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Spam Haters Given Right of Reply
rk_cr wrote to mention an Israeli technology firm which has set up a system to allow harried email users the right to reply in force. The system "batters spam websites with thousands of complaints. The plan is to fill order forms on spam websites offering pills, porn and penile health tonics with complaints about the products advertised for sale in junk messages. The plan has been criticised by other anti-spam workers who say it amounts to vigilantism."
Sure this might annoy the spammers, but it's also going to cause problems for anyone unfortunate enough to be sharing a network/webhost/isp with a spammer. And what happens when someone sends spam appearing to be from a competitors site, in order for them to be attacked?
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Unbelievably stupid. Or, as Mitch Wagner observed:
And even he doesn't cover all the problems; for example, as everyone with the slightest clue about spam has known for years, responding to the spammer in any way is absolutely idiotic.
But since the people involved in this company have no anti-spam credentials, no track record of involvement, and no clue how their "counter-attacks" will be neatly retargeted (surely nobody is naive enough to believe that spammers will sit still for this?) I can't say I'm surprised. This is merely the latest bonehead idea in a long series (e.g. challenge-response, callbacks, SPF, etc.) of bonehead ideas put forth by people who have clearly failed to comprehend even the rudimentary aspects of the spam problem...or who have, but simply do not care about the conequences for everyone else as long as they can selfishly "solve" their part of the problem.
I've already blacklisted the company behind this tripe and null-routed their address space. I recommend the same for everyone else. There's simply no place on the Internet for those who want to profit from our collective misery by making it worse.
I have my doubts about whether this will actually work, but I'm not sure it matters.
I just think getting thousands of complaints should be the natural result of pissing off thousands of people.
The psychopathic behavior of a spammer wouldn't be tolerated for an instant if he were face-to-face with his victims. Try attending a ballet or opera, and yelling "I have cheese in my butt!" at top volume.
Whether it works or not, what Blue Sec is doing should be an expected inconvenience of spamming. Even if it just causes spammers to set up their own filters, at least it will weed out some would-be casual spammers.
The Internet is full. Go away.
A couple of years ago I submitted a request to the Thunderbird team to include a button which would do exactly this. I still believe it's a good approach, although an Outlook plugin would probably be more effective.
I'll try to address some of your objections, but I think you missed the main one;
(*) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
I've had to deal with dozens of Joe jobs every year, and I'll have to deal with dozens more every month for the forseeable future. It's already so bad, a few more won't make it significantly worse.
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
No, even a few thousand false records in a spammers database would be enough to increase their costs. That's the goal here, and while more would be better (especially if the company which hired the spammer is paying per response), it's a step in the right direction.
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it
None.
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (This time the spammers will be doing the filtering, and that will be quite easy for them.)
It will reduce their profits. That's good.
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
This will reduce it.
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
Doing nothing will achieve even less.
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
It doesn't have to, at least not by itself. Spammers are just another in a long line of parasites humanity has had to deal with over the years. We're winning more often against most of our parasites, but rarely do we ever eliminate them completely. Spammers are winning now, they're a plague on the internet. Getting them under control in the way we have lice or fleas under control is a process, not a once-off event. This will be one control out of many.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
How exactly is this different from a bunch of people just filling out bogus information?
Answer: It isn't.
If a significant percentage of us, just did this, the spammers would be hurt by rising costs and sharply reduced product value proposition. (leads)
This company is just making that easier.
No harm, no foul.
Unless you are the spammer making money off of shared resources without giving anything back that is...
I hope this works and it catches on. I would use this service in a minute.
Want to cut down your junk mail? Spend a few days each month filling their postage paid envelopes with their competetors offers and other interesting bits you can stuff in there. For those little card things, fill 'em out with crap.
People have done this for years and this spam service is no different than hiring somebody to send crap data for you.
Blogging because I can...
Spammers will continue their work as long as it is proffitable. Normally I'd als append "and legal", but it's been demonstrated ad nausium that the spammers really don't care about what's legal and what's not, so that's out. That leaves us with only two alternatives really - increase enforcement of the laws, (isn't that always a problem?) and make it not proffitable.
The problem with the proffitability is that the average consumer IQ is 100, and that means 1/2 of them are below 100, so you're not dealing with the brightest collection of people in the world. There will always be a ready supply of suckers to reply to the spammers, so we can't stop it that way.
If we can't stop their revenue, the only way to financially affect them is by costing them money. The most straightforward way to do this is by bandwidth charges and fake submissions. Is this vigilante action? You bet it is. But right now even though spam is hated by 95% of the world, there is no effective legal enforcement against it. (try to think of anything else that 95% of people in the world don't hate, that isn't illegal as a result?) The main reason this is the case is that there's so much money in spam - it's very proffitable if done correctly. As long as there is incentive in the form of lots of cash, the problem will never go away. It doesn't matter how many laws you make or any other actions you take - if it remains a very proffitable venture, people will continue to engage in it.
The only thing that makes spam different is that ONE person can annoy the piss out of hundreds of thousands of people at a time, and as far as social injustice is concerned, that's very impressive. Someone with that level of morals doing that degree of harm to the general public deserves no protection from society or its justice, even if vigilante.
Lets say I go driving around town spattering mud on people's houses. It's a nuisance, not really harmful per se, but I'm annoying the piss out of people. How long do you think I'd be allowed to continue to do that before the cops would come haul me away? Now imagine I was managing to do that TO AN ENTIRE CITY. There'd be an APB out on my carcass, you can be sure. The only reason spammers don't have this probelm is they can spatter mud on people's houses from another state or another country. For now this makes them safe. I look forward to the day this is no longer the case.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.