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  • From: Maria Winslow <maria.winslow AT windows-linux.com>
  • To: "Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/" <internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [internetworkers] AdventureGathering, May 1st, 7:00 p.m.
  • Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2003 11:56:20 -0400

Didn't someone just get a Cooper Mini? Want to learn 6 gears (plus reverse)?

Maria

On Thursday 24 April 2003 09:41 am, Gina Norman wrote:
> Y'all come on out now, y'hear?
>
> It's gonna be *fun*! (And let me tell you, you ain't seen fun [or perhaps
> funny?] till you've seen me trying to find my way out of a Lazer Tag arena.
> Last time I played they had to send a rescue squad in after me, 'cause I
> couldn't find the exit! Talk about geographically challenged!)
>
> BTW, as a (mostly unrelated) side: does anyone have an old beater of a
> stick shift (aka "standard", I'm told ;-) car that they wouldn't mind me
> practising on? Once upon a long time ago, a boy I was dating taught me to
> drive shift, and I got to the point where I could do it, but it wasn't
> instinctive. Then that relationship came to an end, and now I've not
> driven stick in, oh, 8 years, and it seems it would behoove me to know how.
> Most everyone I can think of who regularly drives a stick-shift car drives
> a *nice* stick-shift car, which would probably not be good re-remembering
> fodder. But I know someone on the list has got to have an old, beat-up,
> wouldn't-necessarily-mind-a-whole-lot-if-the-gears
> -made-that-awful-noise-once-or-twice-car that I could re-remember on?
> Maybe? You don't have to actually teach me (I have someone else who's
> volunteered for that joy), though, heck, if you *wanted* to... Anyway, if
> you can think of an apt vehicle (or know somewhere that rents standards?)
> let me know!
>
> Happy Thursday,
>
> Gina
>
>
>From joey AT metalab.unc.edu Thu Apr 24 13:38:12 2003
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From: Joey Carr <joey AT metalab.unc.edu>
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Subject: [internetworkers] Spam retaliation or not
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I've always been tempted to go a little over-board in retaliation for
spam. Unfortunately Jesus was right, retaliation gets you nowhere, best
to turn the other cheek. If more spammers got email bombed they would
just find more creative ways to evade getting mail bombed.

For a while I took to opening unsolicited offers of credit and returning
just the business reply envelope. Usually I left them empty, sometimes I
included promotional materials from other companies. This did absolutely
nothing but give me a tiny bit of sadistic glee and maybe clog a
waste-basket or two at whatever enormous processing plant those letters
went to. After the Anthrax scare I decided that such a joke might go
wrong and become cruel.

So our best defense against spam and junk-mail is not necessarily a good
offense. In the case of junk-mail and cold-calls we have some means of
recourse, these have been widely discussed in this list. However, spam we
must simply accept into our accounts and do our best to filter.

Now here's a tenuous connection. The other day I left my laundry in the
dryer for too long, something I rarely do. Instead of piling my laundry
on top of the dryer the person who came along behind me actually *folded*
it. Now I feel so guilty that I can guarantee I'll never leave my laundry
in the dryer over time. And this saint of a person corrected my behavior
without resorting to confrontation, retaliation in kind, or some kind of
passive-aggressive note on the bulletin board.

Maybe that kind of thing only works on the already good-natured, and
exposure of the same kind would never stop a spammer. Maybe so. We've
all agreed that killing people is wrong. We all know it, it's part of the
air we breath. But the fact that everyone knows that killing people is
wrong is a luxury of the time and place in which we live.

One day we'll live with the luxury of everyone knowing that spam is wrong.
It's an abuse of power and privilege that cannot be tolerated in civilized
society, just like crimes ranging from petty-theft to the capitol crimes
(though I do not in general conflate what is ethical with what is legal).

Before we get to this spam-free utopia, there's going to have to be a
revolution in ethical thinking. The fact of spam's low ethical standing
will have to become part of the air we breath. I think it's people like
my sainted laundry room reformer who will have to bring this about.
Legislation is less likely to have an impact. A law with commonly
accepted ethical backing, such as a law against theft, is enforcible
because it is infrequently broken because people know it is wrong. Laws
without such support are less enforcible because they are frequently
broken. Software piracy and marijuana use are two exemplars of activities
that occur illegally mostly because nobody buys the ethical arguments
behind the legislation.

So, I think what needs to be done is to find that act, like folding
someone else's laundry, that so clearly demonstrates that spam is wrong
that only a hand full of deranged or highly confused people can ignore it.
I typically go in for the retaliation bit, so I'm fresh out of ideas.
Anyone?

-Joey



On Wed, 23 Apr 2003, Steven Champeon wrote:

> on Wed, Apr 23, 2003 at 10:19:48AM -0400, Bill Geschwind wrote:
> > This morning I came across a write-up of a study about the origins of
> > spam email. Do those of you who manage mail servers find the results of
> > this study plausible?
>
> Yep, though they didn't mention that many addresses are simply made up,
> whether through deliberate attempts to bloat "millions" CDs, or just due
> to general incompetence of the programmers writing scrapers.
>
> As of this writing, I have 1073 verified spamtraps - "addresses", or
> strings in the form of an address, that have never been live accounts or
> have been disabled for over a year. Most are munged forms of real
> accounts or message-IDs scraped off public mailing list archives. The
> vast majority of the spam I get is sent to one of these spamtrap
> addresses or one of the addresses I've used on Usenet, the Web, or the
> whois database.
>
> To give you an idea of volume, I've received 5923 spam messages this
> month, and my spamtraps have received 8326 so far. That's about 620
> messages per day, all of it spam. Fortunately, we're catching a large
> percentage of it through the use of various filters and the like, maybe
> even 99%, but that still means from 5-10 spam messages get through a
> day. I'm trying various mechanisms to limit that while maintaining a
> sane (ideally zero) false positive rate, but so far I've found nothing
> that catches it all without increasing the odds of catching legit mail
> sent through irresponsible ISP's mail servers or with suspiciously
> invalid headers (cough, Outlook/Exchange/Notes/etc., cough), or with
> contents resembling some other spam, etc.
>
> Steve
>
>

--





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