles by a specific author as they’re published. They’ve just added it; the good old orange XML button now appears on each author’s page. Excellent!

Tags: author, couple, example, feature, left, news, orange, output, rss, selves, site

Tolkien: The Encyclopedia of Arda — great for settling those insanely geeky Lord of The Rings arguments, of which there have been loads recently. ;)

For example, yes, Gandalf does wear one of the elf-rings — and this is shown in the ’sailing of the ring-bearers’ scene in the third movie. (The elf-rings are only intermittently visible in the movie — presumably because only other ring-bearers can see them, or something like that. Ben?)

I’m looking forward to the extended edition of Return of the King already…

Tags: arda, encyclopedia, example, gandalf, geeky, lord, movie, rings, sailing, the, tolkien

TidBITS weighs in. They cover the issues very well, and also have noticed the problem that arises when a C-R system decides to challenge e-commerce notifications — like your air travel e-tickets, for example.

Found at Gary Robinson’s blog, where he also links a couple of taint.org items, cheers Gary ;)

Also, from /.: the House of Lords debates the etymology of ’spam’. Quite funny:

Lady Saltoun of Abernethy: My Lords, do the Government have any plans to restrict unsolicited faxes? My fax paper is always being wasted by people who send me faxes I do not want. I do not know whether they could be called ‘corned beef’ or something, but I have had enough of them.

Plus another anti-spam Senate bill, from Rep. W.J. ‘Billy’ Tauzin (R-La.) and F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.). This one is apparently riddled with loopholes: ‘this is yet another bill . . . attempting to get rid of the porn and the scams, but really clearing the way for legitimate companies to spam,” said John Mozena, co-founder of … CAUCE.’

Tags: air, bill, blog, example, found, problem, spam, system, tidbits, travel