Kevin Elliott 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. then again, 90% of your receipients will most likely waste much more time every evening *willingly* subjecting themselves to advertisement (and a little entertainment between the spots) on tv anyways.

Sampo A Syreeni wrote:

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.

I guess it's just that govs see that they're losing power and thus are scrambling to get themselves involved everywhere. or, on a slightly less malicious scale, they're equally desperately trying to show that they *do* have something of consequence to contribute. maybe DMCA (as much as I hate it) and the breaking of micro$oft (as much as I love it) both stem from the same emotional source.

On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, Kevin Elliott 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

We ought to be. If spammers feared death as a result of their actions, they would be a lot less likely to spam. Alex

Then, depending on your personal preferences and how valuable you think you are to prospective emailers, accept only email messages with $0.10, or $1.00, or $10.00... It's a market; you do the math. -Declan On Sun, Nov 05, 2000 at 08:14:34PM -0800, jim bell wrote:

----- Original Message ----- From: Alex B. Shepardsen

...

On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, Kevin Elliott 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

We ought to be. If spammers feared death as a result of their actions, they would be a lot less likely to spam.

I've got a solution to that....oh, never mind.

If "spammers" attached a digi-nickel to each spam, you'd only have to get 300 such pieces per month (10 per day) to pay for the typical ISP account monthly cost.

Jim Bell

At 11:36 AM -0800 11/3/00, Bill Stewart wrote: (about AT&T knowingly supporting Spam sites)

Fortunately, somebody got this to the right people at AT&T; otherwise I was going to have to contact the Sales VP (Hovancak) whose name was on the contract and ask him to find the sales rep who got fast-talked into signing that contract. AT&T's privacy policies mean that we can't reveal information on our customers' networks, so it's the PR folks' problem to tell you that we've learned the error of our ways,

Oh, I doubt AT&T has "learned the error of its ways." This is just their spin control. Like Esther Dyson's spin control..."I won't let it happen again." Until, of course, the next mass mailing to her "Dear Friends" goes out. --Tim May -- ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, "Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.

Well, let's take this up one level of abstraction. We can stop spam from flooding our inboxes (an economic bad) by: 1. law 2. AUPs with backbone providers/hosting services (industry self-regulation) 3. cypherpunkly end-user technology I oppose the first. I think the second is what the market is moving toward, in much the same way businesses won't let customers conduct DoS attacks from their networks. If spammers want to start their own backbone provider, they are free to do so. Nobody may route their packets, but that is a choice made by free people living in a free society. In order to make it economically attractive for AT&T to route their traffic, SpamBackbone may have to write a check. Or perhaps SpamBackbone (more likely) will cut a deal with AOL and MSN and spam their customers a certain numver of times, for a fee. This fee would presumably contribute toward keeping some AOL and Hotmail accounts "free" to users, or available at a lower cost than would be otherwise, with the concomitant price of spam. Preto! We've converted spam into advertising. The third option is perhaps the best, because it's more granular. It's certainly more cypherpunkly. But I think the second is consistent with anarcho-capitalist principles as well. -Declan On Sun, Nov 05, 2000 at 07:11:23AM -0500, William H. Geiger III wrote:

In , on 11/03/00 at 05:20 PM, Tim May said:

...

Oh, I doubt AT&T has "learned the error of its ways." This is just their spin control.

...

Like Esther Dyson's spin control..."I won't let it happen again."

...

Until, of course, the next mass mailing to her "Dear Friends" goes out.

Am I the only one here that sees something terribly wrong?

AT&T is the bad guy because they hosted a website of an alleged spamer? AT&T may have seen the "error of their ways" because they are now performing content based censorship by shutting down the same website (no SPAM was being sent over their network)? Exactly how far down this slippery slope should AT&T go?

It is amazing how members of this list can go from cypherpunks to censorpunks so easily, I guess SPAM is the root passphrase for some members principles.

On Sun, Nov 05, 2000 at 12:22:46PM -0600, Jim Choate wrote:

...

2. AUPs with backbone providers/hosting services (industry self-regulation)

I oppose these because I don't think some organization should have control of my speech simply because I purchase a service from them. If I buy, for

It would be part of the terms of service, aka the contract. It doesn't "violate the spirit of the 1st" (except for leftists) any more than a contract clause that says "thou shalt not launch DDoS attacks." If anything, by allowing private rules to flourish, it would expand the "spirit of the 1st." Finally, if you don't want your "speech controlled," take your business to a place that allows spammers. Similarly, if you want to publish racist or left-wing agitprop, I am under no obligation to allow you to use my printing press; take your business elsewhere. -Declan

At 12:22 PM 11/5/00 -0600, Jim Choate wrote:

On Sun, 5 Nov 2000, Declan McCullagh wrote:

...

Well, let's take this up one level of abstraction. We can stop spam from flooding our inboxes (an economic bad) by: 1. law "Congress shall make no law ...". 3. cypherpunkly end-user technology I obviously support anything an individual wishes to do with respect to making choices, provided they don't involve me without consent. This aspect should be pushed strongly.

I agree with Jim that anti-spam laws are bad in principle; in practice they're usually worse :-) Some kinds of cypherpunks technology don't involve the law; some do. For instance, user-supplied filters can trigger libel laws ("Hey, your filter called me a SPAMMER! I'll SUE!"). Carrier-end filters have a similar effect (I'm sure Jim would prefer that any such filters be installed by the user, not the ISP, even if they do get installed at the ISP's end of the wire.) Either way, they're reputation servers of some sort. But another set of cypherpunks technology is "the cure for bad speech is more speech" - responding to unwanted streams of bits ("Buy our SPAM today") with equally unwanted bits ("Ping of Death", cracking, and other attacks.) These tend to violate ISP acceptable use policies a and occasionally laws.

...

2. AUPs with backbone providers/hosting services (industry self-regulation)

I oppose these because I don't think some organization should have control of my speech simply because I purchase a service from them. If I buy, for example, a 128k ISDN line what the content of that 128k is most assuradely isn't my providers interest. It violates the spirit of the 1st. ... Economics in general is not the way to set ethical standards.

4. social contracts (for those of anarchist and libertarian bent)

Considering human psychology, not bloody likely.

But social contracts and economics are two sides of the same coin. While the DoD-funded ARPANET policies against commercial speech were censorship, the Usenet prevailing opposition to newsgroup spam was a social-contract thing. In many cases it's broken down, except on moderated newsgroups, but a lot of it is still there. And ISPs implement spam blocking not because they care (some do, some don't, usually depending on pricing models), but because their users keep telling them "Hey, I don't want spam." And social-contract relationships between ISPs mean that if you don't want somebody spamming your ISP, you don't spam theirs, and if somebody keeps spamming you and your users don't want it, you stop doing business with them. But spam is one thing, and politically incorrect content is another. Some ISPs have no-porn policies because they see a market for it, but many have them because they don't want legal problems if some prosecutor decides that they're selling obscenity in an election year. And with others, it's a marketing / branding thing - so if you don't like that kind of ISP, don't do business with them.

5. technical standards (ala Open Source)

Open source technical standards doesn't have a lot of relationship to the spam problem. They do mean that you can find and fix opportunities for spamming that are being abused, and that spammers can find and exploit new opportunities. Back to the 128K problem, with an ISDN line I agree it's nobody's business. You're getting dedicated bandwidth to a router pool, and whether you're on full time or not is strictly a pricing thing (and you'll have a much different opinion depending on whether you're charged by the minute or jsut flat rate.) With cable modems, it's a bit different, because the technology is very asymmetric. IMHO, the carriers like Excite@Home are clueless and annoying in their server policies - but it's partly because they don't have consistent traffic management technology, and partly because they can get rid of most of the problems by blocking web servers and now Napster which tend to be resource hogs. They'd rather be able to shut down users blindly if they have performance problems rather than having to argue about your web server using much less bandwidth than your "client" video-conference program, even though the web server is a much more efficient way to display your fish tank and coffee pot to the world. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639

On Mon, Nov 06, 2000 at 08:37:31PM -0800, Bill Stewart wrote:

At 12:22 PM 11/5/00 -0600, Jim Choate wrote:

...

On Sun, 5 Nov 2000, Declan McCullagh wrote:

...

Well, let's take this up one level of abstraction. We can stop spam from flooding our inboxes (an economic bad) by: 1. law "Congress shall make no law ...". 3. cypherpunkly end-user technology I obviously support anything an individual wishes to do with respect to making choices, provided they don't involve me without consent. This aspect should be pushed strongly.

I agree with Jim that anti-spam laws are bad in principle; in practice they're usually worse :-) Some kinds of cypherpunks technology don't involve the law; some do. For instance, user-supplied filters can trigger libel laws ("Hey, your filter called me a SPAMMER! I'll SUE!").

From: and Reply-to: to some unfortunate victim. In the latter two cases,

Maybe I'm too limited in my thinking, but I don't see this actually happening with usr-level filtering. Mostly for the simple reason that it doesn't make sense to send anything back to the spammer. They're usually spamming from a bogus address or a throw-away or pointing the recipient's email account soon overflows with complaints. So there's not much use in replying to spam. All the recpient can do is filter it into a seperate file or throw it out entirely. The spammer will not know what action users have taken, so they can't complain. This is different from the MAPS case, where the sites that use MAPS (and RBL etc) refuse to accept mail identified by MAPS as coming from spam sites or open relays. This way, the spammer finds out that their spam is rejected, and there's a big organization (MAPS or larger sites using it) to go after. If it's a "cypherpunks technology" spam filter, then there's no commercial program for spammers to test their spam on and no company to sue. In any case, I beleive that end-user spam filters should allow individual users to customize the filters or replace them entirely. I've written a simple user-level filter that attempts to recognize spam by the emails content instead of the headers. It's still a crude experiment at this point, but it seems to be working ok for me. http://www.lne.com/ericm/spammaster/ -- Eric Murray Consulting Security Architect SecureDesign LLC http://www.securedesignllc.com PGP keyid:E03F65E5

At 11:25 AM 11/7/00 -0800, Greg Broiles wrote:

On Tue, Nov 07, 2000 at 10:50:25AM -0800, Eric Murray wrote:

...

On Mon, Nov 06, 2000 at 08:37:31PM -0800, Bill Stewart wrote:

...

I agree with Jim that anti-spam laws are bad in principle; in practice they're usually worse :-) Some kinds of cypherpunks technology don't involve the law; some do. For instance, user-supplied filters can trigger libel laws ("Hey, your filter called me a SPAMMER! I'll SUE!").

Maybe I'm too limited in my thinking, but I don't see this actually happening with usr-level filtering. Mostly for the simple reason that it doesn't make sense to send anything back to the spammer.

Even if they did, there's no argument for defamation liability - all of the popular flavors of defamation (slander, libel, invasion of privacy) require that the defamatory content be made available to third parties (e.g., not the plaintiff nor the defendant).

I was thinking about filters that are installed by the user, but might get their lists of spammer / spams from a rating service, just as censorware products get lists from services. For instance, there are some patterns that are obvious spam and once you've seen them twice, you block them, but there's a lot of randomly worded spam out there which a spam-rating service could help you block. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639