Re: [Asrg] Re: Anti-spam laws do work, FYI. There's proof.

[David Maxwell <david at vex.net>]

On Thu, 29 Jul 2004, Barry Shein wrote:
> On July 29, 2004 at 11:36 david at vex.net (David Maxwell) wrote:
>  > "Reputation systems don't stop spam because of forgery[%]; anti-forgery
>  > systems don't stop spam without a reputation system.  But put the two
>  > together and I can see it making a dent."
> 
> All this is nice fun and games social engineering of dubious value.
> 
> But what causes the spam problem we see is the massive and illegal
> hijacking of resources.
> 
> At any given moment probably millions of PCs are hijacked.

I don't disagree with that being a major factor, but it's not the root
cause.

The spammers hijack PCs because it's easy to do, and cheaper than paying
for their own bandwidth. That certainly magnifies the spam problem, but
it didn't create it.

Spam was present on the net before commercial ISPs and Windows hosts
were plentiful. The www brought more end users on line, and upped the
revenue potential to spammers. It seems obvious to me that we would
still have spam without Windows hosts - though I agree we would likely
have somewhat less.

> It's about the ability (of spammers) to deliver mind-boggling amounts
> of content to (for argument's sake) hundreds of millions of people for
> almost no cost.
> 
> That it's annoying, offensive, tiresome, etc is really beside the
> point.
> 
> If it were hugely entertaining I think we'd still consider it a
> problem as its delivered.
> 
> If you try to understand the distinction I'm making you might
> understand my exasperation with proposals such as SPF, etc.

I understand your point, but the RMX proposals have an effect on the
root cause - injecting arbitrary content into the mail network.

If you think that the virus/trojan problem is the first one that should
be tackled, then promote what you see as a solution, instead of
interfering with discussion of other work that is valuable, just not
valuable to your personal spam vendetta issue.

-- 
David Maxwell, david at vex.net|david at maxwell.net -->
All this stuff in twice the space would only look half as bad!
					      - me


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