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Will Bounties Cure The Spam Problem?
An anonymous reader writes with a pointer to a piece in today's Mercury News about Lawrence Lessig's proposed spam-bounty legislation, excerpting: "If the law passes, citizens could be eligible for rewards of thousands of dollars or more if they're the first to provide the government with proof and the identity of offending spammers."
SADDLE UP, BOYS!
I'M PUTTIN' ME TOGETHER A POSSE!
We're gonna round up them bandwidth rustlers and get us the bounty!
Sounds pretty much like outlaw bounties from the old west. This system has been successful for over a hundred years and there is a large modern day bounty hunter business. The same could work for spam.
Mike Wendland - public enemy number 1.
Now where do I pick up that check...?
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
It could cause a lot of problems to those who spammers masquerade as -- since most spammers don't use their real emails. We could end up with innocent individuals with bounty charges because the spammer forged their emails.
Massive networking attempt for friends
Proof? What year do they think this is?!
Hasn't it already been established that the act of accusing them is proof enough? Send them to Guantanamo Bay, they'll confess in due course.
And then how long before this plan is turned against p2p file sharers?
Do you really want the government to go there?
Nope... this is a waste of time for them to even be talking about.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Let's remember that business spam has to offer some way for a victim to buy the item which is being advertised. That invites a subpoena to search that business for evidence that they hired the spammer...if laws accept that as sufficient evidence.
There is the problem of a competitor sending spam which advertises stuff from someone else, to cause problems for someone else.
And some things are distributed -- like spam which promotes some worthless stock and tries to make the stock price rise. Any of the current stock holders could have hired the spammer.
From the article: "The bounty hunters would need to trace the offending e-mail to its source, identify the sender and provide proof to the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC would investigate and fine the offender, if appropriate. The bounty hunter would get 20 percent of the fine." If the main problem is not having the manpower to trace and catch these spammers now (as posited earlier in the piece), how is this queuing system going to help? I would think that the in-basket would quickly fill up and it would still require huge manpower to investigate each claim. There would certainly be loads of helf-assed cases presented and for that matter, why wouldn't spammers simply flood the queue with bogus "proofs" to bog the proceedings?
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
http://www.lurhq.com/sobig.html
Hello [your name spelled wrong]
Want to make as much as $3000/week, without leaving home!?! Become a Spam Bounty hunter! Just buy Doctor Bob's 12-step program for hunting down spammers...
etc.
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
I will pay $100 to the first person to provide me with the identity of the actual person or persons operating the following spamvertised sites:
The name and address obtained must be within the United States and must be usable for service of process.
"whois" addresses have been checked and are not useful.
These sites move from ISP to ISP frequently. Many no longer work, but others in the same family appear.
We've received over 16,000 spam bounces because of this spammer.
I blogged my rebuttal to Larry last January.
The problem, in a nutshell, is that the success of his proposal depends upon the efficacy of filtering. His bounty, if it works as desired, ensures that we have subject tags to do that filtering. My claim is that even if Larry's proposal allows for perfect filtering, we're still in store for a mail system meltdown.
This claim has not been well received. :)
The problem is that too many people--a significant number of them hang out on this web site--believe filtering is a magic bullet. It isn't, and Larry's proposal provides an example of the situation where you can implement perfect filtering and still have a mail system meltdown.
I do think there may be a remedy that may save Larry's proposal. If the filtering tag is moved from the Subject header into the tranport session (say, an ESTMP parameter), that may reduce the cost of rejecting spam enough to avoid the system meltdown problem.