A war on spam would be as efficient as war on drugs, war on terrorism and war on greed, or anything else that you think you can actually wage a war upon.
Actually, there is a fundamental difference.
A "war on spam" (stupid phrase, but it seems to be the fashion) only has to push the average cost of spamming above the cost of advertising through legitimate channels. Once that tip-over point is reached, the entire point of spamming goes away.
There is no such tip-over point for the "war on drugs" (other than to repeal Prohibition II and create a legitimate market) or the "war on terrorism" (terrorists generally have goals that simply cannot be obtained by polite argument, economic pressure, or any other alternative means of persuasion).
Filters and other barriers may slow spammers down, but if there is no penalty for trying
The only legal reform that will make a dent in spam is to recognize the blindingly obvious fact that spam filters are a form of computer security; ergo, the circumvention or attempted circumvention of spam filters is a form of computer cracking.
How they can hope to do this in the face of much better funded and more experienced lobbyists who are opposed to them is a mystery.
Some people are just plain stupid that way. The same thing happened around here -- a bunch of guys took it into their heads to bring the Expos to Arlington (VA), set their sights on a plot of land owned by a well-connected megacorp that already had plans that would make them about triple what the stadium people would pay, and maintained a deer-in-the-headlights look while they got mowed down.
Every time I think Darl has hit the low point, he makes a bigger fool of himself than I thought possible. I honestly have to wonder where it's going to end.
"Trading a shiv from the machine shop in exchange for my company this evening threatens to undermine the cigarette-based economy of this cell block. This advances the agenda of anti-tobacco zealots who believe that sexual favors should be free."
What other reason is there to ban entire netblocks when only a single IP is the source of the spam?
Oooo! Oooo!! Mistah Kottah!
The purpose of listing entire netblocks is to defeat pink contracts that allow spammers to periodically shift IPs (within the range of IPs available to the host ISP, obviously) in order to evade blocking.
If you hadnt decided to stop reading, you would have seen that you are wrong.
Except that johnjtrammell is manifestly right.
Or at the least, you would have seen why I consider your argument invalid
Oh, that is plain enough. You reject the basic concept that responsibility inherently requires control and authority (e.g. insofar as a sysadmin has control and authority over his server, it is impossible for any other person to be responsible for its spam blocking protocol). It's pointless to argue with someone who uses a clintonian erasable-ink dictionary.
SPEWS claims that they are innocent, because they don't block anyone. This is a lie. They publish lists which are in turn downloaded by automated scripts and are applied to e-mail servers as filters.
I must have missed hearing about the SPEWS infiltration teams that broke into ISP offices and forced the sysadmins to install those automated scripts at gunpoint.
What's particularly shocking about this is that Forbes is normally pro-business, and their stance on this amounts to one of the most virulently anti-business stances you could hold. To deny the plain intent of the junk fax law, to eliminate junk faxes, is to hold that businesses have no right to control of their own fax machines, or the use of their own toner.
Yep -- when you get right down to it, Seth Lubove's scribblings entail a contempt for private property rights that makes Karl Marx look like Ayn Rand.
In other words, they're not pro-spam or pro-junk fax, but anti leeching lawyers, which I have to agree with.
Lawyers who bring actions against people who have committed real violations of people's legally guaranteed rights are not "leeching lawyers" -- they are lawyers doing their job.
Hell, I don't like spam, but I dislike people who essentially are looking for a quick fast buck too.
There is no reason to dislike people who make a buck, quickly or otherwise, by providing a legitimate service. Seeing to it that thieves are punished in accordance with the law is a legitimate service.
I RTFA - it was a news piece that showed both sides of the issue.
The FA you R must not be the same one the rest of us found at that URL.
The pro-fax-spammer slant starts with the very first sentence: "Pity the hapless travel agent or car dealer whose fax advertisement happens to appear on a fax machine belonging to one Ben Livingston of Seattle, Wash." Note that the junk fax is described as something that just "happened". It might be the fault of sun spots, or gremlins, or hoaxers. It certainly isn't the junk faxer's fault that it "happened" -- he is to be pitied, not punished or even so much as censured for wilfully appropriating other people's private property.
The very next sentence refers to Livingston as "a self-described small-claims warrior," (a term that carries an obvious sneering connotation).
How on earth can anyone familiar with standard English usage conclude that this article shows both sides of the issue?
Rather they are saying that the rules are so broad that if you dial a wrong number, you could be sued too.
Nope. The Forbes shill is explicitly defending fax.com, which is in the business of knowingly and wilfully sending millions of junk faxes.
Even if we were about accidental (rather than deliberate) trespass, that would merely call for a reduced penalty (not the complete free pass suggested by Forbes).
I sent a comment, with special emphasis upon the absurd spin in the opening sentence:
Pity the hapless travel agent or car dealer whose fax advertisement
happens to appear on a fax machine belonging to one Ben Livingston of Seattle, Wash.
Yeah, right, it just happened that way (a la the old joke "...and that's how the 15-year-old girl got into my bed.")
Novell has made false statements with the intent to cause customers and potential customers to not do business with SCO.
projection(pr&-JEK-sh&n): The attribution of one's own attitudes, feelings, or desires to someone or something as a naive or unconscious defense against anxiety or guilt.
Another use was instead of having to wait in line at the DMV (or taking a number and waiting to be called), go in, register your phone, and recieve a text message when you near the beginning of the queue.
That doesn't require any location tracking -- the DMV (or whoever) doesn't need to know where you wait. All they need to do is warn you to show up within X amount of time after being paged, or you go back to the end of the line.
No longer a libertarian when you're pissed off, eh, Eric?
Leaving aside your misreading of the poster's surname, there simply isn't any contradiction between punishing spammers (all of whom are thieves and most of whom are fraudsters in addition) and libertarian principles.
OK, let's try to build an exhaustive and organized list:
1. "Computer Cracking" (i.e. evasion of security measures in order to gain unauthorized use of other people's computers).
1a. Creation or distribution of computer viruses designed to open a "back door" into infected computers so that they may be used to relay spam.
1b. Use of computers infected by spam viruses (see 1a above) as spam relays.
1c. Evasion of spam filters by disguising spam messages with forged headers, misleading subject lines, disguised keywords, etc.
2. Denial of Service ("DoS") Attacks (i.e. disabling other people's computers or network connections)
2a. Attacks on websites that maintain lists of known spammers.
2b. Forgery of mail headers to make some other person appear to be the spam sender in order to deflect complaints. The identity theft victim is often unable to receive legitimate e-mail once the complaints flood in, and may be disconnected by his Internet Service Provider until he can establish his innocence.
3. Fraud (i.e. misleading advertisements)
3a. Medical fraud (e.g. "penis enlargement")
3b. Financial fraud (e.g. stock-touting "newsletters")
3c. Unauthorized use of copyright/trademark (e.g. "herbal Viagra")
3. Other offenses
3a. Mailing of pornography without effective screening to prevent distribution to minors.
However, and this opinion probably won't be popular with the/. crowd, federal "pound-me-in-the-ass" prison is not the answer here.
Why not? People who commit other forms of computer cracking (and that is the correct description of spammers' practices of filter evasion and relay hijacking) go to prison. People who commit fraud in other communications media go to prison. Why should not spammers, who routinely do both of the above, get the same punishment?
The law needs to recognize a blindingly obvious point -- anti-spam filters are a form of computer security, and the use of filter evasion techniques is therefore a form of computer cracking. Thus, filter evasion is criminal in and of itself, and each additional enhancement to the filter evasion technique should map to a corresponding enhancement of the sentence.
Is prison at all sucessful in rehabilitiation especially in the case of white collar crimes?
I can't think of anything, except maybe exorcism, that might rehabilitate Darl & Co. The objective at this point is to deter anybody else from pulling the same scam.
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I'm sorry, but making you try to figure out why the ground rules for the universe change without notice does not count as "trying to make you think".
Actually, there is a fundamental difference.
A "war on spam" (stupid phrase, but it seems to be the fashion) only has to push the average cost of spamming above the cost of advertising through legitimate channels. Once that tip-over point is reached, the entire point of spamming goes away.
There is no such tip-over point for the "war on drugs" (other than to repeal Prohibition II and create a legitimate market) or the "war on terrorism" (terrorists generally have goals that simply cannot be obtained by polite argument, economic pressure, or any other alternative means of persuasion).
The only legal reform that will make a dent in spam is to recognize the blindingly obvious fact that spam filters are a form of computer security; ergo, the circumvention or attempted circumvention of spam filters is a form of computer cracking.
Some people are just plain stupid that way. The same thing happened around here -- a bunch of guys took it into their heads to bring the Expos to Arlington (VA), set their sights on a plot of land owned by a well-connected megacorp that already had plans that would make them about triple what the stadium people would pay, and maintained a deer-in-the-headlights look while they got mowed down.
"Trading a shiv from the machine shop in exchange for my company this evening threatens to undermine the cigarette-based economy of this cell block. This advances the agenda of anti-tobacco zealots who believe that sexual favors should be free."
Oooo! Oooo!! Mistah Kottah!
The purpose of listing entire netblocks is to defeat pink contracts that allow spammers to periodically shift IPs (within the range of IPs available to the host ISP, obviously) in order to evade blocking.
Next question?
Except that johnjtrammell is manifestly right.
Or at the least, you would have seen why I consider your argument invalid
Oh, that is plain enough. You reject the basic concept that responsibility inherently requires control and authority (e.g. insofar as a sysadmin has control and authority over his server, it is impossible for any other person to be responsible for its spam blocking protocol). It's pointless to argue with someone who uses a clintonian erasable-ink dictionary.
Nonsense; that is the only relevant issue. Responsibility lies with the person who freely takes a given decision.
I must have missed hearing about the SPEWS infiltration teams that broke into ISP offices and forced the sysadmins to install those automated scripts at gunpoint.
Yep -- when you get right down to it, Seth Lubove's scribblings entail a contempt for private property rights that makes Karl Marx look like Ayn Rand.
Lawyers who bring actions against people who have committed real violations of people's legally guaranteed rights are not "leeching lawyers" -- they are lawyers doing their job.
Hell, I don't like spam, but I dislike people who essentially are looking for a quick fast buck too.
There is no reason to dislike people who make a buck, quickly or otherwise, by providing a legitimate service. Seeing to it that thieves are punished in accordance with the law is a legitimate service.
The FA you R must not be the same one the rest of us found at that URL.
The pro-fax-spammer slant starts with the very first sentence: "Pity the hapless travel agent or car dealer whose fax advertisement happens to appear on a fax machine belonging to one Ben Livingston of Seattle, Wash." Note that the junk fax is described as something that just "happened". It might be the fault of sun spots, or gremlins, or hoaxers. It certainly isn't the junk faxer's fault that it "happened" -- he is to be pitied, not punished or even so much as censured for wilfully appropriating other people's private property.
The very next sentence refers to Livingston as "a self-described small-claims warrior," (a term that carries an obvious sneering connotation).
How on earth can anyone familiar with standard English usage conclude that this article shows both sides of the issue?
Nope. The Forbes shill is explicitly defending fax.com, which is in the business of knowingly and wilfully sending millions of junk faxes.
Even if we were about accidental (rather than deliberate) trespass, that would merely call for a reduced penalty (not the complete free pass suggested by Forbes).
projection (pr&-JEK-sh&n): The attribution of one's own attitudes, feelings, or desires to someone or something as a naive or unconscious defense against anxiety or guilt.
That doesn't require any location tracking -- the DMV (or whoever) doesn't need to know where you wait. All they need to do is warn you to show up within X amount of time after being paged, or you go back to the end of the line.
Leaving aside your misreading of the poster's surname, there simply isn't any contradiction between punishing spammers (all of whom are thieves and most of whom are fraudsters in addition) and libertarian principles.
1. "Computer Cracking" (i.e. evasion of security measures in order to gain unauthorized use of other people's computers).
1a. Creation or distribution of computer viruses designed to open a "back door" into infected computers so that they may be used to relay spam.
1b. Use of computers infected by spam viruses (see 1a above) as spam relays.
1c. Evasion of spam filters by disguising spam messages with forged headers, misleading subject lines, disguised keywords, etc.
2. Denial of Service ("DoS") Attacks (i.e. disabling other people's computers or network connections)
2a. Attacks on websites that maintain lists of known spammers.
2b. Forgery of mail headers to make some other person appear to be the spam sender in order to deflect complaints. The identity theft victim is often unable to receive legitimate e-mail once the complaints flood in, and may be disconnected by his Internet Service Provider until he can establish his innocence.
3. Fraud (i.e. misleading advertisements)
3a. Medical fraud (e.g. "penis enlargement")
3b. Financial fraud (e.g. stock-touting "newsletters")
3c. Unauthorized use of copyright/trademark (e.g. "herbal Viagra")
3. Other offenses
3a. Mailing of pornography without effective screening to prevent distribution to minors.
Why not? People who commit other forms of computer cracking (and that is the correct description of spammers' practices of filter evasion and relay hijacking) go to prison. People who commit fraud in other communications media go to prison. Why should not spammers, who routinely do both of the above, get the same punishment?
The law needs to recognize a blindingly obvious point -- anti-spam filters are a form of computer security, and the use of filter evasion techniques is therefore a form of computer cracking. Thus, filter evasion is criminal in and of itself, and each additional enhancement to the filter evasion technique should map to a corresponding enhancement of the sentence.
The witch produces spectral images in a box by the aid of Satan! Burn the witch!
If your point is that Saudi Arabia in 2003 is stuck at about the same level of civilization as Europe in 1203, I completely agree.
I thought this thread was about Star Wars et seq (and et preq), not The Last Temptation of Christ.
Judge: "Baliff, whack his pee-pee."
I can't think of anything, except maybe exorcism, that might rehabilitate Darl & Co. The objective at this point is to deter anybody else from pulling the same scam.