Slashdot Mirror
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."
Cool, Sounds like something to throw a tape int he vcr for. I have always found these kind of conferences interesting.
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."
slashdots being over-run by spam first aol now this, sounds like a good idea though hopefuly they will find out how to at least get rid of some of the spam, which by the way is getting very bad, I registered a new hotmail account the other day and normaly when you finish creating an acount there is one message, a welcome to hotmail from msn not this time nope there was two one was the welcome the other was a porn mail.....things are getting out of hand
MIT (who is hosting this conference) has a key server that presumably hold millions of mail addresses.
Seems it'd be more appropriate to go out to eat Spam afterwards...
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
This is the guy who brags on his website that he doesn't have a credit card. The same guy who helped "steer" VA Linux to the biggest dot com stock flameout in history. The same guy who runs a blog that is so right wing that his solution to plane hijackings is to arm all the passengers. The same guy who brags he has no formal training in software development. The same guy who was pretty much run off the Linux kernel developer mailing list.
...
Who exactly gives a shit what this guy has to say?
Just asking
...and forward this message and Slashdot page to ten of your e-mail contacts, you shall be granted eternal life!
Also, you shall be given a free Penis Enlargement, millions of dollars from your Nigerian friends and find out how to lose 50 pounds of weight in less than 5 seconds.
Yes, it is true!!!
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
care to post your home and email addresses? i've got something to sell you. =)
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
Does anyone know what happens to the hundreds of emails I forward to uce@ftc.gov each month? Someone mentioned to send them there, and I tried to read the stuff on the ftc site, but they just say its their "database" for spam. What does that mean? Do they actually do anything with the stuff? Not that the 20 seconds to forward with headers really kills my day. But I just want it to be useful to someone...
And out of curiosity, what are some other people's ideas on trying to prevent it? Basically right now I just try not to have my email address anywhere online (without some sort of word in it or something along those lines). And I watch what I might sign up for and their "privacy" policies. And I don't reply to the spam I get, since usually that apparently just confirms your address and makes you more valuable.
So any more tips?
being that the conference is about Spam, where Ralsky et al. have set up shop.
Is there such a thing as premeditated Pavlovian response?
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
Hmmm... I'm thinking (-1, Spambait).
I opened up my Inbox this morning and had like 50 emails about this conference...
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
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.
E-mail 250,000,000 people about their ideas on fighting spam. That would surely work!
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
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
All the anti-spam team concentrated in one place. What's the chance of a certain prominant spammer `accidentically' causing the building to collapse?
there aren't enough 'offtopic' mod points to go around....
now you've posted that site and they'll get thousands of click-throughs from /.ers wanting to see what the fake website looks like!!
Hey... you sure this isn't some cunning spam advertising method to get us to go to your site? Is Yusaku Godai even your real username or is it really cafecutie21?!?
What happened to Arc? I think their spam tools are (to be) written in their (paulgraham.com) new dialect of lisp called Arc.
There seemed to be a lot of activity about it months ago, but I haven't heard anything since. And the website has not been updated.
Anybody have any news?
--t
It seems that at some point ISPs/mailbox providers are going to wake up and see that they should filter out the junk mail for their users. But, since we're all still waiting for that to happen, I decided to try a little program called SpamNet that promised to block out junk email. After a few months of use I'm happy to say it works great. The premise of SpamNet is that all users of the software can block spam. This works well, and works even better as more and more people use the software.
SpamNet sends it to a little folder called "Spam", in case you want to double-check and make sure nothing you wanted got blocked.
The good parts:
- Automatically blocks about 95% of spam
- Small, fast, simple, FREE
The bad:
- Not at all configurable (just does what it's supposed to do...)
- Occasionally it will block something from Amazon.com or another large mailing list which isn't really spam.
If you're tired getting spam give it a try for yourself, here is the link:
SpamNet
System Requirements:
Outlook 2000/2002/XP
Windows 98/2000/XP
One idea that occurred to me was requiring the sender to do some nontrivial computation (for instance, the receiving mail server sends the product of two (large, but not RSA-large) primes, which the sender must factor and include with the message to be accepted.
Now, unfortunately, such a scheme has some problems. The huge variation in performance between machines out there means any computation substantial enough to crimp a spammer might cause grandma's 486 to become unusable for sending email. More to the point, it could greatly increase the cost of running webmail services (not to mention mailing lists). Now, the big webmail providers might be prepared to play along - they might even build some dedicated hardware for the purpose of running the protocol fast. However, there's nothing to stop spammers building exactly the same kind of hardware, enabling them to continue to send out spam by the bucketload!
So, anyway, I don't think my idea is the answer, but surely the whole area of improved mail protocol design would be worth exploring.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
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.
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.
I run my own business. I rely on e-mail heavily to communicate with customers and clients (I get orders via e-mail, support questions, contract inquiries, etc.) I spend upwards of 5 non-billable hours each week having to take care of the crap that fills my order inboxes, customer support inboxes, and my main mailbox. This crap includes both spam and e-mail worms. I spend that 5 non-billable hours a week AFTER everything goes through filters (if I didn't have filters, then I'd be spending more like 20 hours a week) - and it's only getting worse.
So, to sum up - it's not just a few e-mails. And yes, e-mail is about communication, and spammers are destroying the value of e-mail as a communications medium. And, by extension, since my business relies on e-mail, spammers are destroying (or at least seriously disrupting) my business. I pay business taxes, my bottom line is being affected by these criminals, and I really wouldn't mind if we just outlawed spam altogether.
You want to know what's anti-american, anti-business, and anti-innovation? Scum who abuse public resources - namely, spammers.
What if you were a CEO? How would you feel about all this bad press?
I'd fire the asshole in the marketing department who decided mass-mail was an acceptable practice, and I'd lobby Congress to outlaw spam.
What about those irritating popup ads? I would also like them to be classified as spam. They do the same amount of damage, if not more - to the end user. Or is the definition of spam restricted to the e-mail mode only?
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."
There are over 24,361,450 businesses in the US (Source here)
...
...
:-) Bottom line is: don't trust numbers, you can make them say whatever you want!
So let's see. If:
o every US business was doing 1 mass mailing a year;
o that day would be picked at random;
o your email ended on 2% of these mass mailing lists;
The you would be getting:
24,361,450 mailings / 365 days * 2%
(launching calc...)
= 1335 spam per day
Hey that was close enough!
PS: yes, I made up the assumptions to match the result
I code, therefore I am.
Technically, billboards (and to a lesser extent, other said forms of advertising, too) are not opt-in. I don't remember ever paying to read spam. Your logic must be twisted as hell if you meant to imply "well, if you don't want to look at giant advertisements placed every 20 feet along the road, then you should move way out in the middle of nowhere and not ever come into the city."
As far as I'm concerned, billboards are far less opt-in advertising than spam, because you pretty much have to look at billboards, but you don't necessarily need to use email to communicate (there are still people out there that don't check their email 50 times a day, you know). Email, television, and magazines alike all are similar in that they offer information and communication but at the price of abundant uselessy information by way of capitalism from legitimate and not-so-legitimate sources.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
While anyone will be welcome, we're hoping most of all to make this an opportunity for hackers working on spam filters to get together and compare notes.
Filters. That's a give-away. Filters are damage-control after the thief has left. Block them at the first HELO, block them after their ISP refuses to handle complaints to abuse@, block widely, block often. Talking heads, I've said it once.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Use POPFile instead. It's free, Open Source, multi platform and easy to use. It also doesn't use a heavyhanded approach to email (like forced white/blacklists) which can cause more headaches than they are worth...
If I get spam about this conferences I'm gonna be pissed. Like an angry Christmas shopper. Heh, happy holidays y'all.
There are over 24,361,450 businesses in the US
Ah yes, I forgot:
"According to the MPAA, there are over 65,744,682 businesses in the US. They actually found 24,361,450 but some of them were big corporations."
I code, therefore I am.
And what do you say to the ISPs whose mail servers fall over due to the load imposed by spam attacks?
What do you say to those who have to pay for Internet access based on the amount of data they transfer? They certainly never asked for the spam that's costing them money.
And you certainly can't claim that relay raping is anything but network abuse.
Spam is not welcome. I never asked for it. My having a mailbox is not an open invitation for unsolicited commercial email.
noah
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
He did, he just used them all in one......spot.
If this is a conference on spam, then shouldn't about 1000 random people show up and tell the hosts that they could make big bucks by charging everyone who attends one dollar, but let them in for free if they bring ten friends?
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
http://www.brettglass.com/spam/
Id like to share with you /.'ers a portion of the email i sent to this guy Hes a laywer, and he was whining about being black holed because he had a open relay that he says could not be... but I digress. (see his thing for details). I think it speaks for itself, and has larger implications beyond spam.
/allow all,some, or none. The criteria they choose to use to control that traffic is strictly up to them. They make the choices on whom to lay trust and whom not to, not only to allow traffic but where they get information which effects their criteria.
Quote below:
--
On a non logic issue, it is my belief that we (members of the internet) will soon badly need some law that enchances the common sense doctrine that you have the right to control all content that goes in and out of your network. On that note people have every right to block incoming traffic, including email. They can choose to block
rmail in emacs on this particular system has headers from http://spamassasin.org Now that those headers appear on a lot of the messages, how do you get through the messages from your favorite correspondents before dealing with the more problematical spam commercial messages?... Not being a programmer, it's a bit perplexing not finding the information!... at http://spamassassin.org
rmail in emacs on this particular system has headers from http://spamassasin.org
Now that those headers appear on a lot of the messages, how do you get to the messages from your favorite correspondents before dealing with the more problematical spam commercial messages?... How do you sort out your favorite correspondents' messages from the hundreds of spam commercials?... Not being a programmer, it's a bit perplexing. The information didn't appear at
http://spamassassin.org
***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.
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."
It is a conference AGAINST spam instead of a spammer conference.
Lucky I didn't fire my nuke yet...
Great - now your saying that you can make email better by making it slower! Not only is that one-dimensional but its the wrong vector. There are plenty of legit reasons to have to send out a few thousand solicited messages to a list - think of the bands that want to tell their fans about tour dates and all the nerd techie lists (no offense intended) - We don't want to collectively punish the rest of the internet because of spammers.
,But it too is a solution the collectively punishes the rest of the net (and imagine how up in arms we all would be if somehow "they" started charging for email!)
I'm thinking based upon reading these posts that the best immediate solution is going to be smarter filters and more of them. But this is a technical solution - perhaps there is another angle..(dimension?) Hey- and this is largely the focus of the SPAM Conference. cool. The only thing about filters I still want to be able to get the REAL EMAIL from my girlfriend when she sends me a message saying "I WANT YOUR HUGE C**K TONIGHT" We don't want SPAM filter to become SMUT filters - cause while we might all know SPAM when we see it, we still all have different ideas about smut.
SPAM for FUN and PROFIT?
the market itself will(should?) eventually do some sort of self-regulation (nice thing about free markets) - I don't think there are terribly many people spamming for the fun of it. Somewhere there is an econmic incentive - some dismally low percentage of people who are ordering Growth Hormone or Penis Enlrgers from unsolicited mail they receive will either make it worthwhile to continue spamming for customers or will lead anyone who can add (or subtract) to attract customers in other ways. Solutions which propose a charge for outgoing messages are heading towards this idea
Marketers are just like little kids (something they actually share in common with techies!) -- when they get a new toy they love to play with it more than the old toys. Email is still a newish toy for them. much more fun than doing direct mail.
anyone know the click through or sales rates for any unsoliced mail? Unfortunatly there will probably be a similar reaction as when ad-banner CTR dropped - make more of them and make them bigger.
yrs. cyberRodent
Talk is cheap. Supply exceeds demand.
They're going out for some Chinese food? That has to be the funniest thing I've seen in the last 3 days! (The Great Firewall, etc....)
C|N>K
Egads, hasn't that windbag been discredited enough.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The ratio of people with pages on SourceForge or having nick's like Cap'n Crunch compared to politicians is still too bad... If you know what I mean... :-(
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
"According to the MPAA, there are over 65,744,682 businesses in the US. They actually found 24,361,450 but some of them were big corporations."
:-) ... shame I've no mod points right now.
Heh, that's the first truly funny post I've read all day
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
dude, you do know you've just been trolled?
Gee, Skippy, thanks for the heads-up, but I've been playing in this sandbox a while (note the increasingly rare 5 digit uid).
The fact remains that two of the major reasons that spam continues to be a problem is that too many people either just accept it as "one of those things" they have to deal with as part and parcel of the electronic age, or they actually think that spammers have a right to hijack other people's property and time.
Since I'm pretty sure it's still illegal for me to personally hunt down spammers and plink them with my DE .50AE M-VII or show them a little hot and heavy lovin' with my Mossberg, I have to settle for doing my part by reminding people that spam is not a Free Speech issue whenever the subject comes up, wherever that may be. The fact that UCE is a property rights issue has fuckall to do with whether the post to which I replied was a troll.
The fact that you probably consider your one-liner to be a great personal achievement - representing your highest and your best potential - and therefeore must surely think my several paragraphs a veritable magnum opus representing a huge investment of time and personal sacrifice, has fuckall to do with the fact that some of us actually use language to convey meaning to other people - as a matter of course, not as the rare exception.
"We're an apex predator with the fecundity of a base level herbivore... We're a virus with shoes..." RazorJAK
Not if you keep getting it day after day after day after day, ad infinitum.
Female Prison Rape in NY
Out of curiosity and boredom I clicked on the link
They didn't expect you to join or pay anything. They wanted you to follow the link on their fake girl website so their advertiser pays them for the click-through to the online dating service. It looks you followed the link just like they hoped. (you did click on the link to see where it went didn't you?)
You didn't see the obvious. Ker-ching $$
P.T. Barnum was right!
The truth shall set you free!
0900 = call to order
0910 = roll call
0930 = "Old business?.....Spam sucks."
0931 = "What have we done about it?.....Nothing."
0932 = "New business?.....Spam still sucks."
0933 = "What are we going to do about it?.....Probably nothing."
0934 = "Meeting adjourned.....let's go get some chinese food!"
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
Oops! Just deleted the e-mail from your (mother/father/brother/sister/spouce/SO/ boss/once in a life time confidential offer).
But isn't that what I get everyday from the spammers? Once in a lifetime confidential offers to enlarge my penis, accept money from Nigeria, meet hot lesbian college chicks and more?
And I demand to be renumerated for all of my expenses for all unwanted communication.
At $20/month for phone usage, I *DEMAND* my $.000015 for twenty seconds of *STOLEN* phone time.
Worse, the costs to me for the garbage truck to haul away a single postal pamphlet ar far worse. $.00166 (at 1/30 pound/letter, $.05/pound disposal fee).
I don't know about you, but those cost me 10x and 100x the cost of receiving a single spam. Where is the cry about *that* supposed theft of service?
I'm not for spam at all, but at least I'm not hypocritical and irrational about it. Each postal letter you dont' want costs *you* more than 100 spams, in terms of the cost to you. I don't know about you, but I get a couple fliers every day in my mailbox, costing me 10x as much as the email spam I get.
If you disagree about these prices, please give me numbers. I've been looking for numbers for over a year, and NOBODY has given me anything that wasn't outright bullshit.
Are there conferences on billboard ads? Do people lose sleep over magazine ads? Is there an anti-TV commercial movement?
1. The fight over bill boards has a long history. Ladybird Johnson officially started the fight with her work on highway beautification. Many large cities now have a moratorium on billboards. The content of billboard, like all advertising, is heavily restricted.
2. Magazine advertising is also restricted and people lose sleep over how to circumvent those restriction. However, because magazine ad campaigns cost real money, and the advertiser and magazine are liable for those campaigns, people generally behave.
3. Again, the fight over TV commercials are at a very mature state, but they are still skirmishes. A few years ago it was over underwear in commercials. Now the liquor companies want to end the voluntary ban of hard liquor advertising on TV. Of course we cannot directly promote tobacco on tv.
Which is to say it is extremely naive and ill informed to claim that advertising is not illegal in America. It would be very easy to put together a campaign that is illegal, and even professional mess up every once in a while. What makes non-internet advertising manageable is that the rules are known and it is assumed that the advertiser will always be held accountable. Contrast this to email where the advertiser assumes that the laws of the land do not apply because they can cowardly hide behind fraudulent headers.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Bernie Shifman and Alan Ralsky go along and open up a can of whoopass?
The real, current bogofilter page is at http://bogofilter.sourceforge.net.
I'd suggest reading my post again. I did not say billboards were opt-in. Thank you.
I really don't want to hang around the Media lab all day.
Does anyone know what time the conference is going to be held?
No kiddin'. I would have deleted my VA software IPO offer if I hadn't read about it on Slashdot first.
It sounded like a lot like a Nigeria scam. ;) If only I had the good sense to sell all my stock that first day...
Funny I never get telemarketing that comes collect, and I have to accept to get my other calls
I never get advertising from people who took over the newspaper printer and printed their ads on the newspaper's paper without paying for it
The television ads I get are from advertisers who help support the costs of running the program not people who freeload on the stations wavelength and add to the program's cost
Face it. Real advertising not only pays its own way, but reduces the cost of the media it uses. Spam is just theft.
And as for the companies whose million dollar ad campaigns get shut down by the spam filters, how do they have any more right to put their advertising on my computer without my permission than to come into my home to give me their speil without my permission?
My computer, my internet connection, my rules. If you don't like it f*** you, you damn commie.
Yes. To provide another analogy. It is illegal to FAX ads to people with FAX machines. The reason is that the recipient must pay for paper and toner, and is therefore paying for your advertising. Similarly, spam uses ISP network resources and disk space, which is an expense for the ISP that they should not need to deal with. Free speech does not mean you get your venue for free as well.
Vote for Pedro
or are they baiting stupid spammers into showing up as well, so they can beat the crap out of them?
Vote for Pedro
I wonder how much more spam these guys will get after this meeting....
-v