The end of commercial broadcast radio as we know it.

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

LOL.  The Internet has been taxed since the beginning of public ISPs. Wake up people.

[W3LSN]

It appears that somebody is saying they would tax all e-mail sent and received, with mail of International origin being taxed twice to the domestic recipient (or assigned a surcharge). I just don't see this being feasible because it means that all e-mail traffic would have to be audited for tax purposes by a middle-man or anyone who hosts their own mail server. I remember that Snopes had this email tax rumor some years ago, and basically quashed it. In light of the current public discontent, I think it's a political nonstarter.

For one thing it would eliminate all free e-mail and anonymous accounts, and convert Hotmail, Gmail, and the like to fee based plans which would only cause massive non-compliance from the average Joe as they escape overseas. To stop that, I suppose that possession of a foreign e-mail account would have to be elevated to the level of felony tax evasion which is beginning to sound a bit like Red China.

It would force all businesses of any size with their own mail servers to maintain audit records with Sarbanes-Oxley type auditing, reporting and security requirements. Basically it would cause many smaller and medium size businesses to have to outsource their e-mail to a hosting service. Many of the smallest ones already do this, but it will be an unwelcome expense to any non-publicly traded firms with their own mail servers.

Another option is to require routing of all e-mail traffic through servers belonging to the taxation authorities so it could be charged against your account and a bill e-mailed out every quarter. Lovely. From there it’s a slippery slope from having them intercept your e-mail, to having them reading it. 

I guess they would have to make spam illegal again in the process, and hunt down the remaining spammers like dirty rabid dogs, and/or create a spam exemption. I suspect there will be a lot more mail classified as “spam” in order to evade tax, which will then trigger random audits of e-mail content.  There goes any privacy that may be left, but maybe I’m just old fashioned.

73, Jim
WA2AJM/3

[K5UJ]

is this that hoax floating around on email?  there's been some b.s. like that for years that drifts around like the Neiman Marcus Cookie and all the other junk.   Always be skeptical of anything weird you only hear about via the internet, especially in the form of bulk forwarded chain type email.

http://www.snopes.com/business/taxes/bill602p.asp



rob

[W3LSN]

Business internet is bandwidth. It just routes packets based on the destination address in the IP packet header. It's a different story if the ISP does e-mail hosting for a business or individual. ISP's would need to retool to sniff the packet data for a  mail protocol and then save the it to your account. Hackers will have short work coming up with middleware to circumvent that.

I just don't see the idea working, but maybe I'm not as cunning as the tax man. There are too many escape routes for people, it would basically require registering all e-mail accounts with an authority. Then there will be unfunded mandates for businesses that in their weakened state they won't want to absorb. We would become a nation of outlaws, and the country a police state.

I have it on good authority that kids don't use e-mail, it's too "last century" for them.  They use Instant Messenger, Twitter, and social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace to send messages. When the college kids get into the business world I've learned it's a bit of an adjustment for them to go back to dinosaur technology like e-mail. This means all the Facebook private mail, IMs and what not would also need to be audited and taxed to cut off the alternate escape routes. The kids are not going to want to pay for their Twitter and Facebook. I think I'm moving to Botswana to set up a data center.

73, Jim
WA2AJM/3

[w3jn]

What Rob said 

There are several email services that strip the originating IP from emails, so you can't trace them to the source computer.  Gmail, hushmail, and fastmail.fm are some.

[k4kyv]

I think the Twitter thing is silly. I don't want to waste my time keeping up with every detail of somebody else's life.

I had yoghurt and orange juice for breakfast.

I just took a shit.

But I remember a little program they used to have at work.  At the time they were all Apple computers, and the program was called Broadcast. You clicked on an icon and it brought up a list of every computer in the building, and you could access other buildings as well.  Then you clicked on a member on the list, and a little text box opened.  You typed in the message, and it would instantly pop up on the other computer.  The person on the other end could respond instantly.  Like Twitter, you were limited to a small number of characters per message.  Sometimes you would get messages broken up into several "broadcasts" in order to transmit the entire text.

Then they phased out Broadcast and went to regular email.  I found it cumbersome compared to Broadcast.

[N3DRB The Derb]

LOL.  The Internet has been taxed since the beginning of public ISPs. Wake up people.

set disrupter on stun.

[WQ9E]

AM broadcast radio, like amateur radio, can be pretty low tech, robust against many hazards, and easily reestablished when compromised.  There is a definite need for this still in times of natural disaster or civil defense.

I remember the first time I ever stayed awake all night was when hurricane Camille hit in August of 1969.  I was 9 years old living in Gulfport MS one mile inland from the gulf.  You could feel the house shaking in the wind and around 11 that night the TV mast folded over in the center and was swinging dangerously close to the sliding glass door but never made contact.  The next morning the yard was covered with pecan limbs and snakes who had wandered up to high ground.

We made it home from vacation in the TN mountains late in the afternoon before the evening landfall and the winds were already beyond gale force and quickly got worse.  I remember my father's biggest concern was that the wind readings taken by the hurricane hunters were incorrect.  He was a civilian working in PMEL at Keesler AFB and was responsible for the group calibrating most of those instruments.  Although Katrina was geographically larger and did far more damage, I believe Camille still holds the record for the strongest wind associated with a U.S. mainland hurricane and at that time it was very surprising to see recorded wind in the 200 MPH range.

There is an interesting article in the online Popular Mechanics on Camille with some of the photos of the aftermath:

http://books.google.com/books?id=kdgDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA90&dq=popular+mechanics+hurrican+camille&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

The routing inof is stripped from the email headers. This does not mean the route cannot be determined. It will just be more difficult.

What Rob said 

There are several email services that strip the originating IP from emails, so you can't trace them to the source computer.  Gmail, hushmail, and fastmail.fm are some.

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

The ISP is taxed (payroll tax, tax on profits, etc). Those costs are passed on to the customer. We've all been paying an Internet tax since day one, unless we accessed the Internet via college or gov connection.

LOL.  The Internet has been taxed since the beginning of public ISPs. Wake up people.

set disrupter on stun.

[W3RSW]

Oh you forgot the 'activities' fee in your college tuition.?
or did you think that was just for attending football games? 

personally, I enjoyed the sor.house access.

[w3jn]

The routing inof is stripped from the email headers. This does not mean the route cannot be determined. It will just be more difficult.

Impossible to trace back to the user's ISP and IP, unless you subpoena the email provider or use a service like readnotify.

[N3DRB The Derb]

I dont believe people will accept a cellphone type payment and/or ISP tax system scheme on email service. of course the ISP's are taxed, it's not the same thing.

[KA1ZGC]

Oh you forgot the 'activities' fee in your college tuition.?
or did you think that was just for attending football games? 

personally, I enjoyed the sor.house access.

I probably came closest to tax-free internet back in the 80s. I didn't pay money to be on the UMaine campus, or for my account on their IBM 370. I probably learned more than 95% of the CS majors who went through there over the 20 years or so I was there.

I liked it better when DARPA was in charge. You didn't hear about identity theft, cyber-stalking, botnets, compulsive bloggers, or any of the other crap that (IMHO) was the result of opening it up to the masses before they were ready for it (and vice-versa).

Broadcast radio? Already dead. ASCAP, BMI, and RIAA? Trying to save themselves from drowning by thrashing even harder. They're modern-day Luddites, insisting that it's the consumers' fault that they steadfastly refused to even acknowledge the changing times, let alone keep up with them.

The only decisions any of them have left to make is whether or not to die with a modicum of dignity.

[W1DAN]

I too survived Camille...

but in New Orleans as a little JN.

I remember trees down in my back yard, and a big boat on the ground near the shore near Biloxi.

Dan

[ka3zlr]

Howdy,

 I wonder what Advertising has to say about all this.

73
Jack.

 

[w3jn]

Only your ISP would have to track the number of emails that get sent and received from your account (the email account they give you). No need for subpoenas or tracing any received email's origin. If ISP's were forced track the number of emails coming from your account then pay a tax they would just transfer that cost to you. It’s not all that complicated.

It is, in fact, quite complicated when people don't use the email service the ISP gives you (ie POP servers) and instead use online email that strips the originating IPs, as I stated in my post.

And before you say, "well they can just track who logs on to gmail or fastmail", there are encrypted proxy services to get around the ISP tracking this sort of thing too.

[Opcom]

If it gets that bad, which I doubt it will until everyone is forced to a standard type accepted computing appliance with Trusted Platform and DRM in order to connect to the internet, there are and always will things that exist right now for sending messages. any web page with pictures.. steganographs. or binary files to download. All that is needed is a simpletons' front end to cope with automating it and the problem is solved. The hackers, good and bad, won't need to spend 15 minutes writing that software. go to your friends' website and download their "cat picture of the day" and use your key to get the message intended for you extracted from the file. That is real obvious, so think of all the sneaky ways to do something essentially like that.

It is as well not to even worry about it. Worry about something serious like the impending doom from the comet. Let's just hope the BC band will remain, especially AM, for the sake of the beauty of the method and the simplicity to receive.

[w3jn]

As I've said, there are many encrypted proxy services to get around any ISP limitations on where you can surf.  The ISP has no way of knowing your ultimate destination is an email service as all of the traffic, IP routing, etc., is handled by the encrypted proxy.

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

Brian, you are not accounting for offshore Web based email accounts. If I connect to them via a VPN or Onion routing, no one in this country will know I am sending and receiving email.

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

It would be impossible to force people to use their ISP email service. Using Onion routing is as simple as installing any other program. No technical expertise needed.

[w3jn]

 

It's even simpler than that.  Just log onto an encrypted proxy server (am I repeating myself?) and bypass any ISP-imposed restrictions.

[W3RSW]

 You all have to remember what totalitarian govt's are really like.  You'll have ISP cops and watchers just like block wardens,  they'll be delighted to report you, what they hear at the local pub, who's doing what, etc. Once the finger's pointed, the microscope peers ever deeper.

As usual those that comply, pay the tax; those that don't (provided they continue to not pay) drive up the tax for the rest of us.

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

LOL. You are being naive. The internet is not free. We've already discussed that.

Tons of non-taxed email services would spring up overseas. Unless the Feds stopped all access to servers outside the USA, any email tax would be easily sidestepped. State sales taxes are being sidestepped now with little or no effort.


Watch out for those black helicopters!

[w3jn]

Watch out for those black helicopters!

I always do, and this advice has served me well