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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.
We've known this all the time. Spammers spam because it makes them money. Didn't we have a /. article a while back showing how big of a house a big-time spammer had, and giving all sorts of stats, e.g. foreign servers in China, Russia, etc spewing spam, three T1 lines, a network of computers in his basement, etc?
Yes, spammers spam to make money. But that doesn't make it legal. Robbers rob to make money, but stealing is illegal.
Well... I RTFA and that article didn't go anywhere.
/. postings and personal experiences.
He says there's a spam problem (no kidding?) and that the economics of it are viable (Well, no kidding? Is that why we continue to receive spam?) and there's no way to stop it without incuring an overhead in transmission (either through permission based, authentication or challenge and response) - well... we already knew that through 100's of
So what was the point of the article? To just rehash the same old situation?
We need a solution, not a restatement of the problem. The solution is going to involve more overhead, because the fundamental problem with SMTP is the touted low overhead itself. There's no real authentication and anyone can send anything to anyone else. THAT is the problem, so of COURSE we are going to have to have more overhead in a "new" SMTP protocol of some sort if we want to affect a change. This is just a given.
The focus needs to be on coming up with a system to track the responsible parties (for good or ill) - and that will cost overhead. We'll have to suck it up, but it's the way it's going to have to be, unless we want to continue on the road we are on now.
I still think that mailservers should use the PKI structure. Each new mailserver would require a public/private key pair. Each key could be signed by a prevoius key, leading up to one person (I'll vote Alan Cox, cause that guy knows his shit!).
He signs a bunch of keys, then those keys sign a bunch, and so on and so forth. Lookups would just simply walk the tree. You set the depth at which you'll receive e-mail from, and can elevate keys to top-level if you want, to avoid the headache of having subdomains or backup mail servers faulting for domains on the fringe.
Now spammers will have to get keys from trusted sources, which can be identified. Too many bad certs, and wham, lop the branch of the tree!
It's more of a tragedy of the commons (similar to, not the same)
If there were one spammer, sending one piece of spam to everyone on earth a day, and getting rich off it, it would NOT be a problem.... the effect on everyone else is negligible.
If the gain to the spammer is X, the loss on his million victims is on millionth of X each.
The problem is that there are many spammers.. so though each spammer sees his effect on individual recipients as tiny, the overall problem is quite large.
Contrast to the sheep scenario in tragedy of the commons... one guy adding one extra sheep to common land being grazed at capacity already is a net benefit of one sheep to the farmer, but the corresponding negative effect to him is shared among ALL those who share the land... so he sees a net gain. The problem is that every participant would come to the same coclusion, and add mroe sheep... cancelling out the percieved gain, to the detrement of all.