You have the right to do whatever you want to do with your work, nobodys stoping you from doing that, marketing it, singing it, sticking it on your head and tapdancing with it.
Wrong. Free market ensures that you are unable to market and sell your work if it's freely copyable, simply because marketing costs something. And if you do not profit from doing it, in free market you can't keep doing it, since you run out of money, can't buy food or shelter, and die.
I have an implicit right to copy whatever information freely comes my way.
So if you go to an empty hair saloon to get your hair cut, the barber never mentions that he expects to get paid, and you get your hair cut, then run out without paying, you are doing nothing wrong? After all you received a service freely, you never agreed to pay anything for it, and you even didn't deprive anybody else of a chance to get a hair cut since the saloon was empty!
Another fallacy of yours: copyright does not cover *information*. You have every right to use information in a book any way you wish. You could write your own book with the same information and sell it, and nobody would say you're doing something wrong!
Thankfully, now copyrights are becomming unenforcable. Good luck dealing with that, you'll need it.
The day they become unenforceable is the day you can't get new films on DVD any more, and only literature you can buy will be of the paper newspaper type or personal weblog type nobody can profit from even if they try. Why does this make you happy? Don't you have any books you like in your bookshelf that are made by professional writers, for example?
If not, if you've for example never gotten so much enjoyment from reading a book that you think the writer has right to make a living by writing it, then I pity you, for you do not have very rich life experience... (Please note the *if* above)
So now you want to talk about basic rights and control, since you are unable to give any examples about how not having copyrights would be benefical? Ok.
- Slavery violates the slaves right to control his person. - Stealing or abusing other persons property violates his right to control his property. - Copying creative work of somebody else violates his right control his own creation.
So not having copyright is actually *like* slavery. Not having copyright would prevent a person from controlling something that is rightfully his.
For certainly if you *create* something (say, contents of a book) through long hard work, you have much stronger right to control your creation, than if you're merely given some land property that was (for example) stolen from American Indians a few hundred years ago...
If you considered capturing and selling slaves as legal activity, then you might have a point. It is illegal, therefore releasing slaves is not only legal but commendable.
The opposite is that authoring books is not only legal but a good thing for our culture. Therefore activity that in a fundamental level makes writing books or creating films a priviledge of the few rich should be illegal. And look, we have copyright! *Anybody* (even a bum who finds a pencil and some paper in a dumpster) can do a creative work and try to make money from it, without somebody else just taking the result for free!
Do you have more trollish responses, or can you provide something more concrete on how a society without this would be a better than the society we have now?
Certainly you don't propose that everybody should have freedom to try to kill anybody they don't like?
Should there be freedom to have complete privacy at each ones land and deny everybody else the freedom to go there? Or should there be freedom for anybody to go anywhere they wish, including other people's bedroom while they're having sex?
Should there be freedom to just throw garbage on a street you think you won't be using yourself later so it will not bother you?
Should there be freedom to take results of somebody else's work and efforts without giving anything back to them?
Your "free market" is utopia without people who are selfish and especialy without people who are mean and get pleasure from having power over other people.
You can't exactly have a worldwide we're switching to "smtp improved" day.
My fear is that we will have "smtp doesn't work any more" day, and much sooner than anybody expects.
There's finite bandwidth available, and there's finite server space available. Mails start disappearing more and more, so spammers will end up sending more and more spam to compete with each others. And soon you just can't rely on email at all, it'll be worthless as a means of communication.
Maybe growth of spam will stop, but I don't really see why it would... I don't see spammers co-operating and agreeing on quotas. So it'll grow and grow until it dies and takes SMTP with it to the grave.
Well, SMTP should require a signed From-field added by SMTP server. And SMTP server should require a login before it allows sending mail, and *add* that From field, or at least check that it's one of the valid values for that login, and sign it, for example simply using web signatures. So then it's not so much of a privacy issue, From field would identify the ISP and mail account they vouch for, but not anything more about the sender.
Now blocking spam would become a question of a) dropping mail with revoked signature at the server b) blacklisting signatures that are known to be used for spamming but not revoked yet c) blacklisting ISPs that keep getting new signatures for spamming purposes d) not accepting signatures from signature providers that give signatures with false information
Getting a signing key is not free from any supplier, and if one signature would be useable for spam for only very limited time, that would push up the cost of spamming greatly, not to mention it'd make ISPs careful to not leak their keys since it would disrupt their mail delivery and incur the cost of getting new keys.
Also, a signature would always be traceable either back to the ISP or at least back to the company that issued it in the first place, so there would be clear targets for litigation if their security (or business ethics...) is not good enough.
People will not use S/MIME or PGP because it is not mandated, and because the receiver doesn't use it anyway in 99% of the cases. That's precisely why current version of SMTP needs to be scrapped completely in public networks, to force people to use the security measures, and therefor allow simply discarding any mail that doesn't. It needs a standard protocol (be it SMTPv2 or something completely different) that says "you *must* bounce any mail that does not have X".
Corollary : If someone did have a solution, they wouldn't even need to go through the IETF or any committees, they could simply publish and get started. Any solution has to be able to bootstrap itself.
No. In a case like this it's a chicken and an egg problem. Nobody would use the new system because nobody else is using it yet either. There needs to be a powerful push for a new system to replace an old one, because this new system would have to become as common as email is now.
Now of course that push can be that SMTP email simply does not work well enough any more. But somehow that sounds like a bad idea, the kind of thinking that any problem goes away if you just think about it long enough without doing anything... Indeed they do, but not quite the way we'd usually want.
It's nothing to do with a "final push", it's that all the proposals so far simply don't work. And these proposals aren't simply wafted away with a few hand gestures (as I admit I am doing here) - they are torn to shreds by seasoned engineers who know what they are doing. I'm as eager for a solution as anybody, but I haven't seen one yet.
There are such obivious, glaring holes in SMTP (such as To and From-fields being totally irrelevant) that I can't really believe there's nothing that could be fixed to make it less ideal for sending spam...
I mean, it was designed for completely differenent internet. If *every* suggestion to improve on it gets torn to shreds, then I'd be more inclined to believe that the problem is actually elsewhere (ie IETF not getting it's act together, personal egos getting in the way of solving the problem).
First, I'd like to say that $ cost per email is *not* a very good solution IMHO, but anyway...
So you simply would not use email for such a list if it cost too much. You would use something else, a private web forum or whatever.
Or perhaps a smart ISP could find customers by providing a mailing list service for their customers, something which would automatically have much more accountability (if you find yourself in a list you didn't subscribe to, you have the ISP that hosts the list to go after).
It's not like *group* communications depend on email, there are a lot of other alternatives.
However, for person-to-person communication, it's the only standard solution that can reach just about anybody as long as you have their email. So if group communication has to suffer in order to keep person-to-person communication effective, and no practical way to do it any other way, then so be it. Better to have a system that works well for one purpose, than a system that doesn't work at all (note that it's not quite that bad with email yet, but I fear soon we will be).
There's nothing wrong with your reasoning above, it's just that "(6)...offer a solution" belies the true complexity of the problem. Seriously, turn this around and ask yourself "Why hasn't there been a solution brought forward yet?" - it's not like vast numbers of highly intelligent people haven't been working on this for years without solving it.
Well, there are a lot of options (see my reply other other reply of my previous post) being suggested by a lot of people. There are a lot of things that make SMTP a very spammer-friendly, that could be fixed.
The reason why it has not been done is just that, IETF can't get their act together.
A lot of suggestions, but they don't seem to have the final push to make something happen. The final push will come if/when Internet really starts breaking up under spam, but it may be too late then. Spam seems to have an exponential growth rate, so from the time it starts to be a real bandwidth problem to the time things actually start to break up is shorter than it would appear...
At this point there should be a set of new protocol standards ready, so software makers could start implementing them and finding the real-world problems in them. The fact that it's a hard problem only amplifies this need. If that implementation and testing process starts *after* real problems are already here, it's way way too late.
There are plenty of suggestions. Combining a good selection of them into a unified protocol would help a great deal. Some of the suggested stuff:
- "CPU cycle" stamp in every outgoing mail. - Making the To-field to actually determine the recipients - Making From-field actually identify the sender (by being added by the mail server software, not by client software, so email-specific login to the server would be needed). - Integrating signatures into the protocol in different ways, at least to identify the originating ISP. - Making email a "pager-type" protocol, recipient only gets a minimally short message telling where to find the actual message (including checksum of the message or what else is necessary), thus stopping at least the spam content clogging up the network.
Lot of little things that could perhaps also be implemented on top of SMTP even without making it horribly messy. But the reason a new protocol is needed is that old SMTP really stops being used "in the wild" outside private networks, and existing vulnerable legacy software (including the various worm-created spam networks around the internet) stops working.
If you received an ad in the mail for my product and the ad was contaminated with anthrax, wouldn't I be liable?
It's not quite like that. When you receive spam that has legal contents, you are not receiving "anthrax". The spam was maybe at some point transferred by illegal means (hijacked computer), but you have know way of knowing that for sure.
If it was your computer that was hijacked, and you could intercept the spam and show what spam was being transmitted through your computer, perhpas then you could go after the company advertised in the spam.
Of course assuming you have the motivation and money to get involved in such a lawsuit... They will claim innosense, being exploited by evil overseas marketing company that actually sent the spams, and they don't have any money anyway if you win...
So it's not easy, and it's not cheap. It could be even dangerous to you or your family, if the spammer has connections to organized crime...
Hey, I'm not even in any IETF workgroup so I'd have very limited chances to contribute to a solution even if I was qualified to design such a new protocol, which I'm not.
However, my logic goes something like this:
1. There's serious problem with the Internet due to spam, and it's getting worse by the minute.
2. The social part of the problem, ie people, really can't be removed or fixed.
3. So we need a technical solution that gets around the problem of people using the internet.
4. IETF is the right body to provide the technical part of the solution, something every ISP and MTA vendor and MUA vendor can implement.
5. There is no such standard solution.
6. Therefore, IETF needs to get their act together to offer a standard solution, and obsolete RFCs that don't support this.
So where does my reasoning go wrong? Which of the above points are unreasonable?
But users wont get smart. So you have to limit any users ability to send email. Simple as that.
For example mandate that ISPs charge 1 cent per e-mail sent from user, and see users to make very sure their computers are secure and not spam relays. Of course this also needs a cap on mails/day, or more like cap on $ spent on sending mail per day so users don't get burned too bad...
Or mandate a CPU challenge per e-mail sent from a MUA that takes 10 seconds to solve per recipient for something like 1GHz x86 CPU, but is cheap to verify by the MTA.
If spammers can't reach high enough volume, spamming will become unprofitable, simple as that.
I guess porn business is what brings in most of the money for spammers.
And then I suppose that once the basic spamming infrastructure is established and paid for by that, there's ready market for getting other businesses and plain scammers to do spam marketing, thus increasing spammer profits more and pushing down the price per email.
It's even more scary when you think what kind of people will be involved.
When will we have first anti-spam people to "disappear" or even murdered as an example to those who would try to hurt the profits of these people...? Or has this already happened?
Something desperately needs to be done with SMTP to control this stuff....
Yes. It needs to be completely blocked at backbone routers, and new and better alternative developed.
So, the steps would be 1. develop a better alternative as fast as possible, and make it as simple as possible to implement.
2. deploy the better alternative for test use.
3. develop a fixed version 2 of the better alternative after it's holes are discovered.
4. deploy the fixed version.
5. block SMTP and version 1 of new protocol at international and national backbones and national borders, so that everybody is forced to switch.
So SMTP would still be completly usable for example inside organizations, so if a company has huge installed base of legacy software, they could have internal SMTP-new protocol gateway.
Of course this would require IETF to get their act together, and various governments to agree that this must be done, and actual new protocol to be simple enough and not contain patented algorithms or any other stupidities.
So it will not happen. Then spam will overwhelm the internet transfer capacity. Then SMPT is blocked and free internet e-mail will cease to exist. Proprietary solutions will develop, but there will be a chaos. Incidentally, Microsoft will happily provide a closed proprietary system only usable from their operating systems.
Of course it is illegal. The problem is catching those that do it. The actual spam marketers will be hard to prosecute for it just because they use services of other "businesses" for delivering their marketing material. And actually getting these "other businesses" to court might be rather hard if they operate in some 3rd World pirate heaven, have no public office, and all business transactions are handled electronically, and are purposefully hidden or obfuscated.
So, in a world without copyright, are you suggesting that authors are not entitled to any compensation for their work? Or do you have some other mechanism to not only make it possible to write books for living, but also encourage writing material that is valued by somebody (as opposed to creating whatever crap with minimal effort just to leech "arts&culture" support money from government, for example).
Look at your bookshelf, do you have books (including all of them, also non-fiction, like professional reference books) you value greatly? How many of those books would still exist if their authors could not expect to get paid for their creation? I bet a lot of them would not...
So, assume a world without those books you value, and all other books other people value greatly, books that depend on copyright law to keep their authors fed. How would not having copyrights bring more good to the humanity, than the lack of those books would hurt the good of the humanity?
(Books here are just a tangible example, substitute with films, computer software that does not need support such as games, or anything that can be copied with zero cost).
There's a difference between using blacklist to block something (ie some email) that comes to you, and actively going out and DDOSing other peoples servers.
It's like the difference between a boycotting a store that's on some blacklist undeservedly, and gathering a mob and lynching the shopkeeper who's store is on that list...
If suing the spammers would be an option, then why wouldn't they already have been sued a 100 times over for hacking people's home computers and all the other blatantly illegal activity that surrounds the spam business?
I don't. Spam eats up bandwidth just being delivered, even if it gets filtered at the end anyway. Then, you have the idiots that sit and open it and wait for images to load in their HTML-enabled mail clients. Despite this, from a technological standpoint, although it chews up and wastes valuable resources, it won't bring the Internet to a complete screeching halt.
Don't count on it. There are worms that spread to create spam relays, and then those relays send spam. Potentially this leads to exponential growth in traffic...
The problem with this is that it does not solve the problem. It may hide it from you, but it does not solve it. Also, it somewhat requires that you don't need to be reliably contacted by people you don't know.
The actual problem is at least two-fold 1. The actual spam traffic slowing things down, costing core network operators, and this cost getting passed down to ISPs and ultimately end users. 2. The threat to home PCs that get hacked for the purpose of sending SPAM from them.
Filtering or hiding your e-mail may help *you*. But unless you expect every stupid average Joe to do it too, it will not discourage the spammer in the least so the real problem remains.
Just go on blacklisting every ISP who can't stop spam originating from their customers. Soon you'll see that ISPs will find ways, such as allowing at most X mails from single user per day, blocking SMTP traffic going elsewhere than their own mail server etc.
Then have a system where an ISP can automatically get themselves removed from the blacklist after 1 day, when they think they've solved the problem. Next time make it 2 days, if they get to the list again, then 3 days etc, perhaps maxing out at about a week.
Oh, and obivously universities etc are ISPs in this context.
Ta dah, no more spam from home PCs.
All it takes is somebody powerful enough deciding that this should be so, and it would happen. There are plenty enough pissed off ISP admins who are itching for an official permission to limit spam traffic to and form their network. A requirement would be even better, then their customers could not even complain or change to the competitor.
For example if EU and US decided this, everybody else would have to follow or lose e-mail communications with economically most important portion of the world.
Sure there would be initial perioid of chaos in e-mail delivery. But then, isn't it a chaos already, if people are talking about internet getting totally broken. Better this than shutting down SMTP port completely at root level routers at some point to prevent complete collapse under the load of SPAM and worms looking for new SPAM hosts...
Actually, he has lost one of the most fundamental and important of his possessions - his hard-earned money.
I take it you do not have a family? I'd hate to think that you'd for example sacrifice your children just for money...
I also take it you don't know anybody who is seriously disabled, or going to die in a year from fatal illness...
But above all, especially if you're an American, you should know that your most valuable possion is freedom. Oh wait, yes, I belive that "freedom thing" is being revoked as we speak (DMCA, Patriot Act, a legal system where money for paying lawyer fees is more important than the truth). So maybe you're right, maybe in the USA the most fundamental and important possession *is* money. Yes, it all makes so much more sense now!
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- You have the right to do whatever you want to do with your work, nobodys stoping you from doing that, marketing it, singing it, sticking it on your head and tapdancing with it.
Wrong. Free market ensures that you are unable to market and sell your work if it's freely copyable, simply because marketing costs something. And if you do not profit from doing it, in free market you can't keep doing it, since you run out of money, can't buy food or shelter, and die.So if you go to an empty hair saloon to get your hair cut, the barber never mentions that he expects to get paid, and you get your hair cut, then run out without paying, you are doing nothing wrong? After all you received a service freely, you never agreed to pay anything for it, and you even didn't deprive anybody else of a chance to get a hair cut since the saloon was empty!
Another fallacy of yours: copyright does not cover *information*. You have every right to use information in a book any way you wish. You could write your own book with the same information and sell it, and nobody would say you're doing something wrong!
The day they become unenforceable is the day you can't get new films on DVD any more, and only literature you can buy will be of the paper newspaper type or personal weblog type nobody can profit from even if they try. Why does this make you happy? Don't you have any books you like in your bookshelf that are made by professional writers, for example?
If not, if you've for example never gotten so much enjoyment from reading a book that you think the writer has right to make a living by writing it, then I pity you, for you do not have very rich life experience... (Please note the *if* above)
So now you want to talk about basic rights and control, since you are unable to give any examples about how not having copyrights would be benefical? Ok.
- Slavery violates the slaves right to control his person.
- Stealing or abusing other persons property violates his right to control his property.
- Copying creative work of somebody else violates his right control his own creation.
So not having copyright is actually *like* slavery. Not having copyright would prevent a person from controlling something that is rightfully his.
For certainly if you *create* something (say, contents of a book) through long hard work, you have much stronger right to control your creation, than if you're merely given some land property that was (for example) stolen from American Indians a few hundred years ago...
If you considered capturing and selling slaves as legal activity, then you might have a point. It is illegal, therefore releasing slaves is not only legal but commendable.
The opposite is that authoring books is not only legal but a good thing for our culture. Therefore activity that in a fundamental level makes writing books or creating films a priviledge of the few rich should be illegal. And look, we have copyright! *Anybody* (even a bum who finds a pencil and some paper in a dumpster) can do a creative work and try to make money from it, without somebody else just taking the result for free!
Do you have more trollish responses, or can you provide something more concrete on how a society without this would be a better than the society we have now?
So what freedoms should one have?
Certainly you don't propose that everybody should have freedom to try to kill anybody they don't like?
Should there be freedom to have complete privacy at each ones land and deny everybody else the freedom to go there? Or should there be freedom for anybody to go anywhere they wish, including other people's bedroom while they're having sex?
Should there be freedom to just throw garbage on a street you think you won't be using yourself later so it will not bother you?
Should there be freedom to take results of somebody else's work and efforts without giving anything back to them?
Your "free market" is utopia without people who are selfish and especialy without people who are mean and get pleasure from having power over other people.
My fear is that we will have "smtp doesn't work any more" day, and much sooner than anybody expects.
There's finite bandwidth available, and there's finite server space available. Mails start disappearing more and more, so spammers will end up sending more and more spam to compete with each others. And soon you just can't rely on email at all, it'll be worthless as a means of communication.
Maybe growth of spam will stop, but I don't really see why it would... I don't see spammers co-operating and agreeing on quotas. So it'll grow and grow until it dies and takes SMTP with it to the grave.
Ok, fax effect is better :-)
Well, SMTP should require a signed From-field added by SMTP server. And SMTP server should require a login before it allows sending mail, and *add* that From field, or at least check that it's one of the valid values for that login, and sign it, for example simply using web signatures. So then it's not so much of a privacy issue, From field would identify the ISP and mail account they vouch for, but not anything more about the sender.
Now blocking spam would become a question of
a) dropping mail with revoked signature at the server
b) blacklisting signatures that are known to be used for spamming but not revoked yet
c) blacklisting ISPs that keep getting new signatures for spamming purposes
d) not accepting signatures from signature providers that give signatures with false information
Getting a signing key is not free from any supplier, and if one signature would be useable for spam for only very limited time, that would push up the cost of spamming greatly, not to mention it'd make ISPs careful to not leak their keys since it would disrupt their mail delivery and incur the cost of getting new keys.
Also, a signature would always be traceable either back to the ISP or at least back to the company that issued it in the first place, so there would be clear targets for litigation if their security (or business ethics...) is not good enough.
People will not use S/MIME or PGP because it is not mandated, and because the receiver doesn't use it anyway in 99% of the cases. That's precisely why current version of SMTP needs to be scrapped completely in public networks, to force people to use the security measures, and therefor allow simply discarding any mail that doesn't. It needs a standard protocol (be it SMTPv2 or something completely different) that says "you *must* bounce any mail that does not have X".
No. In a case like this it's a chicken and an egg problem. Nobody would use the new system because nobody else is using it yet either. There needs to be a powerful push for a new system to replace an old one, because this new system would have to become as common as email is now.
Now of course that push can be that SMTP email simply does not work well enough any more. But somehow that sounds like a bad idea, the kind of thinking that any problem goes away if you just think about it long enough without doing anything... Indeed they do, but not quite the way we'd usually want.
There are such obivious, glaring holes in SMTP (such as To and From-fields being totally irrelevant) that I can't really believe there's nothing that could be fixed to make it less ideal for sending spam...
I mean, it was designed for completely differenent internet. If *every* suggestion to improve on it gets torn to shreds, then I'd be more inclined to believe that the problem is actually elsewhere (ie IETF not getting it's act together, personal egos getting in the way of solving the problem).
First, I'd like to say that $ cost per email is *not* a very good solution IMHO, but anyway...
So you simply would not use email for such a list if it cost too much. You would use something else, a private web forum or whatever.
Or perhaps a smart ISP could find customers by providing a mailing list service for their customers, something which would automatically have much more accountability (if you find yourself in a list you didn't subscribe to, you have the ISP that hosts the list to go after).
It's not like *group* communications depend on email, there are a lot of other alternatives.
However, for person-to-person communication, it's the only standard solution that can reach just about anybody as long as you have their email. So if group communication has to suffer in order to keep person-to-person communication effective, and no practical way to do it any other way, then so be it. Better to have a system that works well for one purpose, than a system that doesn't work at all (note that it's not quite that bad with email yet, but I fear soon we will be).
Well, there are a lot of options (see my reply other other reply of my previous post) being suggested by a lot of people. There are a lot of things that make SMTP a very spammer-friendly, that could be fixed.
The reason why it has not been done is just that, IETF can't get their act together.
A lot of suggestions, but they don't seem to have the final push to make something happen. The final push will come if/when Internet really starts breaking up under spam, but it may be too late then. Spam seems to have an exponential growth rate, so from the time it starts to be a real bandwidth problem to the time things actually start to break up is shorter than it would appear...
At this point there should be a set of new protocol standards ready, so software makers could start implementing them and finding the real-world problems in them. The fact that it's a hard problem only amplifies this need. If that implementation and testing process starts *after* real problems are already here, it's way way too late.
There are plenty of suggestions. Combining a good selection of them into a unified protocol would help a great deal. Some of the suggested stuff:
- "CPU cycle" stamp in every outgoing mail.
- Making the To-field to actually determine the recipients
- Making From-field actually identify the sender (by being added by the mail server software, not by client software, so email-specific login to the server would be needed).
- Integrating signatures into the protocol in different ways, at least to identify the originating ISP.
- Making email a "pager-type" protocol, recipient only gets a minimally short message telling where to find the actual message (including checksum of the message or what else is necessary), thus stopping at least the spam content clogging up the network.
Lot of little things that could perhaps also be implemented on top of SMTP even without making it horribly messy. But the reason a new protocol is needed is that old SMTP really stops being used "in the wild" outside private networks, and existing vulnerable legacy software (including the various worm-created spam networks around the internet) stops working.
It's not quite like that. When you receive spam that has legal contents, you are not receiving "anthrax". The spam was maybe at some point transferred by illegal means (hijacked computer), but you have know way of knowing that for sure.
If it was your computer that was hijacked, and you could intercept the spam and show what spam was being transmitted through your computer, perhpas then you could go after the company advertised in the spam.
Of course assuming you have the motivation and money to get involved in such a lawsuit... They will claim innosense, being exploited by evil overseas marketing company that actually sent the spams, and they don't have any money anyway if you win...
So it's not easy, and it's not cheap. It could be even dangerous to you or your family, if the spammer has connections to organized crime...
Hey, I'm not even in any IETF workgroup so I'd have very limited chances to contribute to a solution even if I was qualified to design such a new protocol, which I'm not.
However, my logic goes something like this:
1. There's serious problem with the Internet due to spam, and it's getting worse by the minute.
2. The social part of the problem, ie people, really can't be removed or fixed.
3. So we need a technical solution that gets around the problem of people using the internet.
4. IETF is the right body to provide the technical part of the solution, something every ISP and MTA vendor and MUA vendor can implement.
5. There is no such standard solution.
6. Therefore, IETF needs to get their act together to offer a standard solution, and obsolete RFCs that don't support this.
So where does my reasoning go wrong?
Which of the above points are unreasonable?
But users wont get smart. So you have to limit any users ability to send email. Simple as that.
For example mandate that ISPs charge 1 cent per e-mail sent from user, and see users to make very sure their computers are secure and not spam relays. Of course this also needs a cap on mails/day, or more like cap on $ spent on sending mail per day so users don't get burned too bad...
Or mandate a CPU challenge per e-mail sent from a MUA that takes 10 seconds to solve per recipient for something like 1GHz x86 CPU, but is cheap to verify by the MTA.
If spammers can't reach high enough volume, spamming will become unprofitable, simple as that.
I guess porn business is what brings in most of the money for spammers.
And then I suppose that once the basic spamming infrastructure is established and paid for by that, there's ready market for getting other businesses and plain scammers to do spam marketing, thus increasing spammer profits more and pushing down the price per email.
It's even more scary when you think what kind of people will be involved.
When will we have first anti-spam people to "disappear" or even murdered as an example to those who would try to hurt the profits of these people...? Or has this already happened?
Yes. It needs to be completely blocked at backbone routers, and new and better alternative developed.
So, the steps would be
1. develop a better alternative as fast as possible, and make it as simple as possible to implement.
2. deploy the better alternative for test use.
3. develop a fixed version 2 of the better alternative after it's holes are discovered.
4. deploy the fixed version.
5. block SMTP and version 1 of new protocol at international and national backbones and national borders, so that everybody is forced to switch.
So SMTP would still be completly usable for example inside organizations, so if a company has huge installed base of legacy software, they could have internal SMTP-new protocol gateway.
Of course this would require IETF to get their act together, and various governments to agree that this must be done, and actual new protocol to be simple enough and not contain patented algorithms or any other stupidities.
So it will not happen. Then spam will overwhelm the internet transfer capacity. Then SMPT is blocked and free internet e-mail will cease to exist. Proprietary solutions will develop, but there will be a chaos. Incidentally, Microsoft will happily provide a closed proprietary system only usable from their operating systems.
Of course it is illegal. The problem is catching those that do it. The actual spam marketers will be hard to prosecute for it just because they use services of other "businesses" for delivering their marketing material. And actually getting these "other businesses" to court might be rather hard if they operate in some 3rd World pirate heaven, have no public office, and all business transactions are handled electronically, and are purposefully hidden or obfuscated.
So, in a world without copyright, are you suggesting that authors are not entitled to any compensation for their work? Or do you have some other mechanism to not only make it possible to write books for living, but also encourage writing material that is valued by somebody (as opposed to creating whatever crap with minimal effort just to leech "arts&culture" support money from government, for example).
Look at your bookshelf, do you have books (including all of them, also non-fiction, like professional reference books) you value greatly? How many of those books would still exist if their authors could not expect to get paid for their creation? I bet a lot of them would not...
So, assume a world without those books you value, and all other books other people value greatly, books that depend on copyright law to keep their authors fed. How would not having copyrights bring more good to the humanity, than the lack of those books would hurt the good of the humanity?
(Books here are just a tangible example, substitute with films, computer software that does not need support such as games, or anything that can be copied with zero cost).
There's a difference between using blacklist to block something (ie some email) that comes to you, and actively going out and DDOSing other peoples servers.
It's like the difference between a boycotting a store that's on some blacklist undeservedly, and gathering a mob and lynching the shopkeeper who's store is on that list...
So who would be hit with lawsuit?
If suing the spammers would be an option, then why wouldn't they already have been sued a 100 times over for hacking people's home computers and all the other blatantly illegal activity that surrounds the spam business?
Standard response to this suggestion:
Then it'd be easy to get innocent web sites DDOSed simply by sending "fake spam" with suitable links.
Don't count on it. There are worms that spread to create spam relays, and then those relays send spam. Potentially this leads to exponential growth in traffic...
The problem with this is that it does not solve the problem. It may hide it from you, but it does not solve it. Also, it somewhat requires that you don't need to be reliably contacted by people you don't know.
The actual problem is at least two-fold
1. The actual spam traffic slowing things down, costing core network operators, and this cost getting passed down to ISPs and ultimately end users.
2. The threat to home PCs that get hacked for the purpose of sending SPAM from them.
Filtering or hiding your e-mail may help *you*. But unless you expect every stupid average Joe to do it too, it will not discourage the spammer in the least so the real problem remains.
Just go on blacklisting every ISP who can't stop spam originating from their customers. Soon you'll see that ISPs will find ways, such as allowing at most X mails from single user per day, blocking SMTP traffic going elsewhere than their own mail server etc.
Then have a system where an ISP can automatically get themselves removed from the blacklist after 1 day, when they think they've solved the problem. Next time make it 2 days, if they get to the list again, then 3 days etc, perhaps maxing out at about a week.
Oh, and obivously universities etc are ISPs in this context.
Ta dah, no more spam from home PCs.
All it takes is somebody powerful enough deciding that this should be so, and it would happen. There are plenty enough pissed off ISP admins who are itching for an official permission to limit spam traffic to and form their network. A requirement would be even better, then their customers could not even complain or change to the competitor.
For example if EU and US decided this, everybody else would have to follow or lose e-mail communications with economically most important portion of the world.
Sure there would be initial perioid of chaos in e-mail delivery. But then, isn't it a chaos already, if people are talking about internet getting totally broken. Better this than shutting down SMTP port completely at root level routers at some point to prevent complete collapse under the load of SPAM and worms looking for new SPAM hosts...
I take it you do not have a family? I'd hate to think that you'd for example sacrifice your children just for money...
I also take it you don't know anybody who is seriously disabled, or going to die in a year from fatal illness...
But above all, especially if you're an American, you should know that your most valuable possion is freedom. Oh wait, yes, I belive that "freedom thing" is being revoked as we speak (DMCA, Patriot Act, a legal system where money for paying lawyer fees is more important than the truth). So maybe you're right, maybe in the USA the most fundamental and important possession *is* money. Yes, it all makes so much more sense now!