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A Conference About Spam

Posted by timothy on from the universal-convergence dept.

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."

4 of 392 comments (clear)

  1. The Internet has given spam a bad name by Dankling · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    ill probably get mod'ed offtopic for this...

    Ever since the internet came along spam has been a problem. People hate spam now.

    i live in Minnesota where 1. we live in iglo's 2. there is no cable or dsl 3. Spam capital of the world.

    I'm speaking of the food of course! Spam has been pretty popular here the last 20 years. You wouldn't believe all of the people that wear spam shirts... although those people go to the salvation army for their shirts its still nonetheless overwhelming!

    --
    Slash-for-Thought
  2. Email needs an overhaul by artemis67 · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    The problem is that email has essentially remained unchanged since... well, since ever. Unlike HTML was given over to a standards board, and has evolved from its humble beginnings, and has been enhanced universally through technologies like JavaScript, Flash, Java, et. al.

    I think the spam problem is only one part of the email issue. Other issues might be that email messages are completely unsecure, and there is no authentication/validation of the sender.

    A number of people have been saying it, and a whitelist server system seems to be the way to go. A signature key, such as in PGP, seems to be a good start, but PGP isn't a whitelist system. You also run into the problem in whitelist servers of not being able to receive the unsolicited mails that you really, really want to receive (like the email from the headhunter who wants to offer you $20k more than you're making now).

    At the risk of speaking blasphemy here, I'd suggest a whitelist server system that charged a postage on unsolicited emails of 10 cents, and the recipient has the option to accept or reject the fee. For every fee the recipient accepts, the ISP also gets a cut for their trouble, to encourage adoption of whitelist servers.

    Of course, any solution that doesn't have universal adoption won't deter anyone. Spam is the symptom, there should be a consortium to deal with the root problems.

  3. parent was wrong by hdparm · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    IN SOVIET RUSSIA...

    Conference is permanent. During breaks participants don't go out to eat Chinese, they eat YOU. Too bad I have no idea where to include spam...

    Oh, and comrades, it's much more fun posting these while logged on!

  4. Re: by mao+che+minh · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    I say we flood government servers with the Slashdot effect. When they ask us why we felt compelled to melt their servers just to prove a point or to make our voices heard, we can show them how such an act relates to our inability to access our email accounts in a reasonable manner.

    I didn't check the box for my crappy, "no one has ever heard of this shitty web site" admin email account for a week and half. I had to wait for over an hour for 3000+ emails to download, erase, and expunge. Take a look at this screenshot from a while back: check the Evolution progress meter!

    That buildup was from only 5 days worth of spam.