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I, Spammer
PCOL writes "The Washington Post is reporting on testimony before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation by Ronald Scelson, an eighth-grade dropout and self-taught computer programmer from Louisiana, who claims that he sends between 120 million and 180 million e-mails every 12 hours, that he can break sophisticated software filters 24 hours after they are deployed, and that he has no choice but to resort to forging the sender information in his bulk e-mail so he can be anonymous and maintain his connection to the Internet. He added that he obtained all his addresses legally and that AOL gladly sold him the company's entire customer directory which Ted Leonsis, vice chairman of AOL, did not deny." It's a tough life. Here's another story about the Senate committee meeting.
This sort of confirms that most spam is sent by a small group. Take this sucker out, and a massive amount of spam drops off the planet. Do it with enough prejudice, just to make sure nobody takes over the vacancy.
Ok, maybe this is a troll, but its what /.ers have done before.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
I wonder if anyone inside of AOL has run the numbers to figure out
and compared that to the amount of revenue that they get from selling out their customers.
Scelson tries to make the argument that what he does is no different than other advertisers who send their adverisements through the US mail.
Unfortunately he, like all other spammers, completely misses the point that the two are not related. When LL Bean sends its catalog to you it costs the company X cents to do so per each catalog.
When Scelson sends out his 180 emails a day it costs him X cents in total. However, it costs all the ISPs whose bandwidth he and others chew up X dollars per email. Thus, he is offloading the cost of doing business to the people who are receiving the email.
This reminds me of the old postal system in the UK. In days gone by it was the receiver who had to pay to accept the piece of mail. If they didn't pay the mail was returned. It is only in recent history that the mail system is such that sender pays.
I wonder if Mr Scelson would be happy if all the advertisers who send him their mailings would tell him he has to pay to get those things whether he wants them or not.
I think the real behind-the-scenes motive of all the efforts we keep hearing about recently to throttle Spam is the intention to remove our ability to send e-mail anonymously on the Internet. Removing this capability frightens me, particularly for those living under repressive regimes. There must be some third way by which Spam can be defeated while still preserving anonymous e-mailing.
Yes, AOL sends commercial messages to its members, but it doesn't spam the rest of the world too -- a perhaps small but significant difference. They do offer a "check here to opt-out of commercial messages" mechanism, but it auto-resets itself after a period of time.
Hmmmm.... AOL blocks 2.4 billion spams a day. I wonder how many the company generates itself to send to its own members.
"Now the individual has lost his right to get any e-mail he wants," Scelson said. So now I want to receive free viagra from jryaixz@yahoo.com? Quite the contrary; with proposed antispam laws, users are finally gaining the right to get only the email they want.
If he's sending 240 million emails a day and getting 1-2 percent return, even if he only make a few dollars off each sale that's a profit in the order of billions a year. Do you get the feeling he's lying to the senate?
I would rather trust a spammer than a lazy computer programmer to get a job done, that's for sure. It's not about being nice, it's about being a hard worker. Stupid isn't forever, but lazy is.
How, exactly, is writing a few scripts to send out a huge batch of e-mail every 12 hours or so, with minimal input from the user, hard work?
Sounds to me like the spammer is the lazy one, but, maybe I'm missing something. Please enlighten me.
my pet machine
Yes, AOL sends commercial messages to its members, but it doesn't spam the rest of the world too
Does the never ending stream of AOL CD's mailed in the post not count as spam? I agree with the OP - this is a case of carbonised kitchen utensils having an argument.
--
Reverse outsourcing: it's the future
Spam is a business because there are actually people out there that fall for this crap!
I maintain that if the general public would just wise-up, spam would go away rather quickly. The article points out that he gets 3% response. If it was 0%, we would be out of business. It's that simple.
So the solution is this: Educate those less computer-wise around you to NEVER respond to a spam e-mail. And definitely don't give them money!
But okay, the reports of Al Ral getting buried in mail did make me smile. :^)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
"..and that he has no choice but to resort to forging the sender information in his bulk e-mail so he can be anonymous and maintain his connection to the Internet."
In other words: "I have to lie, cheat and steal to use resources on mail servers illicitly."
Asshole.
Trolling is a art,
Although I hate to admit it, I use AOL - much to the amusement of my friends. I have to say that I have not been bombarded with any spam since the creation of my new email account. I have used this account solely for communicating with friends, and nobody except my friends have the address.
Reading the comments above would make me think that all AOL accounts attract spam, just because they are at AOL. Some advice for AOLers. if you dont want spam, dont have a profile, and most certainly dont give your email address to all those porn sites you frequent...
>But at least there's the proposal for a "federal antispam SWAT team". I'd pay good money to see a live video stream of that take-down.
I hate to say it, but I hope the SWAT team proposal fails. How will the Federal SWAT team know who to raid? If they can trace a spammer they can trace activists, dissidents, anybody who might be a terrorist, they can trace anybody. Sure they can do it now to a large degree, but if there's a Federal SWAT team they'll need access to some sort of system right? Something like the Terrorist Information Awareness network or Carnivore but geared specifically towards email and only email. The SWAT team has to be efficient right? Mistakes would make them look real bad.
The worst thing spammers will do is cause even more loss of privacy, loss of open mail relays, and an increase of government monitoring of email.
I'm not entirely sure but I think for now I'd rather wear out my delete key a bit more and wait for better technical solutions. The legal solutions are just much too likely to be worse than the problem.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Why isn't this the same crime as handing someone an ID card which says you are someone you are not?
He claims that he "has no choice but to resort to forging the sender information in his bulk e-mail so he can be anonymous".
Isn't that a bit like saying that when I was 19, I had no choice but to resort to forging my driver's license so I could buy beer?
MORTAR COMBAT!
he has no choice but to resort to forging the sender information in his bulk e-mail so he can be anonymous and maintain his connection to the Internet.
Is that like bank robbers being forced to don a mask so they can remain anonymous and maintain their 'business operations'?
I've had one of my email addresses used as a reply to: for quite a few spams. A real PITA. Not only did that address get the standard spam, it get bounces from nonexistent recipients. Sometimes in the hundreds per day, as the result of dictionary attacks on various ISP's. On top of that, you get the indignant replies from pissed off people.
Blatant forgeries in commercial email headers should be made illegal.
It's entirely possible that AOL didn't sell the e-mail list, but the VP didn't know whether the accusation was true or not. In which case he's best off keeping his mouth shut until he finds out.
No, it doesn't. Spam is unsolicited e-mail. What AOL does has been going on for long before the term spam came around. It is also different in that there's no forgery, you can return it to sender, etc. Whether AOL should be sending out tons of CDs is certainly debatable, but it is something different from spam.
There should be a "national opt-out" spam list that all spam senders must check before sending a message.
If such a list existed, you can bet your bottom dollar that every spammer will pay very close attention to it. It would be a list of 100% valid email addresses! Normally they would have to pay for lists of email addresses, and here is one that is free and guaranteed to be accurate.
The spammer could then fire up the spambox which is conveniently located outside of the US, bounce the spam off of an open relay in the Far East, and it would be business as usual.
If anyone out there believes that the spammers are honest and trustworthy, they deserve all the viagra, penis/breast enlargement/pr0n spam they get in their inbox...
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Junk Mail != Spam.
If those CDs were shipped to you postage due, then you can call it spam.
Considering the earlier info someone posted, it looks like he has about 6 more addresses in Slidell, LA. It's definitely him. Hopefully this is the real one because I got it from US Search.
(emphasis mine) I think it's a brilliant suggestion. If the Burns-Wyden bill is passed, then I can easily filter my mail to stop spam I don't want to see. I don't think that my ISPs should be blocking email that may be spam but follows these rules. The filters in Eudora and Outlook Express are powerful enough to stop all spam I am not interested in receiving if I know for a fact that the forged header problem vanishes. I think it's a great compromise.
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
If you want to get your slogan and company name out there fast, it makes sense to use the Internet and email systems.
If you want to attract and retain a loyal customer base, it absolutely doesn't make sense to use spam or other annoying methods of advertising on the Internet.
As an example: I work for a company that owns one of the major online travel sites. A few weeks ago, we had an all-company conference call, and one of the members in my group pointed out that another online travel site had recently stepped up its advertising via popup ads on web sites. He asked why we weren't annoying the consumer with popup ads. The leader of the call replied, "I think you just answered your own question." He explained that while popup ads may be effective, they don't make any friends among consumers and they don't build loyalty.
If popup ads have such a negative impression, don't you think unsolicited commercial E-mail has a much more negative impression on the Internet population? Here's a hint: The spammers who sell Viagra (r), Viagra substitutes, penis extension pills, mortgages, and other spamvertised products almost never reveal their real business name. They hide behind throwaway e-mail addresses and make themselves untraceable to their audience.
Would a business concerned with consumer loyalty really have to hide themselves? My local grocery store doesn't have to hide from me. Neither does Target, Borders, Best Buy, or any number of bricks-and-mortar retailers. Amazon.com doesn't have to hide from me, nor do any of the online travel sites. Yet the spammers pushing penis pills don't dare reveal who they are, where they work, how I can contact them, or anything traceable.
I would rather trust a spammer than a lazy computer programmer to get a job done, that's for sure. It's not about being nice, it's about being a hard worker. Stupid isn't forever, but lazy is.
I think you're trolling here, but in case you aren't: That "hard work" relies on hijacking other people's resources. It relies on deception and lies to push a product to people.
(Disclaimer: This is not the opinion of my employer, of course.)
An officer of a company should not make a statement without ensuring it is correct. Or taking reasonable means to ensure it is correct.
When a specific claim is made, like this there are a few options.
1. No statement at this time, or no comment.
2. Suggest that this didn't happen. This is against our standard policies.
3. Investigate the statement, and then comment on it's accuracy.
4. Say we did no such thing, without checking. This is reckless, and a responsible person should not do so.
I know it sounds weaselish, but you MUST not make a statement when you do not have the information to justify it. You can get in a lot of trouble for lying.
Because most of the actual monetary cost of sending the spam has already been incurred by the time you filter at the client. The message has already been transmitted from client to server to server to server to client over the internet, consuming bandwidth. It has already occupied disk space. Even the end-of-the-server-chain, pre-client filters like SpamAssassin only alleviate the last link in that bandwidth-bonanza (to-client).
.procmailrc to deal with all kinds of situations, but Joe Schmoe email user shouldn't have to learn complex regular expressions.
That spam email should never be sent, period. It should not ever proceed across the internet whose bandwidth is being paid for by millions of users, providing benefit to the sender. It should never touch the hard disk of a server.
In addition, it simply takes too much sophistication for the VAST majority of email users to properly set up filters. A simple [ADV*] -> Trash filter would delete some email that quite honestly some users want -- special coupons from Amazon.com for repeat customers, for example. Those emails would by (proposed) law have to have the [ADV] tag on them. So then you add another filter above the Trash filter to allow ADV from Amazon through... and so on, and so forth.
Pretty soon the hassle of organising your filters has exceeded the hassle of having to just click 'delete' to spam (for the average email user). I can easily enter a new expression in my
MORTAR COMBAT!
But then when you start filtering data on content, you are not an impartial conduit.
You might then be taking responsiblity for the content you do let through.
I think ISPs are more scared of that than spam.
ISP's should let you opt out of their default mail filtering policy, then these spammers lose a big part of the arguement.
Either opt in spam filtering and opt in bulk email.
or
Opt out spam filtering and opt out bulk emial.
Junk Mail != Spam
Both consume limited storage space. Junk mail can fill up your postal mailbox and you'll then get a note, "You can pick up the rest of your mail at the post office." How fun. Spam fills up your email inbox until the sender of the next message gets "MORTAR_COMBAT!@slashdot.org's email is full".
Both abuse a common carrier system, paid for at least partially by the recipients of the message. Junk mail is usually paid for using bulk pricing systems, subsidized by the rest of the postal audience. Oh yeah, and the USPS is a government program. Spam is paid for by the ISPs, who in turn charge their customers.
If you think that receiving a 100-page glossy magazine from Abercrombie and Fitch doesn't cost you anything you are flatly wrong. It doesn't have to come postage due. When your kids spend your money at Abercrombie and Fitch, you've just funded the next round of that glossy magazine's arrival.
MORTAR COMBAT!
Of course, as you suggest, he could be counting death threats as responses as well :-)
Still, with todays bandwidth prices, and an estimate of 10kb per e-mail, if he's sending 10 million messages an hour, he'd be sending around 100GB an hour at around $50 an hour (likely less, given the volumes and since it's mail traffic where he doesn't need to pay a premium for low latency connectivity). A product with a reasonable markup and he might be able to recoup the cost of those 10 million messages with a single sale, possibly even making a nice profit.
And that's why asking people not to buy from spammers won't be enough to get them out of business.
The reason people are working so hard to break filters is not to get to Joe Bob SpamAssassin - it's to get through Yahoo! and AOL's spam filters.
Ask a dozen random AOL and Yahoo! users - I bet not one of them can describe how the antispam features that their mail host uses work.
Can we stop with the cut-and-paste of text from the WaPo site? The site seems to be extremely well architected to handle high demand, and has never been Slashdotted as far as I know.
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
I guess that explains statements like the following, that display his keen insight into our system of government:
"But carriers should be held accountable when they submit to anti-spam groups. Terminating services to companies' such as my own without any legal reason to do so is not the democracy that we should all be living."
Jackass, if you're reading:
1) This is not a democracy. We're a democratic republic. There's a big difference.
2) Forcing someone else to provide you a service is neither freedom, nor related to a democracy. In fact, that would be contrary to freedom.
3) Claiming you're FORCED to forge email addresses because of "bullying tactics" is akin to claiming you were forced to break into my house and dump junk mail on my desk because I refused delivery.
Apparently you think America is all about you, and that you somehow have a level of freedom that compels others to act according to your wishes.
Rot in hell, dickhead.
I have been looking at the source of my spam lately, and, although the email addresses are always forged, the body of the messages nearly always point to some website.
What we should do is have a way to automatize the slashdotting of these sites. The resource cost for every recepient is very small, but is very high for the target web site. If the site is run directly by the spammer, then that's great (he get's to pay the bandwidth bill). If it is run by the spammer's client, then that's even better. If it is hosted on a free non-commercial facility, it will wake them up and will make them find a way to make their users accountable.
So how to do this in a very user-friendly and convenient way ? /dev/null. The app should have a funny user interface, that let's you know when a target host becomes unavailable (victory ! another one bites the dust !), etc. The downloadable list of target hosts should be maintained by a trusted source (it could be GPG signed for example), maybe mailed to you though a MixMaster remailer to avoid spammer suing the originator.
Make a distributed-computing application, very light-weight, that runs on every platform. You should be able to set the maximum bandwidth you want to use (the default could be very low, like 5kbps), when it should start and stop, etc.The app will go and fetch a list of URLs of images or HTML pages on the target servers, and start downloading them to
This could make all the Spam issue a lot more fun !
There are a few possibilities:
There's no reason Leonsis would know every dealing that AOL does (especially those before he rose to this level); if he affirms, he's fucked. If he denies, the best he can hope for is status quo ante if he's right; if he's wrong, he's fucked. So if he answers, 4 things can happen, and 3 of them are bad.
"Wouldn't spamming a spammer defeat the purpose of defeating spam?"
Its called poetic justice. While some will tell you that prison is "corrective", there is the underlying accepted premise in Western culture of the punishment should fit the crime.
He doesn't need to recoup anything; he can just get his client to pay up front, regardless of the actual response rate.
;)
I personally think it's not only the spammers which need hefty fines; it's the people hiring them. I don't think jail time for fraud and many counts of unauthorised computer use (and paying someone to do these things for you) is a bad idea either.
Never mind crap like "spammer gets $100,000 fine, sells one of his ferrari's to pay for it"; I want to see "spammer gets $100,000 fine, 3 year jail term, and all assets potentially paid by or related to spamming confiscated. Companies responsible get $1,000,000 + 1 year profit fine each".
Then I want to see Bush announce a War on Spam; out of the country? No fines for you, we'll just blow you up with a Predator Drone.
Sadly I doubt much less than this would have a significant impact on the problem. And blowing people up might be taking things a little far
I'm in.
Suggestion: rephrase it and put it on Ask Slashdot
-Ab
Nothing fails quite like prayer.
Opt-out is a cop-out. Why should ANYone ever be required to opt-out of any E-mail list that they never opted into in the first place?
You, like many others (thieving parasites like Scelson included), are still overlooking one critical fact:
The Internet is not now, nor has it ever been, a truly "public" resource. Nobody in the government pays me any subsidy to operate my servers, and I don't know of any ISPs in the U.S. that are receiving any similar subsidies.
I pay, out of my own pocket, for the electricity and bandwidth that my servers require to work as they do, just as anyone from a mom-n'-pop ISP to a giant like Earthlink pays for the electricity and bandwidth to run theirs.
In each case, whether you're a single individual or a multinational conglomerate, or anywhere in between, your servers are YOUR PRIVATE PROPERTY, along with the mailboxes on them. You might rent them to others, as ISPs do, but the only guarantee that ANYone has in terms of sending and receiving mail is whatever guarantees are in the contract that gets signed between an Internet provider and their customers.
When spammers spam, they're violating private property rights. Period. When someone spams me, or one of my other users, they're STEALING from me. When someone spams AOL, they're stealing from AOL and its users. When someone spams ANYone with a 'net-connected system, it is theft of resources. Period.
I will do whatever it takes to protect my systems from such intrusions. If that means risking the loss or delay of some legitimate E-mail, so be it.
Apparently, AOL is taking a similar path. That's fine. They have absolute and final authority over their own equipment. Scelson can scream "censorship!" all he wants, but he still has no right to mail to someone else's network if they don't want to receive his (or any other spammer's) crap.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
This national database could store irreversible hashes of the addresses. This way it would not be possible to extract addresses from the database, while it would still be possible to check whether some address is present in it.
If such a list existed, you can bet your bottom dollar that every spammer will pay very close attention to it. It would be a list of 100% valid email addresses! Normally they would have to pay for lists of email addresses, and here is one that is free and guaranteed to be accurate.
In order for unsolicited *commercial* email (read: spam) to be effective, there *must* be a product/service to purchase and a method to contact the seller.
Yell at/Fine the seller. They will know which campaign did the spamming. Then fine the spammer.
In order for the spammer (or the company the spammer is spamming for) to get my money, they have to provide a way for me to contact them. It doesn't matter if they use open relays on Mars, they still, ultimately, have to provide a method for me to contact them.
That means that a national opt-out list, coupled with a spambounty (or some other kill-the-spammer type legislation) *would* matter, and it would *not* be business as usual.
offers for sale matter that I believe ...
/. sell user info? not yet? not that we're told?
actually, from the working that you quoted, it's appears to be up to the discression of the person requesting the prohibitory order.
when it stops aol cd's it has gots to be a good thing, when it lets RIAA request and get your Verizon logs b/c they suspect you to be trading songs, then it's a bad thing. lovely how EVERY coin had at least two sides...
oh yeah, and on the original topic. aol selling member lists is completely WRONG, but does
Sadly, fraudulently representing yourself is protected speech under the First Amendment to the Constituion. The Nike case in California is the biggest test to this in a really long time.
I don't think things would be so different if corporations didn't have that right -- the actors, script writers, spammers, etc. working for corporations would still have the right to tell you lies, as individuals.
(OT TIME) What pisses me off is when the *cops* are allowed to misrepresent the truth. Like alleged sniper guy John Malvo not getting a lawyer because he asked "Do I get to see a lawyer?" and the cops said "No." Then he started singing like a bird. The judge ruled the testimony should be allowed, since Malvo didn't explicitly ASK for a lawyer -- he didn't say "Can I see a lawyer?" But it's clear from his question that his intent was to see a lawyer, and it's also quite clear that the cops knew they could play word games with him, because everyone wants this kid to fry so jurisprudence goes out the window. Hmmm I guess it does piss me off that the cops lie, but it pisses me off even more that it now has a big fat stamp of approval, at least in Virginia. What a crock -- what if someone who doesn't speak English well (Malvo perhaps) is detained and can't formulate the specific grammatically correct sentence to request a lawyer? Oh, wait, that person is probably a terrorist or illegal immigrant, nevermind.
So, I guess the overall arc of this post would be: don't come bitching about how horrible all these spammers are, they lie, hide behind secrecy etc. when that sort of behavior is exactly the same thing our legal system is doing with Malvo, and don't get me started on Ashcroft's tactics.
And, what's the fucking problem with spam in the first place. C'mon people, I have had the same HOTMAIL account for like five years, and for a LONG time my email was listed with each post on SlashDot. I still don't get that much spam, maybe five a day, and I'm not so freaking busy that I don't have the FIVE SECONDS it takes to delete them. What's that, you say? You run a mail server and the spam has got you down? Well, that's why your job is to run that mail server. If it were easy, they wouldn't have to go out and hire a specialist.
Do what I do... if it comes with a "no postage necessary" return envelope, tear it up, put it in the envelope and mail it back to them. I asked the post office if they minded and they said nope, they get paid...
seems if enough people did this then the signal to noise ratio would be high enough that maybe just maybe they'd stop.
in any event, it sure makes me feel better.
P2P networking is a technique which may be used legitimately or illegitimately. Spamming is, in and of itself, a violation of property rights, and thus has no legitimate use.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
What's to keep a spammer from just using a known valid email address as the from address on his spam? Then the hash check will succeed and the mail will go through. The spammer doesn't have to register the address himself, he can just use any address that he knows is on the whitelist.
Still a problem. You can verify your list of emails, or write a brute force program that will keep track of all emails that are verified by the address. a@aol.com aa@aol.com ab@aol.com and see which ones are in the directory.
These verified email addys would then be sold from spammer to spammer and eventually most of the database will be cracked and valid email addresses known.
It just won't work until there is an enforcable penalty and since most get routed outside the US, a nospam list will never be a solution (unless ratified by the world, heh).
Better to scrap the current email protocols and develop a new one that enforces accountability. Don't ask me how this'll work, but I think it the best solution out there.
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
To read about this guy's testimony, you would think there are millions of folks out there who want spam. He tries to paint "legitimate" spammers as good, decent folks who have to resort to underhanded tactics to circumvent the evil ISPs who block their spam messages.
Now, personally there are a few things that I'd want to receive that could be considered spam. There are some companies I go to where I want to hear about the latest deals (the weekend specials from the airline, for example). Sometimes these emails have an advertisement attached to it, which is fine. But the difference between what these companies do and what this scumbag testifying before congress does is I actually want to receive their bulk email. I had to go out of my way to be put on their mailing list, and in that process it was made quite clear that I would receive the bulk mailings.
Of course, the emails I want to get aren't really unsolicited. The impression I get is spammers like this guy don't seem to see any difference. A line hidden in an AUP that says when you sign up for a service you will receive "valuable offers from partners" is not the same as going to a specific webpage and asking to be placed on a mailing list.
So the question remains: Is there anyone who wants to receive coupons for $.40 off Lysol, offers to refinance their mortgage, discounted prescription drugs etc. on a regular basis? Does anyone think this is a valuable service? Would anyone be angry at their email provider for blocking those types of messages before they reach their inbox?
To read about this guy, there are millions who do. Personal experience points to something altogether different.
The Internet is generally stupid
..I send out spam for your company maliciously? I send out forged-header spam advertising the product of a company I hate, causing that poor company millions in fines.
I welcome our new 99% overlords.
hell, I bet maybe only one in that twelve realizes that the spam is being blocked in the first place (what spam?).
That's why I'm with the crowd that thinks that spam filtering is a waste of time. In fact, I think it ultimately does more harm than good - especially when it's done at the server level. If more people actually saw all the spam that was sent to them, there would be a much larger public outcry. As it is, most people regard the problem as somewhat amusing, if annoying, instead of as the costly epidemic it really is.
But then again, I also agreed with the late, great Bill Hicks when he urged all advertisers and marketers to kill themselves. I'm personally offended by all the advertising that I'm subjected to every day. I think that all advertising should be restricted to appropriate forums such as dedicated magazines, TV channels, and websites.
The fact is that people, including myself, do want to view advertisements for products that they are interested in, and will search out that advertising. There is no need to subject people to unwanted, garish marketing -- except that those companies that employ such methods demonstrably sell more products, to the detriment of other companies that try to be more socially responsible. Restrict business to advertising in forums established expressly for the purpose and the world would be a much more peaceful place.
And don't give me any guff about free speech. Businesses are not citizens, and should not have any such rights.
I realize that many media outlets rely on advertising revenue for their business models, and that many would die if they were deprived of it. Just don't expect me to care. Those outlets with the creativity to find better models will survive. More than likely the public would end up being the customer instead of the product, resulting in better media.
(Score: -1, Stupid)
One way to address the spam issue is to open the .GOV TLD to every day people. Let us all get a .gov e-mail address and then we'll either not get spam, or the spammers will stop filtering .gov from their databases and clueless politicians and government people will begin to get an idea of how counterproductive not prosecuting these spammers can be.