raffi@linwin.com wrote:
Spam accounts for more than 80% on (low traffic) Debian lists lately. How can people tolerate this?It is possible. Those of us who used the BBS nets before the Internet took off, remember doing QWKMAIL, which never had more than trivial numbers of SPAM. I am on this elist in part of my own effort to form a coop network which is owned, and run, by the *people* who use it.Why it's not possible to make all debian lists closed to spam crap? I get more spam for illegal businesses from debian lists than directly from spamming idiots! Not so from other mailing lists.
I am trying to find out how to use the soundcard I/O to interface with a 50 to 300mhz transmitter. I dont see any reason why AM cannot be applied at these frequencies. I could give you my number, say 50.00007 mhz, and you could tell your PC to run your transmitter at that frequency, telling my system what frequency to talk back on. I dont even think spread spectrum would be necessary in most areas. But in any case, we can communicate in our own local area, sending data or voice, without paying anyone else for the right to do so.
It's a peer to peer network. My PC sits and waits for a signal; if it dont come from your number, or some other that is on the user list, then it dont bother me about an incoming call. With the multitasking computers are capable of, each user's home pc could function as a relay device to send signals across local regions. When I join the network, it supplies me with a user list, but warns me, that if other users feel annoyed in what I have to say to them, they can blacklist me, and put my name on a list of trolls and ranters. Commercial enterprises could be users, but if the user base decides to blacklist them, you would havta specifically add their source to your personal list of acceptabel sources.
There are villages in poor rural areas like India, which have hooked PCs to FM transmatters for a data network among villages. FCC regulations forbid it in the USA. But FCC regulations became meaningless when the CB fad hit the airwaves. The airwaves belong to the people; we should revisit the regulations. What's to prevent a cell phone company from becoming a coop? There are nearly 300 million in the USA. But noplace is so densely crowded that each of us could have our own megahertz of bandwidth in any given local area, say within 50km.
Local broacasters are already alternatively available on the cable or VSAT dish; but there no longer is any public *need* for them to own the bandwidth that they *broadcast* on, another form of spam, in which most of the energy from the broadcasting station is wasted. You could list the broadcaster as one of your acceptable sources, and still receive their signal, but it would be directed and/or relayed to you. Likewise the 100,000 watts which the broadcaster is using could be reduced to less than a watt for *everyone who actually wants to receive it*.
It is revolutionary to consider, but like sewer, water, roads, & electricity, data has become a *public* service, which needs a non-profit organization like the Jesuits, to support it. In our case, hackers. If we want to, we could setup our PCs with transceivers and wirelessly communicate- without them even being aware of us using the little bandwidth we need to do it. We could vertically polarize the Yagi antennas, tune them to the frequencies we want, and use bandwidth that has been reserved by the FCC for future registration (which will never be used now because of the dish/cable).
Wiretaps would be useless. There's no wire. trying to evesdrop a full duplex spread spectrum signal, where each of the intended receivers had checksums to compare with the effect of noise, but the evesdroper system does not, is mathematically daunting.
I would not be surprised if HAM/BBS sysops were not already doing this, communicating across LATA boundaries to avoid long distance charges, or doing it in the developing world for remote rural villages. But out of simple courtesy, avoiding the use of bandwidth which was already employed, and since no one was listening to the dead air, using that instead. And if you hear the white noise of data, its hard to distinguish from dead air.
There already are COMMUNITY owned ISPs. I dunno why other regions have not sought to do the same, or why those which now exist, have yet to try to establish a Virtual Private Network so that they could exchange messages between their user bases without spam. The BBS software is already out there for an ISP to use to setup an elist just among the local customers, and then add that user/message base to a FIDO or other BBS network list.
Google is doing something interesting besides the IPO; surf google groups. looks like they are trying to interface with USENET, which has been pretty good at limiting SPAM with moderated groups.