hillary-like personal email server appliances

Posted Aug 28, 2016 7:00 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: hillary-like personal email server appliances by Garak
Parent article: Resisting the centralization of network infrastructure

Keep in mind, that a personal mail server is nigh indistinguishable from a spam bot. And it looks like people prioritize spamless email over being able to run a private server.

hillary-like personal email server appliances

Posted Aug 28, 2016 20:11 UTC (Sun) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link]

the internet and hammers are both tools. They can be used to build wonderful harmless things, or used to commit murder. The latter are why we have police, courts, and prisons. Spam leaves evidence. That kind of evidence, and its nature, is something the NSA should be educating us all about, instead of obfuscating for their own benefit. That's my opinion at least. And you are wrong, the only similarity in fact, between a spam bot and a home email server, is that they communicate email messages over the same sorts of ports. However there are a multitude of ways to differentiate between the two, starting with the recipient of a spam email contacting the police and/or the ISP of the spammer. When this is an end/edgepoint in another country, things are more complicated. If I tried to run a spam farm from a residence in e.g. california, things would not be that complicated. The government may try to spin FUD implying that existing laws are somehow magically uninvestigatable and unenforceable when the internet comes into play. I think this is entirely disingenuous and used as pretense to erode the privacy and liberty of the public. Tinfoil hat, Snowden, bla bla. You are clearly part of the problem, not the solution Cyberax. Nigh indistinguishable, jesus. Somewhere there is testimony from Vint Cerf to the U.S. congress from around 2005 discussing how the classic spam arguments against net neutrality are pure B.S. Looks like people like you are still parroting them 11 years later. We've got such a long way to go.

hillary-like personal email server appliances

Posted Aug 28, 2016 20:57 UTC (Sun) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (18 responses)

Keep in mind, that a personal mail server is nigh indistinguishable from a spam bot. And it looks like people prioritize spamless email over being able to run a private server.

For my own amusement, let me paraphrase almost as incendiarily as I can- "Keep in mind, that a purple person walking down the street with a toolbelt including a hammer, though they be only a carpenter, is nigh indistinguishable from a person who recently bludgeoned to death someone with a hammer. It looks like the orange people prioritize a harmonious society with more easily investigatable murders over allowing purple carpenters to walk down the street while wearing their toolbelts"

Alternately, if the crime of littering was your highest priority, you could merely imprison anyone who had the physical capability to litter. But we don't do that. As a general rule, humanity seems to have found a balance where giving everyone liberty, including the liberty to commit crimes, outweighs the alternative.

I suppose your argument, is that you, and the rest of the world are perfectly fine with a world where the internet does not involve anyone operating a server from home. Myself, I'm not fine with that at all, because it sounds like a blueprint for how tyranical authoritarians can turn the 'disruptive' technology of the internet, into something where they get to maintain their position as tyrannical gatekeeper over all the new communication the new internet tech allows.

Not cool.

OMG, forget the murderers, I think yesterday I was the victim of receiving an unsolicited email. Stop the presses, re-open GITMO, break out the black hoods. Jesus, overconcerned about the harms of spam much? Oh, but you say that the environment of spam allows even more nefarious crimes to go on. I'm sure the gubernments that managed to whack bin laden couldn't ever track down those spammers and bring them to justice. It's all lies.

hillary-like personal email server appliances

Posted Aug 29, 2016 7:03 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (17 responses)

Oh well, what a rant.

Obviously, if you don't get over-enthusiastic about a God-given right to run private email server then you are probably Hitler who wants to put everyone in Gitmo.

hillary-like personal email server appliances

Posted Aug 29, 2016 18:16 UTC (Mon) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (16 responses)

actually it's more like- if you go as far out of your way as you have to *completely* avoid acknowledging a serious and legitimate free speech issue...

hillary-like personal email server appliances

Posted Aug 29, 2016 21:29 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (15 responses)

I personally don't see any connections between free speech and personal mail servers. And before you say that I'm a covert GESTAPO agent, I actually lived through (and supported) a fairly recent popular revolution.

Unless you make home hosting easy and practical it won't be used in any significant roles by a significant amount of users. And I just don't see how it can be practical. There are actually more important projects worth pursuing (like https://matrix.org/ ) that can actually make an impact.

And on a sidenote, the rants like the one above is a major reason why people think that techies are completely clueless.

No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus and your triple-encrypted PGP signed network-of-trust email server won't promote free speech in any meaningful way.

hillary-like personal email server appliances

Posted Aug 29, 2016 22:22 UTC (Mon) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (14 responses)

Unless you make home hosting easy and practical it won't be used in any significant roles by a significant amount of users. And I just don't see how it can be practical.

To be blunt- I think you lack imagination. You clearly see no merit in my theory- that the double/triple-price "business class / server allowed" impediment to development, testing, and deployment of new solutions/evolutions, is very precisely the one and only real impediment to "making home hosting easy and practical".

We disagree, that's fine, it happens.

hillary-like personal email server appliances

Posted Aug 29, 2016 22:35 UTC (Mon) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link] (11 responses)

> the double/triple-price "business class / server allowed"

Does it exist in many countries ? In just one ? I sure don't see it here. Does it exist just in _your_ country. If so, is it really an impediment to development, testing and deployment of new solutions/evolution ?
I don't know if it's the case in one, some or many countries, and I'm not sure you know either.

hillary-like personal email server appliances

Posted Aug 29, 2016 22:51 UTC (Mon) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (10 responses)

In my country, the U.S. it does exist. I can't say that I've done a survey asking the major providers what the least expensive server allowed plan is, but... I did manage to utilize the Kansas Attorney General and the FCC to compel a Google(Fiber) lawyer to do the first level of research. I.e. they used in their defense the fact that it was all but defacto practice in the U.S. for major residential ISPs to disallow server hosting in their terms of service.

Shortly after my 50 plus page complaint to the FCC in 2012, a family in Utah (the other major GFiber deployment at the time) got their small children to hold some picket signs, within 48 hours GFiber relaxed their ToS language to allow 'non-commercial' server usage. Which actually feeds my anti-commercial-competitive suspicion of motivation on their part.

As for really being an impediment? I'd sure say so. I can easily enough shell out more money to my ISP or colo or vps provider, but all receipients of any FOSS solutions I develop would need to do likewise. That's enough of a hurdle I think to slow development to a relative crawl. Also going with a colo or vps introduces a new layer of free speech limiting terms of service / gatekeeper being added to the equation. But many other developers no doubt have less concern there.

hillary-like personal email server appliances

Posted Aug 30, 2016 7:00 UTC (Tue) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link] (9 responses)

So we have one data point: in your country, some of the ISPs don't allow to maintain a web server.
As far as we both know now, there is one country in the world where some of the people can't do it.
Maybe there are other places, but as for now, we don't know.

How would you conclude, at this point, that it's even marginally an impediment to the creation of these programs when maybe 1/30th of the world population has this problem (and for most of them, don't care about it)?

Ah, and also, the US are not the center of the world.

hillary-like personal email server appliances

Posted Aug 30, 2016 7:28 UTC (Tue) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (8 responses)

The U.S. may not be the center of the world, but I still like our music and stand-up comedians way better than any other countries. (Well, Canada's not too bad, Kids In The Hall, Rush, Good Stuff...)

hillary-like personal email server appliances

Posted Aug 30, 2016 14:51 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (7 responses)

So you were just trolling? That's a disappointment.

hillary-like personal email server appliances

Posted Aug 30, 2016 16:20 UTC (Tue) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (6 responses)

Yes, read all that I wrote and come to the conclusion that I was just trolling. Go for it. Or convict me for the crime of being moderately disappointed with others who IMHO have failed to take advantage of the wonderful freedom to run servers from home. I think the current situation most certainly does give the opportunity for countries other than the U.S. to outshine the U.S. in the development of this particular kind of home/personal/mobile server software. If the rest of the world squanders that opportunity, then, I guess my respect for the U.S. increases (by a kind of sad default).

hillary-like personal email server appliances

Posted Aug 30, 2016 17:05 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (5 responses)

Your reply to micka was 100% troll. Makes me wonder about the motives behind your other statements.

The rest of the world has already passed the US by in broadband speeds, mobile coverage, and IPv6 adoption. Perceived ToS limitations seem pretty small in comparison.

hillary-like personal email server appliances

Posted Aug 31, 2016 12:25 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (4 responses)

> The rest of the world has already passed the US by in broadband speeds, mobile coverage, and IPv6 adoption. Perceived ToS limitations seem pretty small in comparison.

Not quite so sure about lumping things in together there.

High broadband speeds are generally available to most of the population. Unfortunately due to the lack of meaningful competition in most markets, it'll cost you.

Mobile coverage is primarily a matter of population density. These days, unless you truly live in the middle of nowhere, you're fine. (FWIW, I recently purchased some property that qualifies -- but even there there is good mobile coverage but just not with my current carrier)

When it comes to *fixed* IPv6, Comcast alone puts the US into the top tier of IPv6 deployment. Mobile IPv6 is similarly carrier dependent, but at least two of the national carriers here support it across their entire footprint.

ToS limitations are not "perceived" but actual; In my case, without paying about double the residential rates, I'd be categorically forbidden from running a server of any kind, no option of a static address, and port 25 and 80 blocked upstream.

hillary-like personal email server appliances

Posted Aug 31, 2016 14:15 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (3 responses)

Oof, I didn't mean to go into the weeds. I just wanted to illustrate that ToS are not the biggest networking problem the US is facing, nor are they unique to the US. (Unless you're using a television company as an ISP I suppose, in which case: what did you expect??)

> High broadband speeds are generally available to most of the population

Only by the old definition. 4MB download is NOT broadband, no matter what the FCC says.

Besides, I wasn't contesting that. I was just saying relative to the world, it looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Intern...

Mobile coverage is the same story -- it only seems good if you don't travel: https://opensignal.com/reports/2015/09/state-of-lte-q3-2015/ We've been catching up in the last year but we still have a long way to go.

If you have data that shows otherwise, please share!

You're right about IPv6 -- I was laboring under antiquated information. I'm happy to no longer worry about this one.

hillary-like personal email server appliances

Posted Aug 31, 2016 15:55 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

> Besides, I wasn't contesting that. I was just saying relative to the world, it looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Intern...

That data shows a pretty wide gap between *average measured* vs *peak measured* speeds. Honestly I'm not sure how useful the latter is -- For example, Singapore utterly dominates peak speeds but on average ranks lower than the US -- but the Q3 2015 data does show that the 80% of the US's population has at least 4Mbps downstream -- but given that the average measured is over 12Mbps, there's a substantial part of the population that has much higher speeds. Those numbers have only improved since then -- the Q1 2016 shows average connection speed is 15.3Mbps, peak is 67.7Mbps, Measured 4/10/15Mbps penetration is now 85.7/56.7/35.1%, a substantial improvement for six months -- and even that data is still nearly six months out of date.

That supports my point that higher speeds are usually _available_ to most of the populace in the US, but are often priced beyond what most folks would consider affordable or worthwhile. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, those same higher speeds are not only available but far more reasonably priced.

Of course, what's not mentioned in any of these metrics is the *upload* speed, which is far more critical to running a server.

hillary-like personal email server appliances

Posted Aug 31, 2016 18:37 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

When I visit friends in Japan and Denmark, everyone has cheap 100mbit connections and takes them completely for granted. Over here, we grind along with flaky cable modems and the media still cheers every Google Fiber and Fios announcement. The numbers on that page match my experience anyway.

Agreed, things are getting better, but we're still disturbingly slow in comparison to the rest of the world.

> higher speeds are usually _available_ to most of the populace in the US, but are often priced beyond what most folks would consider affordable or worthwhile

That's always true everywhere. You can pay for a dedicated satellite link if you want. It's another way of saying higher speeds aren't really available, right?

hillary-like personal email server appliances

Posted Sep 1, 2016 5:47 UTC (Thu) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link]

ToS limitations are not "perceived" but actual; In my case, without paying about double the residential rates, I'd be categorically forbidden from running a server of any kind, no option of a static address, and port 25 and 80 blocked upstream.

Indeed. As far the nuance between 'actual at the business contract / terms of service' level, and 'actual at the ISP gateway filtering' level, I merely opine my original point that such difference simply makes or breaks large swaths of potential competitive solutions.

Of course, what's not mentioned in any of these metrics is the *upload* speed, which is far more critical to running a server.

And here I'll try to bow out of this debate with a final compulsive pedanticism- Not 'critical'. As far as free speech is concerned, as long as there is enough bandwidth for plenty of text communication, that has tremendous utility sans any large amounts of upload bandwidth. Certainly with every increasing order of magnitude of upload bandwidth, your server/s can do more interesting things. Text, then gaming, then voice, then video, then high def, then etc... But never forget, even limited to 56kbps, you can engage in some amazing levels of liberating free (text) speech on the internet. Kids probably take that stuff for granted these days.

Get off my virtual lawn.

hillary-like personal email server appliances

Posted Aug 30, 2016 1:37 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

I know that this theory is pure BS. I lived in a country where 1GB Internet was common, without any real restrictions. Yet pretty much the only hosted servic were BitTorrent shares.

hillary-like personal email server appliances

Posted Aug 30, 2016 2:06 UTC (Tue) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link]

and somewhere in a thousand years, some AI will compare and contrast our points here with recorded history. I am still quite hopeful that home/personal(mobile/subcutaneous/etc) hosted servers will bring a very significant level of utility to humanity in the coming decades and centuries.