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  • 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 14:40:11 -0400

How about we stop using e-mail for a week, or a month? (oh, owch that would
hurt me... :-)

Or a no buying week from just online retailers?

Or we stop paying our mail ISPs, cable modem/DSL providers, or other web
hosts until spam stops?

Just thoughts,
Brian

> [BIG SLOPPY GRIN]
>
> That's sorta' what I'm saying. I think that a "new religion" is what it's
> going to take.
>
> Anyway, in response to Brian's response, I didn't mean to suggest that
> non-violent, or non-retaliatory action should be entirely passive. I
> think there is something to be done, like a hunger strike or civil
> disobedience, that makes a statement that's hard to ignore. And, of
> course, it has to be in proportion to the thing it criticizes--a hunger
> strike against unsolicited commercial email doesn't make a lot of sense.
>
> Not to attribute Machiavellian machinations to two of the great men of the
> twentieth century, but both King and Gandhi understood that the
> legislation was already in place or would follow, but the important battle
> was in public opinion--in winning the soul felt sympathy of the majority
> of people. That's what I think we need: the act that convinces normal
> rational people that spam is so wrong that they can't do it.
>
> Personally I'm not quite ready to set myself on fire in the street.
> Anyone have any ideas that might be more, uhm, practical than that?
>
> -Joey
>
>
> On Thu, 24 Apr 2003, Beth wrote:
>
>> 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
>>> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/internetworkers
>>>
>>
>>
>>




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