[ale] Yahoo Groups: perils?

[Charles Shapiro]

As a member of the Vast Corporate Fat Conspiracy who spends his days
figuring out how to abuse users to the maximal extent, I can tell  you one
concrete step you can take to keep the noise to a minimum.  On my home
machines, I have a modified /etc/hosts file which points most advertising
sites to /dev/null. You can find a copy just by goin' a googlin' on the
Mighty Internet  for "hosts files advertising block". Here's (
http://everythingisnt.com/hosts ) one example.  Naturally I don't use such a
thing at work, where I'm _paid_ to deal with advertisements.  And of course
this won't really help if you choose to actually visit yahoo, aol.com, or
some other evil site.

-- CHS


On 2/26/08, aaron <aaron at pd.org> wrote:
>
> I would suggest you show your list members some respect
> and go with Google Groups.
>
> The thing I most appreciate about Google's free services is that,
> even though they are funded through advertising, their adverts
> are not invasive, distracting or user abusive (a complete reversal
> of the dozens of flashing graphics and constant barage of cross
> promotional popups found on the commercial webmail access
> portals and pages I occasionally have to use at Dirthlink and
> Commiecast - don't know why I'm expected to put up with this
> constant commercial abuse at a subscription service that I pay
> for - another case of paying customers getting corporaped).
>
> Most of what we see at entry portals for other free service sites
> like Mafia$oft Snotmail or Yahoo Gropes are even more
> obnoxious and user abusive than Commiecast and Dirthlink.
> I think you would be doing your group a disservice to subject
> them to that unnecessarily.
>
> peace
>
> aaron
>
>
>
> On Tuesday 26 February 2008 14:46, Daniel Howard wrote:
> > It's been recommended that I set up a Yahoo Group for our UUCA Computers
> > for the Community (Linux on donated PCs) volunteer group.  I'm used to
> > majordomo type listserv's, but it seems the Yahoo Groups are easy to set
> > up and can even be restricted/invitation only.
> >
> > Any thoughts from this group on perils or concerns with commercial
> > approaches like Yahoo or Google Groups?
> >
> > Best,
> > Daniel
> >
> > --
> > Daniel Howard
> > President and CEO
> > Georgia Open Source Education Foundation
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20080227/7ba89285/attachment.html