Yupin Mungdee wrote:
Another possible "ultimate end" for the spammer wars would be making spamming illegal, like fax spamming, and having the cops hunting down the spammers. But that can be defeated with truly anonymous markets, still assuming that encryption will be legal.
Spamming is an 'imaginary' felony, as are anonymity and encryption. The only real crime taking place on the InterNet is the marriage of an underage technology to a polygamous pen full of Sheeple whose dowry consists of an evolutionary heritage of worshipping whatever it is that they don't understand and following the Ram(it up your ass) with the biggest horns and the loudest bleat.
To really beat spamming we probably need filters that only allow messages from inside our web of trust. Don't you agree?
Complaining about 'spamming' is the equivalent of going to a Reservation and complaining that "there's too damn many Indians" around. "Doctor, it hurts when I do *this*..." "Then don't do *that*!" I don't post under my own name on USENET for a simple reason. When I do, I get mountains of spam. I do subscribe to cypherpunks through an unfilted toad.com and I get a few niggling spams a day that merely serve to remind me that the 'spammers' are out there, laying in wait. I don't live in Los Angelos for a simple reason. Within the first week of driving in traffic there, I would take out an Uzi and start blowing the other drivers away at random. I do make occassional forays into large cities such as LA and Phoenix when I want/need to do business or pleasure there, but when merely passing through, I do so at 4 a.m., in order to avoid the 'road spam'. The WorldWide Web is just that...a 'web'. If you want to traverse every part of it, just 'surfing' without using any kind of judgement or discrimination, then you can expect to get 'stuck' with whatever kind of substance is being used by those constructing that particular part of the web. When I go into the part of the web that John Perry has thrown his Net over and marked as his territory, my gut-reaction is to think of him as a dickhead, Nazi censor. Realistically, this would be true if he trod over to my few strands of webspace and tried to rule over it, but my willfully traversing into his domain and whining about how he acts within it is nothing more than egoism. Those who choose to participate with John Perry in the construction and maintenance of the web of trust/competency that he is involved in have certain expectations of free communications versus limitations of speech and action. Those who choose to participate in the construction/destruction of the CypherPunks lists can expect to be barraged by all manner of sanity/insanity, and to have to judge the value of the list for themselves in deciding whether to stay or to leave. (Relying on the CypherPunks Complaint Department to 'solve' this or that 'problem' is not a viable option.) "Doctor, I get 'spammed' when I go there..." "Then don't go there..." OldDocMonger