Then I realized... of COURSE Cisco wants you to retaliate by sending as much data as possible. Then you'll need to buy more and faster routers. Sometimes I can be so dense!
"Spam is usually harmless, but it can be a nuisance, taking up time and storage space. The solution is to flame the perpetrators by sending them abusive messages, or to reply by dumping a very large and useless file on their Web server."
At first I thought this might be some sort of late April Fool's joke. Cisco tells spam victims to reply with abusive emails?
Who's next? (Do they even exist yet?) And most importently, when's the IPO?
Not new, exactly, but worth thinking about: If this is the post-Microsoft world, who's the Next Big Thing? We've had IBM (hardware) and Microsoft (software). Cisco, while now the largest company in the world, doesn't strike me as dominant in the same way as those two companies were.
My tentative projection is that they've cleaned up the security issues to a large extent. In some sense, this was necessitated by the fact that the same security holes they previously opened in web pages could be used to shut Third Voice itself out of a web page... with incentive like that, no wonder they moved out of the browser window itself.
After further consideration of that sentance... I'm even more convinced now they'd lose a lawsuit then I was when I first started speaking out against Third Voice. While I would not approve of this tactic, it would be awfully easy to label the company as a bunch of "hackers" (after all, only "hackers" can change websites), and once that word is attached to them, the judicial system would be happy to tear them apart. This tactic would do more harm then good in the long run, but I think Third Voice is quite vulnerable to it in the short-term.
My objections remain unchanged, neither added to nor subtracted from. I still object to the attaching (and therefore modification) of content to arbitrary webpages from arbitrary people. I still object to the systematic modification and profiting from copyrighted material that does not belong to Third Voice. I still think they'd lose a lawsuit if anybody sued them.
There is a new version of Third Voice out now. I don't have time to do a full analysis of it today, but you can take a look at their online tour.
(Congress is granted the power "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" (Article I, Section 8), but is not mandated to do so. The First Amendment is a guarantee.)