DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Bad news sells — it is rare that I read something in the newspaper that makes me smile, much less laugh aloud.

So I have to tell you that today I felt joy. The cause of my elation? A story in the Chron about how headhunters in the Bay Area are all losing their jobs.

I’ve suffered from the existence of recruiters for over 10 years. As a jobseeker, I was promised opportunities that never materialized. Recruiters sent me to interview for jobs that met none of my criteria, lying to me to get me to go. With one exception, an honorable guy who I trust has not been caught by the forces documented in today’s story, I have found recruiters to be the most duplicitous pack of weasels on the planet.

As a hiring manager, I learned that most recruiters do their sourcing at dice.com, which I was subscribing to at the same time. This means that the recruiters planned to charge me $15,000-$25,000 for forwarding the résumé of a candidate they’d never met. That’s good money for doing a keyword search at a résumé website.

At one point I did some contract engineering work for an ex-recruiter (who went on to stiff me for $800… go figure). He described the standard recruiter tactic of selling a candidate to the employer, by fabricating stories of other offers that were coming in for the candidate, to force a quick hiring decision. He described how he’d tell employers that they’d have to pay a premium if they hoped to have their offer accepted. This would drive the candidate’s salary (and therefore the recruiter’s commission) higher.

Most recruiting agencies have a no-return policy, too… if you hire someone who doesn’t work out, you don’t get your fee back. Instead you have to let the recruiter find a replacement, as if they could do a better job the second time around.

In the Chron article, the founder of a job-networking firm describes his experiences with the post-crash recruiting profession: “A guy in the Bay Area told me he was working part time at a dry cleaner… In Denver, I met a couple of (recruiters) working in food service, waiting tables…” Heh.

To be fair, recruiting was probably a less dishonest career prior to the dot-com days, which brought such a demand for workers that any idiot could get a job working on a website — or, failing that, recruiting other idiots to work on websites. Fortunately, one of the characteristics of a shakeout is that all the rotten fruit falls first.

Domain registrar Dotster announced a nice privacy option today: “you can now choose to have your personal information removed from the bulk Whois list that Dotster is required to provide to other registrars.”

I am sure this won’t stop most spam, but it appears that it might stop spam from other domain registrars, such as buydomains.com.

Dotster explains:

All ICANN accredited registrars, including Dotster, are required … to provide Whois customer data to any competing registrar upon request and upon payment of a fee. By logging into your account and choosing
the remove option, your personal information will not be included
in this list if we are asked to provide it to a competitor.

Kudos to Dotster for working to protect my data, rather than selling it as often as possible. (Thanks too for making this opt-out a simple one-click link in the announcement email.)

All week, my father has been telling my mother all the things wrong with her car. He had arranged to take the car in for service this morning.

He’s a bit of a schemer, though — he had no intention of having her car repaired. He’d arranged to have it replaced instead, just in time for my mom’s birthday. So at noon today they walked out of the house to go to a fancy lunch, and there in the driveway was her new car, a 2002 PT Cruiser in “Inferno Red.” With a matching red cell phone, natch.

Is that cool, or what?!

This groove was composed spontaneously at the drum kit. To me it is a great example of how a simple change to a straight-time groove can establish an entirely new feeling.

  1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +     1/4 = 110 bpm
4 x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x 
-     O       O         O    o  O
4 o  o      o   o o  o      o  o

Patronize these links, man:

• Virtual Drummer loop
• MIDI
• MP3

Several years ago, Intel fired an employee named Ken Hamidi, who responded by repeatedly spamming thousands of Intel employees with anti-Intel emails. Intel sued to ban Hamidi from sending bulk email, and won.

Hamidi has nothing, and Intel is a huge corporation, so some people see this as a David vs. Goliath issue, and side with ‘David’. For example, Chronicle columnist Tom Abate wrote in 1998, “Not since David faced Goliath has there been a more unequal contest than that between the bankrupt Hamidi and the $26 billion Intel. And now this corporate giant wants the courts to take away Hamidi’s slingshot.”

Abate continues, “If Intel succeeds in shutting off the flow of e-mail it doesn’t like, it will set a precedent for other companies and other groups to muzzle all manner of annoying electronic communications.”

The way Abate’s argument is phrased, Intel’s suit sounds like a threat to free speech. But this is not a free speech issue at all — it is not about what is said but how the message is delivered. The issue is theft of service. Intel pays for bandwidth and disk space for its mail servers, and therefore has a right to determine how these are used. Sending bulk email (spam) is roughly equivalent to sending paper junk mail postage-due, except that the USPS provides us with a way to avoid paying for snail-mail we don’t want: we can refuse delivery. There is no equivalent for email.

Ryan Waldron wrote an excellent rebuttal to Abate’s article. It’s too good to excerpt, so you’ll have to read the whole thing: Hamidi, Intel, and Spam.

Anyway, this is all old news. Today’s update is that the California state appellate court upheld the lower court’s decision: “Intel is as much entitled to control its e-mail system as it is to guard its factories and hallways.”

Again, self-declared free-speech advocates are alarmed. ACLU attorney Ann Brick is quoted as saying, “This was not a case about protecting a computer system from harm. It was a case about Intel’s use of the courts to silence a speaker it didn’t like.”

Where did she get the idea that email transport is guaranteed? How does it seem right to her that the courts can force Intel to pay to have a third party disrupt Intel’s business, at the discretion of the third party?

The issue was that Access-Inter.net runs an open relay. An open relay is an email server that has no restriction on who can send mail through it. To spammers, finding an open relay is like finding money on the ground. An open relay allows spammers to send email to you but blame it on someone else. The company that runs the open relay then gets blamed, and has to deal with thousands of complaints from spam recipients — and the spammer is rarely even discovered, having already moved on to the next open relay.

In this case, Access-Inter.net’s open relay was discovered by a spam blacklist before it was discovered by spammers. The open relay was added to the blacklist as a preventive measure, on the reasoning that any mail coming from it might be spam. But this prevented some non-spam emails, including Theatre Bay Area’s, from being delivered.

This is unfortunate, but avoidable: there is no reason to run an open relay. Access-Inter.net’s techs were just rushed, lazy, or uninformed (and have since corrected the problem, proving the point that the entire episode could have been avoided).

The spam blacklist in this case is run by an engineer in Southern California. In the sense that he operates a blacklist that is subscribed to by large ISPs, he wields some power — enough to be classified as a ‘Goliath’ by some people, e.g. Chronicle columnist David Lazarus, who accused the engineer of “behaving like a schoolyard bully.”

But what Lazarus does not understand is that it is not the fault of the blacklist that Access-Inter.net got listed. Access-Inter.net was irresponsible in hosting an open relay; the blacklist simply called them on it. That hosting an open relay is dangerous and irresponsible is not news — EFF co-founder John Gilmore was shut down by Verio for the same thing back in March.

But Lazarus seems to think that email transport is some kind of guaranteed mechanism, and that anyone who interferes is breaking the law. In fact, anyone who receives email, or provides transport for it, can refuse some or all email at any time for any reason: if I’m paying for it, I should be able to decline, don’t you think?