If marketing clowns are allowed to do this to my PC, or more to the point, the PCs of people who DON'T know what to do to secure their PCs, I think DoS attacks on individuals or companies that engage in this behavior should be perfectly legal. It amounts to the same thing, really. You interrupt my ability to conduct my business, and I will return the favor...
Amen. Regulation of the internet to curtail spam is a solution looking for a problem without an existing solution. In other words, it's government.
Re:Need More Exposure to Ideas and Methods
on
The New Yorker On Spam
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Let's step back from spam a second. If prostitution is the world's oldest profession, being a con artist is a close second. Before spam, these people were jumping out in front of cars to collect a paycheck, enticing people through telephone calls into shady business transactions, and so on. Spam is only a new form of an old trade.
These people are always going to feed off the ignorant, the naive, the bleeding hearts, and the foolish. You will never regulate this kind of predatory behavior out of existence. All of us make bad choices. Some of those bad choices involve being the con artist, and some of those bad choices involve letting ourselves be duped. You can't stop this, you can only hope to contain it.
That being said, the most effective approaches to spam are going to be those that assume the existence of the problem going forward - i.e. we can not stop nor get rid of spam - and manage it effectively while educating people against the tricks of the trade. I think spam is largely an overblown issue, that most competent sysadmins have tool sets that manage it very well, and that the average user is much more educated then us slashdotters assume.
To put it briefly - spam is an overblown issue that just gives the government an excuse to get their grubby hands on our tubes. In Soviet Russia, the internet surfs you!
It's not just that this idea is unpopular, in my mind it is untenable. The nature of a decentralized system such as the internet is such that it, by its nature, resists control. So you want to require every internet user to have an ID for verification purposes? How would that be enforced internationally? It only takes one China or Nigeria to fail to comply, and the solution becomes worthless. Even if 100% compliance was possible, how long would it take for the system to be hacked? Imagine waking up one morning and finding yourself without internet access because someone else had been spamming using your credentials. I would contend that, if spam is a crime, there would need to be a larger burden of proof than simply seeing someone's credentials attached to an email.
The lack of centralized control of the internet simply forces us to face the reality of human nature - when not controlled, some of us will choose to do good of our own devices, and some of us will choose to do bad. I rather enjoy this kind of environment - it allows the true nature of individuals to sally forth, it shows who is to be trusted and respected and who is to be avoided, and it grants free expression without forcing us into a cookie-cutter mold that some centralized authority would impose upon us.
With all due respect, if you seek the kind of solution you state, move to China. I hear their network is very secure. Good luck logging into slashdot, though.
I know the weekday news anchor in a city where one of the 23 universities is located. I'm trying to get her to run a story on this, ASAP. It's a small measure, but the more awareness of these heavy-handed tactics, the better, no?
I'll post a link to the story if/when it runs, for those who are interested.
Slashdot Mirror
If marketing clowns are allowed to do this to my PC, or more to the point, the PCs of people who DON'T know what to do to secure their PCs, I think DoS attacks on individuals or companies that engage in this behavior should be perfectly legal. It amounts to the same thing, really. You interrupt my ability to conduct my business, and I will return the favor...
Conceiving the system is far from impossible. Forcing people to comply by the rules of the system will always be impossible, that is the point.
Amen. Regulation of the internet to curtail spam is a solution looking for a problem without an existing solution. In other words, it's government.
Let's step back from spam a second. If prostitution is the world's oldest profession, being a con artist is a close second. Before spam, these people were jumping out in front of cars to collect a paycheck, enticing people through telephone calls into shady business transactions, and so on. Spam is only a new form of an old trade. These people are always going to feed off the ignorant, the naive, the bleeding hearts, and the foolish. You will never regulate this kind of predatory behavior out of existence. All of us make bad choices. Some of those bad choices involve being the con artist, and some of those bad choices involve letting ourselves be duped. You can't stop this, you can only hope to contain it. That being said, the most effective approaches to spam are going to be those that assume the existence of the problem going forward - i.e. we can not stop nor get rid of spam - and manage it effectively while educating people against the tricks of the trade. I think spam is largely an overblown issue, that most competent sysadmins have tool sets that manage it very well, and that the average user is much more educated then us slashdotters assume. To put it briefly - spam is an overblown issue that just gives the government an excuse to get their grubby hands on our tubes. In Soviet Russia, the internet surfs you!
It's not just that this idea is unpopular, in my mind it is untenable. The nature of a decentralized system such as the internet is such that it, by its nature, resists control. So you want to require every internet user to have an ID for verification purposes? How would that be enforced internationally? It only takes one China or Nigeria to fail to comply, and the solution becomes worthless. Even if 100% compliance was possible, how long would it take for the system to be hacked? Imagine waking up one morning and finding yourself without internet access because someone else had been spamming using your credentials. I would contend that, if spam is a crime, there would need to be a larger burden of proof than simply seeing someone's credentials attached to an email. The lack of centralized control of the internet simply forces us to face the reality of human nature - when not controlled, some of us will choose to do good of our own devices, and some of us will choose to do bad. I rather enjoy this kind of environment - it allows the true nature of individuals to sally forth, it shows who is to be trusted and respected and who is to be avoided, and it grants free expression without forcing us into a cookie-cutter mold that some centralized authority would impose upon us. With all due respect, if you seek the kind of solution you state, move to China. I hear their network is very secure. Good luck logging into slashdot, though.
I know the weekday news anchor in a city where one of the 23 universities is located. I'm trying to get her to run a story on this, ASAP. It's a small measure, but the more awareness of these heavy-handed tactics, the better, no? I'll post a link to the story if/when it runs, for those who are interested.