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The Battle Against Junk Mail and Spyware
wildfrontiersman writes "A New York Times editorial by Brent Staples, The Battle Against Junk Mail and Spyware on the Web, laments 'The story of technology is the story of noble aspirations overtaken by a hard-core huckster reality. This process is on vivid display in the debate about electronic junk mail, which makes up more than half of all the e-mail that travels on the Internet.' He criticizes the new spam law, the lack of attention to spyware and how it threatens our beloved internet."
A year ago, spyware wasn't nearly as bad as it is now. I was at a friend's house trying to show him some stuff from my gallery on his P4 2.0ghz, and it choked by starting Internet Explorer. 3 toolbars over each other, hard drive spinning like hell because all the ram is eaten up by spyware...
Had to run Spybot, ad-aware, spybot, ad-aware over and over for like 2 hours while rebooting to get rid of everything...
At least the latest Norton Antivirus scans some of it and so does Network Associate's antivirus. I wish Trend Micro's would do it too, it probably will soon...
In most other forms of media, it seems that advertising has had its day. Television is no longer able to subject us to ads and is threatened, Radio ads in internet radio are able to be skipped. So we only have to deal with the advertisements that arrive in our inbox.
There are a variety of ways of dealing with this detritus, the easiest one is make it a social stigma to admit to buying anything from spam.
Have any enlargements or pharmaceuticals ever been sold using this method? Has anyone ever received one of these messages and replied and then eagerly waited for their postie to drop by with their delivery of "Hot Teens"?
Turn Spam purchasing into the Venereal Disease of the new century and it will cost these folks more to send the messages than is returned in sales.
Legislation is pointless in an area where geography is no longer a method of control.
Of course, such code would not have the luxury of tailoring itself to outlook/IE. It would have to learn to work with mail/Safari, neither of which are as instrusive as the MS counterparts.
I leave it as an excersise to the reader as to whether Safari is as much annoyware as IE, or if the OSS base of Safari gives it an edge.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
But the Solution to Spyware is fairly simple. Make the sender pay, like normail post. That is why I don't get hundreds of posts in my physical mailbox. (and the fact I don't participate in competitions every chance I get) Simply put, for somebody to send me email they have to perform a task. Say calculate the first five primes that end in five. For one persons computer this will be trivial. But for somebody mailing out millions of posts it becomes impossible. In fact I can increase the computation difficulty depending on what I want to filter out.
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(x) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!