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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.
Drug dealers and people who commit fraud aren't going to go away becuase they can make money ding what they do. We still despise them and send them to jail when we find them.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Altman is right on about the economic factors that spam produce. First of all about knowing the behavior of the applications that *usually* behave in normal fashion but produce wierd results if one of the input interfaces of a *closed application* doesn't get the desired input. But the way i understand is that a few of the interfaces may not be in user control. How do we get to know the inputs defined at the hidden input interfaces? Will it be possible to inject some faults over there? As Eric mentioned, increase the memory load and see the behavior of notepad, this is simple case. I was wondering about ip tables and NAT rules defined in *nix or even some billing hook defined for some telco. How would be ever able to know the input interfaces of that black box? And another important point that will it be possible to take output of black box / closed app and intercept it so as to avoid it's default behavior and treat that output as input to some other black box? I mean chained black box debug behavior.
so as long as a burgler can make more money through crime than he spends, it is a rational career path?
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
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.'"
I don't follow. Responding to "market forces" (and God knows I'm an ESR-esque capitalist) doesn't give you the right to invade my privacy. Arguably, the mafia responds to market forces. Extortion is "rational behavior in the economic sense." Your point being?
I have discovered a truly marvelous
Plenty of crimes (Drug dealing, fraud, plain 'ol theft) make sense. That doesn't mean they're morally acceptable.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
"... the economic forces that have led to the spam problem ..."
That is an easy one:
Greed+Stupidity=Spammer
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
thieves with no money who mug old ladies are responding to "economic forces" too.
it makes good business sense to not bother protecting workers' health or the environment beyond the minimum you can get away with.
just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.
so what's the point? flamebait story?
But is this ever going to happen? The whole point of email is freedom, freedom of speech and freedom of implemenation across a common protocol. Anyone can set up sendmail and start sending important information, without having to seek permission from a greater authority. Paying for email is all well and good pragmatically, but it is night upon impossible to implement it without losing the freedom that makes email so important.
Gamers Europe - Gaming News. Reviews.
I never understood what was wrong with making spam okay (to a point) as long as they have an Adv: in the subject line. This still allows other people to get it, along with an easy way to filter.
But what about mailing lists and whatnot operated by small organizations? Obviously they can't afford to pay 0.1 cents/email. I subscribe to the IETF mailing lists; those servers must send hundreds of thousands of emails a day. I doubt they would want to pay so much to provide a free discussion service, and then there's mailing lists operated by nonprofit orgs, charities, etc.
"The problem is that our approach to the solution has also been short-term thinking. We have to think long-term. We have to make the spammers pay more than we do."
:P
My dear sir, the problem has been more than adequately defined a MEEEELYUN times at least. I was hoping for a solution, not another whiny 'spammers do it 'cause it's so cheap' rant. Like that's news.
---
SCO is weenies
Gator is Spyware
Microsoft is thugs
While spam benefits spammers, it steals man-hours and network resources from companies who would rather put their personnel and equipment to more productive (and profitable uses). Spam is the collect call that you're forced to accept.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
"So you want to send me advertising, and you're going to pay me $0.10 per message you email me? Send all you want, dude!"
But if that $0.10 per message just falls into the "Big AOL Pot O'Money(TM)", the whining would be louder than it is today.. "What, I'm paying for email and I STILL get spam? You said it'd be gone if I paid!!!"
John
There are many things which are clearly "wrong" and which, therefore are not "right" regardless of the cause. I really don't think that "market forces" are a justification for filling your mailbox with as many penis-enlargment or "generic male enhancing formula" ads as possible.
Seriously, sometimes there are forces which drive me to run nearby vehicles off the road whilst on the freeway, but I find the human capacity to control myself for the greater good. Why can't we ask the same for spammers? Because they face absolutely no punishment or cost for their actions.
To prevent this, you'd have to verify payments for each email with a bank or perhaps some sort of Internet Post Office to issue, validate and cancel the "stamps." I highly doubt such an organization will be created.
I am sorry, anyone who responds to penile-enlargement ads, or nigerian scams, or any sort of other spam is a complete and utter moron.
I dont know why anyone out there would do this, especially given the poor quality of the advertisements sent out via email by the spammers....
Ahh..but as Monsieur Barnum said, "A Sucker is Born Every Minute"....it was true then and it is true now, there are people out there too stupid to live!
And in response to a previous post, at least drug dealers and embezzlers require a modicum of intelligence, the haphazard style of the spammers indicates they have none.
Post apocalyptic gaming goodness
If you charged .01 cents an email
Sure, 0.01 cents today.
Tommorrow, who knows how much. Once the infrastucture is in place, what is to prevent the price from going up?
Don't say competition, because just like gasoline, there will be a steadily increasing cost across all providers.
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
Charging for email without securing the email infrastructure is a bad idea.
Spammers don't send mail from their computers, they send from your computer. Who gets the money from this micropayment? If its the recipient, guess what? All of the spam will be directed to the spammers from the hijacked computers. Instant Powerball jackpot winner. If the ISP gets it, guess what? All of the spammers will become ISPs.
Adding a new market force just changes the dynamics, it doesn't eliminate the crime.
But what about mailing lists and whatnot operated by small organizations?
.01 cent. I wouldn't mind and I think most people wouldn't either. Such an pay system would already have an authentication/signature system, so adding such a "reverse" mechanism would be a non-issue.
Good point. Possible solution: perhaps there would be a mechanism such that to subscribe to such a list, you, the subscriber have to pay your
G-Force music visualization
This article is a bit obvious don't you think? Who didn't not know that whole mass mailing business is based on how easy and cheap is sending e-mails?
I personally wouldn't mind paying .01 cents per email (that'd be Euro cents for me). Or maybe even 1p/email. But let's suppose my ISP, in a fit of enlightenment, decides to put email charging in place. What's going to happen?
Well, for starters, the amount of spam that I get is unlikely to change at all. Because it's nearly all coming from other ISPs. Only if they start charging will my spam load be reduced. And,of course, any ISP that doesn't charge has a sales advantage over all those that do; lower costs to the end user.
This is an good solution, but it needs to be implemented by every ISP (or at least a very significant fraction of all of them), worldwide. Thus it can't be addressed by US law, or EU law or even Chinese law. It needs an co-operative effort of will by a large number of commercial entities... who are all competing for the same customers. Hmm.
If I hadn't made money from it I wouldn't have done it.
It made "economic sense" to kill DiLivio as if he had gone to the cops I'd have gone to prison.
It makes "economic sense" to cook the books like Enron as you get rich, all you are doing is using the market and obeying basic forces.
It makes "economic sense" to use slave and child labour, its cheaper, all you are doing is obeying basic market forces.
Oh and Guns don't kill people... number of deaths as a result of "drive by Sarcasm hits" still at zero however.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Everyone is drawing comparisons between spammers and thieves/drug dealers/other money making illegal activities.
This is not an accurate analogy. Thieves do not come to you asking you over and over if you would like your wallet stolen, they just take it. And if you were stupid, then maybe you would just hand it over with a smile. The fact of the matter is most forms spamming are not yet illegal (as far as I know) and a closer comparison can be drawn to pushy, insistent door to door salesmen - annoying, bullshitting and trying to get your money in exchange for a piece of crap.
Eventually there will be laws passed against them (like no soliciting laws in real life) but the law has always lagged in progress behind technology. For now, this article only defends the REASONS for spamming - not the activity itself.
Yup.
;) It's too evil to not happen.
Ok, now guess who the government would put in charge of implementing this postage system? The U.S. Postal Service has lots of experience with postage...I'm willing to bet they'd get the job.
So, watch as they slap on a small postage fee per email. And then, mark my words, watch them offer a bulk rate for large mailings, just as they do now with snail mail.
...
It's been reported that SpamCop is paying upwards to $30K / year for bandwidth as a direct cause of the continous DDOS attacks on it.
The spammers are doing everything they can to squeeze the anti-spammers out. They use frivolous lawsuits (aka Mark Felstein and his porn spamming backers) or DDOS attacks that either knock the anti-spam resources off completely or increase the costs so that no hobbyist can run them.
And while all this is going on, the law enforcement agencies are doing nothing to counter the clearly illegal acts of the spammers.
And ISPs are doing NOTHING to reduce the number of zombies on their networks. So the DDOS attacks continue.
Nice going.
It's only a matter of time when someone (Al Queda?) will use the zombie network for something that will truly be noticed.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
Pay who, exactly?
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Not to defend spam, but this issue of economic rationality applies to the recipients of spam too. For too many people, the cost of searching for a product exceeds the cost of clicking through a spam email. HTML email and the internet have made it too easy for the recipients of marketing material to satisfy their curiosity (and buy) from spam. In contrast, taking the initative, opening up a web page to Google, searching for a product, and reserach company reputations is too much bother for too many people.
I suspect that many people see spam-promoted products as no more disreputable than companies found by a search, so why not buy from the most convenitent channel? There may even be a perverse psychological drive that favors spam. If you get screwed by a company that you actively searched for and selected, then you feel like a complete idiot. If you get screwed by a spam compnay, then you can (at least psychologically) partially blame the company that sought you out.
As long as it is easier to click through a spam to reward a spammer (and people are lazy), spammers will be rewarded.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I can see SPAM killing itself in the not-to-distant future. SPAM is a numbers game, and it used to be that they could get very small response rate and still make money if they sent out a large volume of mail.
Now, everybody is assaulted with countless email messages, mostly peddling the same products. As people get more and more SPAM, the response rate will inevitably drop lower and lower, and I believe it will eventually bring in too little money to justify the costs that spammers incur to send it out.
My public email address will have 100% junk email on some days. I read 0% of those emails beyond the subject line. 3 years ago, when it was only 10-20%, I at least had a chance of actually viewing the message as I was sorting my mail.
Look at the failure for any micropayment system to even get to the realm of being able to charge a penny at a time, let alone 1/100th that.
And wrong because it is not THAT dificult to stop spam. No, really. But you have to be practical.
1. Make good legislation. Thou shall not spam. IF you spam, you'll be seriously fined. Allow the $@#$%#@ lawyers to sue. Every time I get spammed, I forward the message to the anti-spam organization. Then, the lawyer sues, gets the money, keeps a fee and gives me the rest.
3. Don't tell me it's hard to track the spammer. It's EASY. Follow the money. Here comes step 1. If spam money are sent to Korea or China, block the transfer.
The last point I want to make: there was/is another advertising system where the recipient would pay more than the sender. But, guess what? They don't send ads through fax. Why? Huge fines.
My .02
Bite my shiny metal... oops... Nevermind!
Dealing heroin, they take in more money than they lose. Does that mean we sigh and say 'Ah, such are the wonders of market forces'?
People who beat up little old ladies and take their purses also take in more money than they lose. Do we blame it all on market forces or do we send them to jail? We send them to jail.(*)
Just because something makes a profit doesn't mean it's not bad. The fact that this needs pointing out to anyone is pretty fucking sad.
(*) Except in the UK, but that's an anomaly.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Perhaps there should be a "deposit" charge for each message, which can be returned by the recipient if the message is legitimate, or withheld if the message is spam. That way, in your case, you would pay the deposit for each of the 30k messages, but it would eventually get returned.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
that you don't understand the premise.
"In the economic sense" means you look at the problem purely from the economic standpoint. Not the legal, not the ethical, not the moral - the economic. Just the economic.
Think of it as functioning in a world of just economics without outside forces like law and morality. Things that make sense - i.e. that will make money - are good, period. However, these ideas tend to lose their appeal when acted on by outside forces - i.e. the aforementioned law and morality. You rolled law and morals into your assessment of a model that does not address them.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Seriously, why is everyone so up in arms about spam, when our brains are saturated in advertising everywhere we look?
Spam is what happens when you take mass-communication away from the multi-national mega-corps and give it to the common man...
I've started an online business or two in my time, and carefully-target unsolicited email (aka spam) was an essential part of our business plan, and it brought real benefit to most recipients.
I see a lot of ideas floating out of various government agencies around the world based on making spam more expensive. Personally I don't think this is a good approach. We shouldn't be removing the ability to mass-communicate from the common man, we need to be reining in advertising and other forms of brainwashing in a much more general sense.
What that should mean would make for a much more interesting and productive discussion than just talking about the "spam problem".
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
everyone notice by now how your Baysian (sp?) filter becomes ineffective when the spammer puts random words at the bottom of the message?
I need someone to help me update spamprobe to it only looks at the first 25% of the message now..
seems like it should be easy enough..
Spamming is an ethical issue at its heart. Using open relays, using individuals' computers to forward mail, and other uses of bandwith that the spammers aren't paying for is at the least dishonest, and moreso argueably theft.
There is also the consideration that freedom of speach by definition includes freedom from speach, so we shouldn't have to be subjected to the spam in the first place.
For spam to be profitable, *recipients* must be responding to the offers and paying money.
How about instead of coming up some contorted "standard", Microsoft and the other biggies put out an anti-spam PSA campaign... I'm sure the Gates Foundation can find a few mil for this...
Convince all those newbies not to respond to the spam offers and the senders will dry up.
Responding to economic forces does not in any way exempt anyone from being subject to moral and ethical evaluations.
If I mug people for money and manage to get away with it, that doesn't constitute a defense of any substantive kind. Yes my behavior can be *explained* motivationally by economics, but for someone to therefor be emotionally conflicted as to whether or not I should be condemned for it would be - to put it kindly - absurd.
Now if the alternative for spammers was to starve to death, that would cast this in a different light. But that's not the case. Spammers are people who could have chosen to go to work doing something useful, and instead decided to pollute the commons.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Okay, accepting that everyone has a right to try to make a living, but the thing that irritates me most about spam is that I'll get the same email 6 times in one day to the same address!
So unlike snail-mail based junk mail where the costs ensure the sender will only bother to "spam" me once a month, email spammers abuse the system.
If they'd just behave a little more sensably then I'd have more simpathy/empathy.
The other thing that annoys me is the content of some of the emails. It really isn't right sending out explicit email when you don't know anything about who's receiving the email.... seriously, some of the spammers should be hung, drawn and quarters for the sh*t they send out.
Getting back to the "volume" problem, this will eventually force the spammers out of business, as it will continue to increase and force changes to the email system. It would therefore make sense for spammers to draw up some kind of unofficial code of conduct, e.g. clean their email lists of dupes and "webmaster" and "abuse" addresses, etc, and only send any given "advert" to a single address once every... month preferably, but if they restricted themselves to once a week it would still be a vast improvement.
I can't see that this would be at all difficult for a spammer and I can't see that it would make any difference to the volume of business generated... I mean, there ain't no way I'm going to order viagra 6 times a day anyway!!
All a spammer has to do is send spam on the behalf of companies that are not their customers and there would be no way to know which merchants should be prosecuted. Spammers muddy the water as much as possible - that is their entire means of survival.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Just because spamming is not illegal (and it is, under an increasing number of laws) under some conditions does not make it morally or ethically "right." It is still theft by conversion and trespass to chattel. The court system decided that a lonnnng time back in the original case of Cyber Promotions vs. AOL.
Muggers, shoplifters, and other thieves are not going to go away as long as they think they have even the ghost of a chance of making a quick $$.
Spamming is not going to go away as long as spammers think they can make an equally quick $$.
Spamming would stop practically overnight if the entire Internet-using population simply failed to respond to ANY of the offers contained in spam, no matter if they came from a supposedly "legitimate" company (and, in my eyes, no company that sends any form of spam can be considered "legitimate") or some huckster in a double-wide in a trailer park.
The answer, to my eyes, is two-fold, and is simple enough.
(1) Extend the existing anti-junk FAX laws to cover E-mail. In other words, ban spamming outright. Period.
(2) Teach people early and well, especially the earlier generation: NEVER RESPOND to spam, other than to block or filter it.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Working for a living, even with those annoying advanced degrees, costs a significant amount of time and effort. I've seen claims that acquiring a single job through direct application costs close to $100. And that's not considering the 40 hours a week one must spend at the job. Doing a job that pays poorly is inefficient, so workers limit the number of jobs they do to the highest paying they can find.
But suppose it costs you essentially nothing to make a buck through mugging. Then your best strategy to maximize profits is to mug as many people as you can find. After all, if you're mugging mortgage financiers, there might actually be some money in their pockets. You would miss those potential money sources if you trimmed your list. Perhaps some folks who have expressed interest in designer beer mugs are also walking in your area. If you did the "rational" thing you and didn't hit them over the head with a sand-filled sock, you would miss them, and it costs you nothing, right?
The sad point of all of this is that I'm going to (sort of) defend the muggers and point out that they are responding to basic economic forces that we all respond to at one level or another. As long as muggers can take in more money than it costs them, they will continue to beat people senseless and take their money. This is "rational" behavior in the economic sense.
For the billionth time, Spam != advertising. When a company advertises, THEY cover the costs of the advertising. They buy the billboard and pay the guys to put their ad up on it. Spammers, on the other hand, use MY money, MY network and MY time to deliver advertisements to me. The reason spammers are able to break even is because they're using other people's resources to get their advert out. Besides, if the "common man" wanted your "mass-communication" everyone would be checking out www.viagra-adipex-free-teens-larger-wang.com instead of slashdot.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
Everyone always says that as long as there are people willing to buy this product, spamming will continue. Well, looking at the products advertised by spam, I have trouble believing anyone buys these products.
I don't believe the problem is that spamming successfully brings in new customers. I believe the problem is that spammers sell their service to unsuspecting "businesses" that believe whatever phony lines they are handing them about how it will be good for their business. As long as there are small businesses who believe this, spammers will find a market for their services and spam will continue, even if the premise that spam has a nonzero response rate is untrue. Eventually as it becomes commonly accepted knowledge that businesses are not successful with this type of advertising, spam should drop off.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
I'm sorry, I just don't buy it. Screw economics.
The bottom line Allman is NOT addressing is SMTP IS A BROKEN PROTOCOL. Spamming happens because it is EASY TO DO and it takes more effort to stop it.
SMTP was designed in an era where internet hosts implicitly trusted each other (this same era gave us the horribly insecure TELNET and FTP as well). That era is LONG LONG GONE.
The reality is that SMTP headers are too easy to forge. We will NEVER be free of open relays--this is the fault of the protocol as much as the clueless admins. SMTP needs to be completely replaced.
Look--you can still get spam-free email. Just not over SMTP. Believe it or not, FIDONET still exists and guess what--I don't get any spam there. Why? Because the system would smash down anyone that tried rather quickly--the protocol works. I've been encouraging anyone who will listen to jump back on one of the many FIDONET or Citadel BBS systems available on the internet for decent, spam-free email.
The problem started when text based email was upped to be able to have HTML inside.
It is the HTML that makes email a marketing tool, without it there is hardly any money to make from sending emails around.
Knowing the corporates it will never happen, they rather close down free email altogether and put on a fee based equivalent.
So they will do all they can to ruiening the current system, and what's better than combining marketing and destroying email at the same go...
It is quite easy to get rid of spam. This is what I do:
1. Receive Piece of spam regarding penis enlargement. Sent to junk mail, or doesn't go through my spam filter.
2. When I get a few minutes, and I'm rather pissed off at something, I pull up one of my default response templates. Ie, received E-Mail of Penis enlargement pill/patch/voodoo dance, and simply send an E-Mail back saying:
"Hi, I'm interested in your penis enlargement patch. Please send me some information on your product."
3. Wait for response to mail
4. Send another appropriate but stupid question to them, never actually purchasing.
5. Repeat step 3 if a further E-Mail has been sent to me.
Some interesting things I have noted:
1. My spam has decreased. The spammers are not all stupid and they blacklist my E-Mail address. (From 400 mails a day, down to about 50)
2. And this is the big one. It costs a small, tiny fraction of a cent to send out a generic spam advertisement. Therefore, easy or genuine responses are economically viable, as they only get a few a day.
Now just imagine, if we have the force of a fraction of a few dedicated /. readers. Perhaps about 100,000 of them sending on average 5 generic responses per day. That's 500,000 E-Mails to the evil inboxes of doom.
Let's say that 1 company gets 70,000 bogus E-Mails in a day. It still takes approximately 1-2 mins to read and respond adequately to a person if they want to make a potential sale.
Thats between 70,000 and 140,000 minutes a day. That's about 1,167 to 2,333 work hours a day to respond to the junk they get back to perhaps glean 100 real potentials from their campaign.
If you need to pay an employee just $10 an hour, that's still between $11,670 and $23,330 a day.
That's between $4,259,550 and $8,519,100 that the spammers have to pay in work hours.
Now, lets say that they make about $2,000 a day from the 100 e-mails they get that are legit. They are now running at a loss.
Reading only the subject lines and filtering out the 'non-genuine' responses will result in REAL reasponses being filtered out as well, making their profits drop.
As the article said, they are using basic market economic forces to make a profit. We can use basic market economic forces to reduce the spam.
Summary:
1. Responding to spam has reduced my Junk mail, probably due to blacklisting. (This is only me, and I am only stating what has happened in my case.)
2. If enough people respond with fake letters of interest, the spammers go broke, and it becomes non-profitable.
So a call to arms /. ers. You hate spam? Me too. Let's do something about it.
CRyACin
If life gives you shit, then sell fertiliser - Bayani Portier
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
As the article says, spammers send spam because they make money at it. The solution presented is one we've heard many times... charge for email and make it less profitable.
Why not go after the source? Go after the companies that are advertising via spam? Track them down, follow the links they send, follow the trail, and jail them. Fine them. Make them pay.
If the spammers are making money off of spam, that money has to lead somewhere. Follow it to the source, and deal with the source.
The infrastructure for micropayments on email would be insane considering that (most?) every country in the world would have to back it, there would be a huge amount of tracking and auditing to be done, and a fairly seamless cutover for millions of companies would have to happen... Yeah, right.
urg, he couldn't have made this any more obvious. Imagine he was a company selling sendmail: what would they try and do? They'd try and make it look like they weren't the ones responsible for the spam, as they'd have money (in his case, ego) on the line.
The problem here is a fundamental flaw in smtp.
The solution here is to redesign smtp. Even something as simple as a 'trusted peer server' model would work and wouldn't need a complete redesign: each server is the trusted peer of several others (say 5, and all would have to be fqdn). After mail is sent, and before that mail is delivered, the server it is sent from is validified to be a peer (by doing a quick check on the 5 servers that it claims are its peers). If the server sent from doesn't have peers, then the mail isn't delivered.
While this wouldn't completely trap all spam, and some spam would certainly still get through from exploited networks, it would make the job of maintaining accurate RBLs much, much easier, and would functionally run spammers out of business, if (say) the next sendmail version were to impliment the feature, and people started using it.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Sigh. This is the short-sighted, disconnected view of drug abuse that seems to typify the "legalize drugs now" crowd. Nothing happens in a vacuum. The parent comment isn't insightful or even interesting - it's tragic, if the poster actually believes it. When somebody busts out the window of a car to steal a stereo to sell so that they can buy drugs with which to overdose, then go to the hospital, have the bill paid for by the county, to whom we pay taxes, then off to detox, again supported by our taxes...then start the whole process over again. So either taxes have to increase or other programs get short shrift. Insurance premiums rise. Everybody who can afford it moves away. Worst of all, those "volunteers" lose opportunities...for themselves and for everyone else.
I've seen it in Los Angeles, San Diego, Boston and New York. I've even seen it in places that you've never heard of, like Nampa, Idaho and Portsmouth, Rhode Island.
If you really believe that the only resources that drug dealers consume are those of their customers, then you're just fantasizing.
-h-
Conventional wisdom says that we have so much spam because:
(1) E-mail is so cheap that it's essentially free
(2) The low cost of e-mail makes Spam very profitable, which is why there's so much spam.
I think this may be wrong.
With the all out war being waged against spam, I seriously doubt it's all that profitable. I believe that spam is the result of greedy wishful thinking.
Think about state lotteries. A lottery ticket only costs a dollar and promises a chance to win lots of money. So, every week, millions of people spend a few dollars (or more) on lottery tickets. And even though they never win anything (or nowhere near the amount they spend), they keep buying lottery tickets, week after week, month after month, year after year.
Why? Greedy wishful thinking: a few dollars a week is a small price to pay if it will make me rich someday.
And I think that same basic mentality is driving spam. Sending out millions of spam e-mails costs very little and takes very little effort, so why not try it.
These are the same people who buy into all the various MLM and get-rich-quick schemes. They are convinced that they just need to keep sending out as much spam as possible and someday it will pay off.
If you know who they are, you can filter their mail or report their criminal activity.
A big time spammer forced to identify himself would not stay in business for long. The anonyminity is the most important aspect of their business model.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Time and time again... They're like cock-roaches.
Why not just fine their clients? Advertise something using spam, pay a fine, per delivered message.
The market for Spamming would die out.
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You advocate a
( ) technical (x) 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
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) 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
(x) 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
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(x) 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
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) 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
(x) 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.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're stupid for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Nathan's blog
Bandwidth, disk space etc are *not* the primary cost here - these costs are falling anyway.
What is not falling is the value of my time - the right to put a message in front of me. As people find themselves buried under 'information overload' the value of eyeballs is increasing.
This cost, the cost of my time, is the the most important externality that traditional email is underselling to spammers.
So I now have two types of email address:
1) A private address that I only tell my friends - it blocks mail from non-whitelisted addresses.
2) A public address that is pay-to-send using the sudonames.com system. This is the address on this comment, for example.
Mail to either address ends up in the same inbox, so it is really convenient. No mail is ever lost, and I never get *any* spam at all.
Problem solved!
And if my previous suggestion was too restrictive, they could make it free for up to 100 recipients and then $4.95 for 100-1000, for example. In that scenario, about the only people who would notice would fit into my definition of spammers.
And would also shut down most of the major legitimate mailing lists out there. I'm on 3 high-volume (200+ messages a day) mailing lists that each have several thousand subscribers. There's also all the very-low-volume (rarely more than 10 messages a week - if even that - for all of them) lists I'm on which I believe have even more subscribers.
End of line..
From what I understand, a spammer selling, for instance, penis enlargement pills will sell three or four bottles from a spam run of 100 million spams. Let's say he makes $200 and assume it is pure profit (it is).
Let's further assume of the 100 million spams, 10 million made it to the Microsoft Outlook Inboxes of unique users. Let's say that each spam took 5 seconds to delete. If their time is worth $10/hour (assume half the victims are kids students etc, and half are professionals) the spammer cost them $100,000 of their time to make his lousy $200.
This does not take into account higher ISP fees, anti-spam program costs, credit card back charges, loss of business from lost legit emails, and the terabytes of wasted bandwidth for each and every spam run.
Spammers are conscious of this and their continuing to do it is an indication of sociopathic behavior.
i think a much overlooked fact is, that Spam is moving towards organised crime. Currently we have several trends working that way:
I think a lot of people look at Spam as a kind of nuisance. It is more. If the observed trends continue, we'll find Spam sent by those same friendly guys who offer the heroin to your kids. No joke or rethoric intended, i'm plain serious on that one. Take a look at Sobig, the backdoors it opened and what kind of Spam and how fast you got it.
Regards, Martin
In return, the commercial helps pay for the programming you're seeing. That's the trade; your resources in trade for entertainment / information and their message.
Billboards exist on private property - whether you're looking at them or not is your issue. None of your resources are taken up by their existence. Of course, some areas and communities do place restrictions (or outright ban) billboards and other signs.
A fair enough point. I have to agree - the majority of my "mail" these days ends up in a bin. Although the cost of mailing items does keep this somewhat in control. Email demonstrates how insane dealing with physical mail could be if it weren't for the associated cost.
You've missed on, by the way. "Junk" FAXes. Illegal. Why? Because the recipient is paying for the message in the form of toner and paper. And the incoming message ties up their resource - that is, the phone line.
You see - its not about who makes money. Its about choice, cost, and depletion of resources.
I think a lot of the actual practitioners of spam are simply id10ts who've been duped into believing that the economics of it are in their favor. ("Look at how many people are doing it!" "They said on TV that it doesn't cost hardly nothing"). So they buy mailing lists, spamware, etc. from folks dealing in such stuff... as Make Money Fast! scams. Spammers don't necessarily last very long individually; they seem so persistent only because of the ongoing supply of suckers.
If so, it isn't the cost/benefit of spamming that keeps the crap flowing, but the cost/benefit of selling spamming. It's not the open relays out there that are the problem, but the open (slack-jawed) mouths.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
The sad point of all of this is that I'm going to (sort of) defend the cocaine dealers and point out that they are responding to basic economic forces that we all respond to at one level or another. As long as coke dealers can take in more money than it costs them, they will continue to sell cocaine. This is "rational" behavior in the economic sense.
The sad point of all of this is that I'm going to (sort of) defend the child pornographers and point out that they are responding to basic economic forces that we all respond to at one level or another. As long as child pornographers can take in more money than it costs them, they will continue to rape children. This is "rational" behavior in the economic sense.
The fact is, engaging in kiddie porn, drug dealing, and spamming requires more than a profit incentive; It also requires a complete lack of any moral compass whatsoever, which we all agree that the three groups above do.
I am quite frankly amazed that no one has shot Richter or Ralsky in the head with a large-caliber shotgun yet. Once THAT happens, the tide of spam will turn.
At any rate, I could argue that they are NOT responding to basic market forces; Before spam inundated our inboxes, did any one want to be carpet bombed with offers to "3n14rge yur ===) and (.)?" NO. At a point in the not so distant past, the ratio of gullible morons on the internet reached a high enough value that it became profitable to defraud them en masse. When everyone but the aforementioned candidates for "You Are A Fucking Moron 9" (google for it) took offense, the spammers did the same thing America did in Vietnam: Step up the carpet bombing; You've got to hit one eventually, regardless of the number of innocents you hit in the process.