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The Plot To Hijack Your Hard Drive
An anonymous reader writes Business Week Online examines the business practices of spammers and pop-up advertisers, using much-maligned Direct Revenue as an example case. The article discusses the history of the company, their rocky road through good and bad times, and what they're willing to to get your eyes on their ads." From the article: "Among Direct Revenue's alumni, pride over technical cunning mingles with regret for exasperating so many computer users. After waffling on the issue during a long interview, one former Dark Arts wizard sighs and sums up his version of the company credo with an elegiac observation by abolitionist Frederick Douglass: 'Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.'"
Your post 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
( ) 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
( ) 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
( ) 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
( ) 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:
(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!
yep... otherwise we would have no mad scientists...
Great Spirits have always encountered violent opposition from Mediocre Minds - A. Einstein
As with all other things, the answer to your quandry has already been answered in a Simpsons episode.
Critic: "How do they sleep at night?"
McBain: "On top of a huge pile of money, with many beautiful women."
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
The problem in this topic is the answer to Stephen Hawking's question in one of the previous topics: it is all about demographics. The more people there are on this planet, the more likely we are to have extremely smart people, who will push us to the stars, and the more likely we are to have extremely dumb people, who will buy anything from a popup ad.
You can't handle the truth.
I got a pop-up for some spyware removal software. Would you like the link?
If you feel passionately about this, post your mailing address. For some reason I've gotten the message that people don't value their e-mail as highly as snail mail.
(TWAJS)
now they just need to figure out the happy part and their job is complete.
Which makes the War on Drugs so much harder to understand...
Sorry, couldn't resist. Now, to keep things a little bit on topic, I generally agree with you about silly consumers being slow to learn their lesson, though it still surprises me how many people lack sense.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Is HothRobbingBoobies a subtle Star Wars reference or do I simply need more coffee? :)
Your post suggests a conspiracy theory which is
(x) paranoid
( ) delusional
(x) impossible to confirm
(x) impossible to refute
Specifically, your theory fails to account for
(x) Stupidity of the general population
(x) Lack of a centrally controlling authority for conspiracies
(x) Failure to mention the Illuminati
(x) Facts can be explained without need for a real conspiracy
(x) Stupidity of the politicians
( ) Asshats
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been proven
(x) That's what they WANT us to think
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, you're batshit crazy
( ) 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!
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey