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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."
MIT (who is hosting this conference) has a key server that presumably hold millions of mail addresses.
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
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?
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.
Only because there's not a -1, Wrong moderation type...
Not even remotely; you must be new to the 'Net. (Do you remember when it was called the Arpanet?)
As recently as back around 1990, commercial use of the net for any purpose was strictly prohibited and staunchly enforced. Anyone violating this principle was likely to be summarily removed from the network.
Vestiges of this old anti-commercialism can still be seen in poster's messages saying things like, I have no connection to this company, but am merely a satisfied customer.
Spam was really not a serious problem in the first 20+ years of the 'Net. Quite unlike now.
--
I don't want to rule the world... I just want to be in charge of mayonnaise.
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?
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.
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
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?
***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."
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