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How to Kill Spam Without the State
WaxParadigm writes "The Colorado Freedom Report, an online libertarian publication in Colorado, has an article today about How to Kill Spam Without the State. Will our heavy-handed attempts to stop spam through legislation have the outcome we desire?" The article advocates putting the burden on the end user, saying "We must also take personal responsibility to kill spam. We can't pretend the politicians will do it for us. Their incentive is to develop a cute re-election flyer, not solve the problem. If you're still tempted by the political approach, ask yourself one simple question: who is more technologically savvy, your average spammer or your average politician? There are steps each of us can take to kill spam, and to help foster a culture that encourages spam killing." While this forgets the onus of spam on the ISP and telco companies, it should well be part of a multi-tiered plan against spam.
Spam is revenue for the State, and it isn't a good idea to kill it. Spam has also fetched more revenue for anti-spam s/w firms, than for the purportedly promoted products.
It stands to reason therefore, that the most likely writers of spam are THE SAME ONES WHO PEDDLE ANTI-SPAM WARE.
Thus, to kill spam:
1. Do not trust the State to do anything.
2. Do not buy, solicit or encourage anti-spam software.
3. Use free anti-spam tools wherever possible (this is easier with Linux).
4. Unless spam hogs your bandwidth or disk usage, don't bother.
5. And lastly, or rather firstly, spend money on a CD Writer and media to take backups, rather than on anti-spam s/w.
You will lead a cheerful, richer life.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
No matter how technically savvy you are, if your email address is picked up by a spammer you will receive spam. Whether it hits your inbox or not, somewhere along the line someone has had to relay that message to your mail server and the bandwidth is already wasted.
Get a good filter, use whitelists, whatever. Just don't think that you will be able to eradicate spam without governmental help.
Take personal responsibility. Yeah, right. I don't get any spam. I filter it all out. Does that matter? NO! I'm one person and part of a very thin sliver of the total net population. I actually know what I am doing. The other 95-98% of the people out there do not, and will not. They have trouble getting Outlook Express working and you are going to talk about 'user responsibility'? What a clueless asshole.
Any article with the word 'schlong' in it is suspect, in any event.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Firstly, stop buying things from spam!
My friend once commented on how all he hated getting so much spam the everyday. I myself get maybe one or two pieces a week, so I started to show him the basics of filtering out some of the crap.
So what do you think he says? He doesn't want all his spam automatically deleted he said, because sometimes something interesting comes! He even likes to follow the links two visit the sites.
Fuck I wanted to smack him right in there and then. Actually I'm in a bad mood right now I want to go back and find him and smack him anyway.
I just got a legitimate email returned because spamcop claims that the smtp server of the webhosting provider has an abnormal rate of spam.
The worse thing about spam is that filtering systems create false positives...
My provider requires authentication but everyone knows that you can create spam using a IP address from a well behaved smtp server.
Fear is the mind-killer.
"who is more technologically savvy, your average hacker or your average politician?"
ABOLISH ALL LAWS AGAINST HACKING!
it's up to individuals to make sure every single port is secure against someone wanting to cause damage to your computer/company/bank account.
It's obvious what to do about the #1 problem: people who run web pages should stop listing e-mail addresses in readily spammable form.
On my London Blog I don't use any form of obfuscation. The reason for this is I want people to contact me about my writing. I want to know what people think, and any barrier I put in the way will reduce the number of legitimate emails I get. I'm not confident that most of the Internet population would understand that they need to remove the REVOVE.THIS.TO.EMAIL.ME part of my address.
Sure, I drastically increase the number of spams I get, but popfile takes care of them all. The author of this article is still correct in his economic analysis. There is little burden for me using this method, but a much larger burden for my ISP.
Set your inbox to filter all HTML formatted email.. no more spam. Of course this can only work well for personal addresses for correspondence with friends who understand how to configure their mail client. If you want to be able to correspond with lots of people (ie link your addy on your website, on usenet, etc) I don't see an end to receiving spam any time soon.
Here's an idea about spam on the news: Why not make the following a rule for most groups: If a company posts commercial advertising on a group, it thereby gives the right to anyone to post copyrighted material from the said company. This should slow down unwanted ads, shouldn't it ? Would this be legal ?
Perhaps it is just Libertarian rhetoric.
But it does have some subtle - if not intentional - points that are very important.
There is the technology available to avoid spam. Spam blacklists, Bayesian filters, and Challenge-Response systems will handle the vast majority of spam, if not all of it.
Shouldn't we just be encouraging the adoption of these technologies rather than empowering the state with more tools with which to persecute people?
If you left your house door open and somebody entered and made a mess in your house (or worse!) then who is to blame? Who is at fault? If you have a lock available to you then you use it. The same thing goes for your emails.
Laws are there to be dodged and abused. Community cooperation and prevention strengthens us.
We should be encouraging ISPs to use and support the technologies available to them to destroy spam rather than lobbying for useless new laws (they'll just send the spam from another country you idiots!).
Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary
They really wanted to give it a libertarian twist,
no matter what, didn't they?
99% of the users can't block spam serverside, and just putting the burden on them, will make them pay for the costs, since they have to download it (telephone, burden on bandwidth).
Not putting a brake on the origin will cause even more spam.
There is only one solution: put cost on sending spam AND their ISPs that try to get away with it. Moneywise, or with penalties.
I work the abuse desk for a regional cable ISP, and end up suspending several customers accounts per day because they're either sending or relaying spam (mostly the latter, and usually unwittingly). The majority of the complaints we get come from giant ISPs like AOL, but from time to time we get a mail header from some end user, and the ip is looked up in the dhcp log and the customer is suspended just as if AOL or RoadRunner were complaining.
"Who's going to believe a talking head?" - Herbert West
1) Set up a "trade site" anonymously. Very anonymously.
2) Get your hands on a spammer's mailing lists.
3) Send out several millons of spam with "new better penis enlargement" or some other viagra.
4) Receive all the offers. Even don't bill them, just send out the product. TRICKY PART: Don't send any viagra or other penis enlargers, send out cyanide or some other really lethal poison.
5) Run, wipe all your tracks before your mail reaches its destinations. Leave the "spamming server" with a note on the harddrive for the police to find: "These idiots deserved to die. As long as anyone answers to spam, such 'accidents' will happen. This is not our last action". Take care that it gets to the news.
Fear is a powerful weapon.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
The only solution that I believe is viable is to prohibit companies from purchasing unsolicited advertising from spammers. Spammers don't spam for fun - they get paid to send the millions of mails out. In the end, there are companies and individuals behind them who choose to advertise via email. By making it illegal to do so, the need to stop spammers disappers, as the companies would be 100% liable.
A blog like any other.
We need more than this to stop spam. There's too many idiots about who'll buy spammer's products.
.com/.net, and Nominet is not allowed to be the licensing authority for .uk, and Domicilium is not allowed to be the licensing authority for .im) There can be more than one licensing authority per TLD.
I don't think SMTP itself is fundamentally broken - we just need some improvements to the administration.
In the early days of road transport, drivers were unlicensed - anyone with the money could buy a car and drive it. As traffic built up, eventually this was no longer tenable. As email traffic builds up - lack of licensing for MTA operators is becoming untenable. My server has rejected over 1.2 *gigabytes* of malware in the last week (mostly Swen worms). SpamAssassin kills 80 spam messages a day in my mailbox alone - and still about 15 a day get through. The option of "doing nothing" about email is no longer viable. Schemes like "sender pays" are untenable too (and unfair - why should I pay yet another fee to use bandwidth I'm already paying for once?)
What is really needed is a licensing scheme for people who operate MTAs, just like there is for amateur radio. In brief, here's an outline of what could be implemented. I know this will probably draw the ire of Slashdotters who think they should be able to just run an MTA on their cable modem connection with no qualifications - but this is *exactly* where the problem stems from: to be sure of not dropping too much 'ham' we have to accept SMTP connections from more or less anyone. And this means we get flooded with over a gigabyte of Swen worm traffic in a week.
This list of requirements is by no means comprehensive - it's just a starting point for discussion.
* If you want to run an MTA, you must be licensed to do so.
* A licensed MTA operator may only relay mail from their own network or from other licensed MTA operators. In the case of a home user, this means they can only relay mail from their LAN. In the case of an ISP, from their own netblocks etc.
* A licensed MTA operator may only receive mail from other licensed MTAs. This means you must reject email from the unlicensed (virus/spam spewing) MTA on adsl-192.14.5.6.pacbell.net.
* A licensed MTA operator may only send mail to other licensed MTAs.
MTA licensing can be based on digital certificates. The MTA oper's signature will appear in the header of the email.
To obtain a license, the MTA operator would have to take an exam. The awarding and administering of licenses will be done by TLD. (A good idea would be that the licensing authority must not be the same company or subsidiary of the company that runs the TLD, so VeriSign is not allowed to be the licensing authority for
The upshot of this is that if a licensed MTA operator passes spam or malware, they can have their license suspended or revoked, or fines levied. MTA operators at the ISP level will be *very* careful to ensure they don't harbour spammers because they'll lose their MTA license. They will be *very* careful they configure their system to not allow executable attachments, or at least scan them for malware. Small MTA operators will be *very* careful not to accidentally configure their mail server to be an open relay.
To obtain an MTA license, an exam should be passed not for a specific MTA such as Exim or Sendmail, but general good practise in operating an email server, and general knowledge about internetworking - just like amateur radio licenses don't have exams on a specific model of ICOM radio. Additionally, the MTA operator must provide positive ID when applying for the license - this way, we make sure the MTA oper is accountable for what their MTA emits.
Of course, an actual implemented system like this will be more complex than what's outlined in this posting. Of course, most Slashdotters will hate the idea expressed above - I wouldn't really like to have to take exams to keep running the mail server I already
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Here in New Zealand we just post spammers personal details in major newspapers... http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_811235.html?m enu=
Followed up with threats and obscene phone-calls, this is an effective tactic. There are now up to 100 million less spamails per day.
There is the technology available to avoid spam. Spam blacklists, Bayesian filters, and Challenge-Response systems will handle the vast majority of spam, if not all of it.
And all of these either have either costs, drawbacks, or don't really solve the problem (i.e. Bayesian filter on MUAs don't avoid the traffic etc.), while I can't for the life of me find anything bad on the thoughts of spammer rotting in jail.
</half joking>
Spam exists because it works; enough people buy products that are advertised through spam that the increased sales more than make up for the cost of spamming.
Companies choose Microsoft solutions because Microsoft provides the most flexible, stable and secure systems, with lower TCO than the competition.
I believe both of these statements are false, but are believed to be true by people making the decisions. Why? Because spammers and (to a much lesser extent) Microsoft salespeople are dirty rotten lying scumbags out to make a buck by cheating whoever they can. On top of that, spammers also sell their service by claiming what they're selling is not spam - it's direct marketing to a targeted opt-in list of interested consumers over the Internet. We all know in reality it's completely untargetted and their definition of "opt-in" includes allowing your e-mail address to appear unobfuscated on any web page, using it to register a domain name or post to a newsgroup, or simply choosing an e-mail address that could be guessed at random. We know that, just like we know Windows almost never has a lower TCO than anything. But the people paying the money don't, because they simply don't know better.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
who is more technologically savvy, your average spammer or your average politician?
Who is more technologically savvy--your average bank robber or your average politician? Who is more savvy about poisons and guns--your average murderer or your average politician?
See, by your argument, most laws are useless because they were made by people not as good at committing the crime as the people who actually did commit the crime.
No, this isn't a a daft claim like the one that do-not-call lists breach freedom of speech. I agree with the article that it's just not the place of the state, or even infrastructure providers like ISPs or Hotmail, to filter our private mail based on content.
Even if you think that governments might be technically competent to fight spam, should they be given licence to read (even in an automated way) and analyze all private correspondence just in order to stop some junk mail? [1] I'm not so concerned about blacklisting known spammers, etc., but
Spam is really, really annoying, but when does the cure become worse than the disease?
[1] (Obviously they're going to do this anyway, but we don't need to condone this or make it acceptable.)Run SMTP over SSL and make all connections that are not listed in DNS MX records login with local username and password. Then, have the server sign the message of a logged-in user with server's key, which is registered with a certificate authority. If enough ISPs adopt that and there are cheap mail-only services, people will have an option to only accept signed messages or at least move unsigned ones to a separate folder.
Then, once all e-mail (that gets read) is tracable to a particular person/company, outlaw spam. No need for a no-spam list, because nobody wants spam. People can always sign up for whatever mailing lists interest them. No need to harvest e-mail addresses given for totally unrelated purposes.
Will it get rid of all unwanted e-mail? By no means. But its irresponsible to just complain or try to pass laws without making simple changes to the software first and seeing how well it works. You don't install a UNIX system with an empty root password and then whine about intruders, do you?
In order to deal with spammers, we have to analyze their vulnerabilites. Understanding their weaknesses is easy once you answer this question: What do spammers fear the most?
That's easy. Look at spam messages. You'll see forged return addresses, redirections through open relays, spoofed Received lines, etc.
What does this mean? Spammers are most afraid of being tracked and identified.
And they have a good reason to be afraid. When spammers are identified, they get their ISP accounts terminated, and may get stuck paying hundreds of dollars of cleanup fees. They're harrassed, sued, threatened, they quickly earn a terrible reputation. They'll go to extremes to remain anonymous.
The key is to make it difficult or impossible for spammers to forge headers and obfuscate their emails' points of origin. How do we do this? Require cryptographic authentication of all mail going through any MTA. No exceptions, ever. Every time a mail goes through an MTA, it must be signed by that MTA. Any message without a signature or with an invalid signature gets dropped. By requiring crypto signatures, responsible MTAs can be easily tracked, and spamming MTAs can be blocked.
Key creation, distribution and endorsement can be through a central authority, though I prefer a PGP-style web of trust because central authorities can abuse their power. Naturally, any MTA caught distributing spam should immediately get their keys revoked, and the revocation should be distributed to MTAs as widely as possible, causing all emails from that MTA to be blocked in a matter of minutes. If an MTA wants its emails to reach its destinations, it will crack down hard on spammers.
The difficult part is convincing ISPs to require authentication and drop unsigned messages. However, if a large ISP such as AOL or Comcast can be convinced to do this, MTAs will have a strong incentive to start signing messages, and authentication will start to catch on.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
So if someone is pissing through our letterbox, the libertarian response is "Get a bucket", rather than stop the person pissing through the letterbox. My that's brilliant! And the way to reduce gun deaths is for people to learn how to dodge bullets matrix-stylee.
"You know you want me baby!" - Crow T Robot
who is more technologically savvy, your average spammer or your average politician?
That is the totally wrong question.
Politicians know that they don't know everything. That is why they have staff and expert advisors.
Politicians, however, have something that we the tech-community do not: Police, jails and option to use them.
Spam won't go away 100%, ever. But if the spam rate were on par with the murder or robbery rates (i.e. I have a single-digit percentage chance of getting one spam during my life), then I'd be satisfied.
What we, the tech-community, can do is help them find the culprits. All we need are bounties high enough to make it worth our time.
Raise your hands, you unemployed geeks who would jump at the chance of becoming paid-for spammer hunters.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Is there an online bayesian filtering service, that keeps an individual spam profile? I delete most of my spam without downloading it using a webmail service, I'd really like to enhance this to use bayesian filtering but I don't want to download all that spam. I also would like to do this from work (as I do now), and then just download the remaining email over my modem at home. I might even be persuaded to pay for this service.
That doesn't really work. Either you would only be able to recieve mails from people whose auth token you already know, say from a key exchange in a personal, real-world meeting (obviously not a good idea for sales@example.com type addresses), or you need a global web of trust that makes sure that everyone that can connect to the internet has one, and only one, signature that can be unambigously traced down to the real person (of course, without harming privacy...). The first way is undesirable, the second one has basically be a dream scince the invention of public key crypto, without anything happening.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
The author is right in one regard, legislation won't do it. If everyone who is capable of deciphering the email headers to try to track down the originators of SPAM would try to report just one piece of spam to the offender's ISP, it would possibly begin to make a difference. The math is simple -- there are only a certain number of reputable (ie., non spammer-friendly) ISPs. If even 1000 people a day would use the available tools (www.abuse.net for one), and report this junk, eventually spammers will be forced to move to the spam-friendly ISPs. Then it's just a matter of adding the spam-friendly ISP to your favorite black-hole list, and you've just done your little part to stop spam.
This is true. However, there is a downside. Spam blacklists, in practice, block lots of legitimate mail. Bayesian filters need tuning by the individual user, and I seriously doubt its usefulness to the typical investor in asset enhancement solutions. Challenge-Response systems are potentially effective without the cooperation of the users, but the implementation would need to be very robust and the costs should not be underestimated.
To rid ourselves of the spam menace, it is necessary to stop spam being profitable. Catching and fining spammers is one way this might be done. Technologies that stop spam arriving in the mailboxes certainly help those of us who have no interest in the spam's advertised services. They will do nothing to prevent continued stupidity by those who are stupid today.
One of the nicest ways is a "teergrube" (tarpit) - a special SMTP server that is tuned to process incoming mail really, really slow, thus making the spammer's tools very ineffective. It doesn't take much bandwith or other resources to run one - everybody who has a computer connected to the net and doesn't need to run a "real" mail server (or is willing to configure a teergrubing proxy that only traps spammers and lets the real MTA take care of ham mail) should do so.
Most spam is sent via open mail relays. If you are bored or annoyed enough, take the time to read spam mail headers (the interesting one is the last "recieved" line, usually), and inform the admin of the open relay, so that they can close it or get the fuck out of the internet. Also, inform a blacklist like the Open Relay Database, so that mail servers will reject mails from these hosts.
Try to poison they address databases. Set up a web page invisible for human users that contains lots of addresses that don't exist. But be sure that these addresses also will never exist - only use subdomains that you control, or those mentioned in RFC 2606 (Reserved Top-Level Domain Names), hoping that stupid spamware will try to send to these addresses anyway.
None of this is at odds with client-side filtering or legislative initiatives, just some additional ideas. And annoying these bastards feels good.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
If not for users, how about 'personal responsibility' for admins?
On a mailing list I help run, we turned on Postfix's DNS checks(not RBLs and the like, just "does connecting host have valid forward DNS? Does it match what they claimed?" etc- postfix can do a half dozen DNS-related checks to make sure you're legit. It was ENORMOUSLY successful, virtually killing off all soam overnight, because so much spam has so many fake headers.
We had zero problems with users with funky setups(ie sending work email from home, their own domains, etc). We had ENORMOUS problems with a dozen ISPs whose freaking mail servers often didn't even have FORWARD DNS! Worse, some claimed, when contacted by their users, that it was a problem with OUR dns.
The problem was mostly with clustered outgoing mail servers, where ISPs didn't give a shit enough to set up proper DNS for each cluster member. Do you think they had reverse DNS? :-)
So, we can take personal responsibility by a)refusing to accept connections from servers which have bad/no DNS and b)fixing our own mail server's DNS. That would be a biiiig step...
Please help metamoderate.
I for one feel comforted by the fact that if, God forbid, the day comes that I can't get it up for my wife, and I feel so bad and depressed, and my mortgage interest rates are so high.....
I feel comforted that everyday, there is veritable kornikovia(sic) of options.
who is more tech savvy?
what does that have to do with legislating on spam? i'm sure a lot of murderers know more about killing people then most politicians (excluding bush of course, he was getting rather good at it in texas but he's really shining now that he has a military to order around), but we're ok with politicians passing laws about murder. i'm also sure ceo's and financial people know more about illegal stock trades then most politicians (damn, bush is an exception there too), but we want them passing laws to keep our pensions safe. actually, we still want that to happen. the same points apply to healh care, job creation and education (though the parenthetical comments about bush don't apply on those topics)
i guess my point is that politicians pass laws on a wide variety of issues that concern the people they represent. to do that they have to consult experts in various fields - and that's the skill politicians need: the skill of asking for help and sifting through bullshit. and that's how they can best serve their people.
and obviously the other point is that bush knows an awful lot more than people give him credit for. too bad ken lay didn't get some business advice - maybe harvard could have bailed ken lay out too.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
Why not? We have one here in the UK -- the Mailing Preference Service.
If you sign up to it, direct mailers are forbidden to send you junk mail. The direct mailers have to pay its costs, and it's mostly effective.
They even have a 'baby mps' to stop bereaved mothers from receiving baby-related junk mail/samples.
I can't for the life of me find anything bad on the thoughts of spammer rotting in jail.
To think that just those guilty of mass spam are to be the only victims of such law being applied is to think that innocent people don't go to jail. Naive and, frankly, stupid.
Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary
This article was a waste of my time to read.
For those who haven't read it (and I hope you haven't -- don't waste your own time), basically it says this:
End-users should take responsibility for spam, and the best way to prevent spam is to stop putting email addresses in mailto: links on web pages and in unmunged form in posts to Usenet.
However, it really doesn't explain how the author thinks that people can do something to take responsibility for receiving unsolicited (!) email.
The article fails to mention dictionary attacks and worms, both of which have the potential to find millions of addresses which aren't listed on any web page or in any newsgroup.
I'd be truly surprised if there weren't a worm in the works which would not only act as a mail relay, but which would take care to forward mail to every address listed in a person's address book. Rather than worry about maintaining lists of email addresses, spammers could feed their message to the network of worms (possibly through IRC, or maybe even an instant messaging protocol), and the network would feed messages to every address listed on an infected user's hard drive, and probably to several variants of the addresses as well.
What the article fails to address is this: how can the person who never publishes their email address anywhere take responsibility for spam in the face of dictionary attacks, and when they have no control over friends putting the person's address in their address books?
The article says that when fighting spam, you shouldn't look to the politicians, because they have not the technical knowledge to make legislation stick.
In response to that, I suggest that you not look to the article for spam-fighting advice, because the author seems not to have the technical knowledge to actually develop a solution, or even offer suggestions beyond never publishing unmunged headers.
To those of you who read the article, I feel your pain. You will never get those wasted moments back. But did anyone else cringe when he suggested using graphics to display email addresses in Usenet postings?
My thought is that people advocating posting graphics to Usenet with every post probably don't have a spam solution either. In fact, they're suggesting placing a higher load on NNTP servers, in effect doing the same thing to news servers as spammers do to mail servers: clog them with extra, unneeded garbage, reducing their overall capacity with respect to legitimate communication.
Oh, and have a nice day, everyone!
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
If you left your house door open and somebody entered and made a mess in your house (or worse!) then who is to blame? Who is at fault?
I never get tired of saying this, because it never stops being pertinent:
No matter how big a moron you are, no matter if you leave your front door wide open, then thief who walks in and takes your stuff is still a thief, still guilty in the eyes of the law, and still deserves to be put away.
If you believe otherwise, you're not far off from the "women who wear short skirts have no case if they get raped" school of thought.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
notice the standard libertarian assumption that, if you (a) aren't a libertarian and/or (b) want gov't action against ________________ [fill in the blank with spammers, in this case], you are a person without a sense of "personal responsibility." notice also, the standard libertarian assumption that, as a libertarian, the author is a cut above the rest of us "schmoes."
the fact is, spammers are thieves, stealing services from bandwidth providers. it's not clear to me why the author of this piece, and libertarians in general, regard this behavior as something that can be stopped if i display "personal responsibility" on the internet. it also is not clear just what that actually means, but never mind. and it is not clear exactly why they are less than eager to legally stop this behavior, but my suspicion is that it is because spamming is a business; and libertarians just can't bring themselves to take serious action against that "entrepeneurial spirit." if you're doing it to make money, a libertarian will bless you for it.
i'm dubious about laws against spammers, because i think they will be ineffectively administered. it's not that the technological means of tracking down spammers don't exist, it's that such a process would be time-consuming and expensive. i think that prosecutors just don't want to invest in it. that may be a necessary decision -- funds for attorneys general are not unlimited, and they have to deal with rapers, murderers and wife beaters, too.
i think a bounty law, that would allow individual citizens to bring spammers to book, would be more effective. imagine forming a company comprised of some technically proficient individuals, lawyers and maybe accountants, who working together could track down big-money spammers and present all the technical, legal and financial information about the spammer to a prosecutor, in exchange for either a state-sponsored reward or a percentage of the seized property.
that would rule.
mp
"The secret to strong security: less reliance on secrets." -- Whitfield Diffie
You Might Be An Anti-Spam Kook If...
Source: Posted to IETF mailing list by Vernon Schryver.
you cannot name several potentially fatal flaws in the UFPSTTSP.
Oh man, whaddaya think why I wrote that "half joking" tag? Obviously this whole thing is too complex to deal with in one sentence.
But I'm not willing to invest more in an answer to an article which argues with this "who is more technologically savvy" nonsense.
Remember what you are talking about here. Spam. It isn't people conducting their own affairs in their own house. It's someone shitting all over everyone else annoying mails about porn and penis enlargement.
Denying the need for government like that makes you an anarchist, by the way. Not a libertarian.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Shifting cost back to the spammer might be possible, but there are two problems:
- Already, spammers often operate using temporary untracable accounts. They are cut off when the ISP gets wise to them, and they simply move on to the next account. In some cases they will use a hacked account of an unsuspected user. So, if they are willing to commit fraud or break into unprotected systems to get their spam out, you can be quite sure that they will find ways to avoid any costs being charged back to them. What we might achieve is that certain ISPs will change their policy of lenient to spammers
- Implementing a charging model will come at a price, both a monetary one and one of added inconvenience. The current model of most ISPs who will sell you an unlimited (or a capped) data volume at a fixed price, works out cheaper both for the ISP and for the customer.
As for the cost of spam in bandwidth: I don't recall the exact figures, but spam is supposed to make up a very significant portion of total traffic. We're not talking 1% or 2% here.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
If someone is urinating on your property, that's an actual initiation of force, and hence a legitimate use of government to solve the problem. It is not easy to argue that spam (and junk snail mail for that matter) represents an initiation of force. That is the root of the issue for Libertarians: the role of government is to protect the citizens against the initiation of force, and nothing more. Why? Because concentrated power is the most dangerous force that exists in the world -- it needs to be strictly limited, not expanded to "solve" every concievable social problem.
The argument is not "shut up and deal with it" as the above post would have you believe. The argument is that spam does not represent a true initiation of force, and thus it is not a legitimate use of government to solve the problem. The analogy presented above is a nothing but a typical, predictable, childish evaluation of the Libertarian argument, one which completely ignores the basic principles which guide the Libertarian philosophy.
That's another advantage to my proposal that the laws should be focused, not on spamming per se, but on the use of filter-circumvention techniques (which should be prohibited just as other forms of computer cracking are prohibited).
The distinction between spamming and normal e-mail is sufficiently fuzzy at the edges (e.g. what constitutes "bulk"?) to give your position a grain of plausibility. However, a mailing that is tailored to get past spam filtering (e.g. forged headers, munging of "spammy" words) is equivalent to lock-picking one's way onto other people's property, and as such is a clearcut initiation of force.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
This is really the only answer. Currently it's not against the law to send email with forged/spoofed return address. If I started selling stuff over the regular mail using someone else's name/address, I'd be arrested for mail fraud. That's all spam is, after all, and should have the existing laws covering fraud modified to apply.
Speaking as the former network admin for a "Direct Marketing" aka "Opt-in Mailing" company, the industry is evil.
I've dealt with the hosting in China for the purposes of sending mail, changing ip's daily, thousands of domains, and the use of OpenSource anti-spam software in some very questionalable situations. (Using an anti-spam filter to 'review copy' to make sure its not going to be picked up)
And from all my experience, There's only one thing I can say. The mailers will get around what ever you do, be it state or personal. If you have an email account, regardless of the fact if you give it out, it -will- be mailed to. E-Mail addresses are a super-hot commodity.
Especially if you can get them with the opt-in information attached.
Think of it this way. You opt-in to company A, company A sells your address to Company B. You opt-out to company A. Company B doesnt care. Company B could have already sold your info to Company C, D and E.
Opt-out's are funny, they basically just prove that you're a real live person using that computer.. true spammers love to buy listings that contain those addresses, they dont give a crap if you opt-ed out, they just want live email addresses.
So in short, you want a spam free email account? good luck, do what most people do, create a hotmail account for a spam account, and have a real account that you use for real email.
I've seen databases of 35 million mailable e-mail addresses, and trust me, thats a highly profitable database (and no, i dont have a copy, so dont ask, heh.)
Welcome to the End
This is really bizarre. There are almost 300 comments on this item and no one has even mentioned Paul Graham's proposal for Filters That Fight Back:
The idea is to raise the costs of spam to the spammers, if not at the spam sending side, then at the spamwebsite side. Most spam solicits visits to a website. If a relatively small percentage of Net users were to employ Bayesian filters and/or other techniques to identify and segregate spam, then to accept the explicit invitation in each spam to visit one or more URLs provided, and maybe even download the entire sites a few times, the cost of running a spamwebsite server for the tiny numbers of orders they get would rise sharply.
I don't have it completely automated yet. I'm still using filters in my email client, but they are good enough that no spam gets through to my New Mail folder, and a whitelist ensures that there are no false positives in any mail from anyone I already know I wish to hear from. What goes to my spam folder contains a few false positives of people who have never written to me before, but mostly those whose email contains garbage like HTML.
Once a day or so I simply save the cleaned spam folder to a file and ftp it to one of my servers. There, scripts take over and faithfully accept the explicit invitations in the spam to visit their websites.
As more people do this, the traffic will dramatically increase at the spamwebsites, but orders will not increase. At some level or other, either in their server farm or to their upstream provider, those sites pay for bandwidth. As they get bumped up into higher bandwidth pricing tiers, their margins on the small numbers of orders they get from complete nitwits will drop.
Think of it as a servo system: If the level of spam annoys you, set your filter to fighting back. As more people do that, spam will level off and drop. As it drops to a level at which fewer people bother to set their filters to fighting back, an equilibrium will be achieved. There will still be spam, but a whole lot less than there is now. Think mosquitos and birds. Birds control mosquito populations. There are still mosquitos, but a lot less than there would be if there were no birds. Be a bird -- eat spamwebsites.
The weak point in Graham's proposal is that it really needs a universal whitelist to prevent spammers or other malicious third parties from causing massive traffic to innocent websites by sending out spam that provides URLs that are not the spammer's. It's not clear how such a whitelist would work, who would run it, how sites would get onto it (or off, if they turn bad), or whether someone will come up with a neat P2P solution.
It is clear, though, that anyone receiving 20-100 spams a day can easily review the filtered spams or the extracted URLs and simply delete those that appear innocent. Then scripts do the rest.
Look at the bright side: there's always seppuku.
The best possible means of controlling spam is to run one's own mail system(s). However, doing so correctly takes decent levels of skill in Unix-type OS's, TCP/IP networking, firewall setup and security basics.
I don't think it's at all reasonable to expect that all end users of E-mail have those skills. It takes considerable time, effort, and outside help, even for someone with lots of prior network and computing background (it took me about a year and a half), to become what could probably be considered a 'competent' SysAdmin.
Even assuming the right skills are present, one still needs an ISP that will (1), provide one or more static IP addresses on a broadband connection, and (2), allow their customers to be self-hosted. Such ISPs are, in my experience, rare at best.
It's well within the realm of possibility for ISP's, the big backbone providers, and domain registrars, to put a very serious dent in spamming right here and now. Some things they could all do include:
(1) For domain registrars: Be absolutely scrupulous about requiring accurate contact info in ANY domain registration. We're talking valid address, phone number, and contact name and E-mail addresses. VERIFY that information BEFORE issuing a domain registration. Considering that most spammers want to remain anonymous, this simple change alone would throw a huge wrench into spammers' gears.
(2) For ISP's: Stop hosting spammers NO MATTER HOW MUCH THEY'RE WILLING TO PAY!!! This is a big problem, as spammers are willing to pay serious $$ for ISP's to ignore their own Terms of Service.
There should be a universal policy of suspending an account at the first hint of a spam complaint regarding it. Once said complaint is investigated, the account should be immediately terminated, AND a substantial clean-up fee charged, if there is clear proof that the account was involved with spamming. If not, simply lift the suspension.
(3) For the big backbone providers (and they're the ones who could really help if only they weren't as indifferent as the former Bell System): ENFORCE your own Terms of Service! If one of the downstream ISP's they're supplying bandwidth to is infested with spammers, and does not seem interested in controlling the problem, cut that ISP's pipe fercryinoutloud! Tell them that the pipe remains cut until they dump ALL their spammy customers, permanently! If SpewSpewNet (aka UUNet) did this with even ONE of their big spam havens, I think it'd make a huge difference in the Internet's 'Quality of Life' as it were.
If the ISP in question goes out of business as a result, well, they have no one but themselves to blame for hosting network abusers and criminals.
Regrettably, I doubt we'll see any of the above taking place. Too much greed vs. too much common sense, and greed usually wins.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Is not anti-spam vendors, or people who make money on the few hits garnerned by replies (other than Symantec and Learning Tree, but that's a story for another time)
Rather, the majority of spam comes from suckers who bought into get-money-quick and be-your-own-boss internet marketing schemes. These poor schmoes in the US and Asia buy these kits, which may even come with rented rackspace out of the US to mailbomb from and proceed to splatter their wares to these double-opt-in lists in the hopes of making a return on their investment.
Of course, no one is dumb enough to buy any significant amount from one person. They'll keep hammering that list, getting more desperate, trying to "build a customer base" until finally they default on their hosting contract or whatever.
Meanwhile those marketing "gurus" walk away laughing all the way to the bank.
They get joe-credit-card-debt-schmoe to do the dirty work for them.
They don't have to spam or advertise. They just need good placement in google, which isn't too hard to come by these days. The lazy, the "entrepeneurs" will find them, and a fool and his money are soon parted.
And everybody else has to suffer.
It's not as simple as just ignore it, or don't buy the stuff.
Sleazeball marketing gurus will sell you the Brooklyn Bridge and promise you the moon, a 50% response rate if you just use THEIR NEW, IMPROVED SYSTEM
THAT'S THE PROBLEM!!!
And if anyone knows how to fix this, they get the Nobel Peace Prize, I swear to fucking god.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice