Is spam really a problem?
I see discussion of spam here and everywhere on the net. But who finds it a *real* problem, and why? I've been on the net for nearly 20 years. I'm active on numerous mailing lists. I post to usenet. I have a website. In all cases (except this post) I use real email addresses. Nevertheless, spam does not create a big problem for me. Perhaps 10-15% of my home email is spam, (much less at work) and I identify and kill it in less time than it takes me to sort out the junk from my snail mail. Don't get me wrong; I don't *like* spam. But for me it's a minor problem, certainly not worthy of legal remedies. I'm willing to suffer a certain level of foolish annoyance gladly in return for liberty. The only point at which spam is more than a minor irritation is when sexual spam turns up in my home mail or in inappropriate news groups, and then only because I have young kids, who I don't wish to be exposed to porn until they are more mature (if you flame me on this, you're missing the point of this post, and will be ignored). Masque. PS: I'm slightly anonymous in this message because I fear that if I used my real name, some jerk would decide to sign me up for every spam source on the planet, to prove a point. M
At 9:33 AM -0800 2/18/98, Anonymous wrote:
I see discussion of spam here and everywhere on the net. But who finds it a *real* problem, and why?
Indeed, discussion of "what to do about spam?" periodically consumes all of the main lists I'm on. Discussion of spam is worse than the actual spam.
Nevertheless, spam does not create a big problem for me. Perhaps 10-15% of my home email is spam, (much less at work) and I identify and kill it in less time than it takes me to sort out the junk from my snail mail.
Same for me. I can delete commercial advertisements ("spam") in seconds.
Don't get me wrong; I don't *like* spam. But for me it's a minor problem, certainly not worthy of legal remedies. I'm willing to suffer a certain level of foolish annoyance gladly in return for liberty.
Well said. "Be careful what you ask for." Anti-spam bills are already wending their way through Congressional committees. If passed, an FCC-like authority over the Net will have been granted. (Though probably ineffectual, given the use of offshore sites, throwaway accounts, etc. The real effect will probably be to usher in an era of mandatory identification for account opening, which is pernicious, and various other tracking and surveillance systems.) The only "spam" which really bothers me is/are _mail bombs_, where hundreds or even thousands of messages fill my mailbox. I've been hit twice with these attacks. And a friend of mine received 25,000 messages from one sender...he sued and won a substantial settlement from the employer of the guy who mail bombed him. But such attacks will likely not be affected by anti-spam laws anyway. Perps can use sites in other countries, beyond the reach of the laws. And remailers. And so on. "Be careful what you ask for." --Tim May Just Say No to "Big Brother Inside" ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^3,021,377 | black markets, collapse of governments.
Anonymous wrote:
I see discussion of spam here and everywhere on the net. But who finds it a *real* problem, and why?
It eats up your valuable time. You might not see it for what it is, but it is an interruption of normal service. It's annoying as having your pager go off durring sex and having to call back your boss instead of ignoring it. (Presume you can't shut off your pager.) It takes away from the continuity of life. Further, some of us use ISDN to get their email and transferring the extra junk adds to the pay/minute connections. There are nice technical solutions to this. If sendmail didn't transport things unauthenticated it could be done, but at a cost in CPU cycles on mail servers: Have every sendmail server use a PK scheme to talk to every other server and authenticate the connection. Have every sendmail server accept mail only from those whose key is verified. Anonymous remailers would still work and these could be set up to accept unauthenticated email, but then use their own credentials to send out the mail, so it will auth with your servers. Also have the anon remailers not accept too many messages from one source within a certain time frame to different destinations. i.e. if I send out 50 messages to cypherpunks in one hour, that's cool. If I send out 50 messages to 50 different users everywhere within an hour, it's not cool. This way the spamming bitches would be forced to still register domain names and send mail from them, and you can have your mail server block them as needed and be certain of where they came from. If you have problems with anon users, you can block unsigned (and/or signed but unrecognized) messages from anon users, while still allowing signed messages of anons you know well and accept mail from. [Note: I said known anons, this prevents Spamfuckers from genning 10 billion key pairs to spam you with.] (I won't get into persistant anonymous identities and reputation capital as that's been beaten to death already.) IMHO with such a scheme it will be possible to reactivate email relaying again, it just requires everyone to gen their own DH or RSA keys. The mailer software can handle this for users, so it's of little issue. The other side of the coin is that ISP's should include AUP clauses that state if you spam, you pay extra $$$ and make it enforceable via contract. Say, you pay shit.net $10/month for access, you'll have to sign a thing that says if you use your account to spam, you'll have to pay $500,000 or something just as prohibitive, or release their real world info, (or whatever can be legally used to deter the fuckers.) If any ISP's don't do this, or allow way too many spams, they get filtered from your servers. Mind you, this won't totally stop spammers, but it will make it hard for them. Food for thought. IMHO, with such fascist anti-encryption laws today, this is unlikely to take off. :( OTOH, the idea of pledging not to buy anything from spammers helps in the long run, but there are enough sheep out there that will accept any crap thrown in their mail. Further, spamming them back helps. If they put 800 numbers on the spam, call them and talk to them for hours and waste their time. If they put fax numbers in there, send them orders with fake addresses. If they put up net addresses, block them from your router and/or flood them with extra traffic if you can or want to. If they put up PO addresses, subscribe them to many weird magazines by sending in the fall out cards with their address on it. (seek legal advice before trying these, I'm just ranting and venting.) :) -- =====================================Kaos=Keraunos=Kybernetos============== .+.^.+.| Ray Arachelian |Prying open my 3rd eye. So good to see |./|\. ..\|/..|sunder@sundernet.com|you once again. I thought you were |/\|/\ <--*-->| ------------------ |hiding, and you thought that I had run |\/|\/ ../|\..| "A toast to Odin, |away chasing the tail of dogma. I opened|.\|/. .+.v.+.|God of screwdrivers"|my eye and there we were.... |..... ======================= http://www.sundernet.com ==========================
On Wed, Feb 18, 1998 at 06:33:07PM +0100, Anonymous wrote:
I see discussion of spam here and everywhere on the net. But who finds it a *real* problem, and why?
The way I see it, the problem with spam isn't that it takes too much effort to delete them, but that it discourages useful advertisement through email. Email could be a very efficient way for companies to send valuable information to potential customers, but the incentives are such that virtually all unsolicited commercial email are of very low value and are deleted without being read. If you like game theory, you might want to search the cypherpunks mailing list archive for a game theoretic analysis of the spam situation.
At 12:47 PM -0800 2/18/98, sunder wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
I see discussion of spam here and everywhere on the net. But who finds it a *real* problem, and why?
It eats up your valuable time. You might not see it for what it is, but it is an interruption of normal service. It's annoying as having your pager go off durring sex and having to call back your boss instead of ignoring it. (Presume you can't shut off your pager.) It takes away from the continuity of life.
But *many* things eat up our valuable time. Doesn't mean government action is the answer.
Further, some of us use ISDN to get their email and transferring the extra junk adds to the pay/minute connections.
If you use ISDN and pay minute charges to download an article from me, for example, and you feel it was a waste of your valuable time, should my article be illegal? If someone sees your name somewhere and does the same thing (sends you a letter), should this be illegal? (I threw this last point in because some have argued that there is an implicit agreement that mail on a mail exploder will not be objected to, as it fits the charter, blah blah. So I removed this implicitness by speaking of someone who writes a letter.) If _content_ is not a criterion for spam, as Costner and others have noted, then "wasting Ray's time" is even less of a criterion for what spam is. Look, there's just not going to be a simple government answer to "unwanted communications" that doesn't do serious damage to our liberties. Technological/economic approaches are the only way to go. --Tim May Just Say No to "Big Brother Inside" ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^3,021,377 | black markets, collapse of governments.
Wei Dai wrote:
The way I see it, the problem with spam isn't that it takes too much effort to delete them, but that it discourages useful advertisement through email. Email could be a very efficient way for companies to send valuable information to potential customers, but the incentives are such that virtually all unsolicited commercial email are of very low value and are deleted without being read.
Those of us outside of the Microsoft Marketing Machine have a different opinion. Frankly, I do not want to make Bill Gates's latest advertising gimmick any more 'efficient' nor do I want to be his 'potential customer'. I have had just about enough crap from Microsoft, which is why I deleted JunkOS version 95, and use Linux instead. When I open up my email and find twenty pieces of spam, like most people I start hitting the delete key. Last week I got a call from a friend... "Didn't you get my email?" "uh... no..."
Tim May wrote:
But *many* things eat up our valuable time. Doesn't mean government action is the answer.
Show me one place in the email you replied to where I mention that I would favor any sort of governmental action in terms of passing anti-spam laws. I did mention contracts between ISP's and subscribers at one point, but did you see anything about someone passing laws?
If you use ISDN and pay minute charges to download an article from me, for example, and you feel it was a waste of your valuable time, should my article be illegal?
If I am forced to pay for something that I don't want to buy, it is a theft of my money. If you send me garbage without my asking for it, then you're wasting my money. If I subscribe to a mailing list and don't want to see your messages, it's a different story since I have to take other steps to not see what you post. In other words, in one case you are targetting me with spam, in the other, I want to receive cypherpunks minus one user, but that user isn't directly targetting me.
If someone sees your name somewhere and does the same thing (sends you a letter), should this be illegal?
Ditto as the response above. I will accept any non commercial, non moral pushing message. i.e. there are those who like my home page and email me to tell me so. There are those who hate it and tell me so. There are those who ask for help, or offer help. No problemo there. But there are those who see the upside down pentagram and send me email stating I'm in the wrong religion. Thems I consider spam because they try to pursuade me to their belief system.
(I threw this last point in because some have argued that there is an implicit agreement that mail on a mail exploder will not be objected to, as it fits the charter, blah blah. So I removed this implicitness by speaking of someone who writes a letter.)
Makes no difference what you throw in. A mail exploder that auto subscribes everyone on the planet without their consent IS a source of spam. A mail exploder that sends email to those who wish to receive it is not because there was consent.
If _content_ is not a criterion for spam, as Costner and others have noted, then "wasting Ray's time" is even less of a criterion for what spam is.
Spam is unsolicited broadcasts. Pure and simple. If you spam me with a scheme to make you money, it's spam. If you spam me with "Jesus loves you" it's a spam. If you spam me with chain letters promising whatever or warning of great virus plages, it's still spam. Content is a valid criterion for spam and so is consent. It's the unwanted content of these messages that makes them unwanted. If they were useful to the recipient, they wouldn't be unwanted hence would not be spam. Problem is every dickhead who buys into the "Make Money Fast on the Net By Spamming" theory has dollar signs in his eyes and thinks his message is the most valuable, most useful, most cuddly lovely bit of info on the planet and that he's doing everyone a service by shoving it down their unwiling throats.
Look, there's just not going to be a simple government answer to "unwanted communications" that doesn't do serious damage to our liberties.
I posted a very nice technological way to deter spam, and you go and read governmental interfearence in it. READ the message you reply to before you respond to it.
Technological/economic approaches are the only way to go.
No shit. And that's what I posted earlier. -- =====================================Kaos=Keraunos=Kybernetos============== .+.^.+.| Ray Arachelian |Prying open my 3rd eye. So good to see |./|\. ..\|/..|sunder@sundernet.com|you once again. I thought you were |/\|/\ <--*-->| ------------------ |hiding, and you thought that I had run |\/|\/ ../|\..| "A toast to Odin, |away chasing the tail of dogma. I opened|.\|/. .+.v.+.|God of screwdrivers"|my eye and there we were.... |..... ======================= http://www.sundernet.com ==========================
Ray has widened his definition of "spam" even more. At 12:22 PM -0800 2/19/98, sunder wrote:
Tim May wrote:
But *many* things eat up our valuable time. Doesn't mean government action is the answer.
Show me one place in the email you replied to where I mention that I would favor any sort of governmental action in terms of passing anti-spam laws. I did mention contracts between ISP's and subscribers at one point, but did you see anything about someone passing laws?
You've mentioned that spam is theft. If the courts agree with you on your definition of what spam is, then pretty clearly the legal system gets invoked. (But to forestall any confusions in the courts, the anti-spam sentiment being discussed by Ray and many others is likely to lead to specific legislation. Sadly.)
If you use ISDN and pay minute charges to download an article from me, for example, and you feel it was a waste of your valuable time, should my article be illegal?
If I am forced to pay for something that I don't want to buy, it is a theft of my money. If you send me garbage without my asking for it, then you're
"Theft." Call the cops.
But there are those who see the upside down pentagram and send me email stating I'm in the wrong religion. Thems I consider spam because they try to pursuade me to their belief system.
So, your definition of spam has now been expanded to include someone who sends _you_ (you, not thousands, not tens of thousands) a message you don't care for. Well, not much more I can say here. --Tim May Just Say No to "Big Brother Inside" ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^3,021,377 | black markets, collapse of governments.
Tim May wrote:
Ray has widened his definition of "spam" even more.
No, my definition is the same as it always was. Maybe you didn't realize how wide it was.
You've mentioned that spam is theft. If the courts agree with you on your definition of what spam is, then pretty clearly the legal system gets invoked. (But to forestall any confusions in the courts, the anti-spam sentiment being discussed by Ray and many others is likely to lead to specific legislation. Sadly.)
It is my definition, if others agree, that's their business. I'm not asking the courts to do shit about it however.
"Theft." Call the cops.
It is theft, and I do call the cops, or rather in this case the ISP's involved. The problem is they can't do much as the messages are sent from throw away accounts.
So, your definition of spam has now been expanded to include someone who sends _you_ (you, not thousands, not tens of thousands) a message you don't care for.
Show me your spam filters. Do you not have at least one individual's name in that list whose messages you route to a folder of trash or delete outright? I seem to recall that was the case quite a while back with a certain "Doctor". Indeed, even you make decisions about what is or isn't spam based on WHO sends it. In this case, you, not thousands, not tens o thousands of others is making a decision on what is or isn't spam because you don't care for it. =====================================Kaos=Keraunos=Kybernetos============== .+.^.+.| Ray Arachelian |Prying open my 3rd eye. So good to see |./|\. ..\|/..|sunder@sundernet.com|you once again. I thought you were |/\|/\ <--*-->| ------------------ |hiding, and you thought that I had run |\/|\/ ../|\..| "A toast to Odin, |away chasing the tail of dogma. I opened|.\|/. .+.v.+.|God of screwdrivers"|my eye and there we were.... |..... ======================= http://www.sundernet.com ==========================
Tim May wrote: If:
Indeed, discussion of "what to do about spam?" periodically consumes all of the main lists I'm on. Discussion of spam is worse than the actual spam.
then: Discussion of net abuse is worse than net abuse. Discussion of theft is worse than theft. Discussion of, hey, abortion is worse than... Hear Mister Free-Speech talk, and shudder. .marek
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In <34eeebcf.17966504@gryzmak.lodz.pdi.net>, on 02/21/98 at 12:33 AM, eristic@gryzmak.lodz.pdi.net (Marek Jedlinski) said:
Tim May wrote:
If:
Indeed, discussion of "what to do about spam?" periodically consumes all of the main lists I'm on. Discussion of spam is worse than the actual spam.
then:
Discussion of net abuse is worse than net abuse. Discussion of theft is worse than theft. Discussion of, hey, abortion is worse than...
Hear Mister Free-Speech talk, and shudder.
Oh PLEASE! You can't really be that much of a moron can you?? - -- - --------------------------------------------------------------- William H. Geiger III http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii Geiger Consulting Cooking With Warp 4.0 Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail. OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii/pgpmr2.html - --------------------------------------------------------------- Tag-O-Matic: Don't be held back by yesterday's DOS! Try today's OS/2! -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3a-sha1 Charset: cp850 Comment: Registered_User_E-Secure_v1.1b1_ES000000 iQCVAwUBNO4kio9Co1n+aLhhAQFRIwP+PYYJrui8ofFVmBnfIDV+iXHi6j9DXfPo krouRLrOCmxAgW9+3LxOFmoW/tIz+T6ZrIe7sixhbL+FVEqbj3aUODmS6Fg9u7at 7IBRhnxTxODQkTfyrEcaofCPPFE4FDgD4CLfMYXWARWx1vAoVBdCYx5N1luDy2Sg 04Nqvgr+bzI= =9I+8 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
participants (7)
-
eristic＠gryzmak.lodz.pdi.net -
nobody＠REPLAY.COM -
proff＠iq.org -
sunder -
Tim May -
Wei Dai -
William H. Geiger III