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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."
A bunch of people talking about problems instead of fixing them.
Viagra, anyone?
Congratulations! you're not only completely missing the spammer who sent the emails, you're clogging up your ISPs (and everyone elses!) with MORE spam as you go!
Congratulations for being today's slashdot dumbfuck of the day. Your prize will be in your email (titled "free viagra" or some shit)
around are in nned Irc network. The YOU JOIN TODAY! chronic abuse of Recent article put
This article misses a few key points that are summed up nicely here (requires a click to accept policy and then REFOLLOW the link).The link to Spamhaus provided includes not only a brief description of his transgressions, but addresses from his domain registry etc. The one thing to remember about this person is that he has been careful to follow the first rule of spammers for years.
Rule 1: Spammers lie
Take a look at a few of his quotes here
An old BBC article on him is what scares me. "We are very excited [about the new CAN-SPAM law]," said Scott Richter, the president of OptInRealBig, an e-mail marketing firm in Westminster, Colo. "All of our clients had been worried about the California law. In the last two hours we have been booking a lot of orders for January." This guy is the kind of guy that would piss in your pool. Now that he's got the internet, he gets to piss on millions of people at a time.
Put things in perspective, and have a gander at the 1st ammendment sometime. Ok, so someone sent you an email, or a hundred, or a thousand. Deal with it. Email is a powerful communication medium. Usually, when someone invents a way to communicate easily (like the telephone, wireless telegraphy, paper, etc.) people use it. You know, like what it was invented for. It serves its purpose. That's the point of an email - to communicate an idea to someone else. Interestingly, that's the same idea behind snail mail. Email is a latecomer to the game. Do you get letters/bills/christmas cards in the mail? Yes? Then you would agree that it is a useful to get an idea to someone else. I would also assume that if you recieve that type of mail, you also recieve unsolicited snail mail. People call it junk mail. It's been around a while. To stop it would mean infringing on free speech. 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. I'm pulling this put of my ass, but I'm guessing that half a million emails would use maybe a one or two watts of energy, if that. Contrasting that, 500,000 paper junk emails -- even small ones -- would waste a not insignificant amount of life-sustaining, oxygen-producing pine trees.