I availed myself of some free home page enhancements on the Web yesterday, and all of a sudden, my SPAM has increased by at least an order of magnitude. Obviously, one or more of the sites I visited sold my email address to Mr. Spamford. I am now getting almost continuous Cyberpromo, EmailBlaster, and SubmitKing mailings as well as one from some female entrepreneur in Singapore who wants me to send her US$10 to email me obscene stories. (sigh) The time has come to make an example of Wallace Spamford, and to mount his stuffed carcass on the gates of the Internet as a warning to those who might be tempted to follow in his footsteps. The following was suggested to me by someone on IRC this morning, and I think it's a pretty nifty idea. We write a little Perl script that keeps exactly ONE AND ONLY ONE TCP connection open to each of Mr. Spamford's machines. Keeping a single TCP connection open to someone's box is unlikely to be illegal, and does not constitute a Denial of Service attack. Consider it the packet equivalent of a single person picketing. We publish the script, and encourage every Sysadmin who hates Mr. Spamford to run it. When thousands do so, he will be out of sockets, and consequently out of business. Consider this the packet equivalent of the UPS strike. We can make the scripts clever, and have them goose a wide variety of ports on Mr. Spamford's machines. He can, of course, devise a technical defense against this, but he does not have one installed at present, and it will shut him down for the time being, and give him sufficient time to ponder his evil ways. This also has the advantage of distributing the liability over thousands of individuals, a technique shown in the recent uunet UDP to render legal redress impractical. Anyone have any comments on this scheme, or anything even more insidious to suggest? -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ enoch@zipcon.com $ via Finger $ {Free Cypherpunk Political Prisoner Jim Bell}