Re: Is spam really a problem?

[sunder <sunder@brainlink.com>]

Anonymous wrote:
> 
> I see discussion of spam here and everywhere on
> the net. But who finds it a *real* problem, and
> why?

It eats up your valuable time.  You might not see it for what it is, but
it is an interruption of normal service.  It's annoying as having your
pager go off durring sex and having to call back your boss instead of
ignoring it.  (Presume you can't shut off your pager.)  It takes away
from the continuity of life.

Further, some of us use ISDN to get their email and transferring the
extra junk adds to the pay/minute connections.

There are nice technical solutions to this.  If sendmail didn't transport
things unauthenticated it could be done, but at a cost in CPU cycles on mail
servers:

Have every sendmail server use a PK scheme to talk to every other
server and authenticate the connection.  Have every sendmail server accept
mail only from those whose key is verified.

Anonymous remailers would still work and these could be set up to accept
unauthenticated email, but then use their own credentials to send out
the mail, so it will auth with your servers.  Also have the anon remailers
not accept too many messages from one source within a certain time frame to
different destinations.  i.e. if I send out 50 messages to cypherpunks in
one hour, that's cool.  If I send out 50 messages to 50 different users
everywhere within an hour, it's not cool.

This way the spamming bitches would be forced to still register domain
names and send mail from them, and you can have your mail server block
them as needed and be certain of where they came from.  If you have
problems with anon users, you can block unsigned (and/or signed but
unrecognized) messages from anon users, while still allowing signed
messages of anons you know well and accept mail from.  

[Note: I said known anons, this prevents Spamfuckers from genning
10 billion key pairs to spam you with.]

(I won't get into persistant anonymous identities and reputation capital
as that's been beaten to death already.)

IMHO with such a scheme it will be possible to reactivate email relaying
again, it just requires everyone to gen their own DH or RSA keys.  The
mailer software can handle this for users, so it's of little issue.

The other side of the coin is that ISP's should include AUP clauses that
state if you spam, you pay extra $$$ and make it enforceable via contract.
Say, you pay shit.net $10/month for access, you'll have to sign a thing
that says if you use your account to spam, you'll have to pay $500,000
or something just as prohibitive, or release their real world info, 
(or whatever can be legally used to deter the fuckers.)

If any ISP's don't do this, or allow way too many spams, they get
filtered from your servers.

Mind you, this won't totally stop spammers, but it will make it hard 
for them.  Food for thought.  IMHO, with such fascist anti-encryption
laws today, this is unlikely to take off. :(

OTOH, the idea of pledging not to buy anything from spammers helps in
the long run, but there are enough sheep out there that will accept
any crap thrown in their mail.  Further, spamming them back helps.
If they put 800 numbers on the spam, call them and talk to them for
hours and waste their time.  If they put fax numbers in there, send
them orders with fake addresses.  If they put up net addresses, block
them from your router and/or flood them with extra traffic if you can
or want to.  If they put up PO addresses, subscribe them to many weird
magazines by sending in the fall out cards with their address on
it.  (seek legal advice before trying these, I'm just ranting and venting.)
:)

-- 

=====================================Kaos=Keraunos=Kybernetos==============
.+.^.+.|  Ray Arachelian    |Prying open my 3rd eye.  So good to see |./|\.
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