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California Spam Law Upheld By Appeals Court 58

Posted by samzenpus from the but-I-don't-like-spam dept.
www.sorehands.com writes "In the first California appeals court ruling (pdf), in Hypertouch v. Valueclick, it is ruled that the I-CAN-SPAM Act does not preempt California Business & Professions Code Section 17529.5. California Business & Professions Code Section 17529.5 prohibits the use of falsified headers and subject lines that are likely to mislead recipients. Spammers have been claiming, and some courts have been ruling, that to survive preemption, a Plaintiff has to show all the elements of fraud (false representation, knowledge, reliance, and damage from the reliance.) The reliance and damage from the reliance is difficult as it would essentially require the recipient to buy the penis enlargement pills and show that they don't work, or to send the money to the Nigerian prince. An ISP could never show reliance and harm, as they are not the recipient and would not be responding to e-mails traversing their systems. The ruling also made it clear that the advertiser is responsible for the acts of their agents, even if their agents promise not to spam."

Comment Re:Somehow this tells... (Score 1) 107

by leoofborg (#33097516) Attached to: Average Cellphone Data Usage Is 145.8 MB Per Month

That bears out what I see when I'm in a city area, which isn't so often these days. Just using my iPhone 3GS sans tethering I'm averaging between 2-5 gigs a month. Last month, however, I had to do everything from the phone (including download of software updates, *and* the iOS 4 firmware)... from the iPhone:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/leoofborg/4814198808/

Filer.app (formerly Downloader) & 'Downloads.app' are your friend(s).

Comment Re:Soft machines for testing (Score 1) 420

by leoofborg (#27533311) Attached to: Microsoft Begs Win 7 Testers To Clean Install

Of *course* they're not 'testers'. Guys like *you* are the real testers, right? And of course the company always hires enough development, right? Beta testers should give your QA team data points to shore up your test cases and scripts in the plan, they ARE NOT substitute or 'free' QA.

'Beta-Testers' are for edge cases, data points and ... wait for it.. 'real life'.. They are the frosting on the cake, not the cake.

Because 'real life' is where your baby is going to be USED and not TESTED. Testing = Practice. Testing != Real Life, unless you have a VERY good SQA Manager who understands the customer experience.

Yes I know that you're specifying 'best testing practices' but it's those 'practices' as well as excessive reliance on automation that have companies like MSFT consistently producing buggy POS software.

I'm in a beta program right now, on the 'other side' as a beta tester after a LONG TIME as a tester. Yeah, I remember the litany, 'please use in your everyday workflow on a 'non production' machine. Nobody has time for that, 'outside'. Just like they don't have time to RTFM, do real net sec, or 'conform to a test case. And they certainly don't have the resources to set aside a production machine for 'dedicated testing'.

If you don't have enough edge, negative, or fuzz cases or make your software resilient enough to perform in those worst case, but all to common scenarios, then your baby needs to stay in the lab.
America Online

AOL Users Will Need to Pay $2 a Month For Phone Support 202

Posted by timothy from the dear-mom-and-pop-send-money dept.
destinyland writes "8.7 million AOL subscribers face a new 20% fee increase next month — unless they agree to never call AOL's technical support lines. They'll have to use AOL chat for support or the online help "portal" unless their issue is a failed connection — and they're being enrolled in the program by default unless they opt out. Ominously, AOL used the exact same wording as when they quietly changed their terms of service to allow them to sell subscribers' home phone numbers to telemarketers. 'Your continued subscription to the AOL service constitutes your acceptance of this change.'"
Security

Lt. Col. John Bircher Answers Your Questions 232

Posted by timothy from the questions-that-dan-savage-won't-touch dept.
A few weeks ago, you asked questions of Lt. Col. John Bircher, head of an organization with a difficult-to-navigate name: the U.S. Army Computer Network Operations (CNO)-Electronic Warfare (EW) Proponent's Futures Branch. Lt. Col. Bircher has answered from his perspective, at length, not just the usual 10 questions, but several more besides. Read on for his take on cyberwar, jurisdiction, ethics, and more.
Security

AVG Fakes User Agent, Floods the Internet 928

Posted by CmdrTaco from the way-to-go-guys dept.
Slimy anti-virus provider AVG is spamming the internet with deceptive traffic pretending to be Internet Explorer. Essentially, users of the software automatically pre-crawl search results, which is bad, but they do so with an intentionally generic user agent. This is flooding websites with meaningless traffic (on Slashdot, we're seeing them as like 6% of our page traffic now). Best of all, they change their UA to avoid being filtered by websites who are seeing massive increases in bandwidth from worthless robots.
Microsoft

The Microsoft Office Rental Program 432

Posted by samzenpus from the four-easy-payments dept.
LWATCDR writes "Yes, it looks like Microsoft is going to a rental program for Office. From the article, 'The software bundle, which also includes Microsoft's Live OneCare computer security software, will be sold at nearly 700 Circuit City stores for $70 per year.' Well I for one will be happy to stick with OpenOffice for now. From Microsoft's point of view it means a constant flow of money. For the customer it means you only have to pay a little each year instead of a lot every few years. I don't think this will save the average user any money and I wonder about problems with 'activation.' So will this fly, or will it give a big push to OpenOffice?

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