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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."
How much would I get if I blew up the building that housed hotmail.com?
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
but it will only catch the stupid ones. The "smarter" ones, and I use the term loosely, will endure.
Sent from your iPad.
The first one to find a spammer gets to name it. Well, maybe not such a good idea after all...
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I've been thinking the same thing, but applied to my Provincial Government. Start up a pool, a buck per citizen. Whoever removes Gordon Campbell, our current, fascist prick-in-office, takes the pot.
I'm pretty sure there'd be enough donations to make it well worth someone's time...
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
For a period of one month, all filters on spam and spam hunting should be suspended. Part of the problem is that anti-spam activities are masking the true magnitude of the problem. A wake-up call is needed. When people realize just how much spam is being sent out, the villagers will take to the streets with pitchforks and torches.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I can see the sense in promoting our rights to privacy online, as michael and timothy (bless them) are wont to do, but then we see a sudden reversal. Sure, I guess it's a real pain when spammers send hundreds of unwanted messages over the Internet every day, but is offering a bounty to rob them of their right to privacy really the answer? This is just the government turning citizen against fellow citizen in a foul ploy to get us to turn in our rights to online privacy. Let's look at what's happened so far:
- Spammers send spam
- Geek gets pissed, deletes spam
Now that isn't that terrible, is it? Do we really need to go out and promote a database state and tie together all a person's Constitutionally private information into one big heap of spying and ratting out? I dislike spam as much as the next man, but I draw the line at violating others' online rights. It's a line nobody should be willing to cross.--sdem
From California Spam law:
and
Very similar...
Huh, so I guess that means you didn't read the article, eh?
I have a bunch of female friends that forward letters endlessly to the point that they're no longer my friends. I'd love to put one of their heads on a stick and turn them in for 10k. Do they count? :)
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
The thing is that SPAM works! If it wasn't profitable no one would bother with it but, it is profitable. Highly profitable! So long as people keep buying from spammers spam will continue to infest the internet.
Just like the Nigerian money scam, so long as people continue to fall for it, it will continue to circulate. Blacklists and other technology solutions will never be able to keep out all the spam. Legislation will never be effective against it. The only way to make it die is for people to stop buying from it and so far, it seems that there are far too many people who are insecure about their penis size for the spam to stop.
The author compares the bill that the RIAA bought to allow them to crack any box they want with the "spam vigilantes" that blacklist sites that don't obey "proper" e-mail etiquette and then by organizing automated boycotts of the sites on the list.
His explanation of the bill is Through his bill, these vigilantes would be granted immunity from liability as they deployed tools to hack peer-to-peer systems that they "reasonably believe" violate copyright laws. He compares the two as unaccountable processes that wrongfully victimize people.
He then proposes (drum roll) a law that spammers would have to follow, and a reward for geeks who catch them if they don't. Like they'll follow laws. Blacklisting servers is better; it slaps the stupid admins pretty hard for victimizing everyone else. It also slaps folks like that stupid "internet lawyer" and Bernie Schifman. There's a public good- actual, relevant punishment for offenders.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
Does my family get paid compensation if I get gunned down while searching?
This is big business...with only slightly more positive moral compunctions than drugs.
What's this Submit thingy do?
Does he want them dead or alive? Or maybe just their head?
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
The problem with tagging all commercial email with an identifier such as "ADV:" is that most recipients will simply create an email rule to auto-delete it and never even know it arrived.
That's great for the recipients, but it does nothing to reduce the load on ISP servers; in fact, it may increase it as the advertisers will have to send out MORE mail to make sure at least somebody opens it.
Also, such a solution does nothing to help legitimate advertisers, who need to know the demographics of who is actually reading their ad. If there is an easy way to filter, they may buy a list that is 90% middle class professional office workers, but they have no way of telling what mix actually read their ad. So they would never buy a service that operated under the "ADV" rules. Result: only the scam companies would ever send the mail.
With Berman's proposal, the "vigilante" does the damage (DoS, etc.) before there is any proven wrongdoing. (What if a legit song happened to be labeled the same as a pirated one?)
With Lessig's idea, the vigilante reports the wrongdoing and lets the proper authority take care of it. (A solution I like better. Imagine if there was an all out DoS war between the vigilantes, RIAA, MP3 traders, and all of us in between.)
One can't help but wonder: if this works for spammers, why couldn't it work for MP3s?
A bill like this is perilously close, if you ask me. If this works, the RIAA could start handing out $$$$ incentives for ratting out (illegal) MP3 traders.
having said that, it's also clear that having a way to identify the source of a potential spam would create serious privacy concerns - what's to stop that method from being used to identify the source of any email? nor does "identifying the spammer" seem to be as useful as "marginalizing the spammer" - i.e. making sure that spammers are likely to have to pay so dearly that it's not profitable for them. strictly speaking, we may not need to identify them to achieve this result.
so what we really need is a way to marginalize real spammers without sacrificing others' privacy rights in the process.
See more of his stuff here. They're great!
I think is not a bad idea at all. The reward is high though, so I suspect a few people might find some way to abuse the system.
But what if someone creates a site were you can put a bounty on a particular spam message and add to the pot on locating the spammer ( for legal action, of course ). I don't mean just finding originating network, but the real contact information of the individual or company responsible.
So say you get a particular "work at home" message once a day. You can post your message on there and put $5 in the collection for finding the prick who's harassing you. If he/she is annoying you, chances are there are others who are being annoyed as well. If there is a match in the database, then your money is added to others.
I am sure there are lots of capabable people out there, given $100 bucks to find a spammer *will* find them.
This site could also be used to organize groups of people who would like to sue spammers. So instead of one person footing the bill, if your spammer is being sued, you can join the fun as well.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
What would you do to automate the hunting-down-spammers process?
Perhaps something you could put on your servers? Once certain thresholds and/or parameters are reached, you could have another program kick in that could track them down.
A $10K reward would definitely get people working together in novel ways. Imagine if several ISPs/homeusers/businesses started working together to track these fuckers down.
This is a really good idea.
There are lots of us who want to stop this kinda shit, but have no idea where/how to start.
I don't understand his objection to the RBL. It has checks and balances. It is democratic. Use of the RBL is volentary. It doesn't involve expensive court actions or investigations paid for by taxpayers. It takes no direct action. But if you don't play nice, then others may choose not to play with you. If you don't self-police, others stop listening. Its quite a stretch to say that "restricts the freedom of email" and that it has not "done anything except make e-mailing more difficult." The RBL sure hasn't made my emailing more difficult or restricted my freedom.
I think good laws would add to the effectiveness of the RBL, don't get me wrong. But to hear the spammers tell it, the RBL has made their cost of business much higher, so I wouldn't say it is a detriment.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
...and if a fraction of the people (such as myself) who get that ADV e-mail set up an auto-reply ("Don't ever send me this shit again!"), the problem could get MUCH worse in terms of mail server loads...
The trick will be *where* you draw the line. Who has to use the ADV header and who doesn't? The mailings you're talking about are solicited e-mails.
I'm cool with people getting bulk e-mails if they've signed up for free shit. I'm NOT cool with people getting bulk e-mail if they A) haven't enlisted, or B) can't ever opt out.
I think that Lessig is getting at the lists that never let you opt out. Someone gets your name, spams you, you reply with REMOVE, you get on their short list, and then they sell you (at a premium) to another spammer. That's the shit that should be regulated with the ADV header.
Legit opt-in mailing lists should NOT be affected.
"Alright. I'll kindnap him for 50, deprogram him for 50, and I'll kill him for 100!"
"No, just the first 2!"
"Alright, I'll throw in the killin' for free."
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
"Wow, two Your Rights Online articles in a row. Our legal rights being threatened twice ine one hour. What kind of world are we living in?"
Sorry Mr. Spade, I don't think any +1 Funnys will be flung your way.
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, and rightfully, I might add. My mail server logs had this nice explanation given in the error message from other servers, complete with a helpful link explaining how to fix and get delisted (fix your server, resubmit its IP for checking, get automatically removed).
3 hours and a sendmail.cf later I was back with the good guys, and had this nice warm feeling
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
That's true.
Lessig's idea would only encourage many spammers to get together mail out all their shit together, rather than do it on their own.
There needs to be a way to make the punishment to better fit the total number of spammed e-mails...
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.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
The real hotmail agressively fights spammers. I know, because I look at the unfiltered spam I receive (for submission to SpamCop and my private blacklist). Rarely do I get spam from hotmail IP addresses.
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.
Growing a Spam Killing Community -- "The purpose of this article is to discuss how to eliminate spam through a community of spammer killers. Why take a passive role in spam elimination and why use up precious time and complex tools to track down one spammer? Instead, let's create a community of spammer hunters to track them down and wipe them out, using their own methods against them. Forget killing spam, let's kill the spammers."
How to Download YouTube Videos
It's not working very well, because of weak enforcement. That may change after a few cases are litigated. I do see a hundred or so "ADV:" messages in my trash can right now, placed there by a rule, so it's doing something. But only about 2% of incoming spam is being junked by that rule.
Read the article. The 10k bounty for not labeling spam as spam isn't what you should be paying attention to. It's his attack on volunteer efforts to block spam relays, whom he calls "spam vigilantes", in the worst sense of the word. Essentially, he says that efforts to blackhole servers (presumably, because the admin of that server also needs to be whacked repeatedly with a cluestick) do more harm than good, and that we should just use filtering.
The 10k bounty is supposed to convince spammers to label their spam so we can effectively filter it.
Finished laughing? Let's dissect his thinking, shall we? He says we can handle spam just by making sure the spammers label it. This is the thinking behind a lot of bad legislation - it legitimizes it, instead of eradicating it. Second of all, he implies that vigilantism can work with government (finding spammers who don't comply with the ADV: rule) to fix what vigilantism by itself (blacklists) cannot do. Well, blacklists are meant to eliminate spammer havens - and we have plenty of anti-spam people hunting spammers as it is, FOR FREE. What the hell does he think 10k is going to do, if all the bounty-hunter does is turn the spammer's info over to the government? I mean, the FTC doesn't do much to the existing fax-spammers who are in violation of federal law. (The fax.com lawsuit was filed by a private individual, the FTC just levies paltry fines.) Or worse, what is the US government gonna do to foreign spammers who don't comply with our "label law"?
Essentially, Lessig says we should discard our current system of blocklists and anti-spam tech, in favor of simple client-side filters and a federal mandate to label spam, with a bounty to catch anyone who fails to label their spam. The threat is so feeble, and the undeserved side-effects so beneficial, I'm sure that spammers will love this idea.
It sounds like this effort will involve a tracing operation, digging in to find the systems, the software, and the people behind the spam.
What will the reward be for implicating the spam-enabling software vendors? One in particular that comes to mind is Elcomsoft. Will there be a $10K reward for dragging Dmitry's bizzness into court?
(note, the 'Advanced Email Extractor' tool linked to above used to be a link right on the elcomsoft.com web page, but that alternative 'MailUtilites' web page still comes up as one of the top five links in Google when you search on 'elcomsoft.' I suspect they're hiding their association with the 'mail utilites' product line to get geek sympathy. Spread the word, they sell tools to the spammers!)
After signing up, the number of unsolicited phone calls I get has dropped to zero.
So, for example, if Bill Gates sells some MS stock today, he can't buy MS stock tomorrow.
The way the SEC enforces this is very clever. The law is that any shareholder of the company can sue to nail a short swing trader. If the suit is successful, the short swing trader has to turn over to the company any profit they made, AND they have to pay the attorney fees of the suing shareholder. The profits are calculated in the least favorable (to the short swing trader) way--find the highest selling price he got in the last six months, and the lowest buying price...match those shares up, and count the difference as profit. So, if you buy at 100, sell at 90, buy at 80, and sell at 70, you have really lost 20, but as far as the short swing laws go, you made 10 (the sell at 90 less the buy at 80), and so you have to pay 10.
The final brilliant piece of the short swing law is that the shareholder who brings suit does NOT have to have been a shareholder at the time of the trading--they only have to be a shareholder at the time of the suit.
Combine that with the winner getting attorney fees, and what happens is that attorneys check the public records, find dumb corporate officers who tried to sneak in some short swing trading, go out and buy a share of the company to get standing to sue, and sue.
This has pretty much completely eliminated illegal short swing trading, with the SEC having to spend no money to track it down and enforce the law.
Oh, it's even worse than that. Lessig proposes the 10k fine only for spammers who fail to label their spam with an [ADV:] tag. He essentialy means to leave spammers alone as long as they do that, in order to make client-side filtering 100% effective. Good intentions aside, his idea stinks - I'd rather get rid of them all, than to deal with incoming crap that I'd be trashing ANYWAYS.
Block lists don't take any freedom from spammers. It never prevents them from sending all the e-mail they want. It's just that when it hits a server of someone that doesn't want to hear their speach, the "mute" button gets hit.
Why spammers think that keeping their message out of my inbox is restricting freedom of speech, I'll never understand. Are they not my eyes, are they not my ears? Can I not decide what I'll use my time to read, to hear, to think about? So what if it's the greatest thing since round wheels. If I choose to close my mind to it, trying to sell me the goose that lays golden eggs isn't going to overcome my "buyers resistance".
Not only are spammers stupid, they are persistantly stupid. In the Darwinan game of the Internet, they rank below the Doo-doo of the Do Do.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
One solution i've heard was to make emails computationially expensive. Like, if my mailserver doesn't recognize your address, you have to factor the product of a few smallish primes before it will deliver the message. Something not too nasty, but hopefully big enough that you can't just have lookup tables. If you're sending a message to 10 people, it takes maybe a few seconds. If you're sending to thousands of people, it takes longer. You could even set preferences for how ugly you want the factorization to be: if the headers all match up, it's addressed to one person, and there's no html or images or links, make 'em factor 2*7*13. If the subject contains 'debt' or is in all caps, or there are removal instructions in the body, they have to factor something that's almost crypto-grade.
Put in some work-arounds where someone can email a list admin for permission to mail the list, etc.
Of course my idea of "make them pay" is perhaps a bit different than the norm. I'm not talking about finding out who they are so they can face the swift hand justice, I'm more of the though of finding out who they so they can face teh swift baseball bats of Guido and Nunzio who, when they're done, break the spammers' fingers so they can no longer type out those emails telling me how easy it is to buy my Viagra.
Hell, I'd be willing to contribute to a fund which promised such results. I want my mailbox back and I'm tired of coming up with new regular expressions to make the spam go away.
New "Crossing Jordan" episode: a man is found dead, shot twice. The only clue is a can of Spam jammed in his mouth, unopened...
-- Terry
What I don't understand is why everyone always talk about it being impossible to catch the "smart" spammers. These people aren't sending this shit out for fun. Yeah, they forge headers, return addresses, & so forth. But why does that matter?
If they're sending these damn things out for commercial gain, at some point they have to get your money. They either have a website (which can be tracked down via the hosting ISP, DNS entries, shit - traceroute the bitch & call the next people upstream), or an address, or a phone number. That should get all of the stateside jackasses. Even the ones who host overseas can have the hurt put on them. They have to take credit cards or paypal or something. That means a paper trail & it means that Discover Card or Visa or whoever can lock them out.
All that leaves is chain mail (which is stupid, but sent by your buddies that you can tell to fuck off) and people after bank account info (such as Nigerian princes).
Honestly, why is it claimed to be so hard for spammers to be tracked down? For the average joe, yeah, it's hard. For those enforcing anti-spam laws it should be relatively easy (if a little tedious) to nab the majority. Can someone explain this?
If I'm granted immunity in all cases where I am responsible for the death of a spammer, and I receive $10,000 for each such death of my own doing, count me in. But if it's just 'turn them in, wah wah wah', then I'll have to pass.
To be a Real Official Spammer, you have to invoke the number of the Murk: S.1618. It never made it into law, they'd still be violating it if it was a law, and I live in Canada -- but spammers still have to quote it their turds. (In many languages too. Weird.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Seeking redress?
What a shame!
Your faith is misplaced
in the RBL.
If we had their address,
and a name,
It would probably
take care of itself...
Or, a Limerick:
Send Congress home -- no laws need be made.
Save your money -- the price will be paid.
No judges, no jury,
have it done in a hurry,
A real life black hole -- get a spade.
How do you get off of SPEWS once you're listed incorrectly? There's no quick straightforward way.
The RBL publishes information on how to get off the list; its really not hard. If you can show the address is recent they'll take you off. As for the ratio of customer emails to spam that's going to come down to what customers are worth; which has a great deal to do with the industry.
Are you referring to the MAPS RBL? The RBL that has widely been considered toothless ever since it was sued into unblocking certain spammers? The RBL previously run by the same Paul Vixie who has been caught with his pants down knowingly hosting spammers for the right price? The RBL which previously employed the two patsies who have been "cleaning up" spamhaus PostmasterGeneral/Mindshare Designs for roughly a year now with no results beyond a lot of cashed paychecks?
No? Then perhaps you're talking about the MAPS RBL that patiently strives to list only spammers and works tirelessly to ensure that the owner of every listed IP is given ample notification and opportunity to realize the course they were headed on and avert it? The RBL which is always willing to have secret negotiations with spammers and spam supporters; To work things out and smooth things over; To make exceptions for any number of reasons not given out to the unwashed masses?
Nope, doesn't sound like you're talking about that particular MAPS RBL either. It sounds more like you're talking about an RBL that you have fabricated from whole cloth without any external stimuli.
Quit talking out of your ass.
definitely a brain fart.
So what if it forces a majority of the spammers into using the [ADV] tag in their Subject headers? What is that going to accomplish? Yes, most ISPs will instantly block anything with [ADV] in the subject header but the spammers will still be using bandwidth to bounce endless waves of spam off of your filters in an attempt to get at the remaining mail servers which don't filter for one reason or another!
Beyond that, an [ADV] flag is content. As the subject of this post points out: The fight against spam needs to be firmly grounded in a lack of consent -- not the slippery slope which any argument based on content quickly becomes!
It can't be just the first one. It has to be a bounty to everyone who tracks the spammer down and take them to court. Otherwise, it just wouldn't pay to do it. A better scheme:
1. Allow anyone to take spammers to small claims court for around $2K.
2. Make the person selling whatever is advertised in the spam be responsible for unless they are willing to file a criminal complaint against the spammer.
3. Explicitly make is illegal to advertise someone else's product without authorization (it's probably already illegal...). This is to enable #2.
4. If an ISP cannot identify the spammer, the ISP must pay the fine. This may already be the case, but making is explicit would help.
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
For obvious reasons, and "ADV" wont work. Now, Lessig makes the mistake of thinking that the US is the whole world. That's a very bad mistake. Another mistake is not to realize that my mailserver and bandwidth has suffered from the spam if I accept it. These costs are very large indeed. The only way to avoid this cost is that spam is never sent.
I've been a regular in NANAE for a long time (not right now), and I have supported RBL and SPEWS, and I still see many positive things about them.
Yet, I don't think people realize how much power they have, and what costs a mistake will have. Use of RBL and SPEWS is voluntary, so Lessigs "vigilantism" reference is highly inappropiate. But effectively, so many people are using them that an error on the part of us is too costly for those that it hits.
Mistakes are human, and we all make mistakes, but it is easier to make mistakes when you're not working full-time on an issue, when you don't have the time to research properly. Nevertheless, these mistakes are unacceptable. By mistakes I'm not talking about the RBLing of Peacefire. They chose to stand by scumbags and chose to go to the press rather than resolve it in a manner that everybody would benefit from. I'm talking like the case of Ed Felten's "Freedom to Tinker" experiences with SpamCop and the SPEWS listing of The Linux Kernel Archives. These are examples of things that should never happen. Most of us strive for many 9s of uptime, and can appreciate what it is like to be blocked for days. Traumatic, that's what it is. :-)
Yet, that is going to happen many times more if we continue with current practices.
I think the US needs good laws. Here in Norway we have a law that requires confirmed opt-in and bans business to consumer spam. It works quite well. While I get quite a lot of religous spam from US, I get nothing from Norway, though that is not regulated. It could be that the message is quite strong that spamming is unacceptable anyway, so even the morons don't spam.
While spammers can move off-shore, I wouldn't mind blocking whole countries untill they get good laws. Moving off-shore won't work.
It will not totally stop spam, but only totalitarian regimes want total solution to problems. With laws in place, we may get a spam a month, I don't mind as long as I can turn the spammer over to the justice system and let them decide whether he overstepped the boundaries or not. That's what the justice system is there for.
Now, Lessig's proposal is bad from another angle too, and that is that it to a great extent encourages vigilantism. I really don't want a bunch of script-kiddies running around trying to obtain evidence that some randomly accused person committed spamming. Joe-jobs happen a lot, I've been joed myself. True spamfighters know a joe-job when they see it, but a random script-kiddie out to make a fast $10k won't.
A US ban on spam is needed. Blacklists should be abandoned.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
It made it as a slashdot headline, it's already reached it's audience.
Brings a whole new meaning to that phrase
The cancel-bots went on a strike to show the magnitude of the problem. Few people noticed the difference.
It is unclear whether this was because the ISP filters already take most of the spam, or because one of the major cancel-bots continued to operate.
In any case, it was a PR failure for the bot operators.
E-Mail is distributed. There is no way you can establish and maintain such a system.
All either of the systems requires is a stamp server and for participating users to have stamp-aware mail programs.
You could require billing information be attached to each e-mail, and collect before finally delivering the mail, but the overhead would begin to make e-mail as expensive as postal mail, and nearly as slow.
The crypotographic stamp is the "billing information", and in either plan you are rarely, if ever, going to actually withdraw the cash.
With the 2 cent stamp plan $2 gets you a 100 stamp account, and the 2 cents from any mail you receive will generally just give you a 1 stamp credit for future use. If you still get spam then maybe you withdraw a few $ once a year.
With the large stamp plan in normal use the stamps should never be redeemed. You send mail with a 32 cent stamp to a friend, they do nothing, and you can keep re-using that stamp. If you get spam or other unwanted mail you redeem the stamp for credit. Either you use the credit to buy stamps yourself, or you cash out a few $ once or twice a year.
In either case it's mostly just a bookkeeping game on the stamp server to give bulk mail a non-trivial cash cost. You buy in for two to ten dollars, and unless you're a spammer you can entirely forget the system has anything to do with cash.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
when you close the article, you get a pop up? I find pop ups more annoying than spam myself...
Define solicited mail as for an American company as requiring an American company to provide opt-in. That way American companies cannot receive opt-ins from foreign companies.
If that kind of law passes, the spammers will just set up wholly owned American subsidiaries for the sole purpose of "opting in" spam targets. And if the law is written so as to exclude American companies wholly owned by foreign entities, then it also excludes legitimate outfits such as Nintendo and (once the settlement becomes final) possibly Microsoft.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Spam could be fought and cut down drastically. All we need is to rally the industry behind the effort. Sure, a little will always get through. But mostly, it will be due to luck. I don't buy the argument about "smarter" spammers. If they were good enough to consistently defeat well engineered systems, they'd be good enough to get a real job doing something else that pays a lot better.
:-)
C'mon, look at the spam you get. It's real bottom feeder stuff. It probably makes some money for someone, but I can guarantee no one's getting rich. If you really believe it's possible, then I have a great way for you to make money. Have you heard the good news about Herbalife?
This is one of the most ironic and ultimately annyoing things for me. Recently, I've been getting more spam from companies sending anti-spam or anti-popup products. In addition, I get popups advertising the same.
One would think that it doesn't take a brain surgeon to realize that people who dislike spam/popups are going to be doubly annoyed by spam/popups advertising anti-spam/popup solutions.
Subject: RE: Penis enlargement
Body: Cheap way to remove your head from your ass...
- phorm
"Damn, and I tried so hard too. Do you see me caring about being modded up? Well, you shouldn't because I don't."
Okie then, what do ya care about? Obviously my assumption was wrong, so correct me.
Are you intentionally being thick so you can avoid what I really asked you? If you are, it means you really were going for a +1 Funny. If you aren't, then my next question would be "Is English your native language?".
You know damn well I was asking you what you were hoping to accomplish with that post if it wasn't for karma.
I know using the small stamp system, I give away my 100 stamps in about two days
Why would you send a stamp to someone who doesn't require it, and even if you did, how would it get "canceled"?
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Oops, only sent half a response.
participation is optional, spammers won't participate, and their aren't any other benefits to using a big clunky stamp system.
Right, spammers can't participate without paying everyone. And yes, hitting a critical mass of people using the system is the biggest hurdle. Skilling spam is such a pressing need that I think people would jump at the chance to use it.
AOL and Microsoft are at the top of the list that could easily pull it off, but they're both about the bottom of the list I would expect to do it right though, chuckle.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I thought he was supposed to be one of the good guys... obviously I was wrong. What a moron.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
"Come on now. Don't take pot shots at my syntax."
That wasn't my intention. As a matter of fact, I think grammar/syntax/spelling zealots need to find something better to do. heh. I was actually taking pot shots at your over-literalistic (is that a word? heh) understanding of my question.
"That's a joke...the kind of joke I expect to get branded a troll for."
I hear ya. I burn karma all the time by challenging moderations. =)
"And that's how I stand regarding this issue. I think the answer to your question lies somewhere above. If not, let us continue this wasteful public banter."
Heh I was just messin with ya. Trolling's probably a better word for it. The good news is that your response was far more intelligent than what I normally get. No fun for me, though because I wasn't able to get ya riled up. Oh well!
"If not, let us continue this wasteful public banter."
Aww c'mon, that'd wipe out Slashdot's comments section!
getting several KB of traffic FOR EACH PIECE OF E-MAIL
:) You can always approve yourself and print up as many stamps as you like that people can use to mail you. You can also approve all of your friends as stamp servers, and their friends, and so on. If you ever just junk mail from a "chain-of-friends" stamp server, you just revoke that server.
The stamp server handles either one or two packets for each piece of mail. No need to route mail the through the stamp server. The stamps would only need to be a few dozzen bytes. If designed efficently it would only require a single packet to the stamp server and back to either request a stamp, validate a stamp, or to redeem a stamp.
Note that with the 2 cent stamp plan there no need to talk to the stamp server to validate the stamp, you can validate it locally via cryptographic signature. With the "expensive stamp" plan you only need to request a stamp once and you can keep re-using it (once every 2 or 3 days), and they are rarely redeemed.
you have yet to say how a large mailing list is going to deal with this system
With the expensive stamps you just give the mailing list a single stamp to use every time it mails you. So long as you don't redeem the stamp it can keep reusing it. Redeeming the stamp would effectively be considered an un-subscribe request.
With the 2 cent stamps you could subscribe by sending a bunch of 2 cent stamps, each one buys you / pays for one issue. You giove them a few cents and they give it back.
You could also simply add the newsletter to your mail-readers's "approved" list, and you can accept the mail unstamped.
Another facinating aspect is that ANYONE can act as a stamp server. You can even print up your own stamps. Of course, only people who have you listed as an approved stamp server will accept them
You generally only need to use the public stamp server when mailing a complete stranger.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.