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Spam and the Law Conference Report
Cowards Anonymous writes "The Guardian has a story about a spam and law conference, recently held by the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy, in San Francisco.
The conferences are usually attended by anti-spammers, from the major ISPs, and spammers; and are an attempt to bring the two sides together. The article's author notes 'It's oddly intimate, watching the spammers and the anti-spammers mill around each other like this. It feels like a temporary ceasefire in a vicious war that to most of us seems to be a stalemate.'
Also in attendance was infamous spammer Scott Richter, or 'high volume email deployer' as he wished to be called on his recent Daily Show appearance. Surprisingly the anti-spammers didn't tear Richter to pieces with their bare hands."
And I'm waiting for spammer season! :)
Scott wants to hear from you. Drop him a note!
This letter and proposal has been sent to Google, Microsoft, and
Yahoo.
I get too much SPAM!!!
It came upon me that there is a SIMPLE SOLUTION to the 180 or so e-mails I receive every day and have to spend several hours
determining which are important and which ones are junk. This is a PERFECT SOLUTION with NO WORKAROUND BY SPAMMERS
This is an invasion of privacy and I have the solution that provides pretty good privacy: it is to include a KEY ACCESS ALPHA-NUMERIC (includes HEXADECIMAL CODE) NUMBER within the E-mail as shown below:
My proposal, THE NEILL SOLUTION, would solve ALL SPAM problems.
As "Bill Neill" billneill#123BFD456@google.com another example
is "Bill Neill" billneill#Family124@google.com where the #123BFD456 or #Family124 is an alpha-numeric (or hexadecimal) number or word THAT IS assigned BY ME and can be changed at will BY ME, and is known as the ALPHA-NUMERIC NUMBER CODE (ANC) KEY.
ANC KEY is the BEST SOLUTION by far. If you send an e-mail to me with the wrong ANC KEY (#123BFD456) OR (#Family124) your e-mail will not be received in my INBOX/Sub Box, but will go to a PENDING BOX that would allow me to read it, if I think it is possibly important and then respond with the current E-mail ANC KEY for further communications. This effectively expands
my existing e-mail box into several sub boxes or none at all, if I
should so choose not to use it.
ANC KEY SOLUTION is preferred over much more complicated attempts to solve the problem because it is simple, easy to program, it is in control of the user, it costs nothing to implement, and is EXCLUSIONARY not INCLUSIONARY.
Attempts to exclude e-mail from a source exposes the test to all the computers in the world, but including the ANC KEY code expressly grants delivery access for this message.
In high security applications for the government and such, the ANC can be extended (made longer, so harder to pick, limited only by the 256 network limitation) and generated on the fly (using a random number generator) or made to follow a particular and predictable algorithm with more keys, and ultimately, we see that this approaches security similar to encryption and digital signature software that provides pretty good privacy.
Since I can change the ANC KEY whenever I want to, without changing my actual e-mail account (billneill@google.com), unlike attempts to invoke a blocked list or some other "list" of the "do not send to me" type, both of which are circumvented by relocating off shore, out of reach of the law or simply send a batch and vanish, by changing the source of the sender, will NEVER WORK in todays world. This is a world-wide problem that contaminates the web and slows transmission to a crawl.
With ANC KEYs, I am able to keep the SPAMMERS out of my IN BOX as below:
INBOXES
SENDER FILTER:
Bulk Box Mail here is filtered as to SENDERS being known as a spammer to the server.
RECEIVER FILTERS:
Private Box: Mail here is filtered as to my selected private ANC KEY, #34C56, or #private69
Business Box: Mail here is filtered as to my selected business ANC KEY, #4444D, #office34
Family Box: Mail here is filtered as to my selected family HEX NUMBER KEY, #1A937, #family22
Public Box: Mail here is filtered as to my selected public ANC KEY, #9FF999. It comes from my answering a public question requiring the entry of an E-mail account for verification or access.
Pending Box: Mail here is not filtered using any ANC KEY or using a KEY of #? or * where the question mark signals to allow ANY OLD, OBSOLETE KEYS AND SO ON, to gain access and is the same as a person sending with NO NUMBER KEY( # ) AT ALL.
Bounce the Message:
NONE OF THE ABOVE: BOUNCE THE MESSAGE, have a nice day SPAMMERS. Notice that no E-mail address is in fact changed from what it is today, just add an account maintenance page to allow selection of the ANC (alpha-numeric) KEYS, and allow me to change them when needed to make the SPAM m
Wow. Spam AND bullshit management speak. How many reasons to kill(sorry, terminate with extreme prejudice) him do we need?
i let it gather to about 100 emails in my inbox, then i forward each of them individually to every address that sent it.
At least it's better than hoping the spammers will simply decide to give up.
Make love not Spam!
I say we take-off and slashdot the site from orbit... it's the only way to be sure
I'd be interested in still pics or short video clips of Richter and his buddies. Did anybody snap any?
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
kick in the teeth, anyone?
Well, true, spammers are among the lowest forms of human life and deserve the status. However, at least Scott Richter is willing to do something that most other spammers won't... admit that he does it and is willing to talk about it.
Let's face it, he's willing to explain his motivations and disclose his tactics. Most spammers take great lengths to hide their identity, and are scared to even tell their family what they do for a living. Even if we don't like what he does, at least he's willing to help us attempt to understand the problem. If anybody proposes an anti-spam system, he'll at least do us the favor of pointing out how it's not going to work before we waste our time on it.
Where, it might be noted, it became clear he didn't have a whole lot of experience with the "clitorious."
The best was hearing Rob Corddry say "clitorious" back to him, and Richter not batting an eye. Perhaps the solution to getting this guy to stop spamming is to get him some lovin'? Preferably human?
God Bless America. Why? Did it sneeze?
1) Have a good adress for personal email.
/dev/null unless you know you have a order confirmation. or a welcome email coming for you.
-> only give this to real people
2) Have a shopping adress for websites who ask for it when you buy shit
3) Have a registration email for websites you sign up to like slashdot.
2 and 3 will get spammed to hell but you wont miss anything important if you redirect them to
The one for friends wont get spammed.
There is no god
I don't think I could possibly control myself at such a conference. I'd love to serve court papers at a gig like that. :)
I do the same. Sooner or later the spamers are going to see that it is'nt worth there time to keep spaming when their spamed back.
Is admitting it comes from America. A quick glance at any spammer blacklist shows a clear majority of them live in Florida, but American politicians and lawmakers still push the line that it's an African and Asian problem.
I mean come on. You're talking about restricting our desires to promote what we have. It just goes against human nature. And getting angry because of spammers is overrated because how hard is it to use the 'delete' button?
Activists United
If spammers have connections to virus writers and do all these malicious things, why weren't there cops waiting to arrest them when they showed up? Were they granted immunity to visit the conference or something?
Unknown host pong.
Surprisingly the anti-spammers didn't tear Richter to pieces with their bare hands
I wonder if Richter is bigger than they expected or will there be a mysterious freak mishap in San Francisco involving rapidly expanding gases in a container when he start his car? All in all he is funny for going ya know...
Sometimes I wonder just how much money these spammers really make from the spam. I've never even looked at a piece of spam in serious contemplation of buying whatever "product" they are selling
Setec Astronomy
if the return addresses were actually valid and the person who's e-mail address you just blasted had any possible means to prevent someone from "spoofing" their e-mail address.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
If I had known about this conference, there would have been a few dead spammers in the audience.
Or at least a few broken arms, legs, hands, feet and necks.
The Daily Show - 03.30.04 (Xvid) [87 MB] Torrent
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
Next time we know a meeting like this is coming up, we send a representative and photograph each of the spammers and post a "Most wanted" web page with each spammer's photograph and address.
Then put up forms that can be printed out ala "wanted poster" style and have volunteers post the wanted posters all over the spammers' towns.
Expose them and run them out of where they live. Make their lives as hard as they make ours.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Surprisingly the anti-spammers didn't tear Richter to pieces with their bare hands.
Well, what kind of weapons did they use, then?
AEIOU: open-source anonymous internet currency
Byond the typical laundry list starting with "opt in," and ending it "don't sell illegal items" I'd like to suggest "clean house".
I've opted in to some spam and had to opt back out again.
Let me make myself perfictly clear. UCE* is what we are bitching about. With the huge volume of UCE the few items of SCE* are lost in the wake.
I have to set up filters for each type of S?E* and a few UPE*.
The fact of the matter is UCE is hurting SCE by flooding it out of existence.
Back in the start Spamford made a play at cleaning the situation up. By play at I mean he actually e-mail bombed anyone who complained and only PRETENDED to handle complaints.
(I should have sued his butt for that)
If your lagit add a code.. Ohh brain drain.. I forget how it works but I use such codes to help me partition e-mail lists I'm on into proper compartments.
I'd like to add a nifty additional suggestion....
As a form of tripple check,
Most Spam is sent in HTML with images downloaded over the web. That means when your target reads the e-mail his computer contacts you.
This is good advice even for the e-mail vetters, harvesters and violaters of the Can Spam act..
If your target dose not conact you in 24 hours (dosen't download the image by reading the e-mail) he isn't reading your message. Your being dumpped into a filter bin.
Just erase that e-mail from your list automagicly or slip into your filter system.
It may also be the person isn't reading e-mail as often as you send it and getting 20 e-mails from the same guy (for any reason) is just dam annoying and instantly earns you a place in the perment filters.
*Translations:
UCE: Unsolicited Commertal E-Mail. (V!agra)
UPE: Unsolicited Personal E-Mail. (I love your website, Wana swap links? I like your artwork. Baka Kitty? Couldn't you be more original or is that all the Japanise you know?)
SCE: Solicited Commertal E-Mail. (Yes please tell me when the new Yugi cards come out. Horray I won an eBay auction. Oh joy someone bought some more "Voodoo computer" pin dolls from me.. Time to ship)
SPE: Solicited Personal E-Mail. (It's your mother. Your computer is making noises. Are you experementing again?)
S?E: All solicted e-mail
U?E: All unsolicted e-mail.
I don't actually exist.
Aside from from the bandwidth (which who knows what kind of bulk rates they get on that) the most expensive part of spamming is buying domains.
And the kicker is that HTML doesn't allow you to obfuscate an URL. The best you can do is character codes but that's one to one so not effective.
What I do is harvest URLs from spams and then add them to the rule file for my mail server. It's a mostly automated process to avoid accidently filtering out non spam domains like w3c.org or yahoo or whatever that occasionally end up in spam e-mails along with real spam domains.
You can click the link on my sig and then there's a link from there to see the current rule file my server uses. Since I added in web-mail with spam reporting, this is going to be even easier since spams will have a unique subject line and a to address that has no legitimate uses.
Instead of trying to sort out which e-mails to my real addresses were spam or not, I just log in, report them and then it's a simple sort by to address to find all the spam to filter links out of. There's probably around a thousand filtered domains which equals several thousand dollars worth of domains.
If you're worried about people snooping around on your connection, OpenSSL is comming soon for web-access.
If you have a fully TLS enabled e-mail client you can do secure POP3 and SMTP already. Thunderbird has TLS capabilities for SMTP but not POP3 for some reason. Pegasus Mail is fully compatible. Apparently there's no clear standard as to whether the client should just use the standard 110,25 ports with encyption (what my server supports) or use alternate ports. Thunderbird is quite convinced you absolutely must use a fixed alternate port for POP3.
For most people, it'll probably end up that the web access is the most secure way to use Indie-Mail.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
First, we string Alan Ralsky up in the stocks. Then, we make a chain of volunteers that stretches across the nation "Hands Across America" style. Then, instead of swaying and singing along like a bunch of faggot hippies, the chain of volunteers will one-by-one fuck Ralsky up the ass without the benefit of lube until he's so chafed from the aforementioned-fucking that his little sphincter gives way and all of his innards pour out of him like an over-ripe can of Dinty Moore's Beef Stew. Then, we stand Scott Richter in the middle of the pool of gore and offal that was once Ralsky and the line will reverse direction as we one-by-one kick him squaw in the nuts. Eventually his pelvis will powder and give way and his innards will join Ralsky's in our rapidly-growing pool of filth. Then we start dragging in Super-Zonda and that goddamned spamming grandmother and force them to start eating while on their hands and knees.
All of this, of course, will be pay-per-view, and the proceeds will be used to buy a generator that will be wheeled house-to-house and plugged directly into the cable outlets of all those retards whose zombied broadband accounts make all this fucking spam possible. One by one, we will cause their pc's to explode into screaming, flaming shrapnel, and as they run screaming from their homes we will fling warm gobs of shit at them and pelt their homes with Debian distros.
So let it be written, so let it be done.
Shotgun slugs, to every spammer's head.
I'm surprised that no email spammer has been killed yet. Well, I heard about two who were involved in criminal dealings apart from spamming, but the murder was apparently over the other criminal dealings rather than from someone fed up with the spamming (note that it should never be surprising to find that an email spammer is also involved in other illegal dealings, as all spammers are criminals by definition).
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
It's at time like this we wish we have Terminator (TM)...
"Scott Richter, you have been targeted for termination..."
"Scott Richter, I'll be back..."
I frequently see The Daily Show posted on suprnova... anyone know what date to look for?
- Posted via Danger HipTop2 / T-Mobile Sidek!ck II -
"It feels like a temporary ceasefire in a vicious war that to most of us seems to be a stalemate."
The real question is who is winning. The spammers, especially due to the "can spam act"
Unless the virus takes down a major website, like Yahoo or CNN.com or a government website, the feds could care less. They don't care if a known criminal hijacks your computer and uses it for criminal activity, so long as no businesses or government agencies are inconvenienced.
Think I'm joking? Look up reports from people who have reported known computer breakins to the FBI. The FBI ignores them, the police ignore them.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
I myself would have no problems with my conscience in killing him. The only thing that would deter me is that murder is illegal. Likewise Alan Ralsky, Eddy Marin, and all the penis pill gangers led by Elmar Brunenieks in Eastern Europe.
In some ways (SOME!) I actually see spam as something that could be useful ... in a weird way. See, I classify spam as good, bad, and ugly. Ugly is easy, it's the viruses and phishers. Bad is the stuff with forged headers, misleading subject lines (account canceled, your resume). These two deserve no sympathy whatsoever. They are fraudulent and ought to be dropped in the ocean and fed to the fish.
... 80% is pure trash, with invalid users (I have my own domain), non-ascii in the subject. The rest I have to look at sooner or later just to see what should not have been classified as spam.
But the other spam, well, calling it good is pretty optimistic. I would say only that it is not as bad as the other stuff. When I see a spam whose subject is actually correct, even if for viagra or teenage nympho web sites, my blood pressure doesn't get quite as high as with the fraudulent stuff.
But I get 400-500 a day
You know, if I only got 10 legit spams a day, real advertising for real products, it wouldn't be so bad. But these idiots send it to webmaster, postmaster, root, faxmaster, every sort of imagineable name, and that puts it in the bad category, it is fraudulent. No way has any admin account ever signed up for anything. And sending spam to the admin accounts is just plain deceitful, instantaneous self-indictment of their fraudulent intentions.
I wish spam actually were a useful, cheap advertising medium. I might actually see something once in a while that was useful. But hundreds a day, for pills or porn or loans, that is not useful.
Infuriate left and right
I use TMDA. Sure, it sends one e-mail back to the alleged sender of the message, attempting to verify their authenticity, but it's effective. I went from ~1000 spam messages a day, and a virtually unusable e-mail account, to 0 spam messages a day. And to anyone that worries about the complexity of TMDA from the end user's point of view -- my own 80 year old grandmother figured out how to get an e-mail to me by following TMDA's instructions. Then I whitelisted her... oops :-)
using Mercury Mail.
I have my own custom software that rips through all the e-mails and yanks out the links along with the subject, from and to. I then manually update the filter.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Oh, and your estimates of the waste of energy involved in spam are off by several orders of magnitude. Back of envelope calculations based on incoming mail volume, power consumption (which I've measured), and cluster size has 100,000 emails per day costing at least 10KWhr, and that's just on the receiving mail server cluster (it would be lower without redundancy, of course). Once you add in the sender and all intermediate hops I wouldn't be surprised if that figure doubled. And that's just the beginning; of all network services we run, email is by far the greatest suck of money, brains, and time.
Before you claim free speech in defense of spam again, perhaps you should spend some quality time with systems and network engineers, and see how un-free this "free speech" really is. I'd be glad to do so myself over the telephone ... I assume given your argument you do take collect calls from everyone, right?
This is just yet another popular media article where AOL and MS are suggested to be "good" guys in the war on spam. I wish the popular media would state the real facts:
- AOL only considers spam a high priority problem when AOL accounts *receive* spam
- AOL considers it a low priority or someone else's problem when AOL accounts *send* spam
- AOL snail junk mails offers for up to 1099 hours $free$ online for spammers to issue spam from
- MS considers spam a high priority problem only when MSN/Hotmail account *receive* spam
- MS provides free hotmail accounts for spammers to issue spam from and are slow to react to reports of abuse
- MS considers *ALL* email addresses as having opt-in for MS bCentral.com email until they opt-out (despite there being no actual opt-in request)
AOL, Hotmail and MS-bCentral account for around 10% of the spam I get. If MicroSoft and AOL really consider spam a problem, why don't they get a little more responsive to all they dish out?? Why is it they expect the rest of the Internet to be responsive to their whining instead of following the AOL/MS example of being unresponsive a**holes?
Email is a powerful communication medium.
Without my filter rejecting 99% of everything I get, email would be useless to me. I would have closed my account and gone back to using the telephone. Spam is destroying a useful thing.
I do get junk mail. The ratio is much, much lower, and it is easily dealt with within the overhead time of going to the mailbox in the first place. Plus, it's targetted. I get things I might be interested it. I even use the pizza coupons sometimes. The Spams I get that I might be remotely interested in are few and far between. Plus, if you send certain things in the mail, the postal inspectors will come lock you up. I get all sorts of illegal things through spam.
Hell, I agree the junk mail/spam is annoying, but there has been talk of PHYSICAL VIOLENCE in this discussion. Obviously you jest, but put things in perspective.
You think I jest? I did a very quick calculation, and came up with several hundred dollars a year I lose to spam, in the hours it takes to delete it all. These assholes are taking my time to get rich, and I get nothing in return. Parasites deserve to die. Welfare mothers contribute more to society.
Unfortunately, unlike the spammers, I obey the law, so I can't do anything but blacklist them.
Nice TROLL!!
What's the future of spamming? There's enough effort now being expended that spamming won't continue. So where's the future? What's the sustainable model?
A lot of bad shit happens in this world. For some reason, it never makes the front page. Hell, it's unusual for it to make any page in the US papers.
What's the story on 9/11? Sounds like the US really fucked up. We knew about the threat in advance. Just didn't respond to it. You can read all about it in the UK papers, back long before the US papers picked up the story...
What about that drug raid at a high school a few months back. High school kids handcuffed and thrown on the ground with a gun to their head if they didn't "cooperate" fast enough? Over a hundred kids abused. Video footage available. No drugs found...
The list goes on and on. Ashcroft's porn views. The "lets confiscate all their property and drive them out of business" technique for suing companies. IRAQ. (Need I say more?) What about that guy who spoke against invading IRAQ, and was courtmatialled for it. Or the recent decision to allow arbitrary searches (withOUT cause) of gas tanks belonging to citizens, including removing them from the vehicle by underpaid, underskilled government employees. The Patriot Act? How the Patriot Act II was slipped through congress? Or the efforts currently underway to re-active the draft in 2005?
IN THE US, WE HAVE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS. But that only holds true when you own the press.
EVENTUALLY, INEVITABLY someone will discover spam as a means of publishing "alternative" viewpoints. Probably with google-style text ads. And they'll make a mint...
Spamming is very impolite. The objections aren't really about electricity, or even bandwidth and disk space (for which the costs do begin to mount up) or even the time it takes (which can be a serious imposition.)
The core objection is about impoliteness. Spammers are _very_ impolite on am immense scale. A little bit of impoliteness annoys you. A person pumping out a million pieces of impoliteness an hour...well, that adds up to genuine rage. Especially when it is clear that he knows he is annoying you and hopes you don't care, which is the case with the guy hoping that v1@gr@ will slip past your spam filter.
There's a limit to how loud one is allowed to speak. Beyond that, one is disturbing the peace. A violation of politeness becomes a crime. It's unfortunate when we have to regulate politeness, and it's unfortunate that you can't play your stereo as loud as you'd like, but that's how we live together.
"Courtesy is the lubricant of social interaction," Heinlein said. Spammers are sand in those gears, and that grit is annoying out of proportion to how much actual damage it does.
Is violence justified? No, but I do have to keep reminding myself of that.
Our plan is to sue those companies which are pitching products that will make them more amenable to suit in California, and that may have some assets to go after. I am thinking the companies that are pitching mortgage loans ("Mor|tgage rates tumble - Refinance today ozg w9l") and insurance are prime targets. I realize, of course, that these companies may not be sending out the spam themselves, but I really don't care. If these companies are marketing themselves so irresponsibly, they are just as culpable as if they were pressing the "send" button. Through the discovery process, I certainly do plan on finding out who is pressing the "send" button.
Not being an uber-geek, but only a humble lawyer, this is the role I can play. And I must express my appreciation to /.ers who have inspired me. I plan on keeping a Slashdot journal of the process.
No Inflation Taxation without Representation
>Surprisingly the anti-spammers didn't tear Richter to pieces with their bare hands
Why would they? He keeps them in business. Anti-spam is big money. Without spammers, they're out of a job.
* get a free domain so that it's easy for people to find this & so that it won't cost you
* don't have any email addresses [or as few as possible], so that it is easy to reject spam
* list their credit card info & banking info, if possible
* list their phone numbers if possible
* list their fax numbers if possible
* make the whole thing searchable, in case somebody wants to verify whether or not a particular person is a spammer
testing out my trending skills
I'm amazed that his consistant lies and illegal activities haven't caught up with him yet:
Heck, I have one client that gets 20 spams a day (to a single account, harvested from the website, of course) just from OptInRealBig.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
I don't consider it flamebait. I strongly disagree with the post, but I feel it should be discussed.
Instead of requesting that it be modding it down I'll take the honorable route and address the point that was made...
First of all, a lot of email users still pay for their online time. Other users have bandwidth limits on their accounts - this includes quite a few cable modem users. One is paying by the minute to read email (or do anything else), and the other (a larger group) risks overrunning their bandwidth quota and incurring bandwidth hog charges. Spamming is not unlike telemarketers calling people's cell phones, in both of those cases.
Second of all, spammers use huge amounts of ISP bandwidth, which costs the ISP but is not reimbursed by the spammer. This is not unlike stealing free TV ad time.
Spamming is also not unlike someone intruding on your property and harassing you with Herbalife products.. often despite a standing request that they not appear on one's property. Email is very much digital private property.
On those three points, I feel your POV is wrong.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
And IANAL, but what will the grounds for your suits be? And how will you determine, apparently before the fact, if they have assets to go after?
As I said, I'm not a lawyer but I am a Banker; there are lots of ways to hide assets in the US and even more if you start to park stuff offshore.
Is there alimit to the funds you plan to devote to this activity? I'm assuming (perhaps erroroneously) that you have to pay to file a lawsuit.
Don't take this the wrong way - I'm supportive, just curious how you folks plan to go about this.
A message from our sponsor
Not the spammer, but the advertiser who paying the spammer. The spammer hides his identity, but the spam has the url to the ones who bought the 'service'. Take the sites down who bought the spam and let them know why.
Everyone knows free speech is about being able to state opinions without government intrusion, not the ability to say whatever you want whenever and wherever you want. Outside of the classic "Shouting fire in a crowded theatre..." example, "commercial speech" is a concept that's been around for awhile. Look at legal cases surrounding the Do Not Call registry for more information.
Member of Orkut? Annoyed with spam?
YHBT. HAND.
have a gander at the 1st ammendment sometime
You are so fucking stupid, I can't believe you actually had the ability to log in here.
I don't know what scary-fuck world you live in, but the First Amendment says that people have the right to say what they want.
So it amazes me that you're blasting us for excersising our rights under the First Amendment.
Second, the first amendment DOES NOT grant someone the right to steal, or to harrass - so claiming that spammers are only excercising their rights is bullshit. They have the right to say whatever they want. They _DO NOT_ have the right to force me to pay for that right.
I agree the junk mail/spam is annoying, but there has been talk of PHYSICAL VIOLENCE in this discussion.
Yes - just that TALK - as in: we're excercising our first amendment rights. I thought that you support the first amendment? (Oh, sorry, my mistake - you believe that the first amendment says that it's acceptable to steal from people.)
You should do everybody a favor and blow your brains out. You're too stupid to live.
It's not free speech if I have to pay to receive it. In such cases it is theft.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I sat here at work reading this thread, seeing the comments of people equating spam to "junk mail", telemarketers, etc.
:)
Then I realized that the best comparison to spam are unsolicited(junk) faxes....
Spam costs real dollars to most people who recieve it. If your email provider is filtering spam for you, you are paying for that as well through your monthly charges. Next, some people will say how does it cost you real money by recieving spam? Most people pay a flat rate for unlimited use of the internet. Well, not all people have that,plus if you do have unlimited use - your ISP's operating costs are higher becasue of thier cost for bandwidth.. those costs are passed on to you.
Now, how does this tie into junk faxes ?? Because if you recieve an unsolicited fax, if costs you paper, ink/toner/film, and wear on your fax machine. That is why the U.S. government made sending junk faxes a crime.
Now maybe all these people that have been complaining that anti-spammers need to "grow up" "take a chill pill" etc. will have a better perspective
The program I wrote and use, CF13 archives all email from unapproved senders as spam (for easy subsequent perusal and deletion) that uses more than 'space' characters and alphabetic characters. Since spammers needs @, ., :, and / to spell out email addresses and urls properly, it is impossible for them to communicate. < and > are 'suppressed' as well making HTML impossible for spammers to send. If such spam eludes my program's header analysis heuristics, the above content heuristic will catch such messages and deem them as spam.
dotWOLRDS offers the ONLY true spam free sytem around using the new top level domains like ".usa" and ".us states" to do so. Many of these domain names are completely free eg .cool, .sexy, .geek etc etc so you can try everything out at no cost (for a change). All these domain names come with unlimited email addresses.
Press release links below for an outline of what is going on:
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2004/4/prweb117078.h tm
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2004/3/prweb110492.h tm
dotWORLDS offers the ONLY true spam free sytem around using the new top level domains like ".usa" and ".us states" to do so. Many of these domain names are completely free eg .cool, .sexy, .geek etc etc so you can try everything out at no cost (for a change). All these domain names come with unlimited email addresses.
Press release links below for an outline of what is going on:
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2004/4/prweb117078.h tm
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2004/3/prweb110492.h tm
Sorry, spammer, but that's not true.
Lets see what the courts say :
U.S. Federal Judge Stanley Sporkin:
[Spammers] have come to court not because their freedom of speech is threatened but because their profits are; to dress up their complaints in First Amendment garb demeans the principles for which the First Amendment stands.
Chief Justice Berger, U.S. Supreme Court:
Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit. We categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another. If this prohibition operates to impede the flow of even valid ideas, the answer is that no one has a right to press even good ideas on an unwilling recipient. The asserted right of a mailer, we repeat, stops at the outer boundary of every person's domain.
We got a law. Most of this spam is illegal. Everyone one of them has some way to contact the advertiser or it would be useless.
Except for a couple of actions by Yahoo, AOL, and earthlink, I havent heard about a single lawsuit or better yet criminal arrest. if no-one bothers to enforce the law, well duuuh... it doesn't work. I can't remember who the law lets initiate action (almost no-one as I recall) but who-ever was charged with doing needs to adopt a ZERO TOLERANCE policy and file about a hundred suits a day.
It would sure be nice if the government could get it's nose out of people's bedrooms and do something useful for a change.
J.
--Hi. I'm in Portland and it's raining. This appears to be a permanent condition.