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  • From: bethellison AT netscape.net (Beth)
  • To: internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org ("Internetworkers: http://www.ibib lio.org/internetworkers/")
  • Subject: Re: [internetworkers] Spam retaliation or not
  • Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2003 14:08:09 -0400

Spiritual enlightenment through coping with spam. Religion for the new
millennium.



Brian <russellb AT yesh.com> wrote:

>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
>>>
>>>
>
>---
>Come and play at the InterNetWorkers Web site!  
>http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/
>You are currently subscribed to InterNetWorkers mailing list
>To unsubscribe visit
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>


--
~o)


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http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/east/04/24/japan.cult/

"TOKYO, Japan -- Prosecutors in Japan have demanded the death penalty=20
for a doomsday cult leader accused of masterminding the deadly 1995=20
sarin nerve gas attack on a Tokyo subway."

"Ashara established his cult in 987, combining aspects of Buddhism and=20=

Hinduism and convincing his followers he was the incarnation of Siva =96=20=

a god of destruction and regeneration."

copy editing on 4 continents,
d.m.=




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