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Court Finds Spamming Not Protected By Constitution
eldavojohn writes "In a split (4-3) decision, a Virginia court has upheld the verdict against the spam king making it clear that spam is not protected by the U.S. Constitution's first amendment or even its interstate commerce clause. 'Prosecutors presented evidence of 53,000 illegal e-mails Jaynes sent over three days in July 2003. But authorities believe he was responsible for spewing 10 million e-mails a day in an enterprise that grossed up to $750,000 per month. Jaynes was charged in Virginia because the e-mails went through an AOL server in Loudoun County, where America Online is based. '"
Since when is an appellate court a jury? I don't mean to troll, but seriously, talk about confused and sensationalist headlines.
Serves him right
Email 2 - Order Viagra - Fast, Easy and Confidential. Special suggestion for you!
Email 3 - Most popular ma|e organ enlargement
Email 52,999 - C|al_is 20mg x 10 p1lls = $89.95
Email 53,000!
*hears a sigh of relief from the jury*
...so long as there is one corresponding piece of regular mail, sent to "Resident" if nothing else, at a distinct address in another zip code, for every email.
That would let people express themselves with all sincerity, and help keep the postal system afloat.
An all-around Win!
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Your finding 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
(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
( ) 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
(X) Asshats
(X) 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
(X) 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:
( ) 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.
( ) 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!
(My first of these; how did I do?)
I have to disagree with the decision... I think... It's not exactly "fire" in a crowded theatre, it's just internet noise pollution. It's the stuff you see on LA skyscrapers, really. They need to go after the junk sellers that pay the spammers.
When you're sending millions of messages a day to people who don't want them and other people (usually the ones footing the bandwidth bill) are paying for the connection, you are guilty of stealing at the very least... And in the case of mass spammers you're stealing a whole lot of bandwidth you're not paying for.
Can we get a little editing please? You don't have to be a lawyer to know that a jury would never be able decide on the constitutionality of a statute, so you should know something is wrong with the headline right off the bat. The Virginia Supreme Court is not a jury.
the verdict should have been announced to him over 50,000 times
The pissed off SOB whose network bandwidth is consumed, the guy who sees a 400-1 spam to signal ratio, and the one who has to actively clean this shit for everyone I host, I'm HEARTILY glad that this fucker got himself leaned over the judicial bench and was probed, rectally, with the judges' gavels.
And the dissenting judge's comments about restraining speech for political and religious spam? If a Hari Krishna or a LDS evangelist, or a Politico I don't like comes to my door, I have the right to slam the door in their face and choose not to "receive the message". And if they drop their crap on my doorstep, I get fined for littering.
People buried under torrents of spam don't get this option.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
1.) The VA Supreme Court made the ruling, not any federal court, and certainly not a jury.
2.) Because it was a state court that made the ruling, what they say about whether or not SPAM is protected free speech is completely irrelevant. State courts have no jurisdiction over federal questions. They can no more declare SPAM not protected than they can declare that you really only have to be 32 to be President.
3.) This will obviously be appealed to the Supreme Court (that's the only outlet left after traversing the State courts), and, my guess is, it'll be shot down. The defendant's attorney is correct when it states that the VA law doesn't make exceptions for explicitly protected free speech, such as political speech, and the Supreme Court's strict scrutiny standard for this kind of thing won't let it through. VA may re-write the law to prevent commercial SPAM as different from SPAM that's simply expressing an opinion, but that'd be open to a variety of challenges as well.
4.) Nine years? What the fuck?! I mean, I hate SPAM as much as the next guy, and I spend a stupid amount of time keeping it out of the inboxes of my users, but nine years?!
is how close it was. A 4-3 decision isn't very comforting. Who were the three?
...all of whose inboxes will receive a merciless pounding until they agree to hear the appeal.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Do you realize that 'mail to resident' is where SPAM first got started, all those years ago? If it weren't for that then it's postulated less likely that email SPAM would have ever been conceived of in the first place. I don't know if you're in the United States or not, but what was the last time you really took a look at all the junk snail-mail you get every month? Try this experiment: save all your junk snail-mail for a whole year, and then weigh it, measure it's volume, and multiply that by every household in this country. Do you really think that the amount of money they're paying to get that unasked-for (lack of) content into your mailbox really does anybody any good? Or is it just a waste of natural resources, and furthermore making an already fat, slow, outdated U.S. Postal Service slower than it has to be?
Neither thing, or it's offshoots (telemarketing, junk FAX, etc) should exist, simply because they're all so highly abused, and it's basically impossible IMHO to regulate them.
The write-up states: "Prosecutors presented evidence of 53,000 illegal e-mails"
The e-mails can be sent in violation of the law and the person who sent them is an offender, but the e-mails themselves cannot be "illegal." Their mere existence does not constitute a violation of the law. If somebody said there were "illegal letters," "illegal phone calls," or "illegal documents," then it would be tantamount to saying that the government restricted the existence of information.
We live in a world where the flow of information is controlled, and indeed there are rational arguments on both sides about whether or not such restrictions constitute censorship. But the existence of information and the possession of it are not crimes. If such things were criminal, no rational mind could argue that the related laws weren't tantamount to censorship.
They are not "illegal e-mails." They are illegally sent e-mails.
My emails to my friends get caught in the aggressive spam filters that they are forced to use. Spamming is depriving me of my freedom of speech. Spam is shutting down email. That is a freedom of speech issue and jailing spammers protects freedom.
Yes. Sometimes there are things in the junk mail that are useful, such as ads from supermarkets. Also, people are paid money to create those ads, print them, address them and mail them. Not only that, the USPO is paid at bulk mail rates for carrying them. If it weren't for junk mail, first class mail would cost considerably more than it does. Junk mail subsidizes regular mail and helps keep costs down. The big problem with spam is that it doesn't cost the spammer anything to send, the costs are spread out among everybody receiving it and ISP fees would be lower if there weren't spam. It's not that it's junk that makes it so bad, it's the expense to the recipient.
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Your finding advocates a
( ) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. It worked in this instance. Here is why it won't work again. (One or more of the following may apply to this particular criminal, and (s)he may have other flaws which are not listed.)
( ) The spammer was dumb
(X) (s)he lived inside the united states
(X) They made too much money
(X) They had been doing it too long
(X) They stole from a corporation
(X) Didn't leave the country quick enough
Specifically, your technique fails to account for
(X) few spammers get caught
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) taking out one spammer, 10 more pop up
If you RTFA, this decision was handed down by the Va Supreme. Unless you can file a federal action, this case law is binding in Va.
Overrated, Troll, and Flamebait mod points are not to be used towards posts you disagree with. That IS censorship.
It is good that they have allowed the law to stand up. Too bad spammers can't get the death penalty. I would volunteer for the firing squad.
How ya like dat?
Ah, I see. I would agree with your original argument in spirit at least, but in practical terms it would never work because you'd more or less be asking spammers to self-regulate, and historically speaking it's already been proven at least a million times over that they're unwilling and incapable of doing so. That leads us right back to where we already are. Really it's a case of excesses, and this chap who is going to be doing jail time is as good a poster-boy for these sorts of excesses as any other spammer could be. Beyond that, if there was some sort of actual cost involved in mass-market direct emailing, then legitimate operators still wouldn't go for it because in their perception they'd be spending twice as much to accomplish the same thing, whereas the draw of spamming is that it costs little to nothing comparatively.
...that we can limit posting here to people who know the difference between a "jury" and the Virginia Supreme Court?
It's not a free speech issue, it's a harassment issue. We all know that there are limits to speech when someone else's livlihood is at stake (shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, to use the classic example.) To say spammers have the right to spam is like saying the first amendment gives someone the right to follow you around with a megaphone shouting advertisements into your ear.
An object at rest cannot be stopped.
Leave it to slashdot to get the headline dead wrong. Actually, this was an appeals court decision, there was no jury involved in this ruling. A jury finding of guilty was several years ago, and the spammer has been out free on appeal enjoying his ill gotten gains ever since. The ruling on interstate commerce issues and first amendment issues was not made by a jury. Curiously, there seems to be no word on him actually reporting to serve his sentence, so he may still be free.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
This guy, and anyone else who is prosecuted for spamming, is guilty of being excessive more than anything else (aside from actual criminal offenses). Most things advertised with SPAM are complete ripoffs and/or total junk: fake (or even harmful fake) drugs, illegally copied commercial software, fake diplomas, and more gray-market things like porn sites, pseudo-porn sites (pretends to be an 'adult dating site', har har har), etc. These people are incapable of self-regulating or even self-controlling their greed and therefore will do almost anything to amass more money, which is really what brings us to the root of the problem. Technology, legislation, and criminal action will only ever be partially successful at best. The real solution will have to come from society at large.
If you run a blaring loudspeaker van through a residential neighborhood at 4AM it doesn't matter whether the material you're playing is "constitutionally protected speech" or not. You're still subject to noise abatement laws.
The whole issue of freedom of speech is a red herring.
If the postal service didn't like junk mail they would raise the rate and get rid of it.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
...it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mail including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment
Sorry sweety, but in all my years on the net, getting spam, I've NEVER seen an email asking me, "Dear Sir, would you like a bigger God?" or "Dear Sir, would you like a more honest politician?".
And at the end of the day, both politics and religion are just another form of porn, viagra or stock scam.
[End Of Line]
I hear this said a lot, could somebody please explain to me how larger, heavier mail which costs much much less could possibly subsidize smaller, lighter mail which costs much more?
Seems to me that is junk mail was eliminated, the Post Office could get rid of much of its trucks, drivers and infrastructure. Without junk mail, I'd say residential delivery could be scaled back to one delivery per week, meaning one truck could serve six different routes instead of six different drivers and trucks going out every Mon-Sat. All that overhead eliminated would raise first class rates how? And now the remaining trucks would be loaded with letter sized full-rate first class mail instead of giant heavy bundles of newsprint mailed out for a few pennies each. How is that not better revenue for the post office?
The comment is the subject
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
I always thought that the question of whether spam was protected speech or not was simply beside the point. Think about it. Political expression is definitely protected speech, but does that give the candidates the right to put their campaign signs up on your front lawn without permission? No. It's your lawn, their right to speak doesn't include a right to use your lawn as their venue. They want a place to speak, they get to hire their own hall or use strictly public spaces.
And no, there's not a parallel with snail-mail. With physical mail, the sender pays. I pay absolutely nothing for my mailbox, nor to receive mail, the sender's the one who has to foot the bill for the postage. With e-mail, though, I'm the one footing the bill for the mailbox it arrives in, and the bandwidth to receive it, and the storage space to hold it until I read it. The sender, by contrast, spends nothing whatsoever on postage sending the message.
..and again, I still have them and wish I could use them now, effing Flamebait! :P
I'm not sure who you intended to reply to, but it certainly wasn't me! I made no suggestions of any sort in my post, just pointing out that junk snail-mail helps subsidize regular mail as compared to the economic drag of spam.
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AIUI, junk mail helps keep First Class rates down because that's the way the bulk mail rate was designed. It's less than First Class, but more than it costs to process, leaving some extra to help defray other expenses. The way it works is, bulk mail must be pre-sorted by zip code in order to qualify. This cuts down on the amount of work considerably, so that even at a reduced rate, bulk mail costs the Postal Service less to deliver than they charge. Also, of course, much of it is sent locally, which lowers expenses even more.
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How would anyone use the Interstate Commerce Clause as an argument that spam is protected speech? Was this a nonsensical defense brought up in the case, or does the uber-parent or original article have a non-existent grasp of Constitutional Law?
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
But it should be LEGAL. I've lost two email accounts because of spam: in the sense that I chose to abandon those account due the the amount of spam I was getting. So, sure ... I hate spam. But you don't go making things illegal just because you don't like them.
I should be able to send an email, to who I feel like sending an email to (right now), without worrying about legal issues. Everyone should be able have that. It doesn't matter if they don't like what you wrote, or they don't agree with what you wrote, or they don't care what you wrote, or they are offended by what you wrote.
The person on the receiving end can very easily delete the email without even reading the subject line (or have that done automatically based on whether or not it came from someone they don't know). It's a load of peanuts to make this type of behavior a crime.
Hey if you are a spammer, I don't agree with what you do, and I probably don't agree with what you have to say, but I will defend for you to be able to keep on doing what you do. One day, the tables might turn, and you might be doing something other people don't like, and it would be a shame if they put you in jail, because they simply didn't like what you were doing, as opposed to that it was actually wrong.
Four years ago my wife and I moved into a house, having lived in an apartment before that, and discoverd that the amount of junk mail we were receiving was much much more. Within a short time I was getting so upset about it I was going to put a No Flyers sign out (Canada Post and many flyer delivery companys in Canada won't leave unadressed junk at your home if you simply put a sign saying "No Flyers") when my wife stopped me, explaining that while she disliked the quantity of crap we were receiving, there were certain flyers she had to have and as such a "No Flyers" sign was unacceptable.
I shudder to think of how many trees died so my wife could know what was on sale each week at Zellers and Walmart.
WRT "this thread needs editing": fine:
Emailed SPAM from my friends are caught in the aggressive CAN-SPAM filters that I am forced to deploy. Freedom of speech is depriving me of my SPAM. Email is shutting down SPAM. This is a freedom-AS-IN-BEER-AND-HAM issue and SPAMMING JAILERS protects freedom.
Hungry. Give me CAN of SPAM!!!
There. Edited.
WAS:
My emails to my friends get caught in the aggressive spam filters that they are forced to use. Spamming is depriving me of my freedom of speech. Spam is shutting down email. That is a freedom of speech issue and jailing spammers protects freedom.
Ummm...pardon me for quibbling, but, no, someone else's livlihood does not limit another's speech. It's a property rights issue, not an employment issue. It is easy to confuse the two because in most instances that make it to a courtroom, the property in question is being used by the owner to make a living. But it still applies even if the property is being used by a charity, or is residential, or whatever.
the cost of overhead is averaged among all classes of mail, reducing one class increases the expenses of the remaining classes. This is like the problem we see in business went they start closing departments, they ask who much expenses are assigned to the department to be eliminated, not how much expenses will be saved, so the overhead gets reassigned and reduces the profits of the remaining departments, wash, rinse, repeat.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
This is a bad day for the first amendment, damn that bush for taking all our rights away.
Maybe the guy should attempt to argue jurisdiction like the wikkileaks guy was, maybe then he could get around it.
Seriously now, I don't like Spam as much as anyone. Well, I guess I don't like it less because I simply don't get that much but that is another story. Anyways, I find it ironic how temperamental we are with who's causes we want to support. A site leaking banking account numbers and personally identifiable information is a champion while a guy who mass mails flyer's through a computer system instead of the postal system is scum. I'm not sure where the big difference is. I have heard people claim it is because people pay for their bandwidth yet I don't see a anyone setting up a sender has to get permission first policy for all email. I mean the dork who forwards every joke he can find multiple times to everyone who already is listed in the forward marks of the email because he somehow added them all to his address book isn't getting in trouble. I don't know how many times I got that stupid Microsoft is giving you a cup holder email, I have to forward it to an account I could check in windows just to see what it does- tell me that isn't junk.
I think we are seriously going in the wrong direction here. Not because I think anyone has a right to spam, but because spam is now not covered by the first amendment and you should ask how this will play out when there is a mailing list or something for a political action commity or group. Will the leaders of that be jailed and fined because their spam isn't covered by the first amendment? You know, if the treasurer of Ohio can call five times in 2 days with a recorded message saying that Ohio will make sure you get to the polls if you vote for obama just call some number, and Sears can call me 2 or 3 times saying they are having a sale on items I am interested in, I see no different then this guy sending spam out.
> Jury Finds Spamming Not Protected By Constitution
No. The jury found him guilty. The judge disallowed his First Amendment defense. Constitutionality is not a jury question.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Before we get too uncomfortable with this, let us look at why they dissented. None of them said that spam was a good thing.
Judge Lacy wrote that the law was "...unconstitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mail including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution."
She is trying to protect the free speech rights of non-spammers here.
Great, so now we've decided that what spammers do is, in fact, illegal. Next step: convincing everyone that execution is the only viable punishment. (Yes, I'm joking...maybe.)
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I don't think you're selling people short. I think it's "obvious" that it was inevitable that it would be tried. I'll explain why...
I think where you're right is that there is a commonplace two-step meta-pattern where an idea is tried for an innocent reason and after succeeding someone tries to repurpose the idea for other purposes. So in your case, you're suggesting that if 'mail to resident' hadn't happened, variations and repurposing would not have been able to happen. Probably. But 'mail to resident' wasn't a one-time shot that if it didn't happen on a certain day wouldn't exist. It would have come another day. And even if not, other equivalently powerful and repurposable ideas would have.
For example, 'mail to many' is capable of being repurposed in the same way. Multiple-recipients could be said to be just as enabling. It wasn't in paper mail, after all--a piece of mail mostly went to one recipient (except those interoffice memo things where you could keep re-forwarding the same junk, checking off your name). So once the cost of sending to many was lowered to just naming who gets copies, that was also an enabling factor.
Many years ago (somewhere around 25 years ago, I think), when email was still young (not brand new, certainly, but still not heavily evolved) and when there were not many machines on the then-ARPANET, I obtained a piece of software written by someone at a certain texas university that was on the net. I wanted to reach the author, but had no idea how to find him. So I sent an email to smith, asmith, bsmith, etc. up to zsmith hoping to find someone at that site that knew the guy I wanted to reach. We didn't get tons of email back then, so this wouldn't have been obnoxious like it was now... There was no web back then, and no search engine. I don't even know if there was the 'postmaster' convention yet. (Maybe if there was I'd tried it and failed to get a response.) And hsmith replied, by the way, offering just the helpful info I'd hoped for. The rest of the mail bounced. I never used the technique again, but would not have hesitated to recommend it to another if they were desperate. My point in telling the story is just to say that ideas like this do present themselves when people are faced with barriers. It's the natural way things go.
So I doubt any claim that if 'mail to resident' hadn't happened, SPAM wouldn't have either. Because if someone could come up with the idea of blasting out a query for benign reasons, someone could conceive of pushing that to whatever limit made financial sense.
You could almost make the case that if 'mail for free' had not been invented, no one would have wanted to send tons of mail to people who might not care. That would have reduced volume. But there is a large and thriving junk mail industry even when stamps cost money, so even that isn't true.
I do think that "free email" is the real culprit. We all say we like it, but most of us pay more per year in time and money getting rid of spam than we would pay to deliver mail. In effect, we all subsidize spam in the guise of getting something for free... On net (pardon the pun), we don't get email free, and it would be lower cost if we charged for it.
The same is true for physmail junk mail, by the way: We subsidize it by the lower prices it gets. That's a business decision by the post office, but in the interest of the overwhelming resource usage and waste disposal concerns, I think it's ever more clear it should be at least the same price, if not much higher. But the problem isn't (any more) send to resident, since now they all swap mailing lists. The problem is, again, 'send to multiple'. And with global warming upon us, the stakes are even higher than with email spam.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Hell, where do i sign up?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Around here, those come in newspapers, usually Sunday's newspaper.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
If you RTFGP, you'd see that TFGP assumed the VA decision would be appealed to TFSC.
My (possibly awkward) attempt at a jape was based on the concept that the spammer would attack TFSC inboxes until they agreed to hear the appeal, which would be an obnoxious, counter-productive, and quintessentially American approach to the problem.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
The full text of the Virginia Supreme Court's decision is available here.
Too many people are acting as if that the whole universe is going to die over this. *shrug* I don't see any rights loss in this, I don't see any evil plotting. All I see is someone who did something wrong get hammered.
-Aegis Runestone-
The comment is not the subject
After all, I am strangely colored.
Around here, even if you don't get the newspaper, you get a subset of the ads from the Sunday paper delivered by the newspaper company.
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
Just because it moves money around doesn't mean it's a good idea in the big picture.
You can't take the sky from me...
You know what pisses me off? People who "actively clean this shit" for everyone they host. I'm in the process of setting up my own mail server because I can't even get email from my girlfriend in Japan, yet actual spam continues to make in through. I can't even email certain friends because of brain dead spam filtering. You assholes are killing email. So you can go fuck yourself with that gavel and stop infringing on my freedom to associate with who I please. I can manage my own whitelist and it's truly none of your goddamned business in deciding what is and isn't spam to ME.
I have the right to slam the door in their face and choose not to "receive the message".Sure you do. Just like you can delete your own unwanted email. It remains unconstitutional to jail them for merely making their pitch in your presence.
Around here, Southern California, the supermarket ads come in the mail on Tuesday, as they go from Wednesday to Tuesday. Different areas, different ad cycles.
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There are anti-junk fax laws, which is what we need for SPAM. CAN-SPAM does something, but it's just a drop in the bucket. We don't have a SPAM type problem in the US mail for two reasons: fail fraud and cost.
Sure, we all get junk in the mail, but it's limited. It's so expensive (relative to SPAM) that we don't see the same junk volume. At the same time, we have mail fraud laws so many things you see in SPAM (fake drugs, prescription drugs sold non-prescription, scams like 419s, etc) could actually be prosecuted and the responsible parties locked up. If we could do that with SPAM, things would come under control much faster.
But unlike the post office, anyone can send huge blocks of SPAM from anywhere. You can't just sneak 100,000 letters into the US mail, people would notice. It's easy with email through. The other problem is jurisdictional. The US mail is the US mail. You have to be in the US (where you can be arrested) or you're somewhere else (and we can just block your incoming letters). Since the 'net is open, neither tactic works.
Face it, there are only two solutions to spam. Education (ha), and technological (filtering/sender verification/white-list only/etc). It will be years before things get better. Also in the technological category would be something to replace email built without the weaknesses (IM seems to be used partially because for quite conversations not only is it easier, there isn't nearly as much SPAM).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
It's just like shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater. I'm really sick of people trying to use the blanket of the First Amendment to try and justify all sorts of nastiness.
Have you ever created, or even conceived of a computer that can process some 10,000 e-mail messages per hour?
Until you figure out what the costs of a real world ISP are, please, stop posting on the subject.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
There are anti-junk fax laws, which is what we need for SPAM. CAN-SPAM does something, but it's just a drop in the bucket. We don't have a SPAM type problem in the US mail for two reasons: fail fraud and cost.
Oh, I greatly disagree. Besides, the junk fax law is unconstitutional. An FTC-administered 'Do Not Fax' list would be far superior.
At the same time, we have mail fraud laws so many things you see in SPAM (fake drugs, prescription drugs sold non-prescription, scams like 419s, etc) could actually be prosecuted and the responsible parties locked up. If we could do that with SPAM, things would come under control much faster.
We do. Fraud is fraud; the mechanism isn't really important. There's no credible claims for protecting fraudulent spam. It's truthful spam that is protected under the First Amendment. Of course, I can't recall the last time I saw any, but if it's out there, then it would be protected.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Because the original poster realizes that most spam is sent by p0wned computers running Windows, and that the US is the #1 spambot net. The costs of sending spam are kept low by Microsoft and its' user base..
Unconstitutional? In what world? Better yet - are you arguing that it's wrong? That people should be permitted to consume all of my company's toner and paper supply on a daily basis because they want me to take advantage of their training seminars or low cost vacation packages?!?
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Network intrusion is not a speech issue and is already illegal. Go after them with that and leave my right to speak freely alone.
That's what secondary accounts are for. You must be new here :-)
What really gets me is the ads you see when you look at the article itself - including at least one that promises to help you get your email past spam filters. Search for "bulletproof hosting" for more info (I won't say "google for it" because google is the one serving the ads) Interestingly enough, the ad didn't re-appear when I refreshed the page. Maybe their daily budget is used up ...
the "broken glass" fallacy states that a broken window is good for the economy because someone has to make a new window, someone has to make a hammer and nails to hold in the new window, someone has to install the window, etc. This destructive act - breaking a window - is a boon.
The reason that it's a fallacy is that it assumes the money spent on repairing the window wouldn't have been spent somewhere else, somewhere more productive. In an economy, it is always better for a new thing to be created than for an old thing to be replaced.
This isn't exactly what we're talking about with junk mail, but it's close. Yes, regular mail would be more costly, but the post office would also be spending a lot less on gas to lug all that junk mail around. Yes, junk mail designers would be out of a job, but their skills could be employed somewhere else, potentially somewhere more productive. The fact - and it is a fact - that junk mail has positive benefits does not mean that it is optimally beneficial.
Thomas Galvin
Spammers pay the same flat rate as you do, then abuse it worse than anybody downloaded "pirated" mp3s. Because of the cost to IPSs of moving all that spam around, everybody's flat rate is higher than it would be if there were no spam. When you consider that many spammers send millions of spam out per month, you'll see that the cost per message is practically zero.
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No they don't. They infect machines through viruses/trojans/whatever, creating botnets that proceed to send spam for a short time until they get blacklisted. My boss at work took one a few days ago, resulting in out whole network being blacklisted. Along with our mailserver (YAY!)
ISP fees would be lower?Yes, no need to set up complex antispam systems, fund independent systems that keep blacklists of hosts, use spamtraps etc etc. Most professional installations of mailservers do use paid RBL sites.
Expense to the recipient?To go back at my work example. I hadn't blocked access to port 25 through the firewall because some people in the office check/use their private mail, not passing through the company mailserver for sending stuff. Then my boss got a virus, everything got blacklisted and basically we had to sustain the following expenses:
How about coming back with some facts next time?
nbody2002:If you can read this you may be addicted to the internet
Hmmm, let's see... Oh wow, email: < 2% of bandwidth. Bittorrent 33%. What were you saying about what really costs ISPs money? Do you really expect anyone to believe that 1% bandwidth is a deal breaker for ISPs?
It's nowhere near a broken glass fallacy. This isn't a case of an illegal act, it's a case of a legitimate business model that employs many. If the postal service wanted to do away with it all they'd have to do is stop accepting it and it'd be over with. They don't. Why? Because it subsidizes their business model, it keeps their employees working, it fills in the gaps in their daily routes (eg; long stretches of houses that otherwise wouldn't receive any mail on a given day) thereby making the routes more predictable and efficient.
As to the inception; the ads you get in your mail are paid for by local businesses targeting specific areas of interest. A window company working in the area offering a promotion so they can employ their guys in a centralized area thereby keeping costs down and passing them along to the residents, a car dealership offering a sale for residents in their vicinity, a snow clearing service, etc. These businesses pay for this mail to be created thereby creating jobs in the printing and postal industry AND if they've done their homework and targeted properly they'll increase company revenues thereby creatinug work for their employees and increasing their own bottom line.
With recycling programs in high gear in most(?) heavily populated areas the resultant flyers are generally disposed of in the "blue bin" (or the local equivalent) and recycled to create new products and new employment opportunities.
There is no "broken window" fallacy here because the money was intended to be spent on targeted advertising in the first place. Try to do some research into retail outlets' advertising strategies and you'll see what I'm talking about.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Then nail 'em on computer intrusion. Leave my free speech alone.
Yes, no need to set up complex antispam systems, fund independent systems that keep blacklists of hosts, use spamtraps etc etc. Most professional installations of mailservers do use paid RBL sites.No need for that anyway. I can handle my own whitelist just fine, thank you very much. Charge the suckers who need managed internet more and give be a bare pipe.... oh... That's the way it works already. Ain't free market capitalism great?
To go back at my work exampleYour work example demonstrates damage done by virus... computer intrusion. Computer intrusion is illegal and not a free speech issue.
Yes, in a perfect world, what you wrote would be right, but alas, the world I live in is highly imperfect.
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No. The "broken glass fallacy" tries to prove that breaking the window was a good thing for the economy. What I'm saying is that the junk mail you get through the post office isn't completely bad and, in fact, pays its way unlike spam.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
And political phone calls?
Junk mail subsidizes regular mail and helps keep costs down.
Wrong!
On a very narrow analysis, sure. The post office fixed costs get divided by more pieces of mail. Ergo, when you send one piece of personal mail, the junk mail it travels with helps pay part of the cost.
But who do you think pays for all of that junk mail? You do. That shit doesn't get sent out for the fun of it; it gets sent because on average, each piece makes more money than it costs. When you add it all up, you get a small discount on the postage Aunt Sally's birthday card, and a big ol' charge on your purchases. On average, naturally.
Network intrusion is not a speech issue and is already illegal. Go after them with that and leave my right to speak freely alone.
Then you won't mind me shouting obscenities at your house with a bull-horn.Last I looked, the Internet isn't like "the public commons - most of the networks accessed by spammers are privately owned. You have no protections for "free speech" in the co-opting of others' private property against their terms of use, and to the detriment of their customers. So, in the "spirit of free speech," take your bullshit opinion and go fuck yourself round the rim with it. Twice.
There is no defense for sending out tens of millions of pieces of spam. Both the spammer and anyone who buys crap from them needs to be punished. This is no more a free speech issue than the "right to lie" in advertising is.
You missed the GP's point while at the same time helping prove it.
He was saying that it costs nearly nothing to send email and your 2% statistic there proved that. The point about it costing the recipient had little to do with bandwidth. Hint, Time=Money. If you make $15/hr it's not much to spend a couple of minutes per day deleting spam; if you make $150/hr it starts to add up quickly.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Just one of my domains receives more than 400000 (as in 4E5) emails a day - all but a few dozen complete junk. If left unfiltered, this completely swamps the 5Mbit broadband connection, leaving it useless for anything but delivering viagra ads. With a complex system of auto-whitelist, auto-blacklist, bayesian filtering, SPF, domain reputation, and temporary IP banning, I get this down to a steady trickle of 56Kbit (day) to 400Kbit(4am) email traffic. This makes the internet usable, but then there are occasional false positives resulting in important mail being lost. On the other hand, delivering all the spam would result in essentially *all* the important mail being lost among all the spam. No, this is not an ISP, but just one guy with one mailbox selling stuff from a website. Every false positive means a lost sale. Furthermore, maintaining the filter to keep up with the constant arms race with spammer technology is a huge waste of developer time (even more so than reading slashdot).
So yes, receiving spam is incredibly expensive, and the perpetrators are just as much thieves as the guy robbing a bank. After all, one bank robbery doesn't cost any one person all that much ...
Spam also comes with secondary hazards. Phishing attacks, websites which are for exploiting. These, if even one is successful can cost a company great expense, from data loss, to reputation lost if any corporate machines end up as zombie servers and found responsible for an attack.
Spam is expensive in another way. Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA, and other corporate regs requires E-mail to be archived for seven years. This means spam too. So, those messages about turning Vienna sausages into Titan V rockets have to take up disk space pretty much permanently.
I never said to deliver meds by email. However, snail mail, even twice a week, can work fine. I'm sure you're not receiving a new shipment every day. The scheduling problems would be minimal. If you're receiving it once a month, what's the problem with 2x a week mail delivery?
I don't know about your bank, but mine allows me to send money from my account to anyone with just their email address, and vice versa if they have the same service. Maybe its time to change banks. Its not like they keep the physical check on hand any more anyway.Daily mail service isn't needed. The original poster has a good point - moving it to once a week (or even twice a week) would save a LOT of energy and resources.
Up here, new streets don't get door-to-door mail delivery - they get a key to a lockbox within a block or two of their house. This was done as a cost-cutting measure, and it works.
Spammers would not be in business if people did not buy their products. Believe it or not, it costs tens of thousands of dollars for the bandwidth to send mail; it's not free. Buying lists is not free either. If no one bought any of that vicodin or that penis enlargement then spammers would not be in business, as costs would greatly outweigh the profit.
Unconstitutional? In what world? Better yet - are you arguing that it's wrong?
Yes. A blanket ban is unconstitutional and wrong.
That people should be permitted to consume all of my company's toner and paper supply on a daily basis because they want me to take advantage of their training seminars or low cost vacation packages?!?
You're the one permitting them. It's not as though a DNC list is impossible or impractical. It's not as though there aren't fax machines that just store inbound faxes as data, rather than printing them out, or which can block various numbers. If you want to have a fax machine that accepts unsolicited faxes, then don't get upset when it does. If you don't want it to, then it is your problem. I can put up with a government-run DNC list to assist you (though really there should be something built into the handshaking protocol) but a blanket ban goes too far.
N.b. that I hate all unsolicited advertising; I block text ads on Google, and banners on every website I go to. I skip over commercials, and if someone had augmented reality glasses so that I could block out ads in the newspaper or on billboards, I'd be overjoyed. So don't misunderstand me. I think that these guys have rights to send, though to not force you to receive, just as Nazis have a right to march down the street. It doesn't mean that I like it, or that I want it to happen. I just think that free speech means that we're stuck with it.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
My understanding of the meaning 'free speech' is that you have the right to say something, and I have the right not to listen. If you take away my right not to listen then it really isn't free.
The point is that you have to read the subject of the email, and you often have to open it before you actually figure out is spam. Something with subject containing the word 'V1@gr@' is obviously spam, something with a subject of 'An important message from Ebay' isn't so obvious (and is illegal for other reasons).
Just as an aside, my wife has been receiving snailmail postcards from 'Patrick & Daniel', in a handwritten printer font (but at a glance it looks like handwriting). Took her a few minutes to figure out that it's actually from Telstra (Telco here in Australia) advertising broadband in rural areas. It seems like even snail mail is copying ideas from the spammers - gone are the days when snail mail spam had things like 'You could already be a winner!' written on it and you could just chuck it straight in the recycling...
The problem I have is the same as the dissenting judges. What if I find out that the congress is about to pass a law that sells off the public domain and (as usual) the only thing the news is reporting is "Oh noes,teh Britteny might never get to see her kids!!!" so I send a bulk email to simply say "This is what is about to happen.If you don't approve,call or write your congress rep at".According to this ruling I'd be looking at the same time as "hot Pr0n,B1gger w@ng" emailers. And as we have seen in the past,there are many times that not being anonymous can equal SLAPPed to death in court,or worse. While I have no problem with them doing something about the "V1@gr@" guys,I think they should have made a distiction for emails sent to inform in a non-profit manner.But as always,my 02c,YMMV.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
A slight misunderstanding, here. I was talking about why I don't get my appointments by email. In the long run, however, I still think cutting back mail deliveries to once or twice a week isn't a good idea on general principles.
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Sure, you can delete it. You can only read whitelisted email. You can close your email account. You're free to do any of that. That's missing the point though... you also have the right to listen. The government doesn't have the right to dictate what you can read via the vague definition of spam. How the hell do they know an email is unsolicited? Are they mind readers? The only person who truly knows if an email was unsolicited is the recipient.
Thomas Galvin
Thomas Galvin
.....Do you really think that the amount of money they're paying to get that unasked-for (lack of) content into your mailbox really does anybody any good?.....
Actually yes. We have a wood stove and that junk mail makes good fire starters. There is enough to add a little bit of heat to the house. The stove also gets rid of all other unwanted papers so they cannot be used as data for identity theft by some old fashioned dumpster diving.
I wish that electronic junk mail were of a similar benefit.
All theory is gray
Okay, but if it saves money and resources, and you *still* get your appointment reminders (or they can phone you), why wouldn't Monday and Thursday mail, or Tuesday and Friday mail, be all that bad?
We don't have unlimited resources, and the original idea was a good one. Better to cut back a bit now, rather than being forced to cut back much deeper in the future.
The increased profits are good for the taxpayer, the reduced demand on resources is good for everyone ... the only downside I can see is that some people will get an extra day or two for the old "the check is in the mail" excuse.
1) They've already recently refused to hear a spam case.
2) They have no problems with First Amendment restrictions, including the Junk Fax law.
3) Chief Justice Berger, U.S. Supreme Court: "Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit. We categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another. If this prohibition operates to impede the flow of even valid ideas, the answer is that no one has a right to press even 'good' ideas on an unwilling recipient. The asserted right of a mailer, we repeat, stops at the outer boundary of every person's domain."
.... a computer that can process some 10,000 e-mail messages per hour.....
I bet such a computer isn't connected to the Internet via a low cost DSL home service line. The owner of that computer likely pays for a much more expensive, symmetrical, professional grade service from some ISP.
All theory is gray
....; if you make $150/hr it starts to add up quickly.....
Sounds like a relatively low cost lawyer that makes that kind of money. Even someone like that generally has a $15/hr secretary to screen emails as part of her/his job.
All theory is gray
No, we don't have unlimited resources, but we do have far more than we need. Cutting back on services like this is a false economy, because it encourages people to start cutting back on other things as well. Sooner or later, they start cutting back on essential services, and probably sooner.
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This is a BS argument often raised by people, who see only "one side" of the economics... As was famously said about some other absurdly stupid idea: "This is not even wrong."
Whoever is paying and whoever is paid, it all boils down to a lot of people doing a lot of work sending (the spammers) and delivering (USPO) the junk, so a lot of other people (recipients) do some more work discarding. "Printed on recycled paper" — yeah, right, and delivered with recycled fuel by a recycled postman, who has nothing better to do. That's just wrong.
You may as well pay people to carry water from Hudson to East River in buckets — if your goal is to keep them busy with something, so that the useful service, which can not keep them busy full-time stays cheap. But it is mostly not useful (to anyone) work — and nobody should be paying for it. Contrary to what a politician in need of pork for his district may tell you, it is wrong to order something "to create jobs". The only good reason is because you want to have it (whatever it is).
The whole idea of paying for work, instead of paying for result is ludicrous and I don't understand, how people paid for delivering junk mail feel themselves above, say, welfare recipients and other beggars...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
http://www.apwu.org/news/burrus/2006/update07-2006-052206.htm
May 22, 2006 Since 1975 the first-class rate has increased to 39 cents, a 200-percent increase, but the rates for large first-class business mailers have increased only 125 percent during the same period of time. Under the proposed rates, first-class stamps would go to 42 cents, a 223 percent increase since 1975, while the business mailers rate would increase only 140 percent.
The standard rates for large "automation mailers" have increased approximately 153 percent, and the amount is even less if they drop-ship their mail. Saturation mailers can mail for as little as 12.7 cents per piece, an increase of only 61 percent since 1975." Bulk mail rates haven't kept up with inflation... In effect, bulk mailers are paying less (in adjusted dollars) than they used to 30 years ago and 1st class mailers (you and me) are paying more because of this.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
By your own statement, daily mail service isn't an essential service, and cutting it back to twice a week, in and of itself, isn't a major issue.
The idea that we can't cut back anything because eventually we'll start cutting back on essentials isn't a long-term formula for success. Its like someone saying they won't cut back on their credit card spending on non-essentials, because if they did, they might eventually start cutting back on essential spending as well, whereas its more likely that cutting back on non-essentials will help them make their monthly nut.
By essential services, I mean such things as sanitation services. Would you prefer that we collected trash/garbage only once a month?
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Making a legal distinction between spamming and protected speech is the task as painfully difficult as describing a difference between appearances of a cat and a dog or, to get back to legislation, between (erotic) art and pornography. "I know it when I see it" is the only reliable standard...
I'd be the first to sign up a "kill the spammers" petition, if it weren't for my respect for the 1st Amendment. I'm not alone at this — all anti-spamming bills target not the "bulk e-mailing" itself, but the headers-forging and other related activities.
But even that should raise outcry... Where are the solemn-speaking defenders of the right to anonymity, for example? Should not even the headers-forging be protected by their vision of the 1st Amendment — spammers really do do it to remain anonymous...
At least, political speech is still protected... Oh, wait, it is not — not since that infamous bit of "bi-partisan" legislation named "McCain/Feingold" was passed. Seems like even simply standing on a street talking up a candidate may be a violation, if you do that for too long — everyone's political contribution is limited by this Constitution-busting law, so once you've talked for enough hours to reach the limit at some reasonable rate, your time is up...
Did the Founding Fathers err with the limitless Freedom of Speech, or are we interpreting it too widely and are forced to reinterpret chunks of it away, when dealing with abusers?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
How are supermarket ads useful to anyone except someone who doesn't know the supermarket exists? At least around here, there's no coupons anymore. Actually it's pretty silly--everyone offers to double or triple their competitors' coupons, but none of them offer any so it's useless. As for the content of the ads.. well gee there's a special on turkey in mid-November? Thanks advertisement.
/me hates ads in general
/me doesn't want to be your product, wants to be your customer
/me wants to introduce a model where if you advertise (turn me into a product without my permission), I should get a piece of the action since this unauthorized BS just increased the cost of whatever is being sold.
At any rate, supermarket ads are as useful as the tracking scheme most chains use now where you have to use a card just to pay the normal price. Might be useful to them, sure isn't useful to me.
In my mail, I get flyers, and 4-page foldouts with full color advertising of every description (G-rated, of course) for furniture, new this, new that, etc.
NONE of it has my name on it, let alone my address. Bulk-rate sorting? I don't think so. This is not even first class delivery - this is the lowest class.
They cut down trees for this stuff that I never read, will never care to and would just line bird cages with it.
So how does this help us? I can't even stop unless I fill out a form for each advertiser. And all I want to do is save a tree.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
I work for one of the largest direct (junk) mail companies in the country, and I can say it definitely does the USPS good, as it is an extremely profitable relationship for them.
And before anyone decides to flame me, I'm just an hourly employee working a labor job earning a paycheck, I despise the business as much as the next guy.
Tip: Don't flamebait first post on dialup.
I was attemlting the same thing with an old Yahoo mail account, but it backfired on me when I tried to switch a listserv I wanted to keep to another account:
http://www.geocities.com/catmistake
(& why does geocities seem retro to me?)
The Admin and the Engineer
Which do you think would be easier and cheaper to sort and deliver: 1) 10,000 catalogs, large but all the same size and with machine-readable labels, arriving at the Post Office bundled in Zip code order, or 2) 10,000 random birthday cards, bills, postcards, etc., etc., many addressed by hand, and arriving loose in big sacks?
Also, while the per-piece charge is much lower, the total payments are larger. The big mailers are, in effect, getting cheaper stamps, but they're buying them by the millions.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
I hear this said a lot, could somebody please explain to me how larger, heavier mail which costs much much less could possibly subsidize smaller, lighter mail which costs much more?
OK...
Part of the reason why Bulk Rate mail is cheaper because the sender has to presort the mail before it is taken to/picked up by the USPS. So, all the PO has to do is give it to the carriers for delivery.
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
Most spam originates from botnets which use the connections of other people for their bandwidth. Also wasting time is considered damage.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
How did spam ever become a free speech issue?
Spare me your constitutional arguments and Founding Father quotes and deep thoughts from warped legal continuums, but if intelligent people cannot sit down and agree that there is a difference between, say, a political speech and 50,000 emails about growing your penis, then we have failed as a sentient species.
And we should probably be investigating a wholesale conversion to asexual reproduction as well.
I mean, c'mon already.
It would be a free speech issue if they said "you can't advertise viagra", it's not one if they say "you can't do so by bulk email". Freedom of speech does not include freedom of carrier.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
What the other poster was saying is that with junk snail mail the major financial burden is on the sender, whereas with electronic mail the major financial burden is on the reciever.
With snail mail, the sender has to:
(X) Pay for it to be printed
(X) Pay for it to be mailed
With snail mail all you have to do is:
(X) Dispose of it
With electronic mail, the sender has to:
(X) Have an internet connection
(X) Have some software send the same stuff to large numbers of addresses for little to no cost
With electronic mail you have to chose some of the following:
( ) Spend hours going through your email to sort the chaff from the wheat (spam from the *.meat ?)
( ) Choose an address that wouldn't be on word/name lists (like something from an obscure book)
( ) Pay for professional spam filtering services (like Postini)
( ) Never give your address out to anyone (works best with option two)
Basically what I (and some others) are saying here is that the key difference between junk snail mail, and junk electronic mail is who pays. With junk snail mail, the sender has to pay to make it, and pay to get it to you, whereas it costs you little (read: almost nothing) to just throw it away. With junk electronic mail however, the sender only has to pay for a computer and an internet connection -- once (s)he has those, (s)he can send a virtually unlimited stream of junk. Because of this, you end up with an inbox crowded with messages that you then have to sort through so that you don't miss important messages.
Simply put, on the one hand the sender foots the bill, while on the other the recipient does.
Does this help you?
( ) Yes
( ) No
Poopycock.
Congress has not been given the authority to restrict 'freedom of carrier' so even if freedom of speech were not inclusive of freedom of carrier, it wouldn't matter. But, the first amendment clearly states "Congres shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech..." Limiting the carrier is prohibiting the freedom of speech. Using your argument we could conclude that it would not be a free speech issue if you were not allowed to publish political pamphlets.
You get medicine via the Post Office? What happens if the post office loses it for a week of two. You know, like what happens all the time with mail. The Post Office says first class mail normally arrives within 1-2 weeks and they don't even guaranty that. So any of your vital checks, appointment reminders, or vital meds could easily be delayed a week or two anyway.
You obviously dont get your email pushed to your mobile phone. You dont qualify as a geek or nerd. Go and read another website where you belong.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I had a thought about how to fight spam (Yet Another Idea!).
In short, the problem is that currently email operates as data-push from arbitrary locations to arbitrary destinations. This enables any asshole with bandwidth to carpetbomb the destination-space.
Now suppose a service were added that will vouch for the sender's legitimacy, thereby eliminating the "arbitrary from" half. From the user's perspective, they simply have to locate an email vouching service (hopefully one will be suggested when they create an email account) and register their email with the service. Depending on the user's settings, if the voucher rates the sender as x/N or less the email is canned. If the user thinks it's spam, he hits a button that tells the given voucher/reputation server that sender Q did something bad.
On the admin side, the network of vouchers is decentralized and community-run. After you confirm IRL (i.e. you give contact info) that you are 'good,' you can join your server to the network. Servers exchange lists of addresses and status changes on those addresses (reputation up/down, deleted, etc) between each other via encrypted Bittorrent on a regular basis such that state-coherency is maintained. At regular intervals, a single server would be chosen to receive all updates from the others (possibly percholating up a high fan-in hierarchy), compile a master state-delta, and seed it on the Bittorrent.
To prevent spammers from being able to run their own malicious servers, when the user registers their address with the real network they are given a list of all legitimate servers in the network. If an email's voucher is not on the list, the mail is automatically dropped. To deal with forgery of the from: field is a bit harder. When registering, the voucher exchanges keys with the given mailserver. When a mailserver gets an email, it queries the voucher about it and gives the address & sender. The voucher then challenges the mailserver to send a short encrypted message - if the voucher can't decrypt it, the sender was forged and the mail is dropped. If the sender wasn't forged but has a poor reputation, the user's client will drop the mail. In short, the plan is to sidestep the problem of trusting the sender by having a trusted third party vouch for him.
This will cut off spam in every way. You can't have your spambots forge addresses (because they lack the key, known only to the address's real mailserver & the vouchers), you can't have them register their own (because these will be marked and dropped immediately due to the volume of garbage they pump out). That leaves only legitimate users whose mail client is compromised by malware. This problem will solve itself, because this system will create consequences that only the end user can deal with: You let your box get compromised again? No one can help you. Get a new account and stop fucking up. When people are forced to deal with the consequences of stupidity (unlike how dumbass users avoid the responsibility of dealing with their box after opening a virus-mail today by hassling us nerds presently), they will eventually stop being stupid in this small way.
In response to the inevitable "Your post advocates..." reply: First of all, die in a fire - If you can spend the time to go through filling in [X] in that bit of copypasta, you can write your own sentences like I wrote mine. Second, no, it does not require everyone's immediate cooperation. It could be gradually phased in with an "activate vouching" button on the user's side, and mailservers would be perfectly fine with not querying the voucher-servers. Of course, the advantages would be large enough that the situation would quickly become such that no one would accept mail without a voucher, but that's the point. Third, you should trust this server network because it's run openly.
The only problem I forsee is temporary - the original servers will need to have an absolutely astounding amount of bandwidth to deal with assured spammer retaliation. Once the system goes online and becomes the dominant way of doing email, spam dies and their revenue dies and their ability to buy time on botnets dies.
So, would it work?
Because its been sent to 50,000 people?
Its pretty obvious what is and isn't spam.
I know it, you know it.
I don't normally like to make assumptions here but are you into email marketing perchance?
Because I cant think why else you would be trying to defend spammers.
It is true that the recipient know what is and isnt spam I have about 20,000 emails Id like to present to a court.
~Dan
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
or intentional "goodwill" of the owner of the glass. "wow, I need to improve the economy, I'd better break this glass!" (as a result, two people's times are wasted). Same with junk snail mail: Very few people read the stuff, so it wastes at least three people's time a _lot_ (writer, reader, carrier).
You are thinking like a "city dweller" where everybody is hooked up to the "Intarweb". For the grand majority of adults in non-city areas, its still just a toy and a way to get instant Pr0n. ....if they even have it.
Also, realistically, lets look at this:
- Checks - direct deposit - Won't work... If you are paying another person for services, then you either write them a check, of you send it via your bank's website (again, if they even have one). But even from the website, unless they have specifically setup an electronic transfer, which at least 1/3 of my bills have not done with my bank, then they get a paper check in the mail. I'd like to be damn sure that they get it in time and not charge me a late fee.
- appointment notices - email - Won't work. You assume that people use their email daily, have outstanding filters so they only get toe good mail, and even have email in the first place.
- deliveries of meds - (summary) 1-2 days a week - So we should all suffer because to meet your whims?
You gotta think LCD here. (not the TV...) Until every person in the US has email (which they don't), has good filters in place (which they really don't), users their email on a daily basis (I still cannot get my parents to read it more than once a month), and can move to a tech way of doing things (good luck getting the majority of the Baby Boomer generation to do that), then it ain't gonna happen.
And lets also think about commercial industry. Do you seriously think they are going to go for SLOWER mail delivery? Especially in this day and age where "Overnight Delivery" is considered too slow? Anything of any significance still have to be done with a real piece of paper and a signature. Not email.
Could we drop Saturday delivery? I'd say yes, but the last time it was proposed, there was a HUGE uproar over the idea even being proposed.
I hear this said a lot, could somebody please explain to me how larger, heavier mail which costs much much less could possibly subsidize smaller, lighter mail which costs much more?
To name a few reason Bulk Mail is profitable:
presorted by zip - much less handling
doesn't use a printed stamp - no cost for stamp printing
generally mailed locally or short distances - no cross country airplane ride for the same price as a piece that goes two doors down in the same town
Seems to me that is junk mail was eliminated, the Post Office could get rid of much of its trucks, drivers and infrastructure. Without junk mail, I'd say residential delivery could be scaled back to one delivery per week, meaning one truck could serve six different routes instead of six different drivers and trucks going out every Mon-Sat. All that overhead eliminated would raise first class rates how? And now the remaining trucks would be loaded with letter sized full-rate first class mail instead of giant heavy bundles of newsprint mailed out for a few pennies each. How is that not better revenue for the post office?
The problem is you've only addressed one small part of the cost structure - drivers - and not the rest of the infrastructure needed to haul mail around the country. You still need post offices to take mail; sort mail; etc. - and in some smaller service areas two days may cover everyone - so do you close the post office the rest of the time and make all the employees part timers? Rural delivery is already done in some areas by carriers who own their own vehicle and get paid to use it; so then there are even less savings.
In addition; as people turn to electronic delivery less volume will go through the USPS; so prices need to go up to cover the large fixed costs - and tiered rates may be needed to reflect the actual delivery cost, much as is done for parcels today.
The real advantage the USPS has is they go to every house every weekday - if they could partner with FedEx / UPS to do their residential deliveries they could increase their revenues while reducing FedEx / UPS's costs for home delivery.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I work for the USPS and what you say is true. Junk mail does subsidize first class mail. But I wanted to add this: Some people think we get paid too much but do not take into account that a percentage of our paychecks go to social security, medicare, federal, state, local taxes, and some elect to give to charities through the CFC.
If all junk mail(bulk mail) were to dissappear and our pay was cut by 1/3 or 1/2 that would mean programs that many Americans rely on(social security and medicare) would not be getting as much money from postal employee's paychecks. If that were to happen the federal government would probably just just start taking more out of *everyone's*(that means ALL working Americans, not just USPS employees) paychecks to compensate for the who knows how many millions of dollars that would have been taken out of USPS employees' paychecks had their pay not been significantly cut because you didn't want any "junk mail".
"Sure, you can delete it."
No. This turns people into folder-maintenance monkeys instead of letting them do their..oh, I dunno, JOBS?
"You can only read whitelisted email."
Not a viable option for people who have any sort of customer interaction on behalf of their company.
"You can close your email account."
Yeah. That'll go over. Give people your contact address, then KILL IT.
REAL bright that!
"You're free to do any of that."
No. As a matter of fact, most people AREN'T.
"That's missing the point though... you also have the right to listen."
That's just it, these people aren't sending to the people who want to listen. Hence the "*UNSOLICITED* Commercial E-Mail".
"How the hell do they know an email is unsolicited?"
Duh? Because the users who got it didn't want it, never requested it, and are pissed as hell about having to wade through his crap? The people who complained to their ISPs, who then went and procured lawyers.
Do I need to draw it for you in crayon?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
"I shudder to think of how many trees died so my wife could know what was on sale each week at Zellers and Walmart."
:).
Would it matter so much if trees grown for making paper were chopped down, if they keep growing more trees for that?
If you landfill/store the resulting paper, then it'll take CO2 out of the atmosphere
OK perhaps the whole process (logging, manufacturing, transportation) burns up lots of oil, so there's net CO2 gain.
The idea of free speech in a truly unlimited form has been overtaken by technology.
When the constitution was written, printing presses were still new and therefor expensive to own and operate. It was easy to say "everyone can say what they want when they want" when in reality this meant you either stood on a soapbox in a corner of a park. Sure you could print a leaflet but that cost money, want it distributed, that costs even more. Reality made sure that free speech was very hard to excersise.
E-mail has changed everything, a spammer can send millions of emails at little to no cost. You mention junk-mail, sure that is a nuisance but the MAILER has to pay serious cash to do it. I happen to know that mass mail campaigns are very carefull of what areas their "spam" because of the high costs, if there ain't a store near enough to a town or suburb, that one is skipped because they know they won't be getting any meaningfull response anyway. Area too poor or to rich? Don't get the mail either. It may not seem like it but junk mail is caefully pruned to make sure it only arrives at those houses where people might be intrested.
An email spammer doesn't give a shit, it doesn't cost them anything to spam the entire world and so they do.
Imagine if someone invented a soapbox that could broadcast the speakers voice all around the globe for 5 cents. Would you still be in favor of free speech when any idiot who wants to can drown out all other sounds? Because that is what spam is doing. It has become such a problem that it is flooding out regular emails.
Not that we really have free speech. The letters page in the newspaper is censored, same with feedback options on websites, try to put an ad in the newspaper that the newspaper doesn't want to publish, go ahead run an ad during the superbowl that shows titties, none of them are possible. We do NOT have free speech. Go ahead, hold a speech on the highway, seehow quickly you are taken of your soapbox. Go ahead get a sound installation and start your speech in the middle of the night in an urban area.
The reality is that in the real world free speech is extremely limited.
The internet for a whole gave us the idea that true free speech was possible. With usenet and email you could have you say and have everyone else pay for actually distributing it. This was a revolution. Imagine how it would be in the real world, you HAVE to subscribe to a newspaper that is forced into your hands every day. That newspaper contains all your personal mail so you HAVE to read it and anyone who wants to can put as much into that newspaper as they want. That is the internet.
It is an intresting idea, but sadly the bad guys as always ruined it. None of these spammers are intrested in expressing ideas into the world,they want to advertise their dodgy stuff for free.
There is a truth in the fact that if you want to defend free speech you got to defend speech you don't like as well, but do we do this?
No titties on tv, you can't just hang up your poster were ever you want, where when and how loud you make a public speech is heavily regulated. We DO NOT HAVE FREE SPEECH as in "you can say anything, whenever, however, wherever, you want."
So why should we think that the internet can be different?
We regulate speech in real life, contrary to what the parent thinks, junk-mail and telemarketing IS heavily regulated, see the DO-NOT-CALL list and truth in advertising laws. When did you ever receive a viagra junk-mail or telemarketing call?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
well, it would make people think a bit more about what they put in there...
I don't like spam nor do I send any or want more spam.
BUT actually I think spammers should be able to send spam within certain limits.
What they should not be able to do is tell so many lies just to try to make money.
Spammers should not be able to:
1) Pretend they are someone else (use someone else's email account and name in the From line)
2) Make false claims about their products or themselves
3) Sell illegal stuff
4) Send pictures of penises/goatse.cx to Aunt May if she hasn't said she wanted them - I think there are laws against this already, way before the Internet got popular.
So if they do that sort of stuff you should be able to get them for fraud or criminal impersonation etc. In the USA: "Criminal impersonation is a class 6 felony."
If spammers didn't keep pretending they were someone else, people who didn't want to listen to them could more easily filter them out.
I don't really think that there are that many spammers - from what I see most of us worldwide appear to be getting rather similar emails.
The cops should just try to buy stuff from spammers that appear to be doing dubious stuff and in their jurisdiction (not difficult - follow the money - if a US cop sees the money trail goes via anyone in the USA then go for it).
Just regularly catch the spammers breaking them and I think there'll be a lot less spam. The old laws are good enough, I think there just isn't the will to go around catching them.
you speak from the point of view of a user who has never been involved in administration.
For example, handling white lists are great if you, as a person, decide never to receive email from anyone you don't already know, or you define you idiosyncratic protocol for letting people mail you. That may be a good model for you, but as an admin, I need to make a decision for several thousand people, including folks who have to respond to feedback on web sites, and support sales. In that case, refusing email from anyone you don't know is problematic. For ISP's, the problem is magnified 100 fold. For these people, idiosyncratic protocols aren't good enough, because when you use them for thousands of recipients, the protocols themselves become prime targets for the spammer engineers.
The fact is that spam filtering is an arms race where the spammers have tremendous economic incentive to innovate, and for everyone else it is just a cost. The only way we can compete is by spreading out the costs among many, many people either, usually by contracting out the service to specialists. Spam filtering is inherently hard. People think it ought to be easy, but if there are motivated humans on the other end of an arms race, solutions are never going to be easy or simple. I run a corporate spam filter, and I have had complaints in the past where people insisted that we should not filter their mail. When we upgrade our filtering system a year and a half ago, we made sure that we provided an 'opt_out' option. The number of takers lasting more than a day with this option so far? zero out of several thousand mailboxes. OTOH, having that option has saved me days and weeks of argument with people who simply have no idea what the environment for receiving email is really like. We simply provide the option, and their clue index rises exponentially in a few hours.
During working hours, we see around 92% of incoming mail as spam, outside working hours, such as Christmas day, we have seen as high as 99%. I've had to deploy a three tiered architecture to handle a million incoming emails a day, and scan them all only to deliver the 10-15,000 legitimate ones for the users.
Now your argument is that receiving email is free. If that were true, I would not to have a full-time employee semi-dedicated to this filtering task, maintain an array of servers (which are heavily loaded, I might add) to receive 10,000 emails a day. Receiving 10,000 emails could be done with an eeepc, from the computer power point of view.
SPAM is not a mere inconvenience to users, it makes email reception between 50 and 100 times more expensive. Granted, the starting number is pretty small, but when you aggregate it out, to large numbers of users, and you are trying to measure costs, the facts are the facts.
Spammers aren't giving me a dime for this. This isn't an ad on the street somewhere where they are paying rent. This is like putting up a sign that blocks my driveway, and putting up a fence around my entire house, and plastering it with 20 foot high ads. This is like me paying for phone service, and having it ring off the hook all day and all night, and paying staff 24x7 to answer the phone and politely refuse the sales offers, in order to catch the 100:1 chance of a legitimate phone call. I say politely, because we don't want to upset that 100th caller in case of an understandable mistake, and it impossible to guarantee that we won't make any, given the volume of noise.
Now if you are trying to argue someone else forcing you to pay 50 fold more to providing a service is OK, then you are wrong. If you are saying we should attack the means that they use, such as computer intrusion, fine, I agree that that should be prosecuted as well, but it doesn't change the fact that those are merely means, and other means can be found.
Regardless of the means used, transferring costs to thousands or millions of other people to support your ad campaigns is at the very least highly immoral. There is also the fact that o
Three points:
Twice-weekly mail delivery isn't the same as once-a-month.
I would have no problem with garbage collection going to once a week, mail delivery twice a week (or even once a week), etc., if it means lower costs and less strain on the environment. Heck, I could probably get along with once a month garbage collection - the dogs happily eat any organic left-overs; physical spam (flyers, etc) represents the bulk of what I toss. My garbage bag? It's usually almost empty.
Who should you watch Matchstick Men with
Heck, just go watch it. And The Sting. A certain amount of cynicism is healthy.
Unfortunately not everyone making that kind of money is an attorney/has a receptionist, nor would they necessarily be using their company email address while on the clock.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
I don't know about your bank ... maybe its time for you to move to Canada. I can send anyone up here an email with a unique banking code for that particular transfer, that will transfer $X to their bank account. They don't need to have their account set up for direct deposit from me, or anything else. They just forward the email to their bank, accepting the transfer, and the money is transferred from my account to their account.
No checks to write. No worrying about whether it will get lost in the mail, or delayed, or late fees. No worry about someone altering the amount, or the payee.
Who was most opposed to dropping Saturday delivery? The postal workers. Its extra income for them (hint - always, always follow the money). For a lot of people, Saturday delivery represents more of a hassle, esp. during vacation time or when they're gone for the weekend - it just sits there advertising "hey crooks - nobody's home!".
Besides, who wants to receive bills on the week-end?
Before a user gets it, Mr. "actively clean this shit for everyone." I'm tired of not receiving email, and having friends not receive mine, because some dipshit like yourself decided my single message was the tip of a bulk email iceburg. Assholes like you are ruining email.
First off, how in the world did you get anything about non-spammers out of what you quoted??? She even said "unsolicited bulk e-mail", which is the very definition of spam, regardless of content. Second, no less than then-Chief Justice Berger, as I quoted above, was comfortable with prohibiting "at the outer boundary of every person's domain" regardless of content. Sorry, the reason for dissent gives me no comfort.
Our ads come out in the Friday paper around here which works nicely; two weekend days to do the grocery shopping at the beginning of the flyer period. We have about eight supermarket chains within a very brief drive from our house. Every week we sit at the table for 10-15 minutes browsing the flyers trying to decide which is the best bang for our buck. When things are on sale that we normally use, we stock up. When things are on sale we don't normally use we treat ourselves.
Now, this is different from mailbox advertisements. Those are typically for politicians, religious groups and small local businesses. If something catches our eye hey, what the hell. Otherwise the blue box is right below the mailbox.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
You can also find out what's on sale at which chain. Knowing in advance which store has the best price can save you quite a bit of money in the long run, but I guess you're not interested in that.
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In the five years I've been getting my meds from the VA this way, it's not happened once. If you can't come up with a better argument than that, give up.
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"Before a user gets it, Mr. "actively clean this shit for everyone.""
Because my clients ask me to implement a proactive spam solution. They do so with the complete understanding that yes, they may, on rare occasion, lose a legitimate e-mail here and there (though the data is archives so we can get it back if needs be).
They have at least a shallow understanding of the concept and the problem of BECAUSE I OUTLINE IT FOR THEM before they sign any contracts with me for service.
While YES, some of them might be interested in Viagra or Hoodia or some other crap. But if they are THEY DON'T USE THEIR CORPORATE MAIL FOR IT.
"and having friends not receive mine"
If your friends are on my network, they're subject to my rules, as well as the rules of the company that is paying for their access. If they want to set up their own corn-holed setup and receive every spam on the planet BE MY GUEST!
UCE is a waste of time (which translates into money), labor (which translates into money), and network resources (which translates into money).
You want to spread your message? PUT UP A WEBPAGE OR SEND OUT A SNAIL MAIL! Then YOU are paying for the crap you send. When you spam me, I (and by extension, my clients) are the ones paying for it. And I'll be damned if I'm going to let some malicious little shit cost me or my clients money.
"Assholes like you are ruining email."
{Sarcasm style"weight: megaton;"}
Ruining e-mail! Oh no! We're ruining e-mail! Not ruining e-mail! Oh God help us! Ruining e-mail!
{/Sarcasm}
Ruining e-mail MY ASS. What's so great about waking up in the morning with TEN THOUSAND (and no, I'm NOT exaggerating, I've actually seen it happen) e-mails in your mailbox, only to find out each and every last one is spam.
I find that your entire argument about "I can't talk to my friends" lacks a certain sincerity.
So we have a bunch of options here.
1: You simply don't have a firm grasp of the realities of the situation and are either reacting this violently based on sheer ignorance and incidental misperception or sheer ignorance and influence by the spam industry who's trying to convince you they're doing something worthwhile.
2: You're trolling.
3: You're a shill, paid or otherwise working directly for a spammer or for a company benefiting illegally from UCE.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
"It remains unconstitutional to jail them for merely making their pitch in your presence."
Spam is not "making a pitch in your presence".
It's like standing an audio player outside your office and blaring it at peak volume, or not stopping when you ask them to.
If people like that keep on, you get them jailed for disorderly conduct and possibly harassment.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
As someone else replied, the broken window fallacy has nothing to do with whether the act is legal or illegal. Rather, it refers to justifying anything because it "creates jobs." This is exactly what the original poster did:
"[Can junk mail be good?] Yes. [...] people are paid money to create those ads, print them, address them and mail them. Not only that, the USPO is paid at bulk mail rates for carrying them."
Let me rephrase:
"[Cab breaking the windows of one's own house be good?] Yes. [...] people are paid money to create the replacement glass, nails, deliver them and install them. Not only that, the USPO is paid for shipping them from the factory."
How is it different? Whether or not junk mail is a "good thing," this particular justification for it is completely invalid. If the post office wasn't delivering so much junk mail, their employees could be doing something else for which they would also get paid. If businesses did not advertise with junk mail, they could be advertising in some other way that would also pay people. Junk mail (and broken windows) do not create jobs. They merely divert those jobs from doing something else.
Note: I am not arguing against junk mail, but rather this piece of "logic." The rest of the original post was quite good, identifying the main valid arguments for and against junk mail: the senders and some recipients do actually benefit, but the senders don't face the true cost, passing on a negative externality to the unwilling recipients (and in the case of spam, the delivery services).
I doubt that the average American would agree with you, but can't prove it. Personally, I live in an area where the infrastructure is modern enough that garbage goes down the drain, and doesn't have to be picked up.
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As someone else replied, the broken window fallacy has nothing to do with whether the act is legal or illegal.
Actually, the parable opens up thusly;
In this case it was the shopkeeper's careless son but it could be attributed to any act that results in a broken window legal or otherwise. Regardless, the legality of the act is mere semantics, the point of the parable is the window and the repercussions of replacing same, not the cause of the initial breakage.
How is it different? Whether or not junk mail is a "good thing," this particular justification for it is completely invalid.
No, actually, it's not. As I said in my response the paid advertisements sent by the post office are there to serve a distinct benefit to the merchants who are sending them. The broken window is something a homeowner would not do intentionally because, yes, they would have otherwise spent the money somewhere more productive, hence the nuisance of the "little boy". The parable of the broken window is merely a way to reassure and calm the shopkeeper / homeowner that the act is in fact helping the economy so it's not so terrible. The paid, targeted advertisements are in fact helping the economy for the reasons I spelled out in my previous post;
This isn't in any way a false economy. Flyer advertsing is far less expensive than radio and television and is more targeted which nets a far better cost:benefit ratio for their advertising dollar. Now, regardless of medium, that dollar will be spent in some way or another be it flyer circulation, newspaper flyers, newspaper/magazine adverts, radio/television spots, billboards, bus/bench advertising, direct telephone campaigns, door to door representation or any of a host of other means of getting their name out to the customer base in their target (surrounding) area.
You can easily find a way to discredit any or all of the above means of advertising thereby claiming each one in particular as a false economy but the fact remains that advertising remains the best way to garner attention to your business if done right and flyer advertising works and creates many dozens or hundreds of jobs in the process. It will never go away and the postal service will never refuse to deliver these ads so they're a part of our lives. Learn to live with it or suggest a better way to target an area of customers and present it to the local businesses and the post office and see how well it goes over.
If the post office wasn't delivering so much junk mail, their employees could be doing something else for which they would also get paid.
You mean the ones who are left after the massive rounds of layoffs. "More efficient" in this case means "fewer people on the payroll".
What else besides sorting, routing and delivering mail is a postal employee supposed to do? That's their job description; end of story. If you take away one of those areas there is less work to go around therefore fewer people required to do it.
If businesses did not advertise with junk mail, they could be advertising in some other way that would also pay people. Junk mail (and broken windows) do not create jobs. They merely divert those jobs
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Nice post.
He's not going to reply, and if he does, he's going to reply selectively. Look at his other posts on this topic. People make decent points against him, and he just merrily ignores them. He'll possibly call you a name, like a fascist, or get angry. He's being emotional, not logical, about this issue.
(In response to this comment and the sibling comment...)
My main supermarket is Wegman's. Officially, they don't have sales (unofficially they do). Example flyer. They look like sales, but trust me, they aren't. It's just the concoction of some advertising guru. Notice there's no normal price, or savings listed.
Now I disagree about chasing sales being how to save money. For me, that'd be a ridiculous thing to do. My shopping bill is low, and it's not from chasing sales. Its from buying what I know I can use, not having to throw away anything rotting in my fridge, etc. (Throw away half a can of beans, you just doubled the price). Costco helps too.
I guess this is just different takes on shopping. All I know is that food would cost less if they didn't spend money circulating those ads.
Let me clarify by saying that the person might be using their *personal* email account while on the clock. Speaking in negatives often confuses the context.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
It's a business model that wastes the time and effort of laborers on something we don't want instead of something we want.
it keeps their employees workingThe time and effort of postal employees is wasted delivering mail we don't want instead of doing something useful.
it fills in the gaps in their daily routes (eg; long stretches of houses that otherwise wouldn't receive any mail on a given day) thereby making the routes more predictable and efficientIt increases the number of deliveries they have to make, increasing the hours of labor, fuel, and vehicle maintenance expenditures for no useful end. Delivery routes aren't logic circuits, there's no need for them to have predictable timing. You give every letter carrier a route, and when he finishes his route for the day he goes home.
With recycling programs in high gear in most(?) heavily populated areas the resultant flyers are generally disposed of in the "blue bin" (or the local equivalent) and recycled to create new products and new employment opportunities.Further resources are wasted recycling and reprocessing this garbage that nobody wanted created in the first place.
Look, it's very popular to think that it's always a good thing to waste effort and natural resources for the sake of stimulating the economy, but that's complete bullshit. And even if it was a good idea, there are far better ways to do it. If we used the same reasoning to continuously build and tear down completely unnecessary pyramids in the Arizona desert, it would accomplish the same goal without annoying people. It would be even better, of course, to invest all that time, effort, and natural resources into something useful.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
As far as your last comment goes, you couldn't possibly be more wrong. Businesses advertise because it brings in more money than it costs. If they didn't advertise, business would drop and they'd have to raise prices. I know; my father worked in grocery markets as a manager, and I learned how such things work from the inside.
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Having received many of the emails you talk about, that are meant to inform me of some important political news so that I may take action, allow me to say I'm all for having that crap banned as well. Telling people that Obama is secretly a radical Muslim looking to destroy America from within is not a legitimate use of the email system.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
And a distinct lack thereof to mail recipients and the postal service.
The parable of the broken window is merely a way to reassure and calm the shopkeeper / homeowner that the act is in fact helping the economy so it's not so terrible.No, the parable points out that the act does not help the economy because replacing the broken window wastes otherwise-useful resources.
The postal worker gets a more steady, consistent flow of mail guaranteeing them work.Human effort and time is wasted on something unwanted.
The postal service gets more predictable mail routes thereby allowing the system to flow smoothly rather than erratically making the system as a whole more efficient.Efficiently delivering 10x amount of mail, of course, still costs more than inefficiently delivering x amount of mail.
The printers, artists, paper and ink suppliers are all given work.Natural resources and human effort are wasted.
The business that sends the flyers gets an increase in traffic to their establishment creating work for their own employees and increasing their bottom lines.Perhaps the only real benefit here.
Flyer advertsing is far less expensive than radio and television and is more targeted which nets a far better cost:benefit ratio for their advertising dollar.Indeed. You have no idea how well-targeted my junk mail is, let me tell you. This "Resident" fellow's interests are so similar to mine!
Now, regardless of medium, that dollar will be spent in some way or another be it flyer circulation, newspaper flyers, newspaper/magazine adverts, radio/television spots, billboards, bus/bench advertising, direct telephone campaigns, door to door representation or any of a host of other means of getting their name out to the customer base in their target (surrounding) area.Let's see: newspapers and magazines can be read online with adblockers, radio can be replaced by ad-free alternatives, televisions have DVR now, there's a do-not-call list for telemarketing, and door-to-door marketers get a door slammed in their face. Regardless of medium, there's a high demand for filtering advertising our of our lives, and the postal service should respect this. Currently they don't offer either opt-out or opt-in for junk mail. If they did, the world would be a better place.
You can easily find a way to discredit any or all of the above means of advertising thereby claiming each one in particular as a false economy but the fact remains that advertising remains the best way to garner attention to your business if done right and flyer advertising works and creates many dozens or hundreds of jobs in the process. It will never go away and the postal service will never refuse to deliver these ads so they're a part of our lives. Learn to live with it or suggest a better way to target an area of customers and present it to the local businesses and the post office and see how well it goes over.What the fuck are you, a lobbyist for the junk mail industry?
You mean the ones who are left after the massive rounds of layoffs. "More efficient" in this case means "fewer people on the payroll".Let there be layoffs then. Maybe these people can be rehired to fix crumbling bridges and overpasses, install 100 Mbps broadband lines to every home in America, or do something else that actually improves the world. There are hundreds of far more serious problems that have to be solved before sorting and delivering junk mail is worth paying people for.
The whole idea that junk mail adverts and junk email adverts are analogous is as much a fallacy as the application of the broken window parable to the situation in the first place.It's very analogous: spam helps whatever business does the spamming and keeps thousands of people employed in the IT field to filter it.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Maybe they can become artists. That would improve the world.
How will we advertise the campaigns to feed all the starving artists once you've eliminated commercial advertising?
As I said in my response the paid advertisements sent by the post office are there to serve a distinct benefit to the merchants who are sending them.And a distinct lack thereof to mail recipients and the postal service.
If that were true, they'd have stopped accepting the business years ago. Unverifiable strawmen are fun and all but they don't contribute to the flow of the discussion.
Why don't you go repair a crumbling bridge or install an ethernet cable rather than wasting our time here? According to you, anything deemed not socially responsible and/or productive should be immediately ceased until consensus can be reached to find something more productive. Your post has annoyed the hundreds of people who had to skim their way past it; therefore it's a waste of time, energy and resources that could otherwise have been spent on more productive purposes.
Wow, that's an easy argument to make. I can see why it's been so popular thus far. I can do this all day.
Meanwhile you'd better find a way to pay for all these bridge repairs and ethernet cable installations; I'm sure the businesses who have to shut their doors and lay off their employees due to lack of exposure won't be paying for them. Their tax dollars certainly won't exist to contribute because they'll be on the dole while they try to find a job that doesn't require ad exposure to survive. Certainly not in the retail sector in which they're arguably the most qualified.
You have a lot of good ideas. As the saying goes, I'd like to subscribe to your magazine. Run with it. See how well it works. Let me know when you've made your economy sustainable with all these expensive new projects. I'm curious to see how this all works out in the end.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
So it ends up in the sewer instead of the recycling center?
Maybe you should check out how many tons of chemicals your sewage treatment plant uses ... I was surprised.
No. My point was that where I live, we don't need to have garbage trucks going around almost every, single day to get rid of the stuff. We only need to have the trash removed, and once a week's enough to keep on top of that. However, this whole part of the discussion has gotten a tad off-topic by now, hasn't it?
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Unlike you (apparently), I find out about things I enjoy and pay for using means like "research", "word of mouth", "going to the store and looking around", and similar means that aren't nearly as deceptive and annoying.
Look, the problem with advertising is that with rare exception, no one wants to see or hear it. Right now the market is taking care of that through internet ad blockers, television DVRs, and so forth. All I really want is some way for me to tell the postal service to stop delivering this crap to my mailbox. If that hurts your business, nuts to you.
If that were true, they'd have stopped accepting the business years ago.Nah, the postal service is pretty well restrained by the federal government and the postal union. And even setting that aside, the costs for the mail customer aren't accounted for.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
I'm not bothered by the free-speech aspects here, in spite of being fairly radical about the issue, but the case should have been tossed out of state courts prima facie because it _is_ interstate, and therefore Federal jurisdiction. The spammer can appeal to Federal court, but shouldn't have had to - AOL should have sued him there to start with, though state laws are often much more aggressive about spammers. The Federal You-Can-Spam law is pretty easy for spammers to avoid, but most of them don't seem to bother (except the ones sending spam internationally).
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yep, that's so. Then again, now that you mention it, the bigger-still subsidy is the failure to charge for the resource consumption (the trees cut down) and disposals (plastic windows, inks and dyes, etc). A proper accounting would say that these are costs on all of us in terms of the money spent by public facilities carting this to junk yards, the space lost in the earth to such junk yards waiting for it to never decay, the death of the coral reefs and other environmental things because these pollute our world. And those hugely outweigh the costs of the delivery.
Just as my need to buy spamware and even with that spamware to spend time going through several hundred junk mail classifications per day to make sure no real mail was misclassified is an unreasonable (if smaller than "death of the planet") burden to carry in cyberspace.
Many say you should tax things you don't want people to do. And then we go and tax value added, sales, and earnings... things we want people to do. It seems odd. Maybe the Right Tax, if there can be said to be such a thing, would be "added societal burden". So, for example, a carbon or methane tax, a plastic disposal tax, an inks and dyes in runoff water tax, a litter tax, a going-to-make-others-have-to-buy-a-shredder-or-spamware tax, etc.
The libertarian point of view seems to be that people should leave others alone. And that's very appealing to me. But only to the ponit that the person I'm leaving alone is not creating a burden on me by my doing so. The right of someone to be left alone and not pollute my environment is something I think is rational. At the point where I'm leaving them alone to fill my email box or my real world water supply with junk, then they are not leaving me alone, and I think that's why more people don't rally to that banner. The basic concept of "small, non-invasive government" seems to me to appeal to more people than those willing to call themselves big-L Libertarians. I think the barrier is that the big-L folks often talk a line that sounds more like a shield for people to wash their hands of responsibility for shared burdens that really cannot be opted out of. Freedom and responsibility must go hand in hand.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Someone has an obvious double standard. NIMBY.
I find that your entire argument about "I can't talk to my friends" lacks a certain sincerity.Because some of us have friends. You obviously lack social skills, so I doubt you have all that many yourself. I'll leave you with one last analogy that maybe a friendless person like yourself will be able to understand:
You're at a bar/club/library... wherever... you see an attractive girl and you walk over to say hello. Should you be arrested? You're obviously making an unsolicited attempt to sell yourself, and according to you, that should be against the law. So go ahead.... shout, cry, twist logic... that is the essence of your position.
I have read like 1000 posts on /. about spam. All of you so far, at least the comments I've read, seem to think that spam pays. Why? I mean, it will all be very simple if the guy that sells the spam is the one that sells the goods. But is this really the case?
I mean, to me, it seems that only really dumb people will answer to spam. And by realy dumb, I mean, complete retards. Most of the spam I get here is in Russian, and I don't even know the letters. I am thinking that, maybe the guys doing the spam are really getting paid by the guys selling the product. I mean, you go to some business, and say: "hey you want some cheap advertising? It may be illegal!". The other guy pays and it's all over. The spammer can eventually fake some clicks, it's not like his business is legal to start with!
Well, if anybody has some insight I will be happy to find out more, for my intellectual pleasure!
I just wanted to point out how those arguments that were being used to support junk mail were distracting from the actual reasons why physical junk mail isn't as bad as spam (which you explained): spam has a very low required response rate to be profitable, thanks to the miniscule costs (which don't include the negative externalities of time spent by sysadmins and uninterested readers). The balance between the costs borne by the sender and by third parties is way more out of whack for spam than for physical junk mail. You mean the ones who are left after the massive rounds of layoffs. "More efficient" in this case means "fewer people on the payroll". Yes, some people are out of a job temporarily whenever there is a regime change (think buggy whips). That is an argument for the status quo, not for junk mail [nor against junk mail, which I never claimed it was]. It just so happens those two are currently the same.
Note that the argument works in reverse: if there were currently no junk mail allowed through the post office, but they were considering changing their rules to allow it, you could say there'd be layoffs like crazy in other areas of advertising that would be replaced by the superior targeted junk mail. After all, "regardless of medium, that dollar will be spent" and many of those dollars would switch away from other advertising, because "Flyer advertsing [...] nets a far better cost:benefit ratio for their advertising dollar." So, if there was already a rule against junk mail you'd support keeping that rule to preserve jobs, right?
If anything, your argument about the effectiveness and efficiency of flyer advertising suggests that it "creates" (requires) less jobs while producing greater benefits. Fortunately, that's a good thing. The fact that other advertising alternatives create more jobs is not a reason to consider them. There may be other reasons, but that's not one.
I suspect we'll see some of the many companies who make money off of spam find a way to weigh in against this ruling.
The most obvious, of the legitimate business, that make money off of spam would likely be the likes of symantec and others that make software or hardware to filter spam. These people make a lot of money every year putting out new products to try to reduce the deluge that we all receive.
Possibly less obvious, but very important, is the various internet registrars that are making good money off of spamming domains. Many of these spammers register domains by the dozen, and they often use shady registrars to get that done. Those registrars certainly have contacts here in the US, and those contacts likely know lawyers.
Along with the registrars are the ISPs. Sure many of them are overseas, and won't bother to come directly to the states to try to work against the ruling, but they'll at least keep an eye on it. If the ruling actually has any sort of effect, the ISPs that sell hosting to the spamvertised domains could feel it later.
And then there are the companies that make the products that are sold through spam. Both the real and the bogus. If someone out there decided to try viagra or office 2007 because of spam, then someone else made money off of it.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I don't have a mobile phone. I don't like them. But I do use a wireless laptop.
You're trying to do business via email with your email address published on a website? Why?
Put up a submission form on your website. Yes you will then have to worry about bot's trying to spam your form but there are some ways to confuse them that are far simpler and easier to modify than the email spam arms race.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
No, Blkdeath is an extremist administrator... He's kinda like the soup nazi, but with email. His words and actions are indefensible. He should grow up and stop acting like a child throwing a tantrum. There's no need for you to defend him. You make a much better point.
Even still, we're not talking about hours of sifting here. Even if you get 400 emails a day and 90% of it is spam, it wouldn't take more than a minute or two for you to manually sift through it. About $5 of your time if you're making $150 an hour. Odds are you spent more than that on the Starbucks you're drinking while you sift through email. It's minor nuisance at best.
Spam is nowhere near the nuisance that false positives have become for me. I have three different email addresses that my contacts have to CC to just to insure I get all my fucking email... They practically need a template just to send me email. Some have just given up... I mean three addresses? It's ridiculous. Personally, I'd rather sift through spam in one mailbox than have to log into and check three different accounts. Childish people like Blkdeath are killing email by unloading their frustrations on every user on the network. Assholes like Blkdeath are much worse than spammers IMO.
I think you're full of shit. I doubt I'm alone.
Just wanted to get that out there, since you're being such an asshole to people who disagree with you.
Oh, and fuck off and die. Kthx.
Much as I hate to roll out such a trite response; that's a typical isolationist attitude. Advertising is a billion dollar per year industry for a simple reason - it works. Direct mail campaigns have definite spikes on a company's sales graph which is why they continue to use them. Other forms of advertising have a marked and readily apparent effect on the company's overall annual sales performance. Spam continues to thrive because it's insanely profitable. Sorry, but I'm going to have to call bollocks on your argument.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Weeellll.. Yes and no. Buggy whips went out when the car came in. {cough} Are you suggesting spam is replacing my weekly flyer dump? :)
Note that the argument works in reverse: if there were currently no junk mail allowed through the post office, but they were considering changing their rules to allow it, you could say there'd be layoffs like crazy in other areas of advertising that would be replaced by the superior targeted junk mail.If the rabbit hadn't stopped to take a shit, the dog wouldn't have eaten him.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
In this day and age of multi billion dollar multinational corporations that often buy a courts opinion(look at the recent Exxon case,where the SCOTUS has pretty much made it clear that Exxons bottom line is all they care about,not the 1200 miles of poisoned coast,or the people affected,who will most likely be dead before it is resolved) the ability to point out corruption and thievery in a safe manner is worth more to me than the risk I might get the occasion "B1gg3R P3n!5" or "Osama Obama"ad.But of course that is my 02c on the subject,YMMV.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Ad blocking is also a vibrant industry: witness the popularity of DVR, adblock, and spam filtering. For every idiot out there who buys penis pills from spam mail there are two or three "isolationists" who are willing to actually spend money to filter that crap out of their lives.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
No, I am not a network administrator at present; haven't been for a few years. I do, however, have a lot of experience implementing commercial, educational, ISP and residential networks and e-mail infrastructures which is a hell of a lot more experience than you have with your "three e-mail addresses". I have about 30, but my system allows me to check all of them in about 5 seconds. Parsed, sorted, and spam free I might add, though the odd one slips through from time to time.
Next, you make assumptions about how I filter e-mail. Well, my ill-informed friend, you've got it all ass backwards again. I don't know which ISP you're getting service from but here's a hint: either it's a bad one or you can't follow simple instructions. The goal of all my spam filtering is zero (0) false positives. Junk mail is filtered out and stored for later review. I haven't seen a single false positive in my own personal junk mail folder in atleast 3 years now but I still flip through every single junk message I get.
It's so nice of you to pre-judge me out there behind your keyboard just because you can't get a handle on your own e-mail situation. Maybe that's the cause of your ire. Perhaps if you'd just sign up with a decent e-mail account (no, I won't take you on) you'd re-evaluate your opinions and maybe, just maybe, you'd be able to discuss this matter civilly with other people without calling them every name that comes across your finger tips.
If you're upset that I haven't spent more time carefully holding your hand throughout this discussion it's because, frankly, you're not worth the time I've spent penning this response but your message was in such poor taste and I just had a great Sunday so I figured I'd actually spare you the time of day to enlighten you, though I suspect it'll come to little good.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
The bulk of my garbage seems to be cat litter... most of the other stuff is recyclable.
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
The concept of limiting government was clear to them.
Unfortunately, the idea of government as solution has been growing cancerously since the late 1800's, in the form of progressivism.
The Second Amendment is clear and simply, yet they would love to re-engineer it to mean something else.
McCain-Feingold is another example of wrongheadedness.
The only solution to spam and progressivism is maturity in the population, though how to encourage people to "friggin' grow up" is an intractable problem.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Ah. Why the personal attacks?
Confusing great passion with a great argument again?
And, for the umpteenth time, your analogy sucks. The girl in question has the right to shut you down and not listen to your "sales pitch".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Sorry, but its pretty arrogant of you to suggest that two other people change how they interact because you THINK it should be "good enough for everyone."
In the 15 years I've been using the postal service, I've had two items that got lost. One came months later, the other never arrived. So your assertation that mail gets lost "all the time" is simply horseshit.
You can "toss" flyers into the recycling :-)
However, in the winter months, I have a better use for them. Throw them on the floor of the car, and they'll absorb the humidity from the melting snow from your boots. Replace every few days, and your inside windows will stay clear, instead of having to scrape them at -25.
Its a lot better (environment-wise) than scrapping the car after an accident because you couldn't see where you're going, and it also reduces the need to idle until the inside of the car is warm enough to melt the frost build-up on the inside of the windows.
The other poster was claiming that twice-a-week mail delivery (which wasn't my idea, but it makes sense) was impractical. Its not. It saves energy, resources, etc. The only thing stopping it is inertia and the postal employee's union.
A second claim was that not everyone who sends him money can do the "direct deposit" thing - you no longer need direct deposit to send money via email. So then it became "not everyone has the internet / email", then "not everyone has a bank account." Well, if they don't have a bank account, how are they writing checks? If you don't have a bank account, how are you cashing them? A lot of banks won't cash checks made out to 3rd parties any more because of fraud.
In other words, its just a series of reasons to maintain the status quo in the face of changing conditions, rather than trying to allocate limted resources in a more efficient manner. The original proposal (twice-a-week mail delivery) would cut energy waste by the post office. It would also reduce vehicle wear and maintenance costs, as there would be fewer miles driven each year. It would also cut employment at the post office, which is where the unions get all pissed off.
The other group who would get pissed off by twixe-a-week delivery are all the people selling crap on ebay who's high point of the day is looking to see what the mailman brought.
Do you really care if your phone bill arrives on Thursday instead of Wednesday?
The other poster was claiming that twice-a-week mail delivery (which wasn't my idea, but it makes sense) was impractical. Its not. It saves energy, resources, etc. The only thing stopping it is inertia and the postal employee's union.
Yes, but some people care about getting things immedately. It's nothing to do with inertia, I simply want things to arrive as quickly as possible.
A second claim was that not everyone who sends him money can do the "direct deposit" thing - you no longer need direct deposit to send money via email. So then it became "not everyone has the internet / email", then "not everyone has a bank account." Well, if they don't have a bank account, how are they writing checks? If you don't have a bank account, how are you cashing them? A lot of banks won't cash checks made out to 3rd parties any more because of fraud.
I strongly suspect the "bank" is PayPal. I wouldn't trust that company with $0.10 of my money. Oh, you also realize you don't need a bank account to RECIEVE checks, right? You can always cash the check at the bank on which it is drawn, and there are plenty of check cashing businesses around. Just because YOU don't think it's possible doesn't mean it can't be done.
In other words, its just a series of reasons to maintain the status quo in the face of changing conditions, rather than trying to allocate limted resources in a more efficient manner. The original proposal (twice-a-week mail delivery) would cut energy waste by the post office. It would also reduce vehicle wear and maintenance costs, as there would be fewer miles driven each year.
What changing conditions? Please, if you're going to argue against waste, there are far better targets than the USPS.
It would also cut employment at the post office, which is where the unions get all pissed off.
How so? The same person delivers my mail everyday. It's just that these people would need other full time employement. Do you have a plan to create jobs to fill the void? As far as actually processing the mail goes, they have machines to do that already. Very few people work in mail sorting anymore. So I'm not sure what your point really is.
Do you really care if your phone bill arrives on Thursday instead of Wednesday?
I receive other mail that is time senstive that are not bills. Nice attempt to try and obscure things by reduction though. Again, YOU don't care about when some things arrive. Others do. I'm sure the family of a solidier in Iraq cares if they hear something on Wednesday instead of Thursday. I'm sure there are plenty of other valid reasons for wanting timely delivery of mail.
Then let the people who want them sign up for the mailing list for them. Why should people get them if they don't want them?
"Also, people are paid money to create, sell, deliver and install windows."
Proof please? From everything I've seen, this makes bulk mail rates cheaper, not first class. Eliminating junk mail would at the very least make delivery faster (by eliminating the junk that has to be sorted and delivered), and possibly cheaper as the infrastructure wouldn't have to support the junk mail.
Junk mail does cost the recipient: in time. The time it takes to sort it from real mail and the time it takes to deal with it (either shredding it, throwing it away or recycling it). It also costs our society and our environment to level whole forests and produce toxic inks for something that very few people want. "The right to be let alone is indeed the the beginning of all freedom." as one man put it.
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