CDR: Re: FW: BLOCK: AT&T signs bulk hosting contract with spammers

[Sampo A Syreeni]

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 at iki.fi>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university