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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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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".)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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
Brings a whole new meaning to that phrase