Slashdot Mirror
Spam is Dead
Vainglorious Coward writes "Two years on from Bill Gates' promise to eradicate spam, an article in The Observer claims that spam has passed its peak and is now declining. Is it just me that hasn't noticed this?" I got almost a third more spam in 05 than 04. I guess I exist outside the bell curve on this one.
As soon as 2006 hit, my gmail account started getting spam. I have gotten 7 today alone. Argh.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
As it stands, this is simply an opinion piece, and is labeled as such on the Observer's website. Apart from a loose reference to remembered statistics on the website of a company that sells spam-filtering software, there's nothing in the way of solid evidence to support this guy's claims. What's more, he asserts that things like phishing mails and penny stock solicitations somehow fall outside the realm of "spam". He further goes on to claim that the "new wave" of spam won't actually last, because things like penny-stock spam "rely on credulousness"; he basically asserts that common sense will prevail against the "new" spam where it failed previously. I seriously doubt that the same caliber of individual who falls for the Nigerian e-mail scam will somehow be immune to the siren call of the "penny stock" scam--which, incidentally, has been around for years.
While the author has some valid points, I think he's drawing conclusions on bad assumptions and gut reactions, not hard data.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Gates and co. would have to have an effective monopoly on email traffic for that to work.
Boy, I bet they never thought of that.
KFG
"Nobody will ever get more than 64,000 spams."
I was getting 2-3 flagged by spamass after passing through the mimedefang stuff before implementing greylisting. Post greylisting I've yet to get a single spam in my spam folder (they never made it to my inbox before, but I still had to deal with them.). I have things configured to flag at 2 points, discard at 7. My bayes filters have about 2 years worth of training on them, and I use RBL scoring too.
I vote with my eyes. IGN has lost me as a reader, and other websites will as well if they go to IGN's lengths at advertising. If anyone annoys me with their ads, I leave. I don't block their ads, I simply don't read their website any more. If more people did this, there wouldn't be a need for ad blockers, as intrusive and annoying ads would be down at a minimum.
fighting spam, much like "the war on terror" or "the war on drugs" or fighting pedophilia, is mostly a policing activity. that is, it never ends, nor will it ever end, nor should you think it will ever end, if you really understand the nature of the problem
...no: there is no technological fix to ingenious asocial behavior. a bored teenager is always smarter than your protocol, and always more craven then the good intention of those who create the protocols. it's the tragedy of the commons. so those who see email spam going away with a technological fix are missing the larger point: you don't destroy the behavior, you just move it around: IM spam, blog spam, etc
spam/ drugs/ terror/ pedophilia/ etc. will always require personnel and effort to prevent, forever. it's just a cost of civilization. for to not fight these things allows them to proliferate and spread. it's a maintenance issue, just like taking out the trash to the curb every thursday. it's not like you take the trash out one day, and you never have to take it out again. no, trash constantly accumulates, and it always will. if you think terror, or hard drug use (really only hard highly addictive drugs are a problem), or spam, or pedophilia, or other problems like these, is something you can oppose or (even worse) accept, and the problems just go away, you simply don't understand what these problems are really like
every generation, there will be some group of idiots who think bombing the feberal building in oklahoma city or flying airplanes into office towers is a wise move. likewise, every generation some group of a**holes will see smuggling heroin and cocaine as a good business move (it is, but its the social byproducts of the business itself that is the problem). and, every generation, someone will think "hey, i can just send out a million emails." nothing you will ever do will stop such people from constantly being reborn anew in every generation, forever
these thinks, just like spam, must always be fought, for all time. yes, you can change protocols, but there is no technological fix to human ingeniousness and cravenness: someone will always try to game the system for their benefit, despite all of the suffering it creates for the rest of us. a lot of slashdot types would be thinking "technological fix!" "technological fix!"
true wisdom on the issue of spam and other social ills like it are ones of acceptance of the problem, and constant vigilance of the problem, at the same time. it's not like you can accept the behavior as OK, and its not like you can fight it and kill it once and for all. what is needed is more people understanding the true nature of social ills like spam/ terror/ hard drugs/ etc and understanding that, by their nature, they are mundane criminal policing issues like burglary and vandalism: always with us, but always unacceptable, all at the same time
this is wisdom on these issues. beware anyone who says you can accept these things, and the problems go away, or people who say you can fight these things, and kill them once and for all. such people don't know what they are talking about
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You may not be seeing it, but it's still taking up gobs of bandwidth, disk and CPU, and *somebody* has to pay for all that. I think that the costs to transfer, store and process spam outweigh the cost of individuals' time spent reading/deleting it.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
This article advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) 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
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) 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
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
(x) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) 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
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) 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
(x) Blacklists suck
(x) 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:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) 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!
He made that statement Friday, January 23rd, 2004 so he still has 11 days to pull it off. So he can still slack off for ten days and pull an all-nighter of something. (Maybe he could offer each spammer 2 million dollars to go away? For less than billion, problem solved .. right? ;)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
So Gates declared war on spam 2 years ago. Well, he declared war on Windows security problems 5 years ago.
Given this track record, I expect he will next claim that he will eliminate corruption in Congress.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I actually have a problem with ad blocking. I am well aware that a lot of sites depend on income from banner views and clicks. And since they offer their content free to me and I want it to stay that way, I usually do not filter banner ads. This is not a moral question, just a personal decision. I even click on ads if interested. But there is a limit how much annoyance I can bear, so I block pop ups and stopped visiting sites like macosrumors, which seem to try to compensate decline of content by increasing the amount of ads, page reloads, non working links etc.
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
Me too. I think that on New Year's Day, at least seven spammers emailed me to wish me a more fulfilling and enlarged new year!
Dude, it's just a junk email, let it go. It's not like it's a family heirloom, you don't have to pass your one junk email down to your children and your children's children.
Steve
Time. Time seems... strange.