Re: Responses to "Spam costs and questions" (long)

[dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM)]

Declan McCullagh <declan@pathfinder.com> writes:

> Such a law would be unconstitutional, I believe, and unjust. It's
> compelled speech: the government forcing you to say something.
> Depending on how it's worded, it could also impact core political
> speech, something the courts generally don't like.
>
> On Fri, 6 Jun 1997, Igor Chudov @ home wrote:
> > Is there any justification for a law that would require senders to make
> > filtering easier, e.g., by attaching a [COMMERCIAL] tag to all UCEs.

The following rant has nothing to do with crypto. If anyone wants to
talk about this (and I do hope Ross will will this of interest!), let's
move this someplace more appropriate, like f-k.

First, not all "unsolicited e-mail" is commercial.

Suppose a Jew4Jesus writes a short perl script that collects the e-mail
addresses of all the people who post to the Usenet newsgroup soc.culture.jewish
and various other Jewish-related forums, and e-mails them an unsolicited
e-mail that goes:

"Subject: Re: <original subject>

Beloved friend and fellow Jew,

I'm writing in response to your Usenet article <Message-Id> posted on
<date> in newsgroup(s) <blah>.  I believe that your soul will not be
saved unless you accept Y'hoshua the Moshiah as your friend and
personal savior blah blah Jesus is cumming and you better swallow!"

[I chose J4J as an example because they're probably the most censored and
persecuted group on the 'net today - more so than CoS or the Nazis :-)
It could be a political candidate sending his campaign ad to hundreds
of thousands of e-mail addresses - this has happened before. It could
be an environmental organization calling for a boycott of some product
or corporation]

Under the law Igor proposed (and I understand "anto-spam" bills to this
effect are floating around the various legislatures), this wouldn't need
to be labelled "ad".

"Voluntary" labelling can be made pretty much mandatory - like movie
ratings and now TV show ratings, and Social Security "contributions"
are "voluntary". You don't have to "voluntarily" label any article
critical of the Klinton Administration as "seditious spam", but you
can't find a backbone which doesn't require its ISPs to make it a
part of their TOS. But we're not quite there yet.

BTW, under Stanford Wallace's TOS, if the J4J neglected to run his mailing
list through Stanford's "scrub" database, removing the addresses that don't
want "bulk" e-mail, the poor J4J would probably be spanked hard.

(See WWW.IEMMC.ORG. I'm not sure if this is right either.)

Of course some people make a point of refusing to put their addresses
on the "scrub" list, and then bitching when they get bulk e-mail,
vecause they want all bulk e-mail to stop. Bulk e-mail professionals
have their own blacklist of people who bitch, and try not to e-mail
them even without their "remove" request. :-)

Then again, what constitutes "bulk"? Suppose the J4J sent a single unsolicited
prozelityzing e-mail to a single soc.culture.jewish poster, who goes
ballistic. Or suppose the J4J posted a prozelityzing article in
soc.culture.jewish, and someone sent him an e-mail in response, saying "Fuck
you, hazer, please refrain from sliming s.c.j with your xian propaganda".

"Harrassment" is a content-based judgment call, as is "commercial
advertisement". Would a more polite request to "stay away from our Jewish
newsgroup, please" be more kosher? Is it acceptable for a "politically
correct" homosexual to send hate e-mail to the posters on
alt.fan.rush-limbaugh with specific criticisms of their articles?

Yes, the only honorable response to speech you don't like
is to ignore it or to respond with more speech. Is it acceptable
to send an e-mail flame directly to a poster in a moderated newsgroup
if the flame has no chance of being approved by the moderator?
(No, because there aren't any moderated newsgroups anymore :-)

When an e-mail address is publicized (e.g. by posting to Usenet, or by
having it mentioned in a Web page), it will get "unsolicited" e-mail from
strangers - hopefully not "harrassing". A way out of it is to install
filters that separate "stranger" e-mail from the e-mail from known parties.

E.g., I might create a file that contained keywords that are of
interest to me - names of friends, words like "crypto" or "freedom knights".
Then I could have .procmailrc invoke grep, and if none of the keywords
matched, put the e-mail in a special folder that I'd check once a week
before emptying. (I could do the same with pure .procmailrc I suppose.)
Anyway, I'm not doing this yet, but I think this is our future.

By the way, today's address harvesters do much more than grep usenet
headers for addresses for indiscriminate bulk e-mail.

They not only go through Usenet articles and clean up the usual
"anti-spam" manglings in the headers and bodies.  They also crawl
through Web pages, collecting everything that looks like e-mail
addresses; they monitor IRC and collect e-mail addresses. They
monitor mailing lists to the point of asking the listserv/majordomo
for the list of lists it carries, then asking it for the list
of subscribers to each list.

Also instead of just building the biggest possible list of e-mail
addresses, they build a targeted database, keeping track where a
particular e-mail address was found. Suppose a person subscribes
to a "porsche owners" mailing list, and goes to an investment-
related channel on one of the IRC servers. In no time he'll be
getting "junk e-mail" related to the interests he expressed -
possibly even saying "I'm writing you because I saw you on the
#invest channel on Tuesday, and I want to tell you about this
hot new penny stock"

These programs, vastly more sophisticated than the bulk mail of
even a year ago, which just collected e-mail addresses from Usenet
and e-mail them all indiscriminately, will drive the latter out.
Why bother, when you can pay a very reasonable fee to a service
bureau that will deliver your ad to an audeince that a) doesn't
object to bulk e-mail, b) is bigger than what you would have
gathered with primitive grep-like tools.

Left to itself, the market will stabilize and the occasional unsolicited
bulk e-mail will be even less of a nuisance than it is now.

[One good use for UBE: suppose you've foolishly subscribed to an
ISP like IDT - the crooks that provide shitty service and make it
very hard to cancel - they just keep billing your credit card.
One sure way to terminate one's account is to use it to "spam"
Usenet or to send out a mass e-mail objecting to IDT's lousy
service and content censorship.]

Fuck the Usenet Cabal!

---

<a href="mailto:dlv@bwalk.dm.com">Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM</a>
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps