Posted on November 8th, 2007 by William McGeveran
Dan Solove at Concurring Opinions has some quite sensible concerns about Facebook’s new advertising program — specifically, that it may violate privacy law. I think he’s right, and then some…
In short, the new program allows corporations to set up Facebook pages where visitors who take certain actions can thereby trigger the sending of a […]
32 Comments »
Filed under: Internet & Society, Social Networking, Spam, Digital Media, Intermediaries, Privacy, Peer Production
Posted on September 5th, 2007 by Tim Armstrong
Discussing Washington v. Heckel (2004) with my Computer and Internet Law students earlier today, I wondered aloud whether anybody really cared about the spam issue any more.
Here at Info/Law, we’ve got our spam tag over there on the right-hand side, and if you click it, you can see the half-dozen or so posts, some of […]
8 Comments »
Filed under: Internet & Society, Spam, Filtering
Posted on February 12th, 2007 by William McGeveran
Activists and policy wonks who work with environmental issues take it for granted that private corporate activities and markets lie at the center of both the problems and the potential solutions (like this and this) to issues such as water pollution, global warming, and habitat destruction. Organizations like Ceres work with businesses to help […]
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Filed under: Network Neutrality, Spam, Security, Internet & Society, NSA, Digital Media, Privacy, international, Intermediaries, Filtering, Berkman, Anonymity
Posted on February 1st, 2007 by Derek Bambauer
Simple: don’t send unsolicited e-mail, right? It’s more complex than that. Kelly Jackson Higgins at Dark Reading has a list of suggestions / rules on how not to be labeled as a bad actor. Some are easy: when someone asks not to receive messages anymore, unsubscribe them! Some are more complex: make sure you don’t […]
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Filed under: Security, Internet & Society, ISP, Spam, Intermediaries, badware, Notes
Posted on December 5th, 2006 by Derek Bambauer
According to anti-spam company Postini, 91% of e-mail messages are now spam. A majority of China’s cell phone users get at least five spam text (SMS) messages per week, and 61% have complained to their service provider about the problem. The European Union has spam loads of 50 to 80% of messages, and is (yet […]
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Filed under: Internet & Society, ISP, Spam, Intermediaries
Posted on November 13th, 2006 by William McGeveran
I was catching up on the back issues of Wired scattered around my house and there in the September issue (the one with Beck on the cover) I found an article by Charles C. Mann that started out thoughtful but ended up maddening.
The story dissected the threat posed by splogs (and link farms and comment […]
8 Comments »
Filed under: Spam, Security, Internet & Society, Digital Media, Privacy, Anonymity, Intermediaries, Filtering, Blogging
Posted on July 24th, 2006 by Tim Armstrong
Spam is one of those problems that everyone (except Derek) despairs of ever solving; indeed, Cory Doctorow’s check-box form letter response to anti-spam proposals remains as salient as ever. So it’s hard to know what, if anything, to make of today’s news that the United States now accounts for nearly one-quarter of the world’s spam […]
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Filed under: Spam
Posted on June 14th, 2006 by Derek Bambauer
One of the Internet’s chief virtues is inefficiency.
“Best effort” packet routing - as Jonathan Zittrain describes it, the “bucket brigade” where each link in the network tries to pass packets to the next hop, but without guarantees - is less efficient than a protocol that seeks to guarantee transmission and thereby minimizes bandwidth used to […]
9 Comments »
Filed under: Network Neutrality, ISP, Spam, Intermediaries, Notes
Posted on June 1st, 2006 by Derek Bambauer
Network neutrality - “treating all bits alike” - has been top-of-mind for Congress and for many geeks / lawyers / telco companies. I’m hoping some of you who are smarter / better-informed than I can help me answer this question: at a technical level, how does one define or implement network neutrality?
I approach this […]
8 Comments »
Filed under: ISP, Network Neutrality, Spam, VoIP, Filtering, Intermediaries
Posted on May 23rd, 2006 by Derek Bambauer
The metaphorical “arms race” between spammers and anti-spam companies became real last week: Blue Security, a software company that sends opt-out requests to spammers (via e-mail or through their Web sites) through its Blue Frog program became the target of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack by a spam sender who objected to the […]
4 Comments »
Filed under: Spam, Software, Intermediaries