Bishop recently introduced a bill that would make companies that outsource call centers ineligible for government contracts.

How about we make this into a law that actually keeps desirable jobs in the country? For example, why only call-center jobs? Those jobs suck and don't pay shit, anyway. How about we say "If more than 5% of your total workforce is outsourced outside the U.S., no government contracts."

If you want to save mega-bucks on salaries by hiring foreigners for 10center per hour? More power to you: But you won't be lining your pockets with tax-money anymore, either.

Of course, they can only get that data via an ISP if it is transmitted across the Internet in the first place, and while they probably have the resources to pay somebody to break into just about anything, that's still a fruitless exercise if the lending records are anonymized the moment the books get returned. Likely their network admins have considered the "backup hole" and have already dealt with it, since IT people at libraries have librarians for bosses who understand the issues in play, even if some IT folks don't.

Does your computer just not have "Google" or something? Get off your ass, Mr. Skeptic. My local library is doing this too: I asked.

Its actually quite ingenious... He's going to create an ISP where it is much-more-difficult to compromise a users privacy. They're designing it from the ground up to be PATRIOT-Act proof because it will literally be impossible for them to give the feds the data they want. It is fewer fights, but may amount to one HUGE fight with the biggest gorilla on earth, the U.S. Justice Department.

Another possibility, however, is if he gets anywhere close to a working model where this is possible that he suddenly has an "accident," or his data-center suffers a "mysterious fire." Or maybe the CIA kills his network engineers the way Israel kills mechanical engineers they think can build high-speed centrifuges in Iran.

Security researchers and customers have been questioning why Apple hasn't yet provided a fix for the malware even though Flashback has been around in one form or another for more than six months now.

Duh... They haven't fixed it yet because Macs don't get viruses, worms, and malware, that's a Windows problem... Hadn't you heard?

Oops! Thanks! Knew there was a 3 in there somewhere...

What's interesting about that is that, although the Senate was engaging in a charade of a "session," Obama didn't actually have to wait for them to "adjourn." Article 3 gives the executive the power to declare congress in recess in situations where the houses are divided regarding going into recess--as they were at the time.

Why didn't he use it? It's spelled out in the constitution--not even an amendment, it's part of the original text--so what gives? Why not just issue an executive order that says "Pursuant to Article 3 powers of the executive, with both houses of congress in disagreement over whether to adjourn, I hereby declare them to be in recess until xyz date."

It wouldn't have been any kind of power-grab... It is the most constitutional thing he could have done, and would have been absolutely air-tight. He'd have out-manuevered the GOP, gotten his nominees appointed, and been able to move on. Instead, he gave his political enemies more ammunition to attack him with. Surely he has to have figured out they're going to be pissed and sue, no matter what he does, and that the Supreme Court fix is in, so he's got to conduct himself in a manner that is just absolutely constitutionally unquestionably allowed.

Been a while for me, too. I mean, I'm not tearing-up or anything, but it's something.

Request permission for flyby...

Riiiiight... There is no cake!

Fucking matrix again...

And also, before I forget: the corollary of "filters are only as unintelligent as the people who program them" is that "when smart people program those filters, they're very effective."

We've been suing spammers for 14 years, and have made at best a tiny dent in the problem. Once we got to advanced filtering that actually worked pretty well? At that point, having an effectively run filter became very... well, effective, for lack of a better label.

You do the math... I mean, you won't, since you've obviously already staked out a position that, no matter how ineffective or illogical it is shown to be, you will defend until you get bored. But everybody who isn't you, feel free to do the math and recognize the bullshit: Just suing spammers doesn't do a fucking thing. If it did, the "CAN-SPAM Act" would've solved all of our problems, all by itself, almost overnight.

It didn't.

What made email usable? SPAM filtering in combination with suing the biggest spammers into bankruptcy. Slowly but surely, email got better and better.

...Except that Twitter can see all of the posts simultaneously, even though you can't, so posting from multiple accounts isn't an automatically effective dodge.

You could also make the threshold 3-5% or any arbitrary number...

I notice you have no response to the real thrust of my post, which is, neither solution by itself solves anything.

Filters are only as unintelligent as the people who program them.

For spam on twitter to get results, it would seem to require meeting a couple criteria:

1) Unless the person you want to spam is following you, it has to be directed @somebody so it will show up in their mentions, or the target of the tweet will never actually see it.
2) An actionable link for the user to click-on once they see the tweet.

So, there are literally billions of messages sent on Twitter every day. An enormous percentage of them do not include an "@", which means you can almost certainly discount that tweet as spam. So the "sameness" thing really comes down to the URL... So how hard would it be to write a rule that says:

"If person XYZ posts more than XYZ tweets @somebody in XYZ period of time and all of the tweets lead to the exact-same (or less than 10% different) URL, its likely spam."

Answer: It wouldn't be that hard at all. And is 100% necessary, as the decade-plus-long failure of various "sue spammers" campaigns can attest to.

Yes, by all means sue the bastards. But don't expect the judge to solve the whole problem in perpetuity throughout the universe--instead use the judge to extract a penalty from the spammers after the fact.

In other words, it isn't "either/or" but "both" that you require for an effective solution.

Hey, how many "lets sue all the spammers into bankruptcy" campaigns have there been? When will those lawsuits lead to an end to spam? The first one I recall was in 1998..,

As of today, let's call it 14 years and counting suing spammers, and yet a cursory look at my spam folder (in any of my email accounts--even the unpublished/never-given-out-to-anybody-used-for-personal-archival-purposes one) shows it to be STUFFED with junk mail.

I'm not arguing against suing, merely pointing out that suing the toolmakers that they know about won't by itself stop spammers.

For example, what about a lawsuit stops them from quietly developing twitter spam tools and spreading them around the Internet on various not-obvious-who-owns-them servers, and then regularly moving their toolkits from place to place to make IP banning ineffective? Absolutely nothing whatsoever. Likely, the "best" spammers were on this route long before Twitter started suing people, which means we're still going to need filtering, with or without lawsuits.

Also, just because the attacker might shift tactics doesn't mean you shouldn't try to defeat his current tactic... Plus, you could write the rules intelligently so that just a cursory alteration of the non-URL portion of the tweet wouldn't let the message pass as "spam." For example, it's really hard to imagine that 10,000 tweets to some random landing page on bit.ly coming in over the course of a few seconds from the same account is anything but spam. If you really wanted to get fancy, you could include a circuit-breaker such as "Can't tweet the same link @ more people than you have Twitter followers in xyz period of time."

...a post-box that is currently filled with unread magazines, unpaid utility bills, and angry letters from disappointed shareholders, which might explain why notes to the CEO are also going unanswered...