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Rule 0: Spam is theft

Rule 1: Spammers lie.

Rule 2: When in doubt about spammers lying, see rule 1.

Rule #3: Spammers are stupid.

Rule #4: The natural course of a spamming business is to go bankrupt.

Time and again, these simple rules have proven themselves. Too many fallen spam kings, too many spam kings sitting in jail or just plain bankrupt.

X10 stuff is cheap but pretty easy to tinker with. A number of years ago I bought an X10 Firecracker kit. They occasionally have it on sale for around $5 without warning, so if you keep an eye on that site you might be able to get it really cheap. I hadn't used it in years but a little while ago I figured it'd be cool to be able to remotely turn my porch lights and other devices on/off from my smartphone (I have an iPhone). Since I have a linux box at home hooked up to a cable modem this was a fairly straightforward exercise. I used the BottleRocket software to control the X10 devices from the linux box then wrote a very simple bare-bones PHP interface to it. Poke a hole through my firewall to allow incoming connections (via authenticated HTTPS of course) and now with a couple of clicks I can do things like turn on my exterior lights when I leave work or a friends house. For anybody who is interested, I wrote everything up on my blog and posted the PHP code as well.

Spam filtration is an arms race

That part I agree with.

However, I still say that spam filters will never solve the problem. Spammers will just keep finding new ways around them, and all the while we will continue having to pay the costs of transporting and filtering the junk email (in terms of bandwidth and cpu costs, in particular).

The only way to stop spam is to remove the reason why it exists in the first place:

• Profit

If spammers can't make money off of sending out spam, they won't send it out to begin with.

You're correct, of course, but removing the profit is not a simple proposition.

Technical solutions for making spam more expensive to send haven't worked, and they never will. Congress managed to define spam well enough that all current spam is clearly illegal while legitimate e-mail is OK (if you jump through the required hoops), but there's no enforcement at all, and of course US law doesn't apply overseas.

It's not just a matter of convincing people not to buy products that are advertised in spam; the vast majority don't anyway. Spammers don't just make their money from stupid people buying advertised products; spammers make their money by following Rule #1. They don't have to actually convince people to buy their product, as long as they can convince someone to pay them to advertise it via a "legitimate double-opt-in targeted mailing list" (actually just a bunch of addresses scraped off the web). There's a sucker born every minute, so by the time the client figures out the spam didn't generate any new sales and their existing customer base hates them now, the spammer has a new client lined up.

So what do you suggest? Personally I see the only effective course of action being to lobby Congress to earmark funding for law enforcement, but because our filtering techniques have gotten so effective, the scale of the problem isn't widely understood, and I don't expect Congress to be particularly sympathetic to the cause. However, if that happened, we should see an immediate drop in spam volumes again as the FBI picks the low-hanging fruit, then we can turn to international diplomacy to get other countries to do the same. After that point, we can re-evaluate the situation and figure out what to do next.

See Rule #3.

Rule 3: Spammers are stupid.

It's covered under the Rules of Spam

• Lexical Contradiction: Spammers will redefine any term in order to disguise their abuse of Internet resources.
• • Sharp's Corollary: Spammers attempt to re-define "spamming" as that which they do not do.

Hopefully Rule #4 will soon follow to completion.

Look at that last part again--the board rewrote the definition of science. That's astonishing--and by doing so, the board has admitted outright that "intelligent design" isn't science. If it were, they wouldn't have had to change the definition.

Spammers attempt to re-define "spamming" as that which they do not do

So, Kansas simply redefined "science" as what they do not do...

Don't forget Dark Helmet.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2000/0918/6608230s2.h tml
http://bruce.pennypacker.org/Andy/
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=brunner+lawsuit+ group%3Anews.admin.net-abuse.email

Yeah, it's grown a bit beyond three. #0 and #4 were added later. Didn't Asimov do something like that too?

Slight problem there. My variant of Sharp's Corollary of Rule #1 is: Political spammers attempt to legislate "spamming" as that which they do not do. (In other words, you're asking the people sending political spam to have to will-power to pass laws against doing what they were doing because they didn't have the will-power in the first place.)

Fortunetely there are still blocklists and ballots to deal with them. The problem will come when they think their droppings are so sweet-smelling that it should be illegal to block or filter them. As for the ballots, we're fine unless someone is dumb enough to adopt an all-electronic system with no audit-trail. As if!

Not only do I expect many F/OSS people to be allowed in, I expect the concerns of deploying anti-spam solutions in F/OSS mail servers to be front and center. I also expect there to be people who don't give a flip about F/OSS to be there too, along with a bunch of spammers^Wethikal bidnizmen.

Never underestimate rule #3 of spam.

Probably not the smartest thing to do.

Rule #3

They're just trying to create a gap between evil nasty spam which they do not do, and their wholesome friendly nu'n'improoved targeted direct marketing. *Sniff-sniff* Still smells the same.

Nice to see that they're on-track for Spammer Rule #4.

It wasn't a bot. Rule #3: Spammers are stupid.

Whats the proper phrase for what I am thinking right now...

Oh yeah!

"Liar liar, pants on fire!"

Standard spammer rules apply in this case, especially 1 and 2.

The Rules Of Spam

A lot of spammers are not selling anything besides their spamming services.

They say they will "send your message to 10 million gazillion users" but do they really care that a lot of the addresses they send to are dead, abandoned or obfuscated?

No, they just have a bunch of addresses, and as long as it is in the form of foo@bar.com they don't care if it bounces back, it is still valid enough for their customers.

Remember, it is spammers that we are talking about here.

Voila. Detailed information to be found there.

Read some of the stuff at http://bruce.pennypacker.org/SLAPP/ if you want to see just HOW much of an idiot. The defendant's response is amusing. You don't get to LAUGH at legal papers every day.

Read some of the stuff at http://bruce.pennypacker.org/SLAPP/ if you want to see just HOW much of an idiot. The defendant's response is amusing. You don't get to LAUGH at legal papers every day.