It would be incredibly easy to block that spam using "allow only" filters for.com,.org, etc.
I very truly hope that you mean block spam based on where the link inside the message refers to, and not where it came from. Because if you are blocking spam based on the domain it came from, there are hardly even words available in the English language to describe that level of stupidity.
The problem I pointed out lies in the spamvertised, not the spamvertising domain. The difference being that the former is the one that the spam is asking you to visit, while the latter is the one that actually sent you the spam. If you have paid attention to the spam you receive, you would know they are almost never the same. The ability to purchase and regulate new gTLDs offers a fantastic new opportunity for spammers; even more so an opportunity for those who pay for their services.
Just wait, and we will soon see a new flood of spamvertised domains that are located under the new gTLDs. And they will use the same content obfuscation techniques that they already employ so that your precious filters will not detect that they are advertising for a domain under ".pills"; your filter will think it is yet another ".com" instead.
Spam itself certainly is not novel, I agree. However, the application of newly sold gTLDs to spam will start out novel (at first) and quickly reach a level of "oh shit!".
All the niceness and regularity that we currently enjoy with the internet is about to go the way of the dodo. And with it will go a significant part of what little ability we have to actually fight spam.
That's like a spam-filtering dream. If I can automatically know that anything related to your spammer friend's.pillz domain is untrustworthy, I can very happily have my e-mail client completely disregard it
So you're going to set your filter to read every email for obfuscated links going to.pillz domains? The spam will, in all likelihood, show up as the same bogus "Canadian Pharmacy" spam that we've all seen hundreds of times, but the obfuscated link will in some way point to a.pillz domain instead of the usual "superhappyfunpoodlegoblin.cn" domain. The spam itself will still come from a compromised windows box owned by some unlucky senior citizen in Florida with a DSL connection that they never turn off.
setting up a new tld is apparently going to be non-trivial
it will cost $185,000 or more to apply for your own gTLD
Spammers deal with a lot more money than that.
because the easiest way to then block said spammer is to block the entire domain
Two problems with that statemnet.
First, if you are blocking spam by the domain it comes from, you're an idiot. There are so many problems with that strategy it isn't even funny.
Second, I was referring to the spamvertised domain, not the domain that the email came from. The money is in the domain being spamvertised, not the domain that is relaying the mail.
... anybody who has $185,000 for the fee, that is.
Which one unscrupulous registrar could make up very quickly selling domains (with bogus registration data) to his favorite spammers under that new TLD.
Considering the way spammers (or their customers who own the spamvertised domains) register domains in bulk, they'd probably be willing to put down 5-10k for a single domain that they know will never be invalidated. Making up $185,000 would be pretty trivial if you are the first to put up $185k for something like ".pillz".
You must be new here. You had a chance. ICANN took comments on this last year. Apparently not enough people spoke up about the problems, because they are going forward with it anyways.
There already is one, its called spam. Whoever buys a TLD gets to set the rules for selling domains within said TLD, and manage those sales. Just wait till domains like.pillz,.softwarez, and the like are sold. That will be the death of meaningful WHOIS data and spam will go through the roof in volume.
ICANN is now going to allow people to purchase their own gTLDs (for a price, of course). And when you own the TLD, you are the one who gets to set the rules for registration of domains underneath said TLD. As if WHOIS records aren't already bad enough; now companies can buy up their own TLDs and set their own rules for contact information for customers who purchase domains under said TLD.
Currently, if you receive a spam email selling you (insert favorite spamming product here), you can look up the domain name that is being spamvertised, and generally figure out who is responsible for the operation. With that information you can contact the registrar and the hosting company regarding the activity that is going on. And currently, if the registrar does not react accordingly, you have some (though very limited) choice of action through ICANN if the registrar is blatantly in violation of their obligations to maintain accurate records.
However, ICANN's obligations end with the most common TLDs (.com,.net,.org, and a few others). If they sell a domain like ".pillz" to your favorite spammer, he can setup an unlimited number of second level domains under that for his spamming enterprise, and will have no obligation to have any contact information (valid or not) for those domains. From which will rise the eternally-registered spamvertising domains, over which nobody will have jurisdiction because there will be no record of where the owner (or his business) resides.
This will open the floodgates in a way we have not seen before. I discussed this a while ago when they first brought up this horrendous idea. But they will keep with it, because it will make some fast money. The rest of us can all go to hell with our email.
Forget the land rush. This will cause a spam rush that could potentially make sub-prime mortgages look like a good idea.
As I have stated before, filters will never solve the spamming problem, because they do nothing to remove the economic incentive that drives the spammers to send spam.
You can pitch in and help too
The best thing I have found that I can do is to report spamming domains to their registrars to get their records canceled, which invalidates the links in the spamvertising emails. Hence when someone receives an offer for discount v!@gra or other such nonsense, they click on the link and never reach the spamvertised site. Furthermore, when I find registrars who are clearly spammer-friendly, I challenge their accreditation with ICANN.
Domains have been shut down, and bad registrars have been punished, through this method.
Completely and utterly false myth. Spammers don't make money from sending email, they get money from people reading it and then buying the trash they're peddling
That is splitting hairs. Obviously the act of sending out spam isn't the profitable part, few people are dumb enough to pay for having email sent out, especially at spam volumes.
If filtering works, upstream or at the local mailbox, then the recipients won't see the mail, won't buy the products, and won't give the spammers money. Problem solved.
I'm afraid that part is a myth. Some spam will get through, somewhere. Furthermore the spammers will find ways around the filters and get more spam through. The spammers won't just give up because of the filters, they'll find a way to continue reaching their audience.
Filtering works
Only if you ignore the cost of the spam that you had to filter.
which I retrain
At which point you have consumed both your own time and the CPU time for the filtering rules.
And that is saying nothing of the cost of delivering the email to your system from wherever it originated.
If we reduce the amount of overall spam delivered locally or upstream through filtering, we stop stupid people from contributing their income to the bank accounts of these spammers.
If that was true then you would expect it to have put some of the spammers out of business. Instead spam is at the same or greater level as it was previously.
It's a win:win.
I would say its a lose:lose. Spammers will work harder to get past your filters (or send out even more spam), and you are wasting time training anti-spam techniques that won't work long enough. Furthermore you are paying for the cost of that spam to make it to your filters; the cost your ISP pays to get it to you, the cost you pay to store it somewhere to analyze it as spam, the cost you pay in human or CPU time to declare it to be junk.
Your filter might be a good feel-good solution for yourself, for right now. But it will never solve the problem.
... And shit in the other, and see which fills up first. He closes by saying
I hope the days of the spammer are numbered. Until then, at least we have can enjoy a good laugh at their expense.
But yet almost nothing is being done to actually stop people from sending spam. You can filter and whitelist/blacklist all you want, but that won't stop spammers from spamming. At no point does a spammer likely ever consider whether or not their spam will reach your box; it is a trivial cost for them.
Spammers will continue spamming as long as they can make money doing it. And a spammer poetry contest is equally as useless for impeding that as filters.
if you want Windows to autodetect floppies for you... Buy an LS-120 drive
That sounds like a great deal. Hunt all over the planet for a drive that isn't made anymore, so that when I use a floppy in windows (I've used a total of about 2 of them in the last three years) it will be auto-detected.
On top of that, the LS-120 would most likely be a USB drive anyways, which would already do autodetect whether it was an LS-120 or just a regular 1.44.
Not trying to be mean here, I just don't see the need in 2009 for floppy-disk autodetection. I have a 4gb usb drive in my pants pocket that I never leave home without; why would I care about floppies (granted, I don't fix other people's computers anymore)?
I don't see anything wrong with building enough wind infrastructure to exceed demand. My understanding is that you can turn off a turbine if you don't need it, or if conditions aren't right, or if you need to work on it. It really isn't that often that we have a foresight in the US to build something robust enough to have some redundancy available for those types of situations.
Perhaps you meant to reply to someone else's message? I never suggested blocking the spam itself by the domain name.
The domain name problem comes down to the spamvertised domain, not the domain that the email originated from (which is often spoofed).
You use IP addresses and they get blocked at the first attempt to connect to a mail server.
That isn't particularly valuable, either, as a very significant portion of spam moves through transiently compromised email relays. If you just keep blocking those as they come up you could eventually end up blocking relays that are of value, if one should happen to be compromised for a short period.
We will keep on blocking spam as we have in the past and it won't matter what domain they
claim to be coming from.
You can attempt to block spam in whatever manner you like. In the end, you still end up paying for the bandwidth since that spam made it all the way to your system before you blocked it. And you paid for processor time to figure out that you didn't want it (and hence get rid of it).
And when the new gTLDs are sold, the spam volume will go up as a result of the fact that the spammers will have places to hide that are even more comfortable than before.
And then when you try to determine who the bastard is that is behind the spamvertised.viagra domain, you will find that the owner of the.viagra gTLD is selling domains without requiring anything vaguely resembling valid registration data.
AFAIK, ICANN has defended trademark owners' efforts to protect their marks in domain names. Any.viagra domain is going to be owned by Pfizer.
Ordinarily I would say that is likely true. However, ICANN is moving to sell the right to registrars to sell the gTLDs themselves. Which could well remove the ability of ICANN to reject purchases of such domains. I have not seen any indication that ICANN will sell any of the new gTLDs themselves, so likely the first registrar to pony up the requisite funds will be the one to sell.viagara.
how likely are you to be interested in mail from *any*.viagra domain?
I might not have been clear, I was referring to hosting domains sold in a new.viagara TLD. Spam, as usual, will probably still come from spoofed hotmail addresses to improve its chances of clearing whitelist/blacklist restrictions. However the spam will itself link to.viagara domains for discount pills.
And then when you try to determine who the bastard is that is behind the spamvertised.viagara domain, you will find that the owner of the.viagara gTLD is selling domains without requiring anything vaguely resembling valid registration data.
At which point the trail goes cold and there is virtually no ability for the public to stop that spam; other than setting up more filter rules which will inevitably be circumvented by the spammer a few weeks later.
They mention it only in passing in that article, but the new gTLDs-for-sale are a colossally bad idea. Registrar compliance (or lack thereof) is terrible right now; it is too easy to find a shoddy registrar who will accept completely bogus registration data for your latest spamming/phishing/insert-other-dubious-activity-here activity. But at least the current system of TLDs has some miniscule shred of accountability. If people can start purchasing their own TLDs - say.viagara for example - they can set all the rules for registrar and registration requirements.
At which point our last hope to track down the source of the newest waves of spam have gone out the window, as there will be nothing meaningful to track. And as those TLDs won't be in any way regulated by ICANN - or anyone else not in it just for money - there will be no one to turn to when the WHOIS records are meaningless or empty.
... offering an affordable, open (as in some way to get the recordings off) DVR service? The standard DVR isn't bad, but when you run into the space limitation, you have to get rid of something. If they offered something that would allow you to either copy the shows to another system, or burn them to DVD, that could be a step in the right direction.
At least, if the number of people I hear about downloading huge torrents of movies and TV shows are any indication.
You raise no objections to the idea of beheading spammers
I generally oppose the death penalty. I see no reason to bother applying it to spammers as it would not accomplish anything. If for some reason you drew that to be an endorsement of such activities I urge you to read more carefully as I do not condone public executions of spammers.
Instead you go into this long technical argument as to why it won't work.
I listed it as one of several options that would not work. Many people like to suggest such activities as counter-spam tactics, but they would be counter-productive at best.
Any country willing to perform public beheadings of spammers
I am not aware of any such country.
would have the ability to track the money if they really wanted to
Tracking the money isn't helpful if it leads to un-cooperative governments and law enforcement agencies.
Hey let's call Jack Bauer, he'll get the job done.
You can call batman if you really want to. It still won't work.
If you run into another country's setup, where spam is not a problem, then you have reached a legal dead-end. We can't just go running around the world imposing our laws on people in other countries (note that we do a horse-shit job of enforcing our "anti spam laws" here as it is).
Don't you think someone else already had and tried that idea?
I can even tell you why that doesn't work.
International law.
You can determine that evilspammingdomain.com is registered in country X, but then you find that their hosting is done in country Y. And of course that is only the domain where the spam came from; you know ahead of time that domain won't be around long. By the time you get the registrar in country X to give the actual registration data for the domain, the domain is already closed and no longer relevant (and spammer likely has moved to a different location [PO Box] as well).
But of course you really want to go after evilspamvertiseddomain.com; after all it is their money that caused that email to come to you. You then look them up and find they are registered by a registrar in country Z, and they are using a hosting company in country R. Their email address corresponds to country S, and when you get the registrar to give you their actual data you find their claimed at the time to be residing in country T.
And out of countries X, Y, Z, R, S, and T, only two of them are industrialized countries (funny how many registrations occur in Zaire and Madagascar) and those two countries are Eastern European countries who don't care about US law enforcement.
In short, your money trail just went cold, because you can't follow it anymore. Nobody who has the data cares about you or your problem, and furthermore they don't care about US laws; they either have their own or they don't care about spam anyways.
That's why shutting down ISPs doesn't work. That's why putting individual spammers in prison doesn't work (on the rare occasions that you can catch and extradite one). That's why you could make spam a capital offense in the US this afternoon and it wouldn't change a thing. That's why no political maneuvering in this country will ever make a damned bit of difference for the spamming problem. That's why spammers will continue to work to get around your filters, and hence your filters are ultimately worthless.
Because at that point you have devoted resources to the problem, hence it is a problem. And inevitably any solution that "your company" can implement for "enough money" will at some point be rendered obsolete by new spamming techniques.
Which of course leads you to spend more money on the problem that you previously thought you could stop.
McColo was like the big queen alien, in that it was a central control center and reproductive source for new waves of spam
I disagree with your analysis. McColo controlled some spam, but by no stretch of the imagination was it a significant portion of all spam. Indeed, the decentralization of spam is part of what makes it so strong; you can't just kill one operation and watch the rest die.
but it was well worth doing, regardless
Maybe. You can't study criminal activity in a vacuum. We know that spam loads are back to around where they were before it was taken down. The question we cannot answer is where would it be if we had left it alone? Would we be facing more spam right now, or about the same amount? In other words, did the botnet take in new systems in response to losing McColo, or was it doing that anyways?
Slashdot Mirror
It would be incredibly easy to block that spam using "allow only" filters for .com, .org, etc.
I very truly hope that you mean block spam based on where the link inside the message refers to, and not where it came from. Because if you are blocking spam based on the domain it came from, there are hardly even words available in the English language to describe that level of stupidity.
The problem I pointed out lies in the spamvertised, not the spamvertising domain. The difference being that the former is the one that the spam is asking you to visit, while the latter is the one that actually sent you the spam. If you have paid attention to the spam you receive, you would know they are almost never the same. The ability to purchase and regulate new gTLDs offers a fantastic new opportunity for spammers; even more so an opportunity for those who pay for their services.
Just wait, and we will soon see a new flood of spamvertised domains that are located under the new gTLDs. And they will use the same content obfuscation techniques that they already employ so that your precious filters will not detect that they are advertising for a domain under ".pills"; your filter will think it is yet another ".com" instead.
a novel technical use for an entire TLD
There already is one
Wouldn't that make it "non-novel" by definition?
Spam itself certainly is not novel, I agree. However, the application of newly sold gTLDs to spam will start out novel (at first) and quickly reach a level of "oh shit!".
All the niceness and regularity that we currently enjoy with the internet is about to go the way of the dodo. And with it will go a significant part of what little ability we have to actually fight spam.
That's like a spam-filtering dream. If I can automatically know that anything related to your spammer friend's .pillz domain is untrustworthy, I can very happily have my e-mail client completely disregard it
So you're going to set your filter to read every email for obfuscated links going to .pillz domains? The spam will, in all likelihood, show up as the same bogus "Canadian Pharmacy" spam that we've all seen hundreds of times, but the obfuscated link will in some way point to a .pillz domain instead of the usual "superhappyfunpoodlegoblin.cn" domain. The spam itself will still come from a compromised windows box owned by some unlucky senior citizen in Florida with a DSL connection that they never turn off.
setting up a new tld is apparently going to be non-trivial
$185k is pretty trivial for spammers.
it will cost $185,000 or more to apply for your own gTLD
Spammers deal with a lot more money than that.
because the easiest way to then block said spammer is to block the entire domain
Two problems with that statemnet.
... anybody who has $185,000 for the fee, that is.
Which one unscrupulous registrar could make up very quickly selling domains (with bogus registration data) to his favorite spammers under that new TLD.
Considering the way spammers (or their customers who own the spamvertised domains) register domains in bulk, they'd probably be willing to put down 5-10k for a single domain that they know will never be invalidated. Making up $185,000 would be pretty trivial if you are the first to put up $185k for something like ".pillz".
Where do we sign up to have this not happen?
You must be new here. You had a chance. ICANN took comments on this last year. Apparently not enough people spoke up about the problems, because they are going forward with it anyways.
a novel technical use for an entire TLD
There already is one, its called spam. Whoever buys a TLD gets to set the rules for selling domains within said TLD, and manage those sales. Just wait till domains like .pillz, .softwarez, and the like are sold. That will be the death of meaningful WHOIS data and spam will go through the roof in volume.
ICANN is now going to allow people to purchase their own gTLDs (for a price, of course). And when you own the TLD, you are the one who gets to set the rules for registration of domains underneath said TLD. As if WHOIS records aren't already bad enough; now companies can buy up their own TLDs and set their own rules for contact information for customers who purchase domains under said TLD.
.net, .org, and a few others). If they sell a domain like ".pillz" to your favorite spammer, he can setup an unlimited number of second level domains under that for his spamming enterprise, and will have no obligation to have any contact information (valid or not) for those domains. From which will rise the eternally-registered spamvertising domains, over which nobody will have jurisdiction because there will be no record of where the owner (or his business) resides.
Currently, if you receive a spam email selling you (insert favorite spamming product here), you can look up the domain name that is being spamvertised, and generally figure out who is responsible for the operation. With that information you can contact the registrar and the hosting company regarding the activity that is going on. And currently, if the registrar does not react accordingly, you have some (though very limited) choice of action through ICANN if the registrar is blatantly in violation of their obligations to maintain accurate records.
However, ICANN's obligations end with the most common TLDs (.com,
This will open the floodgates in a way we have not seen before. I discussed this a while ago when they first brought up this horrendous idea. But they will keep with it, because it will make some fast money. The rest of us can all go to hell with our email.
Forget the land rush. This will cause a spam rush that could potentially make sub-prime mortgages look like a good idea.
a lot of work ahead
That part I agree with.
coding new better filters
As I have stated before, filters will never solve the spamming problem, because they do nothing to remove the economic incentive that drives the spammers to send spam.
You can pitch in and help too
The best thing I have found that I can do is to report spamming domains to their registrars to get their records canceled, which invalidates the links in the spamvertising emails. Hence when someone receives an offer for discount v!@gra or other such nonsense, they click on the link and never reach the spamvertised site. Furthermore, when I find registrars who are clearly spammer-friendly, I challenge their accreditation with ICANN.
Domains have been shut down, and bad registrars have been punished, through this method.
Hence my user name:
Damn_registrars
Completely and utterly false myth. Spammers don't make money from sending email, they get money from people reading it and then buying the trash they're peddling
That is splitting hairs. Obviously the act of sending out spam isn't the profitable part, few people are dumb enough to pay for having email sent out, especially at spam volumes.
If filtering works, upstream or at the local mailbox, then the recipients won't see the mail, won't buy the products, and won't give the spammers money. Problem solved.
I'm afraid that part is a myth. Some spam will get through, somewhere. Furthermore the spammers will find ways around the filters and get more spam through. The spammers won't just give up because of the filters, they'll find a way to continue reaching their audience.
Filtering works
Only if you ignore the cost of the spam that you had to filter.
which I retrain
At which point you have consumed both your own time and the CPU time for the filtering rules.
And that is saying nothing of the cost of delivering the email to your system from wherever it originated.
If we reduce the amount of overall spam delivered locally or upstream through filtering, we stop stupid people from contributing their income to the bank accounts of these spammers.
If that was true then you would expect it to have put some of the spammers out of business. Instead spam is at the same or greater level as it was previously.
It's a win:win.
I would say its a lose:lose. Spammers will work harder to get past your filters (or send out even more spam), and you are wasting time training anti-spam techniques that won't work long enough. Furthermore you are paying for the cost of that spam to make it to your filters; the cost your ISP pays to get it to you, the cost you pay to store it somewhere to analyze it as spam, the cost you pay in human or CPU time to declare it to be junk.
Your filter might be a good feel-good solution for yourself, for right now. But it will never solve the problem.
I hope the days of the spammer are numbered. Until then, at least we have can enjoy a good laugh at their expense.
But yet almost nothing is being done to actually stop people from sending spam. You can filter and whitelist/blacklist all you want, but that won't stop spammers from spamming. At no point does a spammer likely ever consider whether or not their spam will reach your box; it is a trivial cost for them.
Spammers will continue spamming as long as they can make money doing it. And a spammer poetry contest is equally as useless for impeding that as filters.
if you want Windows to autodetect floppies for you... Buy an LS-120 drive
That sounds like a great deal. Hunt all over the planet for a drive that isn't made anymore, so that when I use a floppy in windows (I've used a total of about 2 of them in the last three years) it will be auto-detected.
On top of that, the LS-120 would most likely be a USB drive anyways, which would already do autodetect whether it was an LS-120 or just a regular 1.44.
Not trying to be mean here, I just don't see the need in 2009 for floppy-disk autodetection. I have a 4gb usb drive in my pants pocket that I never leave home without; why would I care about floppies (granted, I don't fix other people's computers anymore)?
I don't see anything wrong with building enough wind infrastructure to exceed demand. My understanding is that you can turn off a turbine if you don't need it, or if conditions aren't right, or if you need to work on it. It really isn't that often that we have a foresight in the US to build something robust enough to have some redundancy available for those types of situations.
You don't track or block spam by domain names.
Perhaps you meant to reply to someone else's message? I never suggested blocking the spam itself by the domain name.
The domain name problem comes down to the spamvertised domain, not the domain that the email originated from (which is often spoofed).
You use IP addresses and they get blocked at the first attempt to connect to a mail server.
That isn't particularly valuable, either, as a very significant portion of spam moves through transiently compromised email relays. If you just keep blocking those as they come up you could eventually end up blocking relays that are of value, if one should happen to be compromised for a short period.
We will keep on blocking spam as we have in the past and it won't matter what domain they claim to be coming from.
You can attempt to block spam in whatever manner you like. In the end, you still end up paying for the bandwidth since that spam made it all the way to your system before you blocked it. And you paid for processor time to figure out that you didn't want it (and hence get rid of it).
And when the new gTLDs are sold, the spam volume will go up as a result of the fact that the spammers will have places to hide that are even more comfortable than before.
And then when you try to determine who the bastard is that is behind the spamvertised .viagra domain, you will find that the owner of the .viagra gTLD is selling domains without requiring anything vaguely resembling valid registration data.
AFAIK, ICANN has defended trademark owners' efforts to protect their marks in domain names. Any .viagra domain is going to be owned by Pfizer.
Ordinarily I would say that is likely true. However, ICANN is moving to sell the right to registrars to sell the gTLDs themselves. Which could well remove the ability of ICANN to reject purchases of such domains. I have not seen any indication that ICANN will sell any of the new gTLDs themselves, so likely the first registrar to pony up the requisite funds will be the one to sell .viagara.
how likely are you to be interested in mail from *any* .viagra domain?
I might not have been clear, I was referring to hosting domains sold in a new .viagara TLD. Spam, as usual, will probably still come from spoofed hotmail addresses to improve its chances of clearing whitelist/blacklist restrictions. However the spam will itself link to .viagara domains for discount pills.
.viagara domain, you will find that the owner of the .viagara gTLD is selling domains without requiring anything vaguely resembling valid registration data.
And then when you try to determine who the bastard is that is behind the spamvertised
At which point the trail goes cold and there is virtually no ability for the public to stop that spam; other than setting up more filter rules which will inevitably be circumvented by the spammer a few weeks later.
They mention it only in passing in that article, but the new gTLDs-for-sale are a colossally bad idea. Registrar compliance (or lack thereof) is terrible right now; it is too easy to find a shoddy registrar who will accept completely bogus registration data for your latest spamming/phishing/insert-other-dubious-activity-here activity. But at least the current system of TLDs has some miniscule shred of accountability. If people can start purchasing their own TLDs - say .viagara for example - they can set all the rules for registrar and registration requirements.
At which point our last hope to track down the source of the newest waves of spam have gone out the window, as there will be nothing meaningful to track. And as those TLDs won't be in any way regulated by ICANN - or anyone else not in it just for money - there will be no one to turn to when the WHOIS records are meaningless or empty.
... offering an affordable, open (as in some way to get the recordings off) DVR service? The standard DVR isn't bad, but when you run into the space limitation, you have to get rid of something. If they offered something that would allow you to either copy the shows to another system, or burn them to DVD, that could be a step in the right direction.
At least, if the number of people I hear about downloading huge torrents of movies and TV shows are any indication.
You raise no objections to the idea of beheading spammers
I generally oppose the death penalty. I see no reason to bother applying it to spammers as it would not accomplish anything. If for some reason you drew that to be an endorsement of such activities I urge you to read more carefully as I do not condone public executions of spammers.
Instead you go into this long technical argument as to why it won't work.
I listed it as one of several options that would not work. Many people like to suggest such activities as counter-spam tactics, but they would be counter-productive at best.
Any country willing to perform public beheadings of spammers
I am not aware of any such country.
would have the ability to track the money if they really wanted to
Tracking the money isn't helpful if it leads to un-cooperative governments and law enforcement agencies.
Hey let's call Jack Bauer, he'll get the job done.
You can call batman if you really want to. It still won't work.
If you run into another country's setup, where spam is not a problem, then you have reached a legal dead-end. We can't just go running around the world imposing our laws on people in other countries (note that we do a horse-shit job of enforcing our "anti spam laws" here as it is).
Catching them wouldn't be hard - follow the money
Don't you think someone else already had and tried that idea?
I can even tell you why that doesn't work.
International law.
You can determine that evilspammingdomain.com is registered in country X, but then you find that their hosting is done in country Y. And of course that is only the domain where the spam came from; you know ahead of time that domain won't be around long. By the time you get the registrar in country X to give the actual registration data for the domain, the domain is already closed and no longer relevant (and spammer likely has moved to a different location [PO Box] as well).
But of course you really want to go after evilspamvertiseddomain.com; after all it is their money that caused that email to come to you. You then look them up and find they are registered by a registrar in country Z, and they are using a hosting company in country R. Their email address corresponds to country S, and when you get the registrar to give you their actual data you find their claimed at the time to be residing in country T.
And out of countries X, Y, Z, R, S, and T, only two of them are industrialized countries (funny how many registrations occur in Zaire and Madagascar) and those two countries are Eastern European countries who don't care about US law enforcement.
In short, your money trail just went cold, because you can't follow it anymore. Nobody who has the data cares about you or your problem, and furthermore they don't care about US laws; they either have their own or they don't care about spam anyways.
That's why shutting down ISPs doesn't work. That's why putting individual spammers in prison doesn't work (on the rare occasions that you can catch and extradite one). That's why you could make spam a capital offense in the US this afternoon and it wouldn't change a thing. That's why no political maneuvering in this country will ever make a damned bit of difference for the spamming problem. That's why spammers will continue to work to get around your filters, and hence your filters are ultimately worthless.
stop spam from being a problem for your company
contradicts the statement of
pay enough money
Because at that point you have devoted resources to the problem, hence it is a problem. And inevitably any solution that "your company" can implement for "enough money" will at some point be rendered obsolete by new spamming techniques.
Which of course leads you to spend more money on the problem that you previously thought you could stop.
Or just kill the spammers. After the first few public beheadings the spam will start to drop. Really.
An amusing proposal, but it only works under the assumption that you can catch the spammers. They do their business where they do it for a reason.
... The ACLU just stepped in to help stop a meaningless prosecution of a victimless event that somehow has been pushed around as a "crime".
But for some reason we're still supposed to look at the ACLU as evil?
McColo was like the big queen alien, in that it was a central control center and reproductive source for new waves of spam
I disagree with your analysis. McColo controlled some spam, but by no stretch of the imagination was it a significant portion of all spam. Indeed, the decentralization of spam is part of what makes it so strong; you can't just kill one operation and watch the rest die.
but it was well worth doing, regardless
Maybe. You can't study criminal activity in a vacuum. We know that spam loads are back to around where they were before it was taken down. The question we cannot answer is where would it be if we had left it alone? Would we be facing more spam right now, or about the same amount? In other words, did the botnet take in new systems in response to losing McColo, or was it doing that anyways?
willingness to work with foreign police forces
Is where that plan falls apart. Considering how many countries are involved in one average spam email -
That could potentially be five different countries. And of course spoofing most or all of that is often pretty trivial.