Yea, it's been a vast wasteland for the past 50 years.

The purpose of the American military is to provide jobs to the lower classes and keep the money circulating. Automating target identification defeats the purpose, however it does push money up towards the geniuses that come up with this stuff.

I've been self-hosting my personal email for the last 3 years and have found it to be almost as pain free as a hosted account. The only issues I've run into is that on a couple of occasions the IP address block containing the IP address of my server would get blacklisted and I would have to go through the procedure of getting my IP address whitelisted. On one occasion an automatic software update failed to bring postfix back up, so I had to start it manually. That's it.

I might get one spam email every few months, despite not running any kind of spam filtering software (i.e. SpamAssassin). Other than the above issues I've never had to tinker with anything, it just works - and email is sent and received instantly because my server never has to queue my messages.

When setting up an email server most people who have problems fail to ensure that:

• The server's SMTP banner messages resolves to the server's primary IP address (do 'telnet 25', the part following the '220' is the SMTP banner message
• The PTR record of the primary IP address resolves to the SMTP banner message
• Strong passwords are used, thus allowing the account to get compromised by spambots

The downside of course is that you have to pay for hosting and a domain and you have to go through the hassle of initially setting it up. For postfix (SMTP) and dovecot (POP3/IMAP) you need to configure:

/etc/postfix/main.cf
/etc/postfix/virtual
/etc/dovecot.conf

G+ may be evil but Google is your friend when it comes to getting these files setup correctly ;)

Dear Honorable Representative Charlie A. Gonzales,

I would have written to you about this matter earlier but I've felt a sense of powerlessness that I'm sure most ordinary working Americans share; that possessing only a voice no longer has any meaning to an institution that has become an Ebay where laws are written and sold to the highest bidder.

This sense of powerlessness is in my belief the greatest single threat to our National Security. That the self-evidence of this is completely lost on our nations conscience and government is just more proof of how far we as a people have lost our ability to govern ourselves to the Monied Insterests. Timothy McVeigh took lives and gave his own life just as the Minutemen who won our nation's independence from England; his belief in the principles which founded this nation and his sense of powerlessness to fight our current government's lack of respect for its own Constitution by speaking up drove him to fight in the only way he knew how and to have the courage to stand up for his truly American beliefs all the way to his last breath before his state-sanctioned murder, without remorse. As long as the Monied Interests continue to buy laws that violate our Constitution this threat to our National Security will remain. No missile defense, no amount of spending on our military and police can protect us from the next Timothy McVeigh. The Timothy McVeighs that our sold-out government will continue to breed through their disrespect for our Constitution will continue to blow up buildings and kill innocent women and children or infect and kill with biological agents everyone in a large city or two (maybe even Washington, D.C.) on the ever-increasing number of anniversaries of FBI^h^h^h SS misdeeds until Congress returns to respecting the very Constitution from which it derives its sole legitimacy. When the next McVeigh strikes I'll just smile and say to myself "I told you so," knowing just whose hands really bear the blood. It's like Thomas Jefferson said: "The Tree of Liberty must, from time to time, be watered with the blood of patriots." And while I'll deeply admire and respect the McVeighs' belief in our Constitution I'll deplore their actions because it will give our sold-out government another "excuse" to further repress our freedoms and trample our Constitution. Lest you get the wrong idea I'm not a terrorist who would ever commit an act of violence. The terrorists that I view as role models are Gandhi and Martin Luther King - terrorists who created terror in the hearts of the Establishments of their times through non-violent means. I am a terrorist who would dare speak up against the Monied Interests that have purchased our government; a terrorist who's act of terrorism is to write to their representative as I am doing now and risk imprisonment by Big Brother for unapproved thoughts (thought-crimes) that might cost the Monied Interests a penny or two of their soon to be constitutionally guaranteed profits. Yes, you read that right, Rep. Gonzalez, I'm so disillusioned that I'm equating the act of writing my Representative in the House of Representatives of the United States of America with an act of terrorism. It seems that the Monied Interests and their bought-and-paid-for government already believe that their profits are a constitutionally granted right - that competition and survival in the marketplace and responsibility to society at large are obsolete - so they might not get around to fixing such a mere technicality.

Having said that, I'm writing you this letter to protest the FBI's^h^h^h^h^h SS's latest Ruby Ridge, their latest Waco. On July 16, 2001 (A Date That Will ..) Adobe, Inc. ordered the FBI^h^h^h SS to imprison Dmitry Sklyarov, a Russian programmer and father of two young children, because he gave a speech that described the flaws in Adobe's encryption process used in one of its products. An act no different from Ralph Nader describing the flaws in Firestone's tires. An act not only legal but required in his own country so that Russian citizens can exercise their fair-use rights under Russian copyright law and so that Adobe could thus legally sell its product there. An act of speech. Free speech, that once was protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. But not free anymore. He remains in jail as I write this, having been denied not just bail but unconstitutionally denied a bail hearing. He has been charged with felony criminal violation of the DMCA, a law bought and paid for by Monied Interests to protect their intellectual property by violating the First Amendment of our Constitution. Leaders in Congress are now saying that this is just what they expected of the DMCA and are applauding his arrest!!! Like the Pentagon Papers this sticks in my craw and turns the screw in ways that constitute Cruel and Unusual Punishment. This is evidence on its face that many of your Dishonorable Colleagues are of such nonexistent morality as to have re-election funding as their one and only desire and motivation (to hell with the Constitution) that makes Clinton^h^h^h Nixon^h^h^h Hitler^h^h^h Satan look like the Second Coming of Jesus H. Christ Himself. It is they who should be in jail right now, not Sklyarov!!! And we complain when China detains our citizens!!! Boys and Girls, can you say, HYPOCRISY? Can you say Pot? Kettle? Black? I thought you could!!! Too bad your Sold-Out Dishonorable Colleagues in Congress can't. And they won't care either because the sheeple who voted them into office will never hear about the DMCA or Sklyarov because the Monied Interests who bought the DMCA and who had Sklyarov illegally jailed will make sure they'll never hear about it on TV or in the newspapers or they'll slant the news to make it look like it's the DMCA that's good and it's the Big Bad Evil Hackers who are Just Getting What They Deserve.

I would also like you to know that I found the courage and fortitude today to kick a habit more addictive than Crack Cocaine, a habit more "American" than reruns of "Little House On The Prairie." To protest the DMCA, I called AOL Time Warner and canceled the cable television service that I was paying $70 a month for. I told them why. Not that they even bothered to ask. I kept my broadband internet service because even though it comes from a Monopoly it's the only way I can keep myself informed about what is really happening on our planet but if the Monied Interests And The Congress It Bought And Paid For has its way the Internet will become just as relevant here as it is now in China. Then I'll have to cancel my Internet service, and then I don't know what I'll do, maybe quit the computer profession that our nation is now as dependent on for its economic survival as a newborn baby human is on its mother and drink vodka all day to drown my sadness and misery at what the once great United States of America has become thanks to the Monied Interests and the Government They Bought And Paid For.

I've also considered renouncing my American citizenship and moving to another country, but where to? Within the dictatorship of the multinationals who buy not just the laws of nations but the treaties between them as well, no land will be safe for freedom. We may as well all live in one big Afghanistan.

I need to digress here and say one thing. Although campaign finance reform may be what's needed to get the Monied Interests out of bed with our government I have to say that passing campaign finance reform legislation that violates the First Amendment is no better than the DMCA. We need to carefully consider a Constitutional Amendment to fix the problem. Why can't the Congressmen who are so anxious to get a constitutional amendment to punish those who burn the flag consider a constitutional amendment to return the government to the people? Answer: their bought and paid for. They have to be to get the sheeple to elect them. The United States of America is (expletive deleted).

So please, Rep. Gonzalez, Save Freedom. Save us from those who want to "Round Up The Terrorists Who Warp Our Childrens' Minds By Saying On The "Evil" Internet That It Is OK To Burn Our Flag, Write Software That Competes With Microsoft And Give It Away For Free, Own Guns, Worship Allah, Read Playboy, Have An Abortion, Play Video Games, Etc. Etc. And Subject Them To Cruel And Unusual Punishment And Then Execute Them And Let The Sheeple Watch It On Pay-Per-View So That The Conservative Media (The Monied Interests have convinced the sheeple that it's the "Liberal Media", a "Hitler Big Lie" if there ever was one) Can Fund Your Dishonorable Colleagues' Re-Election." De-Motivate The Next Timothy McVeigh. Defend Us From Monied Interests Who Have Paid Congress To Trample Our Constitution To Protect Their Profits And Further Widen The Already Enormous Gap Between Rich And Poor. And, Please, Rep. Gonzalez, FREE SKLYAROV. REPEAL THE DMCA. YES, I KNOW THAT WE ARE REQUIRED BY THE WIPO TREATY THAT WAS BOUGHT AND PAID FOR BY MONIED INTERESTS TO IMPLEMENT THE DMCA BUT IF WE CAN IGNORE THE ABM TREATY AND BUILD A MISSILE DEFENSE^h^h^h MAGINOT LINE WE CAN IGNORE WIPO AND REPEAL THE DMCA. ALSO, OPPOSE THE NOMINATION OF ROBERT S. MUELLER, III, - THE NAZI GAS CHAMBER OPERATOR WHO FOLLOWED ADOBE'S ORDERS AND INSTRUCTED HIS MINIONS TO ARREST DMITRY SKLYAROV - TO BE HEAD OF THE FBI^h^h^h SS. Stand Up For The People. Stand Up And Defend Our Constitution. Do It For Your Constituents. Do It For The United States of America. Do It Because You Know It's The Right Thing To Do. Do It For Our Children.

Now, here's a much more coolheaded letter that someone else who calls himself "bsdbigot" (an afficianado of the BSD computer operating system, no doubt) on www.slashdot.org wrote that I've "cut and pasted", an act which will soon be illegal if the Monied Interests continue to have their way with our Government. I'm way too bitter to write as he has so I have no choice but to use (or as the Monied Interests say, "pirate") his words:

"I am writing to you to voice my concern with the legality of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (forthwith DMCA), signed into law Oct. 28, 1998 as Public Law 105-304. I do believe that the government has a responsibility to aid in the protection of copyrighted materials. However, the government, first and foremost, is responsible for ensuring that citizens retain their rights.

The DMCA serves only as a monetary protection to the corporations publishing digital materials. It does not address "fair use" by law-abiding citizens, which is a cornerstone of copyright law. More importantly, enforcement of the DMCA deliberately restricts freedom afforded in Amendment I of the United States Constitution. Corporations have a responsibility to their shareholders and investors. One side effect of the DMCA is that poorly engineered software - something that should be a liability to a corporation - is effectively certified as saleable by the government. Imagine, as a parallel, walking into a grocery store to purchase a steak for dinner. Imagine that all the beef for sale was in a pile on the floor, unwrapped, not refrigerated, next to the store's loading dock and garbage chute. If the DMCA applied to this hypothetical situation, it would prevent you from telling anyone about the unsanitary conditions in which the beef was purchased. That is an affront to the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech." If the DMCA applied in this situation, you could only cook the meat exactly as the store instructs you, not because the DMCA says that you must use only the store's recipe, but because the DMCA prohibits development and dissemination of the technology required to make fair use of the meat. If the store's recipe called for pan-frying the steak, charcoal grills would be illegal circumvention devices.

This analogy describes what has occurred concerning the encryption system used by the Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) movie industry. The encryption was found to be faulty and not worthy of protecting billions of dollars of copyrighted material. Whether or not the intent was to slander the grocery store, to steal the bad meat from the grocery store, or to protect people from eating bad meat, DeCSS was released. DeCSS showed the world that the grocery store is not able to protect its meat from going bad. Under the DMCA, DeCSS is unlawful. Under previous copyright law, DeCSS is lawful - it provides a method for you to eat steak tartar, steak and lobster, filet mignon, or charbroiled porterhouse. Like the FDA and various Departments of Health, previous copyright law already prohibits you from reselling your meat in a manner that is dangerous to public health. In its current form, the DMCA does no service to either the shareholders and investors of the grocery store, or to the citizens who shop there. The DMCA only protects the store's secret about how the meat is handled and ensures that the consumer will use the store's recipe for preparing the meat.

A report this week by Scott Hettrick of Variety indicates that approximately 20% of all television-owning households now has a DVD player. The report also says that 460 million DVD movies have been sold since 1997, when the format was first publicly available. In fiscal years 1997 and 1998, Warner Home Video's gross sales of DVD movies were $50 million and $170 million, respectively. If you figure an average consumer cost of $20.00 (US) for a single DVD movie, you have a multi-billion dollar industry, which is supported by an optimistic ten percent of the US population. Ten billion dollars have been spent on DVD movies in only 3 years! And, the growth rate is phenomenal - 200% to 250% per year. These facts should make it clear that any piracy that might occur without the DMCA would be, from a fiscal standpoint, irrelevant. Let us not forget that criminals are criminals - they have no respect for the law. The DMCA is supposed to protect against piracy, but I would argue that piracy will continue with or without the DMCA, and piracy can be prosecuted under existing copyright law. In this light, the DMCA - already a bad law - is also extraneous.

DeCSS is not the only challenger to the DMCA - I use it in my example because it has been high profile in the last year. Last week saw the arrest of Russian Dmitry Sklyarov in a case that is sure to put DMCA to the test. His company (based in Russia) sells a product that takes advantage of poor encryption on Adobe eBook data. This product gives consumers back their fair use rights, but it has been labeled a circumvention device under the terms of the DMCA. This is a sad misnomer - neither DeCSS nor this other product circumvents any protection device. They use an alternate or similar algorithm to decrypt the copyrighted data within. The only thing being circumvented in either case is the manufacturer's intended use (the store's recipe). In fact, in the case of DeCSS, significant advances have been made in the speed and reliability of the decryption - a fact that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) would prefer to hide from consumers. So, here we see another adverse affect of the DMCA: the market for complimentary products is being stifled. Of course, this latest case is also an "international incident," which can only serve to add stress to already strained relations between the United States and Russia. As a result of the DMCA and Sklyarov's arrest, various groups and individuals have initiated a boycott of all Adobe products and a boycott against all international conferences held in the United States. The DMCA is actually hurting a large corporation - the free market is starting to reject corporations that support the DMCA.

There are other challenges to the DMCA in the making. Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM) and Digital Music Access Technology (DMAT) are two multi-corporation technologies that threaten to eliminate fair use. There are initiatives to provide alternatives to these corporate strategies, but reality says that the money that the large corporations can invest in saturating the market with these new technologies will prohibit people from trying to find an alternative.

I do not advocate piracy or plagiarism, and I understand that those practices are exactly what the DMCA is supposed to prevent. The DMCA is good for preventing these practices, but it reaches that goal at the expense of citizens? rights. This is truly a new genre of legislation, and it is asinine to assume that the DMCA is the answer to all questions that arise, or to assume that previous copyright legislation is sufficient. There has to be a happy medium, and I?m convinced that it has yet to be found. Whatever the middle ground is, it needs to be beneficial to both corporations and consumers.

I am pro-business. America continues to remain the most significant world power largely because of the corporations that support our economy and our government, and I have no wish to detract from our success and continued position on top of the world. The government, however, has no business protecting business from consumers. Inherent to a free market economy is the ability of the consumer to choose. The DMCA prevents choices. The government should limit its involvement in the free market to protecting consumers from business and preventing attempts to undermine our economy. I ask that you take my position under advisement and do what can be done to repeal the DMCA."

Sincerely,


Blind_RMS_Groupie

P.S. Yes, I'm aware that you're not on the committee that according to House procedure has the sole power to repeal the DMCA. But you could read my letter into the Record. If you do that, please let me know when so I can go to a friends house and tape it off of CSPAN, assuming of course that Congress hasn't sold the copyrights to its own deliberations to Microsoft AOL Time Warner Disney GE Bertelsmann Sony, Inc. (MSAOLTWDGEBS on the NYNASDAQSE) and that it is still legal for me to do so. OH, WAIT, ON SECOND THOUGHT, PLEASE DON'T DO THAT!!! PLEASE, KEEP THIS LETTER A SECRET!!! IF MSAOLTWDGEBS, INC. FINDS OUT ABOUT IT THEY'LL ORDER THE FBI^h^h^h SS TO COME AND BREAK INTO MY HOUSE, STEAL MY HOUSE AND BELONGINGS AND AUCTION THEM OFF AND POCKET THE PROCEEDS, ARREST ME AND THROW ME INTO A PRISON, OWNED AND OPERATED FOR PROFIT BY MSAOLTWDGEBS, INC., WHERE THE GUARDS CAN WATCH AND LAUGH AS BUBBA POUNDS ME UP THE RECTUM UNTIL I DIE FROM INTERNAL BLEEDING.

P.P.S. I'm unenployed right now, which explains why I have the time to write this letter. Since I can no longer in clear conscience have anything to do with Microsoft or Adobe or their products I might have to flip burgers to support myself when my savings run out. Fortunately, with my living expenses being as low as they are, I can support myself that way.

cc: POTUS (vice-president@whitehouse.gov)
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cc: President Putin (president@gov.ru)
cc: automated constituent opinion talley system (Phil_Gramm@gramm.senate.gov)
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