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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, July 04 2013 @ 09:57 AM EDT |
Don't consider the "email is bad" from the perspective of whether or not
having a list of emails is good/bad or from whether or not the tech is making
use of it properly.
Consider it in the context of the situation where an
individual has been sentenced to jail for acquiring the email via a publicly
accessible means.
Then consider the two statements:
If it is
perfectly legal for AT&T to provide those email addresses in a publicly
accessible, non protected method: why was the person ever convicted of
anything?
If it was wrong, then why does AT&T not have the lions
share of wrong by making the emails publicly available without
protection?
If you open up your local white pages and copy names, phone
numbers and addresses into your daytimer - are you guilty of identity theft?
Are you guilty of circumventing protection mechanisms?
If you are...
isn't the telephone company even more guilty of a crime for having provided you
with that very information in the form of a printed book?
RAS[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, July 04 2013 @ 02:00 PM EDT |
While I love bashing M$ as much as the next penguin, I think blaming the rapid
expansion of the internet on Microsoft is misguided and gives them far too much
credit.
I seem to recall that they had to be dragged kicking and screaming to add
internet capabilities to Windows only when it became apparent that Netscape was
going to eat their lunch. And even then, it wasn't about promoting the
technology, it was about locking users into Windows. (See Novell v. MS, at left)
Meanwhile, the visionary Bill Gates was famously proclaiming that the internet
was all a fad.
Most would argue that Microsoft has done little more than try to hold the
internet to its own backward level by crippling any competition. (See MS
Litigations, at left)
The internet took off because it was an enabling technology that is sufficiently
advanced as to be magic to 95% of users, thereby result in 95% of the users
being 100% unaware of the inherent dangers, and building massive virtual cities
and only semi-virtual economies (unfortunately paid for by real money) over the
magically hidden sinkholes. Microsoft was merely the largest-by-monopoly of the
mostly clueless purveyors of this disaster. Many would argue the internet is
still not ready for prime time.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: cricketjeff on Thursday, July 04 2013 @ 06:03 PM EDT |
And very much in favour of generalised e-mail for everyone, it didn't occur to
me that we shouldn't push on hard with it because it wasn't encrypted or sender
verified. Mainly because I, like I suspect 99% of all the other techies buzzing
round the edge of the issue didn't suspect what all the bad guys would do!
M$ were very late to the Internet party and there was generalised email
available long before they built their tools. So although I'm all in favour of
laying the blame for all sorts of ills at Bill's door, in this instance I don't
believe he was guilty.
---
There is nothing in life that doesn't look better after a good cup of tea.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: tknarr on Thursday, July 04 2013 @ 06:37 PM EDT |
I think it's more a lack of common sense. Most of the "problems" with e-mail
occur with snail mail too, and nobody has a problem dealing with them. If you
get a letter that looks like it's from the power company but is saying you own
some ridiculous amount and have to pay immediately or your electricity will be
shut off, you don't instantly grab the checkbook and send a check to the address
in the letter. You pick up the phone and call the power company and ask what's
up. If you get a letter that claims to be from a family member but asks for
something to be mailed to a weird address that isn't theirs, you ring them up
and ask what's up. You don't assume that people who you haven't given your
address to can't write to you, you know that anybody can look your address up in
the phone book and send you a letter. That's not a problem, you sort your mail
when it arrives and decide based on the item what to do with it. And if it's
junk that deserves binning, nobody has a problem with binning it. Nobody, uses
your address as a unique identifier for you or uses knowledge of your address as
sole proof of identity. And nobody assumes that a letter must have come from
someone merely because their name's in the return address, anybody
could've written that and we know better than to depend on it.
The
problem seems to be that people believe that somehow e-mail is magically
different from snail mail and follows rules and offers guarantees that we all
know snail mail doesn't. That's not a problem with e-mail, that's a PICNIC
error. And the further problem IMO is that we tolerate and even encourage those
errors rather than mocking them mercilessly. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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