Slashdot Mirror
One Answer To Spam: Sell Your Interruption Time
An anonymous reader writes "A recent article in the IBM Systems Journal describes an innovative solution to curb both spam email and telemarketing. In short, the potential recipient of a message/call advertises the potential cost of contacting him uninvited. If the sender agrees to pay that cost, it acquires a token that it includes in the message/call and the message/call is accepted. The recipient decides to collect the fee or not, while recipients in a white list are not required to carry a token. The author also provides for a more detailed description."
This will about as well as asking spammers to remove you from their lists.
This however will never work... spammers only spam because for the majority of them its free/very cheap
Bill Gates suggested this in his book, "The Road Ahead"... Microsoft? Innovating? Why yes...
Score:-1, Funny
actually, not a half bad idea...i figure if i accepted 5,000 spams/calls a day, at 5 cents a call, i could make it my full-time job...what the heck would i list as occupation on my income taxes though...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
Your head. On a plate.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It'll never happen, but it'd be really cool if it did! Sure, you can spam me, but you have to pay me to deal with it!
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
I read that idea here on Slashdot about the time I registered (maybe half a year ago?)
It was to have a penny or whatnot attached to each message and with a white list also available.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
If they're spammers good luck collecting since most of the time the headers are all forged anyway or they're coming from some asian country.
Free Mac Mini
You FINALLY found a girl who think enough of you to use the phone number you gave her. She's hot, sweet and intelligent with a great sense of humour.
"You must agree to pay this geek 5 cents a minute while talking to him," a nasally voice greets her after she dials your number.
"FUCK THAT!"
There goes the love of your life...
Hey, this is a great idea for people on-call too! You get a business call at 3:27 AM (why is it always 3:27 AM??) to reset someone's password, and you get to pocket a cool $20.
spammers operate becasue it doens;t cost them money..
Basci 101 economics lwo cost of entry..
to change that you have to change the cost of entry to a higher amount..
1. Make email protocol key licensed..if you dont have a key proving that you operate a secure email server you cant send..
Really this is the only chang eto chase spammers away fromeial.. but then they will do IM....
Don't Tread on OpenSource
"But however much the phone companies may profit from the current situation, it is generally bad business to continue a practice that infuriates the vast majority of your customers."
:
-Yeah, right. Bwahahaha
Tell that to anyone who flies on a regular basis.
Or has cable TV, etc, etc.
(an aside-
do any other geezers here remember Lily Tomlin's routine way back when
"No, maam, we don't care. We're the phone company, we don't have to.")
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
I've seen various permutations of this idea thrown around on slashdot before.
Umm... surely the article means to say that whitelisted senders do not require a token?
Anyway, this sounds really sweet. I never bothered making a hotmail account before, but now that I can "Earn Money at Home" just by receiving and reading spam all day, I have a reason to sign up!
Java: the COBOL of the new millenium.
Its called a 0900 number.. but 5c/min is a bargain
That use to be a standard response to things like "Make money now..", etc. You send back an email stating that further contact would be considered a request for consulting services at (outrageous number) dollars an hour, 1 hour minimum for each message. I believe a few cases actually made it to court and some people were awarded some money. For telemarketers I have found that being on our states "No Call" list has drastically reduced annoying phone calls. (I am still holding out hope that one of "Trixie and her sorority sisters are waiting for you" emails will pay off for me!)
This already exists, check out http://www.sendearnings.com, or http://www.canijoin.com.
There, you can get paid pennies to read spam.
The article talks about using "Interrupt Tokens" that you can give out as a one-use token to interrupt (email spam, telemarketer call) you. If the person contacting you doesn't have an interrupt token, they can't contact you without paying your "Interrupt Fee", the fee that you set for contacting you.
I often get calls that I don't expect, and I need to take them. I can't have people unable to contact me about a business deal because they don't want to pay my "Interrupt Fee". They'll say, "Eh, to heck with it. I'll give the deal to the next guy down the line."
For telemarketers, I use the key phrase, "Place me on your do not call list." I get maybe one telemarketer call every other month, and normally those are recorded messages.
Chuck Firment
Show me the code and/or binary from Microsoft that does this. Until there is something there that actually does something, I'd hardly call it "innovating".
if you look at this econimically from the spammers point of view...why would they offer this when they get paid so well to send out email that doesn't ever get read? They have no reason to change thier ways, many are already making millions. nevermore-spoon
I have great faith in fools; My friends call it self-confidence. Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1845
I mean really... how many spammers out there, even actually know that your email address exists when they send spam? I have a mostly english email address, and i'd assume that 80% of the spam that i get, goes to randomly generated email addresses.
This idea, is much like the idea, of charging people to look at you. Many people will see you anyway, and you'll never catch them, let alone make them pay.
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
While this is an interesting idea, I can see filters being set up to auto-trash email while a computer is idle (I'm away)... then I just sell a ton of advertising and get much more than my bandwidth costs in return, not having to even read a word. This being used in common practice could easily overload the internet and spammers will soon realize that they're much better off spamming those who only want normal mail to go to their Inboxes.
I doubt if this will ever work.
First, if you try to implement that you confirm your mail exists. Do i need to say more? I get 100 spams (30 - 150) a day to one of my accounts; NO WAY i will ever answer back to any unwanted. Me not in to: field? cancel message. Contains still any of the words i spam filter (all sex terms, gambling, loans, reates, lastminute, etc etc etc) => forward to my spamcop account, then cancel. Comes from certain IPs? Cancel.
For the telephones i have been lucky. I got my first phone (well, mobile) in 1995, and i have NEVER received a SPAM call. I asked for all the telephone companies to keep my info secret; besides of the actual phones i use 4 or 5 of 6 are not registered to me;). I have given the number only where necessary, and will continue that. In case i'd receive a spam call, I'd want to know where they got my number and then who am i talking to. Doing that with an official enough voice gives enough uncomfort to the spammer. If not, "Could you inform the place where you got my phone number that after the next spam call i will receive i will do some legal actions..?"
Easiest solution: strong spam filters and that's it. Maybe opening a special pay - number = like those for adult services, where you will receive your spam calls could be worth trying if you get a lot of telespam.
...not without some healthy assistance from government regulation.
The problem has always been that there simply is no feasible payment mechanism to support it. If we ever get micropayments in some form, then people can implement this.
Getting money out of spammer that's trying to get money out of you. Hmmmm....
Sure it may work -- in theory. In theory, communism works. In theory. (simpsons credit)
old news for nerds, stuff that bill gates wrote 6 years ago...
Fleur de Sel
The way I see it, this only works with really good profiles, or sliding pay scales. You have to pay me much more to listen to a pitch about tampons than about football, for instance. Call me close-minded, but I do have strong preferences. So either (preferably) never call me about tampons, or allow me to easily set prices on different topics for interruption. Probably a "willing to listen" list might suffice, since if I charge a lot to listen to a topic I probably am not a potential customer anyway.
Let's face it: the only attraction of UCE for spammers is its cost: sending the same message to thousands, or even millions, of people costs them close to nothing.
;)
Which is why spammers will never adopt a solution such as this one: it would reduce the pool of potential clients (read: complete idiots) willing to receive UCE and it would raise their costs in an unacceptable way.
I mean, I agree to receive all the spam you want to send me... as long as you are ready to pay one million dollars per email. How is that for a fair price?
This scheme is interesting, in a theoretical sort of way, but it has much of a chance of becoming a reality as, say, flying elephants.
Or, uh, a cold day in hell.
And, of course, my opinion is exactly worth what you paid to read it on Slashdot...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
I also heard that world peace is just around the corner!
I'm sorry, but this wouldn't work without totally restructuring the current "email system" and phone system
This would also destroy the ability of organizations that are truely good in nature to advertise. I make this bold statement because if something like this goes into place, then people will want to get paid for watching TV commercials and for looking at billboards. Hell, the average Joe wouldn't have to work since he/she could get paid just to look at their advertisements! This could truely stunt the growth of our economic system.
Besides, do you think this would actually work? The companies would claim this violates their freedom of speech rights, and since companies have money to pay off politicians and to pay off phone companies, do you REALLY think this would ever happen???
However, I do agree that SOMETHING needs to be done to stop this rediculous mass advertising that goes on, but I don't think that is the answer (or atleast not in its current form)
One of the hilarious solutions that I have come up with (well, I think it is funny) for phone spam is somehting like this:
Anyway you look at it, I win. I get entertained, my number removed from their calling list, and a laugh from the telemarketer sometimes.
However, (and most seriously), this type of system must be implimented in such a manner that the phone companies and ISPs don't make a dime off of it, otherwise the problem will grow
The only solution to this is simple
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
So let's get this straight... I charge $.10 for a token, then my email filter says "Oh look, there's a token! This must be spam!" and summarily deletes it. I like it!!
The recipient decides to collect the fee or not, while recipients in a white list are not required to carry a token.
Ok so how long until spammers/telemarketers figure out how to spoof themselves (like they do with my email address) to send to things via people's whitelists? Or write a virus or spyware to silently add themselves to the whitelist?
I think it's a good idea but I doubt it'll actually work in practice. Anything that can reduce the spam I get (my college email account has finally been infested) it a plus. And if it makes me a little scratch on the side, all the better!
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
It would probably be easiest if all SMTP connect requests would be delayed for 1 second by each Internet core router. That means individual mails get delayed by about 30 seconds max before delivery starts. Even with large companies this shouldn't become a problem.
However, a mass spammer would simply see his/her mails queue up at his end, which takes away the effect of reaching millions with the click of a button.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
A distributed system like SETI@Home, or maybe your own grid, can hand out cryptographic tokens for work units (say, a CPU minute), and the sender can then use those tokens to reach recipients.
In essence, the tokens act as digital postage stamps, but the payment is in useful CPU cycles, not useless cryptographic computations or money.
Assume this works. Assume that you do get paid $0.05 US for each email you receive. Do you now have to read it? Are you forced to actually open that SPAM? You may make $5,000/week, but you'll be spending every hour of every day, reading about how to increase your manhood, or please women. Not how i'd like to spend my day.
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
The point isn't to enact some kind of law or regulation forcing spammers to pay $0.05, it's to setup a way for reputable spammers (oxymoron I know) to pay for their advertisement space to you personally. In theory it would be a good idea, but so many things are good ideas in theory and no in practice..
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
A simpler solution I've seen one guy's website (sorry no link). The footer states that he charges $10,000 per hour to review unsolicited email, and that any sender of spam hereby agrees to these terms. Presumably, he is free then to collect from any spammer of his choice. How does this sound from legal point of view?
--
I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven...
A better solution to spammers has recently been dealt with on the online comic, Userfriendly.Org
0 7
0 9
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=200212
followed by
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=200212
Cthulhu knows how to deal with spammers.
Chuck Firment
For most people, unsolicited bombardment by advertisements is regarded as "part of life".
It would be really great to change this mindset not only in terms of internet based advertising, but also for telephone direct marketing, bulk mail advertisers, and billboards.
At least with TV and radio there's a transaction of sorts going (not that I want to give credence to Jack Valenti's position that people fast forwarding through commercial messages are "thieves"; it still costs me the inconvenience of fast forwarding, but my cost is less): I get to watch some show I value and suffer some inconvenience of advertising that I suffer.
With billboards, the property owner gets money for placement of the advertisement, but the public gets the mental pollution without gaining any benefit. [I won't buy the argument that being informed of products and services is an inherent benefit: when I want to buy something, I'll research it and find out about it then.]
Sound economic theory can be applied to advertising. Explicitly crediting and charging consumers and producers of advertisements would be a positive step towards making this a reality .
The catch is that getting people to agree that their collective attentions are worth something is a political problem. And the same economic theories that could potentially be applied to advertising are already being applied at the overriding level of what I will call "government services", such as legislation controlling advertising. It is in the financial interest of advertisers to have the public place no value on their attention.
Thus, this good idea will have to wait until the public wakes up.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
0. Spam is theft.
1. Spammers lie.
2. If a spammer appears to be truthful, see #1.
3. Spammers are stupid (or at least believe YOU are).
Needless to say, simple economics would preclude using the system (on the receiving end) as a money-making technique. Smart spammers would find ways to locate willing buyers. Stupid spammers would go broke.
ScienceSeeker.org
- You have a whitelist of domains and adresses.
- You also have a blacklist of domains and addresses.
- Every mail from a sender in the whitelist is accepted.
- Every PGP/GPG-signed or encrypted mail from a sender NOT in the blacklist is also accepted.
- Everyone else will get a mail back and have to click on an URL (or reply to the confirmation mail) confirming his/her message to me.
- Double bounced addresses land in the blacklist.
Bang, zero spam.Remember to put your business partners on the whitelist though. ;)
-- Jens
Home Page
If you want the lady to call you without having to pay a fee, then give her a single-use token with your phone number. Jeez...
The first time you get e-mail signed by a new CA, you will see it's policy and decide weather to accept messages signed by it. A typical ISP might state that any messages are allowed as long as it doesn't break local laws and is not an uninvited commerical contact. Another CA might support spam-free anonymous e-mail by signing each message directly instead of signing a user's key and charging a fee for each e-mail to make sure it's important communications and not just mass marketing. You can even have a "Disney CA" which only allows family-friendly messages for those so inclined.
Either way, if you accept a CA and then get a message that violates it's policy, you will forward it back to CA. If they agree, they automatically charge a fine to the violator - let's say $100 - and send you (most of) the money. Or for more serious violations than spam, actually send you real-world contact info for that person and/or notify the autorities.
If the CA fails to respond, you can block it. Pretty soon there will be web sites to rate various CAs and filter out spam-friendly ones.
This scheme doesn't have to be implemented all at once. Some ISP - say AOL - can release an e-mail program that puts signed messages in a separate group in INBOX. The idea is that you will encourage your friends to sign up for AOL because this way their messages will not get lost in spam. Then as the system becomes more popular, people will require all their messages to be signed and stop checking the second group.
Cited references and note
1. SPAM is a registered trademark of Hormel Food Corporation,
referring to a family of ham-like products. The use of the
word "spam" to refer to unwanted e-mail is of obscure origin,
but may have something to do with a comedy sketch by the
Monty Python group depicting a restaurant in which every dish
contains spam.
Woopty Doo Basil, what does it all mean?!
Vanquish is a startup
that does try to sell a system like this. The idea is similar: You get some kind of certificate from them to sign your email. Other vanquish users will accept only 'signed' email. If you receive a signed email that turns out to be spam, you can get reimbursed for your time by the sender.
---- join dshield.org Distributed Intrusion Detec
In a few weeks bayesian spam filtering will be in Mozilla 1.3 and all this will be moot
I just don't see how this could work. There appear to be too many technical issues involved, not least of which is implementation. First of all, you have to assume there will some "e-token standard." Next, you have to assume Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and all the other free-email services will support it. You can do a proxy server on the clients for other mail packages, but anything web-based will have to be adapted to it.
Next you need to somehow distribute the tokens to these different systems. This seems to require some sort of integration between the token provider(s) and the e-mail systems and web-based e-mail services.
I just don't see it happening to fix something that can be handled pretty well through filtering. The fact is, e-mail filtering software is making great headway these days. Baysian filters, collective filters like Cloudmark's SpamNet, and so forth.
One idea I had was for a white-list proxy. The first time someone sent you an e-mail, it would hold it in a queue. It would send them back a message asking them if they're sure they want to deliver the message (99% of spammers won't get past this point). As the recipient, you would would be notified of their intent to e-mail you and then validate whether or not you wanted to allow mail from this new sender in the future.
It has problems as well, but it's infinitely more implementable than the idea this paper proposes.
I worked for a company Javien that implemented this solution for email last year. The product was called Bouncer and would sit in between your email client and POP3 server. When it received a message from someone that wasn't on your accept list, it would bounce it back with a contract that could optionally include a request for payment. This was hooked into Javien's micropayment system, so if the sender accepted the terms of the contract they could attach a digitally signed proof of payment with the email when they send it again.
I think you need to read the How-To-Be-A-Player Mini-HOWTO.
like snailmail, you pay in advance for sending the mail and the receiver can choose to refund that money.
use something like paypal or whatever to do and validate the payment. the sender will receive a ontime key that allows them to send the mail. all of this will be automated by pressing the 'send' button.
people on the whitelist will receive a permanent key.
Privacy is terrorism.
In R.A. Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls Hazel Stone (posing as Gwen something) uses a similar system to protect her messaging system: Spend some money to record an urgent message to her and she decides on whether to pay you back or not.
Give that the book was published in 1985, I would say the idea is pretty old.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
Telemarketers find any way they can to get around the do not call lists. "No sir this is not an unsolicited call. You sneezed while visiting our website so this gives us the right to call you back with other offers as given in the agreement on the website."
If telemarketers can get around do not call lists in order to avoid being fined $500 (and some don't really care if they are fined or not), do you actually expect them to pay 5 cents to some guy who said it costs that much to call me with a solicitation?
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Obviously we could all switch to just allowing accepted-only people to contact us, or requiring confirmation from a person before accepting a message, but this doesnt solve the problem of registration forms which require you input your e-mail address. You know, for things like Forums, Online Purchases, Your slashdot account, they require a valid e-mail address to have confirmation sent to the user. Are these forms going to respond well to such a system? Are they going to respond at all?
Best case: You never recieve your confirmation because your mailer drops the message and the system you are signing up for doesnt respond to replies
Worst case: Your mailer replies to the message asking for confirmation, this is taken to be the confirmation the system was waiting for, you are signed up for something you didnt mean to sign up for.
Even worse: Two of these bounce off eachother, you are sent a bill for 200 million dollars, and your ISP drops you because you were DoSing their mail server.
Uh-huh. Everything I said is 100% true. Really.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Since there seems to be some funny moderation going on, I just wanted to clarify :
I REALLY DON"T LIKE BEING INTERRUPTED.
A LOT
I feel this to the point that I routinely, seriously, consider removing the telephone because it allows people to intrude upon me at their will.
You smartacres out there can snort about typical nerds lost in concentration and borderline autism, I don't care.
I'm sure that I'm singing to the choir when I say that sometimes the level of marketing I'm barraged with seems to border on harassment.
(hmmmm... maybe I can cook up a group action lawsuit against the advertising industry...)
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
If you're wondering how something like this can be implemented, look at the email agreement on http://roblimo.com/
So if the recipient gets a relevent email, then he obviously will not want to collect a payment from a business associate, his long lost buddy from highscool, etc..
I agree with you that something like this should be implemented.
But we should not forget the possiblity of creation of another ICANN-like corporation which will gladly perform such key management.
See some stories.
hany
My dating research shows you should get HER phone number, not give her yours. You get a couple big advantages out of going this route:
- If she won't give it to you, you know you're barking up the wrong tree and can move on.
- If she says yes you're in a stronger position than you were "waiting for her to call you." I mean, how often does that work out?
- Plus you get to appear strong and self-confident in her eyes when you ask for the number.
Hey, asking for her phone number isn't a marriage proposal, it's nothing to be afraid of or nervous about. If you feel comfortable asking, chances are you should. After a while, you'll get better at it, develop your own technique, and find yourself surprised at the number of numbers you get.
Who did what now?
My price is hereby set at $12million (USD) per minute. Please, please call me. Call me day and night; call me at 3am; call me during dinner. For $12million, you can call me during sex. Not only will I cheerfully listen to your entire pre-determined message, but I will ask questions - oh so many questions, and not necessarily about the product you're selling.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
That is such a great idea! We'll just ask spammers to agree to pay, and then they will! I'm gonna MAKE.MONEY.FAST like this!
You didn't read the article very carefully. The caller has to agree to pay the fee IF YOU WISH TO COLLECT. If a long lost friend calls he has to agree to pay the fee, but you don't have to collect the fee and he doesn't get charged.
But isn't there some sort of inherent flaw to this system?
Situation:
Too much spam/too many unwanted phone calls
Remedy:
1) Set up a company or companies dealing with tokens. From the article it seems to be assumed that this/these will make money only on a comission or flat fee basis on charges that are collected.
2)Spammers get charged for sending spam, telemarketers get charged for unwanted phonecalls. They are (presumably) forced to find a different business model or go out of business entirely.
Consequences:
1) No Spam (Hurrah!) No Cold Calling (Hurrah again!)
2) All communication is legit. Nobody charges anyone for email/phone calls because there is no spam. The company set up to oversee the system and profit from taking comission from these charges goes under because it has no source of revenue.
3) Spam comes back in a big way because the system has fallen down.......
Consider that the most profitable business strategy in the current business environment is 1. monopolize market for a given product or service, 2. screw customers who now cannot turn to competitor, 3. profit (no joke). Now apply that strategy to the "pay-me-to-spam-me" service and what emerges IMHO is an opportunity for someone to make money on a service that is currently free. I, for one, will not be paying a monthly fee to the token seller for "service", nor will I be arguing with their nearly nonexistant customer support when someone either circumvents them, hacks them, corrupts^Wpartners with them, or buys them out. Besides, I've already set my asking price for "spam time" - effectively infinity. If I had ever received a spam that wasn't an obvious ripoff then I might feel differently. I'll keep filtering spam myself for *free*, thank you.
I think most people replying are missing the point- that is, that this is an end-user solution, not a government/corporate solution. You implement it with your hardware and software. I think in practice, even if a few people did it, it would certainly work. You don't even need really sophisticated equiptment- current, inexpensive technology would suffice.
/. readers would benefit from actually reading the article mentioned in the piece before they start posting just to be modded up.
Honestly, I think some
When in doubt, f*ck it. When not in doubt, get in doubt!
First off you can usually tell if you are about to get "one of those calls" by the momentary pause of the Predictive dialer system passing your pick up to an available agent. So you can always just hang up if you detect the pause. If you're bored you can wait for the pickup and as soon as the agent asks to speak to you -- you tell them to hold on one moment. At this point I put the phone on speaker phone/mute and surf the web. I've had them waiting for up to 5 minutes before they give up. This tactic, if done a large scale, would bring outbound productivity way down and cost way up.
Any reason why I can't have an EULA regarding sending email via my mail server, and forcing spammers to pay? Just a thought... D
Many elected officials have "access charges" now. Lunch with Pres. Clinton was about $100,000, and Pres. Bush charges about $250,000.
This is already happening in the UK (and most of Europe) for phone calls. It's called making the person who makes the call pay for it.
Yes, I know there are 101 issues about why this couldn't really happen in the US however it means that this sort of thing is rare and if I ever get called by a telemarketeer they pay for the whole call. Which is nice.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Most email accounts receive more wanted mail than unwanted. It follows that most email users are not the slightest bit interested in a cunningly devised system for the prevention of unsolicited email.
A system such as the one proposed would require time and effort invested by everyone possessing an email account. This is a steep ravine to build a bridge over.
A better way to hinder spam would probably be to penalize the parties utlizing the sleezy operators of spam providing services. This could be done easily if the same rules that apply to telemarketing were applied to email marketing.
BUT, that would require an opt-out system to be put in place. You have to be able to put your email address on a list stating that you are not willing to receive unsolicited commercial email. Every company with an email marketing urge would then have to make sure the email addresses receiving their email marketing effort were not on said list or they would be fined.
My country (Sweden) had an opt-out policy effectively in place a year or two ago. It was so heavily criticized by anti-spam lobbyists that it was retracted and replaced with an opt-in policy. Go figure.
Opt-in will never do anything to reduce spam on the simple grounds that it is Impossible To Enforce!
No? Remind me - what were those telemarketing restrictions again?
Sig? - No thanks, I'm trying to quit.
A payment mechanism that can work is for ISPs to
charge for net email traffic. It takes work to
transport an incoming email received from a peering
ISP, so an ISP should charge for the service.
The accounting can be as simple as counting
incoming minus outgoing messages, then billing for
the difference. Then ISPs hosting spam would get
charged for the excess traffic they send, and in
turn they would have to pass that cost to the
spam originators.
By increasing the cost to the spammers, you will
reduce their number, and they will have to consider
how to target their emails to people who might
actually be interested in their product.
This is what happens in the paper mail world -
there is a cost for each piece of mail to be
delivered, so mailing lists are pruned to people
that are likely to be interested in the product.
Daniel
> Anyway you look at it, I win. I get entertained, my number removed from their calling list,
> and a laugh from the telemarketer sometimes.
You only win if your time and what your were doing at the time means nothing to you. That's what bothers me the most about telemarketers, they never ask whether they are disturbing or not.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
um, ok.
while i'm at it, why don't i license the right to rob my house?
this whole platform presupposes that companies should have the ability to interrupt some people. what if we don't take that for granted? what if we presuppose that nobody should be interrupted at all?
Just raise the taxes on crack.
first 100 are free
next 100 are 1 cent each
next 100 are 10 cents each
next 100 are 100 cents each
... So, sending 500 spam emails will cost $1111.
Spammers will think twice before sending 10000 emails...
Now who will collect? The ISPs. They know who send emails (who to bill) and how many they send (how much to bill). And I don't care if the government or some internet agency collects from the ISP.
This model does not prevent normal use of emails, but addresses the spammers where it hurt the most.
If they ever come out with this, and you want to show your gratitude, remember, I accept donations of beer.
Wow, more than 100 posts already and still 90% of posters obviously did not grasp the (rather) simple concept. I've seen a number of completely irrelevant objections:
: That's one of the best feature in this idea. No need for a new law. The recipient already has the right to block incoming messages. You know, when your phone rings, you won't go to jail if you don't take the call.
: Of course not, but nobody asks them! Using this kind of solution is YOUR decision; you don't have to ask anybody's permission, especially spammers.
: So what? This system will work for me even if I'm the only user. It's not one of those things that require a critical mass of users to be useful.
: Frankly, I don't care. If it prevents spam sent to me, it's good enough.
: You're missing the point. This is not about making money, it's about discouraging spammers. No spammer will ever send you an email if it costs him 5 cents. And the price is not for making you actually read the spam, it's only for allowing it to reach your inbox. In the very unlikely case a spammer actually pays, just delete the message as usual.
The law would never pass
Spammers will never accept this
Widespread adoption will never occur
This will not completely eradicate spam
5 cents to read spam is not worth it
So please, read the article. The idea may not be completely new (email stamp) but the details address most obvious objections.
One problem I can think of is still pending : what happens if the sender is also equiped with a similar system? Will we see payment notices bouncing back and forth between both ends without ever reaching an inbox? I guess a solution would be to automatically whitelist any address you've sent an email to, if only for 1 hour.
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
I would like to have such a whitelist/blacklist spam filtering system on my mailserver too, with the ability to auto-reply to "unsubscribed" email senders to get them to click a link or send a confirmation reply back to me to get accepted into the whitelist. Where kind I find software to do this? Is it open-source or commercial? Will it work with my current sendmail gateway that I use to handle multiple internet domains that get relayed into my interior ms exchange servers (I never place an exchnage server directly on the internet, but instead I "firewall" it behind a Linux machine).
I read a paper on this but can't for the life of me find it online right now. The basic idea is this: Tweak SMTP/POP to cause emails to be stored by the sender instead of by the recipient, and only sent when the recipient (who has received some sort of byte-tiny notification that there is an email waiting for them) requests to read the email.
This would eliminate spamming problems because 1) they'd have to host all their spam and 2) the spam wouldn't clog Internet bandwidth unless viewing it was requested.
I know talking about our supposedly-deregged local phone market is really a joke, but think if a company tried this approach: "Our service costs the same, and we WON'T sell your number to telelmarketers. We have ACTIVE telemarketer-proofing tools. We are anti-spam."
I think it's possible, and if the telemarketing problem were to explode like the spam problem, I think we would see it. Right now, though, I don't think it's quite annoying enough - don't know about you, but I'm not getting 15 telemarketing calls a day...yet. So there's not enough consumer outrage now to get a huge customer base.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
A 9mm bullet in the back of the head of the spam sender.
A logical extension to the bill/token idea would be to send the bill for said bullet to the family of said recently deceased spam sender. (sick idea (c) 2002 Chinese Legal System)
Ok, so lets assume this scheme gets implemented. Aside from all the other arguments posted already, and those mentioned in the article, if the telemarketers/spammers agree to pay your price, would they then assume that you are reasonably expected to sit there and listen to their whole spiel? I expect someone would turn around and sue you if you accepted their money for the priviledge of your time, and then turned around and deleted the message without reading it, or said "I'm not interested". There doesn't seem to be any provision there for the telemarketer to get their money back.
Now whoa there back the hell up a second. I will be the last one to ever defend a spammer. Listen before you warm up your flame thrower. What i'm worried about is not that most of us would probably do this anyway (hang up or insta-delete whatever spam does come through), which we would - hell, i sure would. What i'm worried about is opening up a legal can of worms, and having spammers actually sue us for ignoring them.
I think that if they agree to pay your fee, then they might get it into their heads that they can reasonably expect you to sit there and listen to them. But how far will that go? Do you have to listen to them for the whole call? What if they talk for an hour? 10 minutes? 5 minutes? 2 minutes before you can tell them where to go and how to get there? I personally wish nothing more than to cast spammers into a pit and put it on cable tv, but really, if you think this is a clear victory for us, if they actually agree to go along with it, we might be stepping into a situation where we're worse off than we are now.
One point made in "Release 2.0" is that the cost of sending spam would vary depending on the importaince of an individual. I might only be able to charge a penny to a spammer for sending me an e-mail but Bill Gates might command $100 or more per spam.
I don't really like the idea myself. Basicaly, if I tell someone to stop sending me junk I should expect that they will be compelled to stop, otherwise I should be able to sue for harrasment.
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
If you'd read the article, you'd understand that the spammers are NOT the ones adopting the proposed solution - users are. Under the proposed system, the spammers consent to the system is not required. Either they agree to pay the token, or their mail is not delivered to you. There's no provision for them to just not pay the fee and mail you anyway.
Sean
Simple solution:
"If you are calling for personal business, please push 1 now. If you are a telemarketer please push 2 now. If you are calling from a rotary phone, please hold."
Option 1 gets you right away, option 2 takes them to voicemail, option "hold the line" also takes them to voicemail.
Everyone wins.
Although this is still slightly annoying. It all depends on how much you care. Fortunately for me, I'm on a little used exchange, and I'm out in the country. It's actually been a few months (honestly) since a telemarketer called me.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
The electronic stamp - a pattern of bits attached to the message - costs the sender some amount of money. The recipient (or the recipient's mail software) can examine the value of the stamp and, based on that, decide whether to read the message.
Super. Look folks, I still get hoards of snail mail spam every day that I have to sift through, the printing fees of some of which far exceeds the 30 for postage. Will we get as many spams about pleasing pudenda under this scheme? Probably not, but we'll still get spam.
And what's more, if and when this becomes the standard, we'll have to start paying to send all these quick emails to our friends and relatives. Yet another marketing scheme conquers what was once a free (and Free) Internet. I suppose it's time to start implementing POP4 based on Gnutella.
Spam filters are getting more and more intelligent every day. If they aren't good enough for you and you don't want spam, don't give out your private email address. But please oh please don't give away the last remnant of the free Internet. I see Microsoft and AOL warming up to getting thrown into the briar patch again.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
They will NOT pay 5 cents to contact you, and under this system, that means their mail/calls would not get through to you. Whether it's practical to implement this system is another question, and I leave it to people more knowledgable than I am. Sean
Some people will never get tokens due to privacy issues, just the same way some people will not subscribe to the free subscription required New York Times.
Many view any of these blockers as having their hand out or a huge No Tresspassing Violators will be Shot sign on the front lawn. A do not call sign like this will keep me from calling.
Weeks later if and when I see you, I may let you know you forgot to include me on your white list, and it may have been an oversight. But if you don't wish me to call, I'll respect your wishes.
Now if you want to enable it only for blocked calls or toll free (telemarketing) calls, I have no problem with that. Anonymous Coward marketers should be blocked.
The truth shall set you free!
Sorry, left out a key point in my reasoning. I realize this scheme is supposed to allow friends through immediately, but why implement "estamps"? Just have a safe list and automatically email anyone who isn't on it asking for some sort of non-automated reply. This "pay for stamps" smacks of commercialism and I don't think the charges, once started, will stop at unknown senders.
The concept of "pay for email" is too good for ISPs to let alone once it has its foot in the door, and that's why I think most people (the AOL & MSN subscribers of the world) will end up paying to send email to friends and relatives.
In the EU we have a right to our own data. Essentially, you cannot spam me legally, unless I ask you to. Many of my American friends have told me it can't work - but it does very well. Once people trust that the information they hand out will only be used by that group then many people become quite happy to allow spam - on the subjects that interest them. This also includes paper and phone marketing (basically any Direct Marketing is covered under the Data Protection Act 1998). I get direct marketing from a range of websites, and no spam to my work address at all. That's because I've never given it to a US-based company (who could then hand it out to the world). I use a hotmail account for Americans because I know it's going to be spammed. I realise the US constitution didn't cover privacy as it was an entirely alien concept at the time - but that doesn't mean you shouldn't have the right! If the US could get a privacy law, the volume of spam would crash. ALL of the spam I get is offering me US-based products - NOT ONE EMAIL is from a european company (even if they've got EU addresses they've ripped off).
Pimping my Karma Whore since 1847.
Just want to point out something ...
Your cost isn't the inconvenience of fast forwarding, it's the extra you pay when you buy products at (say) the supermarket, where a significant portion of the price goes to support the advertising costs of the manufacturers.The net effect of the current system is that we pretty much all pay for TV advertising, regardless of how much or little television we individually watch. If you value watching TV programs, but don't buy much, then you're coming out ahead. If you never watch TV but regularly buy things at the supermarket and department stores, then you're subsidising advertising agencies and indirectly, the producers of television content.
Given that in all likelihood you are paying for TV shows every day, you might as well watch them if you care to do so, without any twinge of guilt for skipping over the adverts.
The tokens would be single-use only; generated on-the-fly. You could checksum the entire message, and then hash it against the current date/time using a suitably long key. Checking the token's authenticity does not involve a list of pre-stored tokens; it is the ability to decrypt the received token that matters. If the token is successful, it gets appended to the "obsolete token" list -- never to be accepted again.
Granted, the encryption key is what the crackers would go after, but that would not be readily available to the average spammer. Given the miniscule success rate of spam, the spammers cannot dedicate much time to cracking anyone's token scheme.
Unfortunately, impersonating the "white list" senders would be much more feasible. As it is, we have spammers guessing the e-mail addresses to receive the spam. Once they guess and verify a valid e-mail address at xyz.com, it wouldn't be hard to use that as a fake sender for all the other successful guesses at xyz.com.
Of course, there is always the "spam yourself" scam, where the spammer guesses your address, and then uses it as a bogus sender. You become the sender of your own spam. Anyone who whitelists their own address is as vulnerable as they were before.
Either way, it looks like the whitelist is more vulnerable than the tokens.
Everyone you care about is on a whitelist, everything else requires a monetary fee before you'll view it. If you're feeling like you don't want to talk to someone, you go and raise your non-listed communication fee to $10 or so. Otherwise you keep it at 50 cents or so, letting people who you don't otherwise know call you for a low amount (this also happens to raise the cost of telemarketting and spam to the point where you don't have to bear the burden of its cost).
:)
I can't remember if it was Peter F. Hamilton or Greg Egan who had this in a story of theirs, but it's as old as the hills
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
It would work better to act like your interested, and ask the person to explain the deal 20 or 40 times, over and over, until they go insane. After wasting an hour or 2 of their time, finally say, in the middle of their explination, "OH! I get it...not interested." then start bitching at them at how telemarketing is wrong and how they should never call you again.
If and when the time comes to give them a CC number, mess up 1 or 2 numbers here and there every time you give it to them, this will make you seem utterly retarded and make them want to gouge out their eye with a spoon.
By doing this, you not only make telemarketing less feasable, as less people are being advertised to, but you're also annoying the hell out of the poor guy on the other end of the phone, whom will go slowly insane as people do this to him/her.
Although, I'd prefer a PSTN switch or answering machine in my house with the ability to have a phone number firewall installed on it. Someone calls me I don't like, and I can simply ban their number from ever calling again. I'd bet most places don't change their phone numbers every week and the phone companies would be quite annoyed if they had to deal with that.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
We also have the problem that some people are just too stupid to elect which token's they'll cash, and which they wont. Other people just can't be bothered. So even in times when they may not wish to cash relevant tokens, people will wind up doing it anyway. Taken with what i was discussing above, and what other people are saying, chances are some people will start charging significant amounts for their tokens. $0.05 is probably reasonable, as even that would deter a spammer. But if people charge $1, and then stupid people charge $1, $2, $5 and cash in all tokens (never mind greedy people), we've got ourselves a whole new economy coming from spam.
Maybe we should have a standardized rate, rather than letting individuals set their own price. Of course, i fully expect if anyone standardizes this - and you know it would be, cause almost everything gets standardized in one way or another once it becomes popular enough for the government or some big corporate weenie to notice it. You can argue this, but i doubt you'll be able to convince me otherwise - then the fee for acceptance wont go to the individual anymore, it will go to whoever standardizes it. Maybe not fully, but there are always administration fees. *sigh*
So we have the potential to create a system where we are expected to listen to spammers or risk being sued, and also one where our phone and internet bills will explode as a side-effect of ignorance, greed, and laziness. Seemed like such a good idea at first, didn't it?
If i got this right, its the same idea SendMoreInfo is using.
(Yes, this is a pitifull attempt to get me and myself more referrals ;P)
Bot Assisted Blogging
Would the right party in this plan recieve the money? You'd be paying the reader- what about the ISP who had to store the mail, or the 12 servers the 48K thing hit on the way?
I don't like the idea in general. I'm on seven discussion lists, and I could never afford to pay 100 to 750 (!) people with each mail I send to them.
There's a lot of potential for abuse in this system- crack the key system, the company getting bribed, and what about ISP system messages?
I think it's a bad idea, personally.
Warning: Poster of this comment is a nerd. Just like everybody else here.
If this happens, I'm blasting an email address all over China and Hong Kong so all the chinese language emails display as scrambled symbols on my iMac.
You're right. They get a break because they're presorting the pieces of mail and bundling together the pieces that go to the same ZIP code, which saves the Post Office a lot of work. On the other hand, they have some restrictions on what kinds of mail can be sent at this discount. It all has to be the same (in a given mailing), if not enough pieces are going to a 5 digit zip, then a higher rate applies (for 3 digit zip, and then if not enough there, they have to pay full rate), and so on.
Oh, go on, check out my job.
You give me sendmail with the capability to do this and I will install it.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I remember a similar idea back in highschool, cept it dealt with a overflow of deer and some guys with guns...
This system, though, may be "played" and "hacked". I don't see this becoming strong, because you would depend on a large number of initial subscribers for this to took off. As nobody seems in /. to have heard of Vanquish, I guess it is not very big.
This dovetails nicely with the article yesterday regarding big political donors demanding access to politicians.
So - I guess money really *IS* speech.
- -
A few years ago, I saw a mathematical proof based on the concept of;
time=money
and the physics definition of "work" which proved that the more money you make, the less you work.
I guess the speech=money corellary built upon that is; the less you work, the more you talk?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
would be to simply overwhelm the spammer with false positives.
Spam generates at the very most 0.01% orders for the advertised product. What if 10% of recipients replied to the spam asking for more information, a borchure, or a sales representitive to visit a (false) address?
This would make it unconomic for the company theat the spam is being sent on befalf of to trawl the repies for the one real enquiry per thousand.
Implementing this would require a bit of effort, but running it for a year or so could prove very effective.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Why not just add a tax of 10 cents to every single phone call and reduce personal income taxes by the same amount ?
The actual amount might need to a bit of tweaking, I got 10 cents by assuming that telemarketers are successful on one in a thousand calls and that the average profit per sale is $100. Does anyone know real numbers ?
I guess I could do the same thing by getting my own 900 number, but that might be sort of difficult to implement unilaterally.
The point is that those who know (deep in their black, black, hearts) that you do not want to receive their new mortgage/viagra ads will know that they WILL have to pay the fee and will desist.
The author cites at the start of his paper, my own article on this concept. Many people have come up with this idea independently, and while I was one of the earlier ones, proposing it at USENIX in 1996, it has earlier roots as well in places like AMIX and others.
In fact, I seem to get a mail every week from somebody who has just thought up this idea!
However, since being an early proponent, I have decided it's not so good an idea after all, though it can form one component of an anti-spam strategy, particularly for dealing with how to continue to allow anonymous mail in the anti-spam world.
At the heart of it, spam is the abuse of bulk mail, so solutions should attack the cause, not the symptoms. Undesired non-bulk mail is still undesired but it is not in any remote way a critical problem worthy of a complex solution, and we have decided as a socity you should not have any right not to be annoyed, though you can have a right to not have your mailbox overwhelmed. (Just as a ping is not on offence, but a ping-flood is.)
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Pardon me, but I thought it was rather interesting how all the proposed solutions in this white paper, while innovative, neato, and rather cool, still involve my spending more money to get rid of a problem I shouldn't have in the first place.
I absolutely love how there's a whole section involving means for businesses to make money from implementing the scheme, but the part where he notes that all of us poor schmucks who actually get bombarded with spam and telemarketing calls will have to "upgrade" to newer phone sets and e-mail programs (no doubt with a cost) is just glossed over. Isn't most of the problem with spam and telemarketers that they cost us money already? How is paying more supposed to make us feel better about making them (we hope) go away?
Surely there's got to be some way of dealing with this problem without spending more money, without enriching the telco robber barons (at minimum), or at least by using money we're already going to spend anyway (coughcough where's the CRTC when you need 'em?)...
I'm reminded of possible "forced" upgrades by other entities -- regarding Microsoft software, HDTV, DVDs, CDs, and I can only stop to wonder if IBM might, were this scheme implemented, be conveniently right there with a plug-in for your phone or something... (Always look for the ulterior motive, sez I.)
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Your cost isn't the inconvenience of fast forwarding, it's the extra you pay when you buy products at (say) the supermarket, where a significant portion of the price goes to support the advertising costs of the manufacturers.
When you need to buy something, specifically avoid anything you've seen advertised. If companies begin to see a negative correlation between advertising and revenue, they'll be forced to rethink their marketing model or risk going out of business.
(place obligatory "when pigs fly" comment here)
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
The author of the article addresses this issue. He points out that online forums or vendors will need to provide a way for you to give them a token along with your request (could be as simple as typing it into a form).
If you didn't want to deal with that, you could just place the domain of the forum or vendor on your whitelist.
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
This system is pure fantasy.
One question: in what way could this system possibly prevent somebody from creating a bot that would read SPAM all day long and get paid for it? If this goes into place, I'm sure to make zillions as my computer gladly signs up for SPAM, opens it, and deletes it for me.
If an elected official and sets the fee at $10k or $100k per call, they've just come clean about being coin-operated. But are these fees campaign contributions? Or are they earned income?
I put a warning on my web site about how much I charge for 'storing' spam. But so far all of the invoices I have sent have been ignored.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Isn't this basically the same micro payment idea that gets suggested by about 100 people pretending to just come up with it on the fly everytime a story about spam prevention comes up on /. ? It is nice that IBM is behind it though, that might add some legitimacy to the plan and perhaps see it enacted instead of just mentioned weekly in the /. comments.
Wouldn't this whole spam thing just go away (largely) if we made it too expensive to send? Why not build micropayments for eStamps into email systems so that anyone not specifically "blessed" by you (ie. friends, relatives, or biz email you actually want) would have to pay something to send you unsolicited mail?
Well I had an idea once that everyone should get personal 900 #'s and use them on all their business correspondence etc (I.e. anyone who might sell their information). Then you could reverse the charges for people you liked, the others get $3.99 per minute calls to "MarketMe Entertainment" :)
We don't need any kind of payment mechanism to stop spam. If we could just make wholesale changes to the protocol such as he is suggesting, fixing the spam problem would be a snap. Why? Because spammers never ever ever use their real email address to spam with. They would get too many bounces, angry replies, and so on.
Back in the early early days of the net, there was no commercial presence, and no world wide web, and no usenet email harvesters, and the net was a much more trusting place. The mail RFC did not contain an authentication protocol, because it was obvious that the vast majority of admins could be trusted to use email appropriately.
That trust has now been violated. If we are going to change the way email works, all we have to do is add an authentication protocol, and a few other basic security protections. Spam would disappear overnight. However, changing the protocol will be a very major effort, hence the current band-aid solutions which exist.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
I had this thought, and I'm sharing it with you before I even talk to a lawyer (bring on the ridicule). I own a domain name - serversolved.com - and most of the spam I get comes to that domain (about 60 messages a day - all spam).
Here's my thought - could I copyright or patent that 'serversolved.com' domain, so that anyone else that would use it could potentially be sued?
So my friends would have implied consent to use that domain to email me. But spammers, I could potentially sue for infringement.
I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know if this would work. Anyone ever tried something like this?
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
I would kill for some nice targeted ads... I mean, something from Tektronics or Fluke. Or a chip company, I have enough trouble selecting components, it would be easier if they were advertising them to me.
Instead, I get mortage quote spam (I'm canadian, it doesn't help), car insurance (no car OR driver's licence for that matter), penis enlargement (like WTF?), HGH, and weight loss (I'm on a weight-gain diet, because if I don't gain some mass I'll probably die, stupid anorexia.)
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
I get maybe one telemarketer call every other month, and normally those are recorded messages.
Which are illegal. Have you been collecting your $500 from the companies doing this?
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
No you won't. Read the article.
This is like 900 numbers for email. If the system had a widespread implementation, I can see two negative effects that would probably make it as bad as the current system if they weren't dealt with in some way.
Probably the easiest way to counter both of these would be to have a trust system so that people could rate each other's treatment of unsolicited mail. The reverse spammers would still try to counter this, probably by creating false accounts and rating themselves and so on, so a meta rating system would probably also need to be built in. And it'd likely have to be built around a cryptographic system, making the governments of the world all nervous and being an automatic reason why 90% of people probably won't bother to use it.
In other words, charging for unwanted email isn't an easy fix, it's getting really complicated and is it worth bothering with?
Sorta offtopic, but I thought I'd post here to let anyone who cares about the subject know. My company was approached by a notorious spammer who wanted to buy our mailing list and was offering a reasonable sum for it. Of course, being the spam hater I am, I couldn't allow this, so I took a list of common american names and appended random dates and @hotmail.com to them. So we sold them our "mailing list" and went on with our business. Later on they called and started bitching and threatining to sue, but they never did and our lawyer said we were ok. So I screwed a spammer out of a couple of grand! Go me!
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
I can see it now:
You see a crying kid in the mall who says his big brother left him there and asks you to call his mommy for him. You dial from your cell and get a message saying it might cost you $25 to place this call. You think, "Oh well, they won't bill me for finding their lost kid."
*PLONK*
Repeat same situation with "lost" pets let loose in residential neighborhoods with id tags.
*PLONK*
And I don't think too many bank/creditors are going to be keen on the idea of having to pay you for the priviledge of calling to remind you that your credit card bill is 90 days past due. Of course, you deadbeats may think that's a plus, not a negative.
Same thing for police departments, hospitals, schools, etc. They all may have legitimate reasons for calling you, but why should they be forced to pay if some a**hole decides to *plonk* them each and every time.
No, never seeing spam because spammers won't pay.
Normal people can afford one cent per outgoing email, even if we did want to collect from them. Mailing lists can be whitelisted, so they don't even have to offer to pay. You would already know this, if you weren't too damned lazy to read the fucking article, you moron.
There are several thousand telemarketing companies. If each calls once a year, and you ask to be on the no call list... you get the point.
Alos, there is usually no way to know which company is calling, so you can't really check compliance anyway.
Additional clueless followups to this story will be charged at a rate of 50dollars per character per reader to read.
Posting further signifies your acceptance of these terms and conditions.
Well, I hear of this CRAZY idea that they use in some parts of the real (non-computer) world that people call 'stamps'! And you have to pay to put one of these on any piece of mail that you want to send to somebody else.
Now if we could just do EXACTLY THE SAME with e-mail, I think we'd enter a crazy new spam-free era! What a new and kooky idea! Stamps!
Seriously, why do we need some complicated trust-checking initiative and process that will hardly be taken up by anyone, when we can just directly transfer something that exists in the real world to an information-age process?
-Nano.
$500??? Is that a state or federal law? I could retire! I get several recorded messages a week, AND I'm on my states (PA) do not call list.
Even more common are calls that are just dead silence - the telemarketer equivalent of "ping" to see if anyone is there. Since there is no voice on the other end of the phone (human or otherwise) there is no way to request being put on their do not call list.
this sounds kind of like a postage stamp....
There's a simpler answer that doesn't require micropayment accounting. Just bounce every un-authorized sender a message back, with a password that can only be read by a human, and optionally a request to be taken off of any automated mailings. (You can pre-authorize any mailing lists you want to get.) Once someone has a password, they can send email from the same account.
That immediately kills spam that doesn't have valid return addresses. It requires a human in the loop for those with valid addresses, which increases costs. If you included a request to be taken off of any automated mailing lists, having a human read it should clear up any question of whether the sender has been legally notified.
quoting SciFi as precedent is a nearly foolproof way to get yourself labeled (and in a fairly unflattering sense)....
not the best path to credibility
If anyone has any information about this in the state of Michigan, I would be very glad to hear about it. You can reach me at chuckfirment at thathotmailwebsite.com. You know the one.
Thanks,
The soon to be $500 richer Chuck Firment
It was pre-internet, but I have a friend who used to get surprising good results by giving out stamped, self-addressed envelopes....
I put up a sign like this a few months back in my front yard. Along the lines of "$100 FEE" in large print, and then lots of small print stating that if you drop a newspaper or advertisement in my front yard, you are implicitly agreeing to engaging me in a consultatory role. My fees are on the order of $100/page, with a 1 page minimum. I did send several bills out to the local newspapers and vendors who dropped stuff in my yard, to no avail.
While I didn't get any "consulting" money, I did receive a decrease in the stuff showing up in my yard.
--
wwjd? jwrtfm!
It's a federal law. See the applicable FCC regulations on this page -- "[No person may] Initiate any telephone call to any residential telephone line using an artificial or prerecorded voice to deliver a message without the prior express consent of the called party, unless the call is initiated for emergency purposes or is [not made for a commercial purpose, made for a commercial purpose but does not include the transmission of any unsolicited advertisement, made to any person with whom the caller has an established business relationship at the time the call is made, or is made by a tax-exempt nonprofit organization.]"
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
See the TMDA website.
Now you can mess around with the telemarketers, curse em or whatever, and now you get paid for it
The problem with filtering is that, in essense, you've already paid for the email. Think about it, the email has already been received by your system, so you've paid the cost of the spammers email.
Using a "token" or "tag" based system means that spammers would have to request a token from you before they could send you an email. Their costs now go up (as does yours) as they have to filter your email (and the thousands of others replies to token requests) to get the token to send you. In the long run, companies could provide the service of token processing so that your personal email would only be accessible to white-listed addresses (thus moving your costs to the token-processing server).
See TMDA as one approach to this problem.
I thought my worst case scenarios had been perfectly tailored to be understandable to even the stupidest of individuals, but I seem to have been mistaken: I'm talking about sites that DONT support this hack, moron. Ones which do probably wouldnt ignore the reply or accept it as a confirmation. Don't be so eager to spout "RTFA" without READING THE FUCKING POST. bitch.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Hence my comment about using a whitelist as an supplementary method.
But it seems you were too busy spewing spittle all over your screen to consider that.
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
i'm just gonna change my address to i.unconditionially.agree.to.pay.one.dollar.per.kil obyte.received@cosand.org and just send invoices for email i didn't want. Looking through my inbox, there's a pretty clear size differential anyways: emails containing information from my friends and colleagues seems to run 1.5 to 3k, while spam and junk from the university buearacracy runs from 8k up to a few tens of ks. Depending on how bored i get, i could sue to collect on some of the more expensive ones. I'm not sure it would hold up in court, but one the other hand, it would be fun to stand in court and ask the defendant "which part of 'i unconditionally agree to pay' weren't you clear on?"
IANAL, but make sure to include a license agreement which protects yourself from having a spammer saying that you somehow "agreed" to let the spam in, despite the advertised charge for your attention.
You know, something like: "This charge [for sending me spam] is the only means for obtaining access to this e-mail account. No contract, prior or otherwise, shall supercede this agreement. I declare that I, myself, am not legally permitted to waive this charge under any circumstances, including by acceptance of contracts or agreements. Any provision of another contract or agreement which may be construed as an attempt to waive any portion of this agreement is declared void and unenforceable. Have a nice day!"
Muchos Gracias!!!! I think that's exactly what I need. I've looked at Phil Munts's spamfilter (www.munts.com) for Openbsd about a year ago but the OBSD crew flamed him for using code with unchecked buffers or something like that and I haven't really looked at it since.
Wouldn't this just result in a huge market for lists of valid email addresses + interrupt tokens?
The problem is figuring out who the fuck made the pre recorded call.
I was thinking about such a system, except that it would ring the phone unless there was no caller ID data, in which case they would be instructed "If you are a telemarketer please add me to your do not call list, otherwise, leave a message after the beep." This could be done with vgetty.
I like the current method to cut down spam:
:)
1. Get an online publication to write an article in which a spammer brags about his expensive home
2. Tell thousands of geeksabout it and present a thinly veiled challenge to find the guy's address
3. ?????
4.Profit!!!!
Sorry, once I got to number three I couldn't resist
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
sure it isn't a solution to the problem but it is a step... popfile!
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
If you're going to work will caller ID, the most guaranteed way to do that is this:
:-)
Upon receiving a call, log the caller ID, and ask the person to enter the number they are calling from. If the numbers don't match, explain (automatically) that if the intent is to market products to you they are to add you to a do not call list and are to hang up immediately. Otherwise, push 1 to be callback verified.
Your computer automatically dials them back (assuming they are within your area code!) while ringing your number and you decide wether or not to whitelist the number.
Very few telemarketing calls actually come from "real" numbers, and no sane telemarketer would have left a real call back number anyways.
You might want to add a message system into all this so that you can still catch people with extensions!
Just a thought inspired from the BBS days (50 karma for CBV! Oh yeah!).
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
I read an article with what I'd call an identical idea in some magazine like New Scientist or sth...
IN 1994 or 95!
Nobody's implemented it in these years, I'm not holding my breath for IBM.
... one will be occupied all the time giving and revoking permissions to send mail or phone.
n-e
This solution of legally/physically locking out spammers is nice. But the muscle of big corporations could force you to opt out....Picture fine print on opening new account with ISP, getting new mobile phone plan, etc: "Customer agrees to waive any interruption charges incurred from contact made by this company or our subsidiaries to the customer...". So if you *really* want that product (or there's simply no realistic product competition), you're forced to say yes.
Yes, I couldn;t be arsed to create an account.
How about this as a (possibly lucrative) way to deal with spammers.
If you can identify the spammer (Tricky with most, but sometimes OK) just tell 'em to stop sending all and any unsolicited communication now and for all time.
Allow them a reasonable time to clear their system - lets say 7 days.
OK, so if they've got a real burning need to send any more unsolicited mail either for themselves, their successors or assigns or on behalf of any third party, you (very kindly) offer a contract to receive further unsolicited mail, but only at your standard fee.
Lets say you set that fee to $1000 per item and that non-payment will be considered as breach of contract, which may be pursued at Law with all costs and expenses to their account.
You inform them very clearly, using simple words for the hard-of-understanding, that If they want to ACCEPT your (very kind) offer and enter into a legal contract, all they have to do is carry on sending send that unsolicited junk mail, because that action is the way they can show their UNQUALIFIED ACCEPTANCE.
If they DON'T want to accept your offer, then they simply don't send anything more.
If they don't pay, then that's breach of the contract they entered into by accepting your (very kind) offer.
Perhaps it would be advantageous to copy your (very kind) offer of a contract to the judicial office local to the source of spam.
OK, this would only work with companies who you can trace and who operate within a judicial system accessible to you, but I'm sure that Alan Ralsky (US Citizen operating out of the US) can afford my modest fees.
Of course, you could set whatever level of fees you want, since you decide how valuable tyour time is to you, and only you can do that.
The trouble with a system like this is clear when you think how it would work in practice.
Suppose that you buy a plane ticket from Travelocity. You probably buy many tickets from them, so you've put travelocity.com in your white list, which means that any email from that domain gets through without a token. But then you're doing Christmas shopping and you decide to buy a set of specialty jams from East Jabip Specialty Foods, Inc. Their domain name isn't on your white list and, worse, they outsource their e-commerce so your confirmation email won't even be from that domain, but rather from greater-jabip-internet-services.net, which also isn't in your white list.
So the confirmation email requires a token. Regardless of the amount, what is the likelihood that they're going to send the message through? I'd say approximately zero - why should they risk you making them pay even a penny when YOU are ordering a product from THEM? So you don't get the confirmation email which contains your order number. Madness, of course, ensues.
Of course, greater-jabip-internet-services.net has put a reminder on its confirmation web page (which you didn't print out or even read carefully) telling you to add them to your white list. But who's going to read that? Some Slashdot readers, maybe, but not my mother and certainly not my grandmother who can barely figure out where to click on a page to get the order done. Besides, even if you DID read it, would you add some unknown like greater-jabip-internet-services.net to your white list? What if they end up being a spammer?!
Theoretically, this is a fantastic idea. It solves the fundamental problem of spam, which is that it's very inexpensive. Practically, though, I don't see it working on a wide scale.
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
I didnt bother with that one for a couple reasons.
The most obvious being, you can't know the hostname that is sending out the mail.
The second, more subtle, yet I think much more important, is that having to whitelist a server [or group of servers] every time you need to get a mail from an unknown source makes this whole thing no better than any other system. The point of sending along a token is to get messages through without having to deal with a whitelist. Whitelists are pretty much against the entire purpose of using E-Mail instead of IM, It takes away the entire purpose of this 'token' method, and as I mentioned, You can't always know what server to expect the message from.
So see, it wasnt that I merely didnt consider it, but it was so utterly stupid as to not warrant a responce.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Spam? What spam? POPFile kicks ass.
The solution isn't any law or regulation, but better filters.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Yes you will. Read the AC clear-up. ;^)