128 DEAR HACKER
128 DEAR HACKER
Dear 2600: While reading an online article about your recent court ruling to
remove linking to DeCSS code, the article stated that linking to the material was considered illegal. This is what caught my attention. Now not only distributing this code is illegal; but the mere act of in- serting a link into a web page to this information is illegal. It would
be like you asking me where you could buy a gun. I tell you Dick’s Sporting Goods and then you kill someone. Am I responsible for any wrongdoing (keeping in mind that I didn’t provide you with the gun but only the information on where to buy one)? It seems to me that the ruling is extremely unfair and unconstitutional.
We prefer to avoid gun analogies almost as much as house analogies. What we need to remember is that we’re talking about speech, something far more valu- able—and powerful—than any weapon. Many reasonable people are sickened by the proliferation of guns in our society. But to see speech as a threat—that requires
a distinct hostility and fear toward the openness we’ve always been taught to value. You don’t need an analogy when the actual event is so blatantly wrong.
Dear 2600: Your site is blocked on my school’s network. My school happens to use a
filter program called X-stop. The program is the masterpiece of a com- pany called 8e6 Technologies. I went to their site and requested that your site be unblocked. The following is what was sent back to me:
“The site is currently blocked in our Criminal Skills library and does meet our criteria for blocking.”
I think this is total BS. You guys aren’t criminals and your website is nothing more than a news/information site. Keep fighting and good luck on the DeCSS case.
Nick Fury, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D
THE CHALLENGES OF LIFE AS A HACKER
We’d appreciate it if everyone involved in making software purchases sends people like these a periodic note saying “Your software has been blocked from our purchasing department because you meet the criteria of Close Minded Morons.”
Dear 2600: Unsolicited commercial email (spam) is crippling the effectiveness of
the Internet. Roughly 80 percent of the mail arriving in a typical email user’s mailbox is spam. This is an incredible drain on users, involving millions of dollars of lost time for businesses, frustration for users old and new, and the clogging of system bandwidth and disk space.
Technology has not solved the spam problem, nor is it likely to. Filtering technology has been ineffective. Government will not enforce the laws that have been enacted until citizens start to demand action. So far, they have done very little. And the UCE industry has demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law of the land and common decency.
Therefore, we, the users of the Internet, are declaring war on spam. This war will continue until the UCE industry obeys the existing laws. We demand that the UCE industry provide functional opt-out proce- dures, stop forging return addresses, label advertisements in the subject line, and comply immediately with “do not contact” requests.
The FTC has announced that it is “collecting” spam. You can refer spam to uce@ftc.gov . Since the government refuses to take action to enforce the laws, we will send every piece of spam in our inboxes to the FTC until they take positive action. There is a small underground movement of users who are already doing this on a case by case basis. The goal of “spamwar” is to amplify this and give it a focused stra- tegic goal.
We will conduct this war email by email, making the lives of the spammers hellish until they surrender unconditionally. It is time for the users to take back the Internet.
brujo Before you get too carried away with your epic struggle to liberate the masses,
you should understand a few things. Bombarding a federal agency with redirected