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In (Sort Of) Defense of Spammers
CowboyRobot writes "Eric Allman of Sendmail has a rant in which he looks at the economic forces that have led to the spam problem: 'The sad point of all of this is that I'm going to (sort of) defend the spammers and point out that they are responding to basic economic forces that we all respond to at one level or another. As long as spammers can take in more money than it costs them, they will continue to spam. This is "rational" behavior in the economic sense.'" Otherwise known as the Willie Sutton principle.
Neolibralism (capitalism) is the basic ideology behind their actions. Just as any other company out there, their goal is to maximize their shareholder's profit. A board of directors that do not maximize profit are doing a bad job.
Willie "The Actor" Sutton was a bank robber. His claim to fame is that someone asked him "Why do you rob banks?" and his answer was "Because that's where the money is."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Spammers don't make money by selling their products, they make money by selling addresses to each other.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Yes, but you forgot an important factor. If the person is truly rational, they will use the following formula:
Expected Gain = (Gain from burglary) - [(Probability of being caught) * (Estimated monetary cost of penalty)] - (Opportunity Cost)
Opportunity cost is important - my opportunity cost is high, for example, since the next best option for me is my current job, which pays well, has health beenfits, etc. For someone with only a GED, though, it is significantly lower.
the estimated monetary cost being caught is a value assigned to the penalty (i.e., how much is it worth to me to stay out of jail).
Given that formula, a truly rational person will burgle whenever the Expected Gain is greter than 0.
"Oh and Guns don't kill people... number of deaths as a result of "drive by Sarcasm hits" still at zero however."
yep. there was no such thing as murder before guns were invented.
oh wait.
guess we should also outlaw knives and any other sharp objects.
oh wait.
looks like baseball bats and other heavy blunt objects are right out.
oh wait.
going to have to get rid of any chemicals that are the least bit toxic, lest someone poisons someone else...
oh wait.
people have been murdered by drowning. looks like we better make water illegal.
yeah. blame it on guns!
moron.
The only way to deter crime is to take away the profit. Where have all the bootleggers gone? The profit died when prohibition ended. I have worked on a plan to remove the profit from spam, but I have to assume it is a stupid idea because I have never had anyone tell me otherwise. Instead of blocking servers or the million variations of Viagra, I do an IP lookup for every web address in the email. Most spam has a link to a website or an image. I then block the IP address (not the URL). The spammer can no longer use that IP address to host some website to try and make a profit off me. I figure that if everyone blocked email in the same way, spammers would quickly run out of IP addresses to host their fraudulent websites. They'd have to lease more servers, costing them more and more money, eating away the profits.
/dev/null.
Another thing that I would like to learn to do is block outgoing email as well as incoming email. Then, if someone authorized to use my server gets infected by a spambot, the spam will just head off to
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
There is nothing wrong with it, there is just no motivation for the spammers to go along with it, so it would never happen. Trying to enforce that would be just as futile as trying to enforce CAN-SPAM.
If everyone who ever gets a 1-800 number in a spam were to actually call it and waste the person on the other end of the line's time that would cost them a fortune..
unfortunately it is rare to have a 1-800 in the spam.. but please use this strategy.. nothing wrong with pissing off spammers with innane questions..
r.
Why do the above? It forces the spammer to house the mail instead of the recipient. If it is a spam, there's a good chance the sending site will be blacklisted before many of the recipients ever receive it.
Not perfect, but it changes the economic balance in the right direction without payment schemes.
This is something that's bothered me for a long time. If spam largely is fraudulent (direct ripoff) or advertising fraudulent products (real product, doesn't work), or even criminal (selling drugs illegally), why don't we ever hear about prosecutions for this?
Presumably the money trail is the easist thing to follow in a spam message, particularly with the scary new laws associated with money movement these days. It also seems that RICO statutes could be used to ensnare pretty much everyone involved as part of a corrupt enterprise. And then you go away for hard time, 10-20 and forfeit most of your assets to $100k+ fines.
Given that these laws are powerful and their penalties severe, it would seem that a couple of major RICO busts would put a serious dent in the overall spam business. It would not eliminate it completely, but serious jail time for some of the larger members as well as continuing prosecutions might make it much more scarce.
My own theory is that the government is loathe to prosecute fraud, simply because "aggressive marketing" is so entrenched in otherwise "legitimate" business. My tinfoil hat extension to this theory is that otherwise legitimate businesses are profiting immensely from spam (albeit at an arm's length), and have told FTC/FBI to go easy on it (naturally through their paid-up contributions to their favorite officials).
Although to this day, I'm still wondering why nobody seems to go to jail for selling bogus penis pills and Valium without a perscription.
Seriously, we must expose who is doing the spamming. Once people are out in the open, they may be less willing to send spam.
But we already know who the big spammers are.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
All this talk of paying for email is silly. It won't work. We're already nickled and dimed for bandwith, connection fees, cell phone services, etc. It's an interesting theory, but it just won't work. I have a better solution to deal with the spammer solution.
First, you hunt down the spammers. Torture them until you get a hold of the people they were hired by. Torture them. Continue until you get to the CEO of nike, or viagra, or whoever started the chain.
Take this long line of people and dismember them publicly (perhaps take some of George Carlin's ideas about letting people bet on the event to make some money) in a most graphic fashion. Make sure that everyone knows that this is because they were spammers, or directly contributing to spamming.
Repeat as needed. Eventually this none too subtle approach will encourage people to find other lines of business. Sure, you might get some collateral damage, housewives, people wrongly identified, that sort of thing, but if you do your best (ie: not just looking at mail headers), this can be minimized. You have to break eggs to make an omlette I say! I think it'd work.
Seriously though, saying "it takes in more money than it puts out" is a bogus argument. I can pimp out my 12 year old sister on the street corner and take in more money than I put out, but that doesn't make it right. Saying "but she's a blonde, and all I have to do is buy a pair of high heals every 6 months" doesn't make me not the scum of the earth. I can make money by dumping radioactive waste in a playground for big business and make money as well, but does that mean I should?
On second thought, maybe my first idea isn't so far fetched after all.
the links. Except for the rare text only spam most spams either have a picture or a link that goes to a domain.
Those domains are used by tons of spammers. So by filtering out a single domain blocks dozens (or more) of spammers. And there's zero risk of blocking a legitimate e-mail since no legitimate e-mails are going to link to those spam domains.
The other bonus is that IPs are free from the ISP but domains cost real money. I've harvested hundreds of domains from spams that have hit my mail server and at $7 a pop or more, I've just "cost" spammers thousands of dollars. They have to pay a chunk of change any time they want to spam me about something. Every few days enough spams get through to care to update my Mercury Mail server filter with the new URLs.
And thanks to the HTML protocol you can't obfuscate an URL. The best they can do is base-64 the entire message but those are easy to filter out as well. It does't matter if they plain text the URL either. It's not looking for an href. It's just looking for "topofferz.biz" or whatever. As long as you keep the ".com" or whatever you don't have to worry about random letter domains that have letter combinations that can show up in legitimate attachments. Attachments are encoded without the use of a "."
The filtering happens server side so I save 50% of the bandwidth cost for every message caught. Plus cost spammers real money they paid for their domains. It's a win-lose situation just like it should be.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
His buildup is fine, but his conclusion is off by a mile and a half.
Firstly, he claims that our bandwidth and disk space aren't free... welp, he's right, but only barely. The marginal cost of the additional disk space, CPU cycles, bandwidth, etc is virtually zero, but certainly positive. Yet then he claims that a spammer's costs are zero. What about their computers? Email addresses? Bandwidth? Hard drive space? Those certainly aren't less costly than the same types of resources for each individual recipient.
But, more to the point -- why filters will make reduce spam by effecting the marketplace:
1. The filters have forced the spammers to degrade their own salespitch. By being forced to include extra characters, poor spelling, lousy grammar, etc in an effort to circumvent filters, they are serving to reduce their own credibility. By doing so, they are making their advertising less likely to attract any particular customer. Therefore, their response rate of the folks who might respond to spam is reduced, making spam less profitable.
2. By making spam filters more and more effective and easy to administer, they will find their way to more and more people's mail clients. For many of the new adoptees of filters, it won't be because the new users sought out the filter; it will be simply because the filter was part of the email program they happen to be using. Some of these folks are in the set of "spam-responders", that is, folks that might respond to spam. So, as filters proliferate, they will end up filtering spam away from potential customers -- again, reducing response rates and hence profitibility of spammers.
So, there's two ways where spam filters will reduce overall levels of spam by using the powers of economics against the spammer. Reduce the liklihood that somebody will respond to a spammed message by reducing it's quality, and reduce the liklihood that a potential customer will even see the email in the first place. Sure, the recipient will bear some costs in the short term, but the long term results will be less and less spam overall.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
If nothing else, just the transmission capacity spam uses. Requiring ISPs and the long-haul companies to put in substantially more fiber than they would need for legitimate traffic just costs all of us extra money.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Really? Been to any big city lately? I guess if by "discrete" you mean there isn't a big flashing sign that says DRUG DEALER, then you're right. Otherwise, it's pretty damn easy to tell who's dealing and who isn't. I lived in the bad part of San Diego for five years in the mid 1990s...it didn't take a degree in marketing to know who was doing what. Nothing's changed.
That being said, I've never heard of dealers giving anything away for free. When I was a kid in the late '60s and early '70s, it was a big deal with LSD and heroin, but all I ever heard were "stories".
-h-
No, we'll just put and end to government funded healthcare, welfare and such. Then people will be free to turn into ignorant turds with out the resultant drain on our pocketbooks from drug laws or from handouts.
I metamoderate, therefore I am