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FTC Recommends Bounty on Spammers
joke-boy writes "AP reports that as part of the CANSPAM legislation, the FTC has issued a report recommending placing taxpayer-funded 6-figure bounties on spammers, much like the bounties placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted."
It's about fscking time.
Oh yeah. Now since the playing field is little even, let me get my catcher's mit.
Free XBox, PS2
Gurgh.
...when it's "wanted dead or alive". I'll get my gun and we'll go a-huntin'. HEE HAWW!!!!!!!
Now these bastard are gonna make *ME* rich!!!!
I'd be happy to do it for free. Better yet, I'll be happy to pitch in $100-200 for the next spammer over.
Surely there are things that money could be better spent on. Like say, the implementation of a new email protocol. Or (gasp!) things like Social Security or education.
Seriously, am I the only one thinking that this is just... awesome?
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Like a good caning or flogging plus prison time and life bankrupting fines and I'm sold on this!!!!
I think spamming should be stopped, but six figures is just too much. It'll probably just be given to Bill Gates to add to his collection.
Bounty is a good idea, but I was hoping for more of a Mad Max scenario. You know, 2 Men Enter... 1 (non-spamming) man leaves
Paladin, Have Gun, Will Travel
Anyone seen my jagged little pill?
This action will hurt consumers.
You see, now I'm going to have to increase the cost of my penis enlargement pills to cover the increased risk this represents.
Just tell me where I can donate to the bounties.
The following statement is false.
The previous statement is true.
Welcome to my world.
What about the people who are unknowingly sending spam from their cracked computers? Is this basically saying that there is a 6-digit bounty for the grandmother who doesn't know enough to keep her computer secure?
Six-figure incentives are the only way to persuade people to disclose the identity of co-workers, friends and others they know are responsible for flooding online mailboxes with unsolicited pitches for prescription drugs, weight loss plans and other products, according to an agency report Thursday.
I dont think spammers run around telling coworkers and relatives they send spam. These people keep to themselves.
How does that quote go? The only way for 3 people to keep a secret is if 2 of them are dead.
It works for crime because most criminals like to brag, no incentive to brag here.
I would love to make an addition to my pages that talk about hunting vermin, bats, rats, and squirrels that would be called Hunting Spammers
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Can A Bounty System Cure Spam?
Unlikely. But, if the law actually get's off it's ass and actually hands out fines, spammers might be more inclined to stick the equivalent of "this is spam" (the opt-out message, etc.), which could make filtering more effective.
Perhaps we should be fining the ISPs who happily let spam-servers loose on their network?
"It would promote vigilantism on the Net and it probably would not catch any bad guys," said Louis Mastria, spokesman for the Direct Mail Association
There are plenty of technically-skilled knowledgable people out there who might otherwise not have bothered, but who could probably track a few people down.
'the FCC has so much information on their identities that to get anymore would be useless.'
We don't care whether they're known or not. We just want to bankrupt them and get the money we have lost* due to spam.
--
* Most end-users don't lose money, but the amount of stress and anger caused to me by spam has probably shortened my lifespan, and can you put a price on that? --
9569643
Why make the taxpayers pay for cleaning up the internet of spam?
Make the spammers pay out the bounty. There's absolutely no reason to make taxpayers (you know, citizens) suffer and go further in debt (via the nation) for the crimes to humanity that spammers have perpetrated.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
1. I can think of a lot of different types of criminals that would deserve a six-figure bounty before a spammer.
2. Taxpayer funded? Bullshit. I don't care if it comes from a non-profit organization but there is absolutely no reason why taxpayers should have to fund six-figure bounties on the heads of people who cause an annoyance. Fuck, put it on Johovah's Witnesses first. I actually have to stand up to deal with them.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
Not to be negative, but I feel like this probably won't work.
I think a lot of spammers are out of the US, so it won't matter to them.
But even those that are in the US, are probably doing a fine job covering their tracks. They wouldn't put out the bounty if they could easily take care of the problem.
GMail invites for completed freeipods.com of
complete bullshit. Follow the trail of money, lock up their ability to perform commerce, and you shut down the spammers. Last thing we need is to fund a bunch of vigilantes.
Lawrence Lessig has been pushing a bounty system for spammers for a long time. See this Interesting People post, for example. He was still pushing the same concept recently at his talk at the Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (July 2004). I'm surprised that he isn't mentioned in TFA.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
I think that they determined that it would take $100,000 - $250,000 for people to turn in people that they knew were spamming, but according to the article: The FTC, in a report requested by Congress, did not take a position on whether such a system was a good idea. To me, that sounds like the refrained from recommending it.
I guess it's up to us to convince them that it's a good idea.
Note: they recommend that this money come from taxpayers, but in an effort to try to cut down on that, can I suggest we find another source of it? Perhaps we need to not only look to civil penalties from the spammers, but also from the ISPs who behave negligently toward spammers.
I'm sorry, but I find it a bit disturbing that the FTC is likening spammers to violent criminals. As much as we hate 'em, making such correlations is extreeeemely dangerous, and despite how much I hate spam, I'd rather have my money be spent on fixing the system so that it can't be manipulated instead of just finding the people that are manipulating it, because... once one goes down, there will be another to take his/her place.
[insert witty comment here]
I'd like the death penalty applied to all serial-spammer scum.
"When a ball dreams, it dreams it's a frisbee"
With $###,### who needs herbal viagra or the youngest hottest teens on the net!?!
we can shoot them when they flee?
Yeah baby! I can see a new career for me here.
Let's see, plastic cuffs, a box of 9mm ammo, oh, and a badge too! Oh boy! I can't wait to shoot some spammers in the back as they run away!
When there's a bounty on the advertisers who use the spammers, then we'll see a reduction in spam
If you forget about the future, the future will forget about you.
I for one would be happy to see my tax dollars go towards something I really care about as opposed to killing more brown people or helping ceos out with their yacht payments :-p
What I wouldn't give to be funny right now!
Here it is, a perfect set up for a comment that somehow involved Viagra-Town and Master-Blaster! It's so close I can almost smell it, but I just can't see it. Gaaah!
Sorry, I have a problem with that. We can easily raise millions in voluntary contributions for a Ralsky Kneecapping Fund.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Your post advocates a
( ) technical (x) legislative ( ) 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
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) 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
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
(x) 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
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) 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
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) 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:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
----
Also, finding spammers has never been a problem.
So is this one of those "Wanted: Dead or Alive" bounties?
EvilCON - Made Famous by
relatively speaking, 6 figures is just a drop in the bucket of social security.
i'd gladly cough up an extra dollar to the government (and im sure others would too!) if we can stop these idiots from continuing to flood our mailboxen.
Course I'll have to move to Florida.
Just as long as they don't decide to promote the system with spam. I can see my inbox now...
...ad infinitum.
"EZ money! Get $100,000 CASH NOW!!!--znsdfjk"
. . . so long as it's payable whether the spammer's delivered dead or alive. Preferably dead.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
I have, in the past, made a handful of comments w.r.t. the spam problem. After thinking about it for a bit, I've come to realize that the solution is not so much in applying new technology but applying new people.
Think about it: Right now, almost everything that lands in the spammer's inbox is signal because right now, no one in their right mind responds to offers for the hottest young teens on the net and herbal viagra. Thus, it's trivial for them to send out a hundred million e-mails and it's also easy to sort through the maybe one thousand people dumb enough to respond: It's almost ALL signal.
But, suppose that of those hundred million people, ten million clicked the link and a million responded. The S/N ratio goes from 10:1 to 1:1000 or 1:10000. It's no longer going to be economical for the spammer to sort through so much static. It should be possible to respond to, perhaps, 1/10 or 1/20 of the spam you get. It won't take much... Just something like "I'm very intrigued by your offer. Please tell me more." You can't use a computer script to generate responses, because they can easily be filtered out just like you filter 99% of spam. You'll maybe spend 30 minutes a day to respond to 60 spams.
Before long, the bastards will spend so goddamn much time sorting through the static that they won't be able to send more! The only problem is, what do we do to reedcuate the millions of idiots (ie the ones who create the problem in the FIRST PLACE!!!) who are (mostly) trained to pound the delete key?
....confiscation and public destruction of zombie computers. Then just *perhaps* enough people would bingo to what they are running and how they are running stuff on their computers to treat them with a little more intelligence, and they in turn might go seek out those who supplied them with inadequate products that are sold with no warranties, the vendors and software makers who ship these easily zombified boxes.
It's way past time products that come brand new pre-borked got recalled and the vendors ordered to "not do that".
We as consumers and the government wouldn't put up with "acme doors" that failed to swing open and closed, failed to lock adequately, and anyone could open with a gentle shove when it was allegedly latched, but with computers connected to the internet they can ship totally insecure crap and profit from it to the tune of hundreds of billions with little recourse for the consumer when they get owned or the dang thing fails to function as advertised.
And really, the thought of a legion of whizzed off grandmothers who had their zombie computers confiscated descending on a computer and software marketing weasel convention and laying waste with brooms is rather a nice image.
YOUNG MAN *WHACK* DON'T YOU EVER *WHACK* SELL THAT SHODDY MERCHANDISE AGAIN!! *WHACK WHACK WHACK*
People spamming just to be turned in, doing a bit of jail time or paying fines or whatever (after all it's not like you killed someone or stole anything etc.) and then splitting the bounty with whoever turned them in.
I smell a scam...
If having to occasionally delete a junk message that thunderbird missses can save taxpayers those six figures, then I think I can put up with what good filtering has made into a trivial annoyance.
Well, I am just outraged! Why does the FTC want me to put paper towels on spammers? Are they going to microwave them or something? Furthermore, why does it have to be Bounty, in particular? I know it's supposed to be the, "quicker picker-upper", but, come on, can I at least use a bargain brand like Marcal? This is just insane...
What?!?! A reward offered by the government for acts deemed beneficial to the state...?
Oh.
Nevermind...
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
You know, sometimes it's good to take a step back from our collective geekdom and look at the bigger picture. I'm thinking of this from my Mom's perspective, a woman who once didn't know what the O and I on opposide ends of a power switch meant: is this a sign of the times or what?
We just comapred spammers to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted. Spammers are, on some level, comparable to druglords and serial killers. Isn't that true, though? Especially druglords. I can so picture a spammer sitting back with his small army of a spammed-up crew protecting him.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
It's spammers the FTC warns
Their business will surely be torn
Yet if this becomes law
It will be the last straw
How the hell will we get daily porn?
I wonder if it wouldn't be better (certainly more efficient) if large ISP's gave bounties for identifying spammers on their lines. At least it would cut out a little good ol' government waste.
the last thing we need is a bunch of geeks running around with sniffers and spoofers thinking they are cowboys (er, spammerboys).
StrayByte.Net
Let the finger pointing begin!! Seriously though, who is going to sort the noise from the signal??
And of course the weasels from the Direct Marketing Association don't want this to happen. They're the same sacks of sh*t who fought long & hard against the Do-Not-Call list. Imagine that, they don't want spammers turned in either.
1. Contact the site advertised by the spam.
2. Agree to split the $100K 50/50 with the site owner if he fesses up on who he paid to send the spam. Odds are it was a hell of a lot less than $50K.
3. Profit!
4. Repeat!
Of course, there is no guarantee the advertising site won't cut you out of the loop...
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
This sounds like a great plan to me. Catching spammers isn't easy, and requires specialised skills that I'm guessing the government is fairly short on. An amount like this makes it viable for an appropriately skilled person to make a living out of it. Spend 3 months full time hunting down a spammer & putting a case together, and get $100K. Sounds like a good living to me. It's probably far cheaper than getting the government to do it - a motivated individual will always work much faster that a salaried person in a large organisation.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
Read their mails and look at their sites... If everyone did that the bandwidth costs alone would cripple their buisness and would more than likely put off anyone hosting them.
So, do they need 51% of the corpse or will just a head on a pike do?
1. Send out 1 million spam messages
2. Get my mother to turn me in
3. I'm ordered to pay a $15,000 fine, or something like that
4. My mom gets $100,000 and gives me half
5. PROFIT!!!
6. Go to step 1
Notice the distinct lack of a mystery step in this plan.
So the only way this can possibly work is if the fines/penalties levied against spammers exceed the value of the bounty.
Your company advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (x) 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
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) 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
( ) 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
( ) 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
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) 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
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid company for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
___ This sig is in boldface to emphasize its importance!
Ref: A/c # 1072514588 of Mr. Steven Williams.
RE: APPLICATION FOR RELEASE OF FUNDS.
Consider my request! Sir.
Mr. Steven Williams Levitan was my relative, who died in the plane crash of Ethiopian airlines, flight No.801, along with some of the passengers and crew on board.
On checking the various records of my relative, I his brother, Mr. Benson. Realized that he maintained an account with a bank with the account number! A/c # 1072514588
Some of the deceased's and managers suggest that there was a credit balance of the sum of (USD$20,000.000.00) (Twenty Million, United States Dollars) in the account.
As next of kin, I would now like to submit my application to your esteemed bank for a release of my brother! Sir Steven. Into your bank, in the concernment of your bank, for my safety purpose
Sir, kindly consider my information's, let me keep you in tough, if you need anything, please do Contact me. Hope you wouldn't mine if provides some back up my claim.
You may note that these funds are needed to pay off Mr. El Mir Hsu Ben's liabilities, and also to complete some of unfinished urgent projects started by Mr. El Mir Hsu Ben. Therefore, I would request you to please process my claim and release the funds as early as possible.
Thanks for your co-operation.
Yours faithfully
Mr.Beson Williiams
- Spammers use stolen resources (hijacked zombie computers, DSL/cable connections) in order to further their business.
- Spammers do not seek consent before bombarding email systems with their marketing information.
- Spammers generally disrespect requests for them to stop sending unsolicited email, and in fact often send more mail after such requests (selling 'confirmed' addresses to colleagues)
- Spammers deliberately conceal their location of 'business', mislead consumers in their 'marketing campaigns' and forge their identities.
It's good to see these people increasingly treated as what they really are, criminals that have been harming society and getting away with it because our current laws are too slow to catch up. What they're doing is not only annoying, but harmful to innocent peoples' systems.I agree.
Further, I am very curious as to how many bounty hunters will have will and/or the ability to get foriegn spammers to US Courts.
This, of course, speaks nothing of the spammers who are already here.
Spammers being actively hunted in the post Soviet Bloc countries, China, Nigeria, etc would be a very interesting thing to see if it *ever* happened, which I sincerely doubt.
The war on spam reminds me of the war on drugs.
And, IIRC, the war on drugs has yet to be won.
Donald Rumsfeld, a man I am not very fond of, did correctly point out in my opinion that the war on drugs is a demand problem.
So is Spam.
As long as spam is profitable, it *will* continue.
This will mainly serve to make the FTC look good while doing little (VERY little) to solve the problem.
Our tax dollars at waste - again.
.
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
$ (figure 1) 1 (Figure 2) 0 (Figure 3) 0 (Figure 4) . (Figure 5) 0 (Figure 6) 0 (Figure 7)
So you see $100.00 is seven figures
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
I got an idea: Let's announce the bounty to the world by sending emails to everyone we can scrape an email address from.
Table-ized A.I.
I would opt for DEAD!
...... Reply to Spam? Click on the links? In order to cost them bandwidth and make their inboxes too noisy for them to conduct business properly??
I'm convinced the people posting these messages are themselves spammers. This is the most inane thing I've ever heard.
Yes, and the way to make advertisers go away is buying lots and lots of their sodas, beers, cars, etc whatever.
Oh and of course, we know that every spammer users a legit return address so hitting reply will, of course, go back to them.
No way.
IMHO, printed junk mail is much more agravating, because it is wasteful. It costs money to print, money to send, and a vast majority of the time winds up in the bin without much of a look. And it wastes materials, paper if nothing else but will now often go up to an eye-catching (?) CD in a shiny package (hi AOL!). Now we're tossing out aluminum, shrinkwrap, and a small disc of plastic. That's the kind of thing that should have a bounty attached to it.
Perhaps we should be fining the ISPs who happily let spam-servers loose on their network?
That's the first time in 3 months I've seen the word "loose" used in a context other than a misspelling of "lose." Can I shake your hand?
Their punishment should be to swallow their entire stock of enlargement pills. At least we will finally know if they work or not.
Table-ized A.I.
Spammers are, on some level, comparable to druglords and serial killers
When's the last time a spammer shot and killed a 12 year old for not delivering his e-mail? Or closer to the point, the government should not be spending tax money to protect people who don't have the common sense to not click on junk mail on their employer's time. But, whoops, that's too much common sense for our bureaucratic nightmare that is the federal government.
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
who claim to be calling for the faternal order of police or some crap like that and then try to sell you something once you've given your $20 to 9/11 fund
when they ban enctryption only criminals wi$21*J *#JF$%!@#$':
As you may know the CANSPAM legislation now includes a SIX FIGURE bounty on spammers. I am willing to share with you a list of known spammers for a paltry sum of $US10. Please send money to...
skribe
Blog
these are all names of a major email list distributor in my state. I have been tracking them down. My father is good friends with the attorney general; who has agreed to assist in an effort to end his company's mass email marketing.
;)
If you care to follow, read my blog here
I'll go ahead and claim the bounty on this one
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Also, because what will become the worst of the spammers (Big Biznuss) will never be prosecuted anyway.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
What about the people who are unknowingly sending spam from their cracked computers? Is this basically saying that there is a 6-digit bounty for the grandmother who doesn't know enough to keep her computer secure?
... it will most likely lead to that person being sued and the state would have to PROVE that he's a spammer... otherwise, no bounty.
A tip-off will not lead to immediate punishment for spamming
I see no other way for this to work, really.
Spammers are scum, that have little morals and are only motivated by money correct? Well, people tend to hang around those that are like them. Spammers aren't going to hang around you or me because they'd be likely to get beat the fuck up. It's a fairly safe bet that at least some, if not most, of their acquaintences are light in the morals department and heavy in the greed.
So suddenlt there's a multi hundred thousand dollar reward for direct testimony against a spammer. One of these individuals then thinks "Hmmm, I don't really care about this guy, but I can get a shitload of money by turning him in. What the hell." So they do it.
It really does work in many cases espically in circles that lack morals. Those people that a smapper deals with don't turn them in because what's the point? However if the point is $300,000 or something, they are much more likely to.
Que the Steal Horse music. Im feeling a 80s glam rock mood coming on!
If you can take a picture of yourself smoking a pipe, with a safari hat on, resting your feet on a bearskin rug... and in the background is the head of a spammer mounted on the wall, well then...
I will send some money towards _that_ bounty!
What's to keep spammers from turning in other spammers? Then the spammers get MORE money.... OUR money!
Even if the 6 figures is half a million a shot, and they give out a hundred rewards a year (which would mean there'd be like no spamemrs left) that's still peanuts. Each F/A-22 in the initial run is likely to cost $200million. Cut just one of those and that's enough money to pay that optimisticly high bounty figure 4 times over.
Implementing a new e-mail protocol is a loser since you have to get everyone to use it. Sure I can make secure e-mail, it doesn't take a genius to do it, however the problem is it is worthless unless it can communicate with insecure e-mail since I'm not going to move my servers over to something no one can talk to, that's the whole point of e-mail.
Also realise there is likely to be recovery here to a degree. The government seizes all thigns and money you gained via the comission of your crime if you are convicted. If spammers really do manke the money they claim, the government gets to take all that away from them (you aren't allowed to profit from crime).
It's worth trying at least. IF they really do start paying out tens of millions per year, maybe we need to rethink it but I have a feeling it'll be 2-3 million, if that. Worth it, if it cuts back spam.
All assets gained in a criminal enterprise are seized if you are convicted. Also spamming caires a fine, as well as jail time. So they are going to pay for it, just not up front (justice doesn't work that way).
The fact is that major corporations, like the illegal drug dealers, outsource the most dangerous of their illegal activities to small time criminals. The discounts these small time criminals provide are the smallest part of the benefit. The real benefit comes from a judicial system that allows Wal*Mart to hire illegal aliens at wages that do no meet the federal standards, but not be responsible for the legal consequences. This shifting of responsibility away from corporation appears to the primary purpose of the modern executive. And therefore the livelihood of the million dollar executive depends on the fiction that he or she is not responsible for anything separated by the smallest sliver of paper. Even if it requires that the we assume the executive is the stupidest person in the planet, pride in ones job and oneself has become so irrelevant that stupidity is the preferable interpretation.
This means that the spammers we are likely to catch will be replaced tomorrow, created by the corporate dual obsession with criminal behavior and outsourcing risk. They at the same time need to protect themselves from lawsuits, but also need to sell prescription drugs to kids. There is always another person who wants to earn a buck, and the pushers are always willing to set up another patsy to take the fall.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
with a reward in mind I'm sure more programmers will not only learn to fight spammers, but effectively track them down. only problem is won't it be like the whack-a-mole with one popping up after the other? still, would be nice to see some of them get their due.
CV*(B&
free ipod and free gmail!
Do you need a new mortgage? Do you want to earn your d1pl0ma? Do you want a Nigerian penis? Send $1 to:
Sincerely,Darl McBride
IT's testimony to bring charges and convict. I mean spamhaus can say someone is a spammer, that isn't enough to get a subpoena much less a conviction.
What they want is someone who has direct knowledge of the spammer's illegal activities to come forward and testify. If I know Alan Rasky's been spamming because I've heard about it from an ISP, no good. If I know he's been spamming because I've been to his house, heard him talk about it, and seen the servers, that's what they want.
Convicting someone is different from knowing they are doing something. The OCCB division of a police force knows about basically every mobster in a city. They even generally know what they do. However knowing they are a hitman is real different from having evidence that hold up in court they are. If Joe Blow says "hey that guy's a well knwon hitman" they say "Tell us something we don't know". If Joe Blow says "I saw that guy kill someone" they break out the recorder and take a statement.
Be a shame to have to lug whole carcasses around.
why didn't this happen earlier? only problem is the ones that get prosecuted only get a slap on the wrist! we need better laws to go with things like this...
CB#~
free ipod and free gmail!
They should pay for it from the anti-terrorism funds that have already been allocated. After all, what is the largest flow of unregulated information into the US? Spam of course. They already talked about looking for steganography in pornography but sending secret messages to unidentifiable recipients using spam would be childsplay. Millions would receive the spams so the terror cell members couldn't be identified and the sender is virtually untraceable because of using rooted zombies. And due to the infinite variety of spam, what G-man could determine which spams even contain messages?
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Now our tax dollars are going to go towards keeping our penises small. Great.
Sounds like a nice supplement to my income I only need to bust one a year to make a really nice living. Bring it on I am more than ready!
Got Code?
In other news, G4/Tech TV announced plans for a reality TV show that trails SPAM bounty hunters as they search for their pimpily prey.
Or just the pelt?
-- Alastair
Turnn ln Spaamer$ t0dayy!! f0Rr Qu1cck ca$$h!!
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
From the above link:
What we really need to do is figgure out how to make it so that spam isn't profitable. Ever.
That's easy.
Shut off email.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
...dead or alive?
This could be a good thing in some ways but in others it could be really bad. There are many "spam" services that people subsribe to that could be screwed over in situations like this. I know of a person that runs a subscription based mass email service. Hes constantly being called a spammer by the people that subscribe to his emails. Even though often he can proove that they have subscribed to the lists. (eg subscribe then a confirmation email then a response that then they go onto a grey list for a few months after no complaints they are in the white list as a valid user) hes fanatical about how careful he is with his list and his mails all abide by the CAN SPAM stuff.
Um, not all spammers reside in the US. What elite strike force is going to bring them to justice? Navy SEALs? No, this is a poor use of my already overtaxed paycheck when simpler (cheaper) methods will do the job. And is it just me, or isn't 6-figures a tad on the steep side for snitch work? Something about this reeks... Like another group of people looking to stick their hands in the taxpayer pot of money.
And of course this all leads to another question-- If spam is so despised and so much of a problem, why do you need a six figure prize award to get the ball rolling? Really now, I'm serious. You'd think people would be jumping in line like a "do not call list" to shut these people down for free. They aren't freakin drug dealers, for cryin out loud.
Something is very very rotten here. Not sure what it is, but it's stale, rotten and decaying like a mofo.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Bounties are not the reason!
I suggest you read Slashdot
How do I find one of those people who will tell their passwords for chocolate?
There's a whole spammer infrastructure, a constellation of crooked companies that make profitable spamming possible. They're not hard to find. Most of them are committing felonies. So why aren't we hearing about arrests once a week or so, instead of once a year? Most of the players are actually in the US or Canada, even though they may seem to be offshore.
Just as an exercise, I looked at the last spam I received. It was a porno spam, linking to a web site in China. But on the payment page, the form submission was to a server in Canada, connected to Bellnexxia. That's fairly common. Often, spammers don't want to process the payments through the anonymous crooked ISP that serves the data.
What's really needed is to apply pressure to the banking system to shut down the "high risk third party billing" operations upon which spammers rely for credit card processing. A few money laundering cases would clear up that issue.
Worst spammers are big business? Hardly. Ask anyone if thier email is full of unsolicited GE and Chevy ads.
Everyone I ask says no, its all pr0n, mortgages, male enhancement and bootleg software offers.
"I forgot my mantra."
Tapayers should fund the bounties to get it started, then it should be replenished by fines on the spammers, keeping only a minimum of the budget paid by taxes. That will motivate bounty hunters and bureaucrats alike.
--
make install -not war
California had a state law that was to go into effect where citizens can collect fines from spammers (at least in state). Unfortunately the so-called "CAN Spam Act," nullified the state law. So the CAN Spam Act actually encouraged, not discouraged SPAM. The members of Congress are no doubt technically ignorant and easily presuaded by lobbyists (especially the Direct Marketing Association) that I don't see much hope from the old geezers (no disrespect :-).
(I'm new here so I don't know if this has been posted on every spam thread)
It seems to me that the only decent technical solution to this is something like Hash Cash, which has the end result of restricting the amount of mail a computer can send per unit of time . . . at least, it would be a good addition to any existing measures. How practical is this? Would it scale properly? Etc.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
Here in Rhode Island, we used to have a bounty on woodchucks at 25 cents. Indeed, the bounty was on woodchuck noses, since each woodchuck has only one.
I suggest that we do the same for spammers, and since spammers are largely male, I think that a different part of the anatomy should be used, though that part of the anatomy might need a magnifying glass.
--
BMO
Don't forget Col. Mubutu and his money laundering - that's important too!
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
At first I thought, "why waste the time when we have things like Eliza to do it for you?"
/dev/null and I haven't seen any false positives in the past six months. I get plenty of false negatives but the hits are ready to feed to a script, and I'm too lazy to respond to them myself.
Then I thought, "that's too funny, somebody must've done it already," and, yeah, here's the perl script.
You can't use a computer script to generate responses, because they can easily be filtered out just like you filter 99% of spam. You'll maybe spend 30 minutes a day to respond to 60 spams.
I suspect if you built up the vocabulary well enough, and, more importantly, use the content of the message with a word rank algorithm and then do some thesaurus lookups and stemming, maybe using WordNet you'd have something that would be at least as unique as what any given subset of 10000 people would come up with.
I'm intrigued because I have a good enough ruleset now that any SpamAssassin score over 10 goes to
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
It's all about enforcement.
It's a sad day when one branch of the government offers a bounty to get another branch of the government off their asses to enforce laws that have been on the books for decades.
Spammers break laws. Felony laws. 95% of all spammers break serious laws that could have them put in prison.
We don't need people to report spammers. All someone has to do is put an unpatched windows pc on the net for a few hours and they'll be a zombie pc and start collecting info and able to identify the spammers. In a day you can have a hundred charges of computer tampering.
Think about this come election time. We have a government that has been neutered by big business that has little concern for anything which doesn't directly affect big, multinational corporations that contribute to their campaign coffers. The apathy of the public is responsible for allowing these losers in office.
most spam doesn't come from inside the states anyway
where is the enforcement power
How about legalizing (or promising to look the other way) vigilante attacks against spam sites? If they give a phone number, set up an auto-dialer. If it's a website, launch a DoS attack. If there's a physical address, mail them a bomb. If this stuff was all legal, I guarantee the problem would solve itself.
Seriously... bounties that are marked "dead or alive" are far more effective.
BTW, editors, why don't you guys RTFA once in a while. The FTC is not recommending anything. All they did was figure out what type of reward would be needed should such a system be implemented. From the article itself:
Way to completely miss the point of the article.Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
"Further, I am very curious as to how many bounty hunters will have will and/or the ability to get foriegn spammers to US Courts.
You are free to use any methods necessary, but I want them alive...no disintegrations!
You're using her as bait, Master!
How about something that works: Fight SPAM
[blue] - The Ministry of Information approved this message...
Soon, they'll get desperate. Times will be tough, they'll be like the corner pusher when the heat is on.
If there is a god, in a few months time, spammers in Florida will be running one another down at the stip malls in their over-leveraged SUVs. Cheap nylon button ups sticking to the hood ornaments like so much tinsle on a Land Rover Christmas tree.
I long for this future...
-- RLJ
"Dead or Alive", right?
How about a reduced bounty on the ISPs that knowingly host spammers?
I am MuchTall
If they only had $1Million dollars to spend on this, I think that they'd be far better off to give 100 people a $10K bounty than giving 10 people a $1K bounty.
The one thing that I'd do, however, is allow multiple people to get bounties of up to $10K on one person up to a maximum of $100K.. it'd be a real bitch doing 2 months of work and finding out you're only getting $500 becsuse 20 people nailed the same bastard.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
"Dead or alive", perhaps? Sounds good to me! Pass me the 30.06, I'm off to bag me a spammer or two.
Let's face it, spammers are a PITA. Why not just invoke the old west style justice? Bringing in a head works for me. :-) Hang 'um, or better yet chop off their fingers so they have to type with their nose... 10K a finger, second offense is burning their eyes out of their sockets.
Seriously though, just imagine the extra bandwith that we could enjoy without spam. I remember accessing the inet in the "early" days via a VAX system, ftp was it folks... but it was way cool!
Just rambling...
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
My new low-paying job is taxed enough as it is after my high-paying job was outsourced to India.
Can't we simply roll-back some of the taxcuts for multi-millionaires to pay for this?
Better yet, lets find out who is actually gaining wealth from all the money outflow ($200 billion) to fund Iraq's "nation-building" and tax those lucky bastards since they're rolling in money right now.
If the situation were reversed, I wouldn't mind giving up part of my millions to put bounties on spammers...
I spent all my mod points already.
Anyway, if molecular manufacturing became a safe, viable, reality, the food/clothing/shelter problem of society at large will be taken care of without need for money, the key to all of capitalism's strengths and weaknesses.
Federal programs are available to you! You can make THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS with a simple email or phone call!
1. Find a spammer
2. Turn him in
3. Profit!!!
The Federal Government wants this message to get out to all InterWeb users! So send this mail to all your friends and family!
davejenkins.com |
If I knew where those fuckers were hiding I'd have already offed them--no reward necessary. I don't like perfect strangers asking me if "[my] dick is too small". Let's see if they think my dick is too small when I bend them over and shove it up their asses.
With sheer numbers alone, we can all chip in a dollar per slashdotter and easily offer a million dollar bounty on the spammer of our choice. I say we skip the FTC middle men, and hire our own million dollar hitmen to take these spammers out...
So is Spam.
As long as spam is profitable, it *will* continue.
the problem is the scale of spam.
even if one person out of 4 billion responds to a spam, the spam is still profitable.
the less people who respond to spam, the more spam these criminals will send.
the only way to stop spamming is to make it too expensive to operate. huge $$ penalties for spamming is one way to accomplish this.
of course, the laws actually have to be enforced. allowing law enforcement to sieze property of spammers would provide plenty of incentive to prosecute them.
Is that dead or alive?
[*] Defined as the maximum lifespan ever attained by a human being plus twenty years
5. Spammers sell fraudulent 'products' and 'services', or pitch outright criminal acts like investment scams / stock pump & dump / ponzi schemes / etc.
www.freeipods.com is the same company that does freeflatscreens etc. ;)
All these sites are registered by gratisnetwork.com who's website proudly boasts
"We utilize a number of proven online customer acquisition methods including website placement, email marketing, co-registration, and lead generation."
ie. sign up and you instantly "opt-in" to recieve many "special offers". I don't think an inbox full of spam is worth a free whatever. Maybe we should dob in the guy offering gmail accounts for helping the Spam gangs blossom
RebateFX.com - Spread rebates for Forex traders
Interesting how the FTC will create bounties on spammers, but have given little more than lip service to corporate crime. I guess it's no wonder since the same big business stiffs who commit the crimes also primarily fund power in the government. I, for one, would like to see these bounties offered to everyday employees of corporations who can provide proof their coworkers corporate crimes (the one's that *acutally* take our and the government's money!!!!). It's pretty crappy that the government will get the IT industry workforce to hunt down their own kind (albeit a crappy kind), and do the FTC's job for them. But, of course, big businesses are the most financially indebted to eliminating spam. So it seems until we create a booming accounting industry and have a lot of accounting nerds with nothing better to do with their time, we'll have to wait for the FTC to get serious about a hugely under-prosecuted crime and will actually try to keep money in our pokets!!
I know Earthlinks $16 million judgment against Howard Carmack was just a drop in the bucket for a spammer, but the 3.5 to 7 years the fed got him for should get the attention of the other ass pounders.
In the blue corner: my retired dad. Dad can send email, and copy images from his digital camera. He's bought a copy of some anti-virus thing and his friend installed it. His computer works just fine and anyhow he only uses it for an hour or so a week, it does what he needs it to.
In the red corner: spammer. He's making good money getting spam around the net. He's either a technical expert, or employs one. Either way, in this corner there's somebody being paid good money to spend many hours reading cutting edge security advice to find holes and weaknesses in the major browsers and mail clients, and exploit these weaknesses.
Who's going to win? your guess!... come on, Joe public doesn't stand a chance! Joe Public doesn't want to spend 40 hours a week reading security advisories, he just wants to email his relatives, send them some holiday snaps, buy a cheap airline ticket. Maybe once every few months he will read a news story and download a new version of a free software patch, but that's about it. My dad doesn't really understand the word 'browser' - he knows he clicks on the blue E and then he can look at the internet. No problem by me, I don't understand anything about cars but my dad fixes mine all the time. Nobody can be an expert at everything. You don't offer a workable solution. Joe Public needs support. Either government support (laws) or commercial pressures, or some sort of expert support. Joe Public isn't going to be able to fight expert spam geeks, ever.
Scam? Spam? Spam for sure, and the dubious claims in the spam must be a scam. And the free iPods site brought me all of this.
Thanks, but no thanks.
Clever signature text goes here.
I was Joe Jobbed this week. It's not the first time it's happened. I was a little annoyed.
The "Take me off your fucking list" emails were fine - I replied to people explaining the situation. Some people are now aware of the dangers of replying.
The "I am interested in your product" emails is where the fun began. The product in question was new and used networking equipment.
I received aproximately 50 emails in total that the spammer would also have recieved. My replies also went back to the spammer.
Below are a few of my replies. I am also in direct contact with the spammer. He is claiming that a virus send all the emails - so funny. I'll save them for another day.
Email #1 A spammer spamming a spammer
My reply:
Email #2 The stupid
My Reply:
You get the idea :)
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This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
If they put out an ad right now offering $100k+ for any bigtime spammer (or with a spam sample saying "Get the guy who sends *these*), I would probably be among many people who would track these people from their spam all the way back to their home addresses and fly out there and physically confirm it and haul them in if we had to, for that kind of money.
11*43+456^2
Is this really an effective way in which to spend that money? this approach will not materially reduce the volume of spam, since spam is a worldwide issue. But it is once more another charge on public funds. It is very easy to make recommendations for spending public funds, which is one of the reasons Big Government is a bad idea; you get a lot of people coming up with bad ways to spend lots of money.
--
Toby
Even spammers deserve a wife who will not turn them in for some quick cash. Then think about all the people who will be framed by clever hackers. That will create Stalin's Soviet Union of people who are encouraged to spy on each other, only for capitalist greed rather than communist fevor.
A modest reward of $100 or so will encourage IT people and geeks to try and trace a real spam to the source rather than just deleting it. At the same time, that's not enough to betray a relative or frame someone and risk going to jail yourself.
From what I understand, the FCC and various other agencies know who they all are. With all the Carnivores and Echelons and such in place, it seems to me fairly impossible to hide your activities, Spammer or not.
So I am left to conclude that the people in charge want spammers in place. Why?
That's obvious. --And talk about bounties and Americans getting used to the idea of turning in Americans for fun and profit under the guise of 'legitimate' vengeance should make it all the more obvious. That and further warming people to the idea that the 'internet is a dangerous place' which needs to be controlled.
And from what I've seen on Slashdot, it appears that the tactic is working rather effectively on more than half the posters.
-FL
Bring it on man! I have years worth of logfiles :D!!!!
From the article: "Americans are being inundated with spam"
They're also causing most other countries to be inundated with spam. Why are they phrasing it like it's an internal issue?
Nearly all my spam is from America. Almost none of it is from my own country (the UK). If I had the time to work out how to do it I'd simply bounce all mail originating from the US. The only problem with that is that I occasionally order from US websites like Amazon (amazon.co.uk does't always have everything).
pyramid scheme
n.
A fraudulent money-making scheme (...)
scam
n.
A fraudulent business scheme; a swindle.
A pyramid scheme is and remains a scam, no matter if you call it "multi-level marketing" or whatever the buzzword is these days.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Right there the FCC has certified this as a good way to make money via fraud. All fraudsters have to do is find someone willing to be the fall guy - i.e. "become" a spammer - in return for a percentage of the reward when they're "turned in". With the above paragraph, the FCC has made the business case for this by saying that the reward will outweigh the penalty.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Why doesn't the government just arrest the spammers? Most of them reside in the U.S. anyway. As anyone that reads NANAE or NANAS, we already know the home addresses of most spammers. If we know, the government _certainly_ knows.
Alan Ralsky, Ronnie Scelson and other scum spammers all boast HUGE houses and fast cars and their addresses are widely known. They made their fortunes by spamming. So the government wants taxpayer funded bounties despite that the spammers have more than enough money to cover any such civil penalty? What?
ROKSO is your friend. Use it some time. But the government _already knows_ who these people are and where they live. Yet the FTC doesn't give a rat's ass. I've forwarded hundreds of thousands of pieces of spam to the FTC's spam collection addresses. Still from the same old spammers. The spammers are just living it up because they know damn well that the government does not care about prosecuting such illegal activity.
most of the world's spam originates from the usa, like the world drug suppy (if you include tobacco)
You obviously share the same neo-con views as Rumsfeld.. War on Drugs is a distraction .. if drugs were not illegal .. there would be no method of business for so called criminals .. also the "cool" factor of drugs would be lost and much more kids wouldn't do it. After all thats the whole idea right? I don't think the gov should have any say as to what I smoke as an adult .. its much less harmful then say cigarettes or aspartame.. (You can thank Rummy for getting aspartame approved.)
So spamming went peer-to-peer too?
The war on spam reminds me of the war on drugs.
Excpet that there are people who *want* those...
Well, it's not REALLY a pyramid scheme, or a scam. They are very upfront about the whole thing. You agree to get spam^Wdirect marketing, you agree to get some friends to agree to get direct marketing, and they give you an ipod. While the method of propogation is the same, and it does have the same bounding limits, as long as they send the ipod it's not a scam.
A pyramid scheme uses money from the bottom run to pay the (bottom-1) rung. In this marketing gimick, the money doesn't come from below, it comes from outside. It can't really collapse as long as the money they make from the spam is greater than the cost of an ipod for each person. In their case, as long as each person is profitable then it's not a pyramid scheme, it's an business that engages in voluntary direct marketing with an exponentially growing client base that most likely doesn't realize what they are signing up for (and kiss any protections you may have had on the Do-No-Call list goodbye).
Sorry, but I had to get that off my chest.
Never confuse volume with power.
because things can't get better unless they get worse at the same time. There are consequences to progress. Any tool that can be used for good can also be used for evil. You can't have liberty without security. Without venereal disease it just wouldn't be sex. Without hell, who'd care about heaven?
Instead, why don't we try things out, see if they work and if they do you can admit you were wrong.
People who put up illegal handbills advertising a service by phone number get called every 30 seconds by an auto-dialer telling themselves to turn themselves into the police to be fined. Either they go in or they have to cancel the phone number. Either way, justice is served.
where I can be the US Government and sue the spammer and get 10 percent and I'll be your ranger.
"Qui tam (Black's Law Dictionary pronunciation: kwày tæm) is an abbreviation from the Latin "qui tam pro domino rege quam pro sic ipso in hoc parte sequitur" meaning "who as well for the king as for himself sues in this matter."
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
That's the point. Consumer pressure would put pressure on government which would put pressure on the computer vendors and the softweare makers which is WHERE it belongs. THEY promote themselves as computer experts, not your dad. THEY sell this easily cracked crap to your Dad, which turns him into an unwitting accessory, but STILL an accessory, and until all parties involved with this scene are aware of the risks and responsibilities it will continue. Something has got to get their attention.
If your dad drove a car down the street that was belching tons of smoke and leaking oil in huge amounts, eventually he'd get pulled over by the traffic cop and given a ticket, and he'd fail emissions tests and not be allowed to drive or get insurance for the junker, yes? There's no one demanding that he be an expert mechanic, but there are laws insisting that you take your car to an expert to make sure it works properly. And -here's the main point- if the car came from the factory in that state, it wouldn't be allowed to be sold. THAT'S the point, this stuff shouldn't be allowed to be sold pre-broken. And just a few geeks complaining about it isn't working, the companies are still gleefully extracting billions. What other sort of pressure is needed? Market pressure hasn't done it because it's turned into a MONOPOLY, because no one has any blame, because there's no MANDATED WARRANTY. Every other consumer product out there has a minimum warranty, but NOT computer crap. You get a sleazy hardware warranty but without the software computers are just a pile of useless junk, the warranty needs to include the software, which is the whole point of computing, running the software, and a lot of that stuff comes pre broken and is shipped out the door and profitted from. There's no other solution other than mass rejection of the hardware/software combo that is broken, and the only way to obtain that is massive consumer inconvenience, and the only way to do that is to make it illegal somehow to be a zombie on the net. People weren't voluntarily using cars that polluted less, companies weren't making less polluting cars, eventually laws were passed MANDATING certain minimum standards and you as the individual driver also have to pass inspection and if it is broken, no driving on the highway. If enough are broken they get recalled. Same should apply to computers. We as society have finally determined you shouldn't be allowed to drive it around in public because it's just too crappy, even if it's only one hour a week. Same with the infohighway and computers, enoughs enough with insecure and polluting computer junkers on the highway and "innocent" drivers and "innocent" companies that supply the computer drivers. All of them say it ain't their fault... uh huh. It's all of their fault because it takes all of them to pollute the infohighway. It's called responsibility, and it should apply vertically, top to bottom, starting with the corporations down to the consumer who needs to be forced to also have a certain minimum awareness. If the individual consumers can be inconvenienced enough-either from confiscation of machine or being refused public internet access with that machine they might put pressure in large enough numbers on government and the corporations to disallow selling polluting junkers and calling them functional when they clearly are not.
We got EVERYONE saying it's a problem yet it's NO ONES fault. Huh? This is UNIQUE to computers and software and the net, it doesn't exist any place else with consumer products.
Take away the "not my fault" aspect and it would get fixed.
The $25 million reward the U.S. is offering for Bin Laden's capture just isn't enough. Sure, $25 million would induce a Pakistani peasant to turn in Bin Laden, but it's not enough to attract the financial markets to the Bin Laden hunt. With the possibility of earning a $1 billion bounty, however, professional Bin Laden hunting firms would form, allowing the U.S. to enlist the efficiency and creativity of the free market in our fight against Osama.
...
t ml
The twentieth century's economic battles between capitalism and socialism proved that the private sector is far more effective than the government at providing services. Unfortunately, though, for many activities such as terrorist tracking, private companies have little incentive to engage. But a $1 billion bounty would motivate firms to join the hunt for Bin Laden.
With a $1 billion reward in place, an international group of intelligence, military and terrorist experts that could credibly claim to have, say, at least a 5% chance of finding Bin Laden could easily raise $20 million or so from the financial markets to finance their search. With several such organizations unleashed on the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Osama's margin of safety would shrink.
If the billion dollar bounty failed and Bin Laden ended up being located by the CIA or the U.S. armed forces rather than the private sector, the bounty wouldn't cost the taxpayers anything. But it still would have sent a powerful signal to our enemies that the massive wealth of the U.S. can be deployed against those who strike us.
Many other nations don't seem to care very much about whether we catch Bin Laden and $25 million certainly isn't enough to change their priorities. But $1 billion would make a difference to nations like Pakistan and perhaps motivate them to search seriously for our main enemy.
quoted from
http://www.techcentralstation.com/080904D.h
I can't wait till someone in India starts busting spammers, then people will complain about government offshoring law enforcement duties.
Great.
With a bamboo pole, is my recommendation. Put it on national television like the Arabs do, and make their immediate and extended family sit up on the front row. Get a couple of whackers up there that have been chewing coca leaves all day, in preparation.
I'd pay to watch it.
Open a season on spammers, and sell tags through the local Div. Of Fish and Game. Raise money and eliminate the problem at the same time. Just tell every bubba and billy joe that they are a rare and elusive game, and they taste just like chicken.... Problem solved.
'Nuff said.
It's all fun and games until someone loses the key to the handcuffs.
You could make it illegal to advertise using spammers, but that makes it easy to get framed: if I don't like your company, I can send out a billion spams advertising your products, and you get hit with a fine.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
...that after many long years, my dream is finally coming true.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
...as opposed to putting the money into, say, cancer research.
I know I'm going to be modded up on this
I'm glad the FTC isn't sure that this is a good idea, because it isn't.
Once my taxpayer dollars start going towards regulating spam, then it's not a far stretch to move onto regulating the rest of the Internet.
Sure, spam is bad. It's background noise, undesired traffic, and so on. Throwing government funding at the problem isn't going to make it go away, though. Few things will, in fact, short of a series of concentrated DoS attacks on the spammers themselves, by doing everything just short of providing any real personal information. Clutter their databases with garbage. Sign up as Seymour Asses, 123 Fake St, New New York, NY. Ask for more information, and target it all at a spamcatching address.
Make them WORK to get any kind of useful data from their own systems, like we all have to work to find the good email in our inboxes.
Just don't try to regulate the Internet. There's too many loopholes, and you'd end up eliminating both the bad and the good.
Raptor
"Procrastination is great. It gives me a lot more time to do things that I'm never going to do."
There will be a substantial reward for the one who finds the spammers. You are free to use any methods necessary, but I want them alive. No disintegrations.
No, I do NOT want them alive.
Go ahead and disintegrate them.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
Most spam originates in the US.
"C" is not a valid LANG. C is a locale. A valid LANG would be something like "en".
You may as well set LANG="" if you specify C. But en will give you the effect you're looking for.
Hands in my pocket