Also, Yahoo got PWNED pretty badly about a week ago, userIDs and passwords compromised for a very large number of users, and their accounts used to send spam and malware. So if you have a Yahoo account, change your password ASAP. (One of my clients' personal email addresses got compromised in the attack. Also, British Telecom cancelled its contracts with Yahoo as a result of this.) There is a way to stop spam dead in its tracks, which is to charge a teeny-tiny fee for every outgoing email. This would destroy the economics / business model that allows spam to thrive on "free" email. (As Richard Stallman says, "free speech isn't the same thing as free beer.") However that won't help if scumbags break into networks and steal user accounts. BTW, the recent flood of proposals for surveillance-based authentication ("behavioral passwords" and "password in a pill") are utter bullshit. All that's needed to block password scanning is to use three-word or four-word passphrases: easy for humans to remember, hard for computers to break. -G. ===== On 13-06-11-Tue 4:56 PM, Tracy Jacobs wrote:

Hi William- The problem with "making it computationally expensive," is that it's pure thermodynamic entropy, and in an era where computers account for a large slice of overall energy consumption, it translates to increased energy consumption that produces nothing. By analogy, like trying to reduce frivolous automobile usage by forcing cars to drive around in circles before they can go to their destination, as compared to just raising the tax on gasoline. Further, as the recently exposed Bitcoin botnet schemes have demonstrated, bad actors can simply export that entropy load to innocent parties, who for the most part remain blissfully unaware that their machines are busy grinding away for the benefit of the scammers. Whereas charging a fee per outgoing email, even at the level of 1/100 of a cent, also helps pay for the communications infrastructure, which is part of an overall strategy of breaking free from the "advertising-driven" (surveillance-driven) model of the internet. Driving around in circles produces nothing. Increased gasoline taxes fund public services. This also provides a means of alerting users when their machines have been hijacked, via an odometer-like display in their email app. If you see your odometer incrementing, while you're not sending email, someone else got into your machine. And the fact that there's a cost, even if it's only ten cents per thousand emails generated on your machine, is also a direct incentive for people to secure their machines and investigate when they start seeing their cost-odometer move while they aren't sending email. BTW, the name for the cost-per-email proposal, via Jaron Lanier, is "a homeopathic dose of postage." (That does not imply belief in homeopathy, only that it fits as an analogy.) -G. ===== On 13-06-11-Tue 7:55 PM, William Budington wrote:

Putting together an open art exhibit for the next oakland art mumur - https://sudoroom.org/ai1ec_event/art-year-of-the-snake-rebirth/?instance_id= It will be titled *YEAR OF THE SNAKE: REBIRTH* january 3, 2014 during ar murmur and after I'm speaking to people in San Francisco who do a lot of great community-driven political art, street art, and graffiti. I haven't gotten them to buy in on this yet but working on it. If you know anyone who does similar work it would go well with this theme, ring me up. *troy, i'm talking to you! =D* ============================= Romy Ilano romy(a)snowyla.com On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 10:41 PM, Romy Ilano <romy(a)snowyla.com> wrote: