Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

internetworkers - Re: [internetworkers] Spam retaliation or not

internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Brian <russellb AT yesh.com>
  • To: "Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/" <internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [internetworkers] Spam retaliation or not
  • Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2003 14:06:56 -0400

Hello. I just subscribed to the list. This e-mail seemed to me a great time
to chime in.

I agree that turning the other cheek may be what is necessary. Gandhi
believed this literally and just for the reasons you mentioned bellow.
Sometimes it does take an act of submission and humility to show others how
violent and arguably wrong something is. Funny how our internal "ethics"
kick in when we see the direct results of our personal act of violence.
Suffering.

Now how does this apply to spam? Well the theory is good but how does a
spammer feel bad when we accept his/her spam begrudgingly?
For the sake of argument does:
Spam = violence
Full e-mail boxes = submission or non-violent action

E-mail and other kinds of modern communication removes some valuable sensory
input that we rely on day to day. Such as smell & touch. Other senses are
greatly crippled. For example we can not see and hear the exact response of
another human and combine that with the abstract "feeling" that we get being
next to them when we communicate with e-mail. Even web cams with mics is
debilitating.

I am not a luddite. Though I do believe that we have to work extra hard
using written communication to keep it clear. You know how hard that
sarcasms can be in e-mail.
<sarcasm>
Whoa stay off the road! Someone can't drive a stick shift. Whoa!
</sarcasm>

So I guess the very fact that we are only communicating with the written
word is the reason spam is so powerful. We have no easy un-ignorable way to
make spammers feel empathy. Thus trigger an ethical response. Stopping spam.

Cheers!
-Brian

> 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
>>
>>




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page