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A Conference About Spam
zonker writes "January 17th will be the first (annual?) meeting of the Spam Conference held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The informal meeting will feature Paul Graham, John Graham-Cumming, John "Cap'n Crunch" Draper among others (possibly including ESR though he hasn't yet confirmed). The free conference will consist of a number of talks about new ways to combat the growing spam problem, after which everyone's going out and getting some Chinese food. Should be an informative and fun meeting and a chance to meet some interesting people."
I'm not sure if I want it to become an annual conference or not. While combating spam is always good, and the list of those involved looks decent, if the conference becomes a regular thing, it means that spam is still a big problem.
Yeah, yeah. I'm probably being over-idealistic again to try to imagine that spam would become any less of a problem, no matter what measures are enforced.
So while I really hope something somehow gets done (Maybe that *cringe* AOL thing will help...) I'm not throwing out my spam filter just yet.
~The Incredible Xan~
"Saying that men can't be lesbians is gender discrimination."
If they didn't before, they will be now.
Never heard of them doing so... And I think that given the amount of hardware it already takes to send out millions of messages a day, they wouldn't think it was worth it to get many times more in order to do the (computationally trivial these days, but still far more so than just sending some spam) calculations to encrypt it.
Try this on for size: If your received just one e-mail from every business in the US, you would get 1,200 per day.
Say it with me. Just hit delete. 1,200 times. Oops! Just deleted the e-mail from your (mother/father/brother/sister/spouce/SO/boss/once in a life time confidential offer).
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Agreed. Surprising how quickly all the spammers jumped on the Windows Messaging bandwagon after a couple of stories were published on it.
spam costs the receiver money. magazine ads, TV commercials, and billboards do not. the first of those three are completely opt-in, as well, since you have to buy them or watch TV to see the ads. the third is fully paid for by the billboard owner. why is this concept so hard to grasp?
Of course there are idiot. Its called culture jamming and its alive and well all round the world. Its not all left wing polemic. A lot of people are just tired of the overwhwlming amount of and stupidity of the ads that assult them from billboards, magazines and tv's.
As well, there are laws about where you can put billboards and how offensive you can be in tv and print ads. And if the public complain enough about ads the CEO listens and takes them off.
Why should spam be any different to other advertising.
There are three reasons (that I can think of off the top of my head) that spammers are not doing this:
1. The people that have PGP keys are extremely unlikely to respond (positively) to the product/service/scam being offered in the spam, as compared to a broad cross-section of Internet users.
2. Many of the addresses on PGP keys are outdated.
3. The keyserver operators (should) notice if there are suddenly a ton of queries from the same person. (Just recently, I got an e-mail from a keyserver operator asking if I was an individual who was making lots of requests.)
For the last goddamned time:
This is not a free-speech issue, it's a property rights issue. Advertisers are no more entitled to use my computer to send me an ad at my expense, than they are to break into my house and paint a billboard on my living room wall.
No, advertising isn't illegal, but using other people's property without their consent is indeed illegal.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Are there conferences on billboard ads? Do people lose sleep over magazine ads? Is there an anti-TV commercial movement?
Advertisers lease space on billboards. They give money to the owner of said property (the billboard) in consideration of its appropriate use by them. This is a legitimate contractual exchange between consenting parties, all of whom enter into said arrangement of their own volition.
Advertisers pay publishers to have their adverts printed. This is a legitimate contractual exchange between consenting parties, all of whom enter into said arrangement of their own volition.
Advertisers give money to networks and local stations to run their adverts. This is a legitimate contractual exchange between consenting parties, all of whom enter into said arrangement of their own volition.
Spammers use network and computing resources that do not belong to them and for which they have not paid anything in consideration of use, often relaying through other networks (and hijacking bandwidth and CPU cycles that would otherwise be used for legitimate and probably profitable tasks) in an attempt to hide their origin. The processing of UCE on the receiving machines takes CPU cycles and ultimately otherwise useful and profitable time away from the owners of those resources. There is no legitimate contractual agreement there, anymore so than if I spraypainted my company's logo on your garage door in the dark of night and left it to you to bear the cost of cleaning it up. It's just advertising, right?
If I feel sorry for anyone it's the companies whose million dollar ad campaigns get shut down by "spam-blocking" email filters, portable video recorders (like TiVo) that allow "skip commercials" functionality, and other anti-America, anti-business, anti-innovation tactics.
Print and broadcast advertising are what keep publishers and networks in business, and what keeps the cost at the point of consumption of print and broadcast media in the range of free to a few dollars per unit for the consumer, but there is no binding agreement between the consumer and the network or publisher requiring the consumer to watch or read the adverts in consideration of consuming the product (the content of the magazine or TV show).
Freedom of speech != a right to a captive audience, and most certainly not at the audience's expense.
And, as an aside, if the profitability of a product or service rests solely on the success or failure of its "million dollar ad campaign," one surely must question just how innovative it could possibly be.
"We're an apex predator with the fecundity of a base level herbivore... We're a virus with shoes..." RazorJAK
***BZZZTTTT*** I'm sorry; the correct answer is "It's called theft of service".
Thank you for playing, and don't forget your lovely consolation prize.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
That's great, but what about people who want to receive some categories of unsolicited email? If you only listen to people on your whitelist, how will you find out about that classmate who you lost track of and is now sending you an email because he finally found your address? How will my boss handle the emails that she gets from prospective clients asking about the services that we provide? How will my previous boss receive questions about the scientific articles he's published?
The plain fact is that there are lots of kinds of unsolicited mail that people really do want to receive. They just want to be able to receive them without getting a ton of ads at the same time. The real answer is to figure out a way of smacking the people who are spamming the world with ads, not to cut off the legitimate unsolicited mail.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Just use a combination of a whitelist and an autoreply. If your on my whitelist you get through automatically. If not, my mailer automatically sends you a response saying that your not on my whitelist, and asks you to reply to the message to get through my filter. The returned message will have a unique ID in it that will work once to pass the filter. I will see the second message and can choose to add you to my whitelist.
The only way the spammer will get through is if they have a valid return email, and an intelligent agent on the other end that can interpret the returned mail and send a new spam. Highly unlikely that this would happen.
There is a slight inconvenience the first time someone tries to contact you because they will have to mail you twice.
- Cees
If you run a business, for example, you'll frequently (if you're lucky) get queries from potential customers who want more information. You WANT those unsolicited e-mails. Or you might get e-mail from someone you worked with 10 years ago but never thought to add to your whitelist, perhaps because you don't even know his or her current e-mail address.
I have whitelists set up for my e-mail accounts, but I face both these issues on a regular basis. I can't afford to discard an e-mail from an unknown sender without first verifying that the sender really doesn't have something useful to say. Fortunately, most spammers use obviously retarded e-mail addresses or subject lines that make it relatively easy to skim and filter them out quickly (and of course I use a blacklist for known offenders as well).
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Egads, hasn't that windbag been discredited enough.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Due to the excessive volume of robotic responses to the emails I spend time and effort to send to people I have not known to prior to this, have been forced to do this robotics test.
If you do not run a robot, please ignore this message. I will only send it once. Its purpose is to check someone's mailbox to make sure that I am not communicating to a robot, either some whitelist robot, or a vacation program, or something equivalent. I value my time: Nothing is more annoying than to spend an hour carefully writing a message to you about a subtle technical flaw than to have an obnoxious robot tell me my effort was a waste. Now, if this email is sent without resulting in a bounce, my 'AEIOU ('Avoid Egocentric Ignorant Obnoxious Users') will inform me to not write the message. Otherwise, please reply to this message to confirm that you do exist and this message is read. Only then will I proceed to write the message I wished to.
So, if this email arrives in your inbox, my apologies. It will only happen once. I've been forced to such extremes only because of the widespread use of such robots. You have my apologies, but I have been left with no choice.
I do have some good news however. In the future, we'll have constructed a realtime blackhole list that anyone can check to verify if an address runs a robot or not. This way, people not running can be looked up to verify that they're not running a robot and will not see these messages. If you wish to voluntarily add yourself to this list to state that you are or are not a robot, please see http://aeiou.losers.example.com/addlist.html
Based solely on my observations, this probably isn't "some enterprising college kid" so much as their business model.
At which point they turn around and sign up as another "affiliate" within seconds. Assuming, of course, it wasn't the main site doing it through shills in the first place.
As far as I'm concerned, if your system is this trivially easy to abuse, then you aren't an innocent bystander, you are part of the problem.
Really? I don't think I've ever had Geocities take more than 48 hours to nuke a site, except over the weekend.
To get specific, I've been having some problems with a chatroom spammer that has persistently been spamming ifriends.com / webpower.com for quite some time. They're always geocities or tripod pages that link to an ifriends "affiliate" page. Geocities and Tripod take the pages down within a day or so. Ifriends has left them running for six weeks or more. They're either unwilling to deal with the problem, unable to do so, or (as I suspect) they are the spammers themselves.