On Fri, 3 Nov 2000, Tom Vogt wrote:
You know, I don't like spammers any more than the next guy, but come on. Unethical? we're not talking genocide and it's not like it cause significant (heck, even measurable) harm.
as a matter of fact, it does. the quantity of it, you know. if your 1 mio spam mails cause every receipient half a sec (on average) to discard, you've just wasted roughly a week of worktime.
I think it's more about the principle of it. No sane, sensible, tolerant person would go as far as to try to regulate spam. Or, indeed, UBE-friendly ISPs. But bulk mailing is such reprehensible behavior that it surely deserves a pile of social and technological sanctions. Blacklisting, shunning, DoS attacks and teergrube-kinda software immediately spring to mind, a combination of the first and last perhaps being the least intrusive. I totally fail to grasp why governments seem so intent on criminalizing most such measures. To me they seem like the essential ingredients of basic cyber-hygiene. Sampo Syreeni <decoy@iki.fi>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university