Lessig On Bounties For Spamhunters

An anonymous reader submits: "Digital rights (as in yours, not the RIAA's) guru Lawrence Lessig comes up with a Swiftian idea of how to fight spammers -- $10,000 for the first ubergeek to hunt the offender down. The column is at CIO Insight. Wonder if it'll reach its audience there."

Comments

Re:How much...

[Tackhead]

> How much would I get if I blew up the building that housed hotmail.com?

Nothing. The spam doesn't come from Hotmail. Spammers forge hotmail.com dropboxes into the headers, but typically spam through dedicated machines hosted by spam-friendly providers.

If someone were to go apeshit with a SuperSoaker full of saline solution in ELI.NET's or Level3's datacenter, for instance, your load of inbound spam would probably decrease substantially.

There are some "ISPs" allegedly in Mexico and Brazil (but hosted via US-based backbones) that are no more than spammer fronts.

Lessig has not done his research

[gorbachev]

SPEWS does not "block with any appeal allowed".

First of all, SPEWS doesn't block anything. SPEWS only provides the list of scumbags. Its users then decide what they do with the information. Some block Email, some flag Email for filtering by end users, some use the list as evidence of anti-spammer evils.

Second of all, there is an appeal process. The spammer just needs to stop spamming.

Thirdly, he seems to imply that it would be common to be listed in SPEWS by mistake. This is simply not true at all. Usually a spammer has to exhibit a pattern of abusive behavior to get listed. There appears to be a human process involved in getting listed by SPEWS, which seems to be very effective in weeding out mistakes and joe-jobs.

Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. The slower, the better. The more painful, the better. Remember, knees first, so they can't run away.

Ferguson vs. Friendfinder

[Animats]

There is an attorney trying to collect using California's anti-spam law. The case has been all the way to the California Supreme Court, and is now back at the trial court level. This case has been going on for over two years now, and the plaintiff hasn't collected yet. But they will.

Re:What an asshole

[hysterion]

Once added to the list, there is no way to appeal the blocking or to fight such policies

This is bullshit, and he knows it, but he has to exaggerate and distort the truth in order to highlight his fashionable Bounty idea. I inadvertedly ran an open relay and quickly ended up on Ordb [ordb.org],

This is out-of-context, selective quoting, and you know it, since right after this he continues with: ``Sometimes, the spam vigilantes offer people a way to appeal, but not always. Spews.org, for example, blocks without any appeal allowed.'' So,

• He does nuance his assertions. You `exaggerate and distort' them.
• He's talking about Spews.org, not Ordb.org.

Re:True

[AndroidCat]

Umm, that's not a good idea. Just who are you going to reply to? Spammers tend to forge headers for a reason. If the spam "payload" was a URL link in the body rather than a dropbox in the From or Return-Path, you've just sent an unsolicited email to whoever the spammer wanted to abuse. (Also known as a "joe-job".)