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Laurence 'Green Card' Canter Has No Regrets
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What is research but a blind date with knowledge? -- Will Harvey
What is research but a blind date with knowledge? -- Will Harvey
Spam by any other name... (Score:1, Insightful)
Of course, this was talking more about those spammers stealing emails however they could get it. I just notice that the average person who gets "SPAM" doesn't have a clue that yes, there are companies who actually "spam" legally. If you signup, and don't read the agreement, you get what you asked for, literally. =)
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... (Score:3, Insightful)
No matter how full your snail-mail box is, it only takes a couple seconds to empty it and sort through it. You don't pay anything for that junk (except for maybe the garbage collection fee, but that's a flat rate no matter how full your dumpster out back is).
E-mail, on the other hand, is something people pay dearly for. If you're on a slower than broadband connection, like a modem or cell phone, you're usually paying by the minute, and with many spam messages reaching 50k or larger, it can take more than ten seconds each to download. How many here get more than twenty a day? That's over three minutes of your money going to waste. And no matter what connection speed you're on, it takes time to go through and delete them all (no more than sorting snail mail, I guess). And what about the people that get e-mail at their pagers? Many pay money per e-mail.
Spam isn't just evil, it's expensive!
This just in!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Gimme a break. This guy is *NOT* responsible for all of the spam the we deal with today. A society made up of a bunch of money-hungry-but-too-lazy-to-get-off-their-asses-
If this guy is responsible for the spam plague, then why do we bother complaining to spammers / ISPs / web-hosts about our spam...Why not just send all of our complaints to this guy, since he's responsible, right?
Re:Spamming is a right (Score:3, Insightful)
SPAM is comparable to if I had to pay the postage on all the junk mail I received from the post office, BEFORE I get to see who it's from, what it is, or even if it is junk mail. When you send SPAM you are infringing on my rights a lot more than I am infringing on yours by trying to stop you. By the way, the state of Indiana just passed an anti-telemarketer law not too long ago, and I don't see it being declared unconstitutional by anyone. Maybe that could be seen as some sort of precedence?
Go back to your bridge you silly troll.
Re:Spammer reminisces (Score:4, Insightful)
Ugh... this guy doesn't get it!
The REAL problem with unsolicited e-mail is that the cost of delivering it is ultimately borne by the carriers and the ultimate recipient, not the sender. The sender just has to pay $20 or so for a throwaway dialup account, and he can blast out thousands of emails before he gets shut down.
The recipient's ISP has to pay for extra storage capacity, bandwidth costs, and larger SMTP servers, so that his infrastructure doesn't collapse under the deluge of spam. The open relays between the spammer and ISP also incur significant bandwidth and processing costs, with no compensation.
At least with junk mail, the sender pays a bulk mailing rate and covers the costs of delivering it. He can send as much as he likes, but now there's an incentive to control his costs and make some attempt to target his mailings.
If there were a way of passing the true costs of spam back to the original sender, we would probably see a sharp reduction in volume.
I despise spam, too, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
...it's really irrelevant who cast the first stone. Looking back, the commercialization of the Internet (incl. Usenet, email, the Web) seems more like a historical inevitability. If it wasn't Canter and Siegel, it would have been someone else two weeks later, guaranteed. The network was simply too rich and too full of potential at that point in time to not be mined for profit.
Don't forget, the "unwritten rules" of the Internet as a non-commercial venue included the Web(!) at first; there were always "dot-com" addresses, but outright advertising was seriously frowned upon. However, had this fundamentalist purity somehow miraculously stayed intact, most of us would probably be out of a job today. I know I would.
Canter and Siegel's place in history will be less on the magnitude of Jimi Hendrix, and more like the name of the first concertgoer through the gates at Woodstock-- a piece of trivia at a historical event.
Old lesson... do unto others... applies here. (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparantly his parents were lacking in teaching him morals. My parents always taught me "Before you do anything, think about what the world would be like if EVERYONE did that thing. Before you toss that gum wrapper out of the car window, think about what the street would look like if everyone did it. Before you say something nasty to someone, think about how you'd feel if the rolls were reversed."
It's pretty basic stuff. I can't tell you how many spammers I've confronted via email (I report every spam I get) only to be told "Lighten up jerk! It's only one email. My response is always "Yea, but what if every business on the planet did what you did?"
I'll never understand spammers. They seem to be almost universally lacking in the ability to tell right from wrong. That Canter's excuse is "if I hadn't done it, someone else would have, so it's OK" only shows that he too is lacking in that ability.
-S
Eh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Quack quack quack.
Thinking backwards? (Score:3, Insightful)
From the article: The Usenet, to my way of thinking, is very different than e-mail because it's not something that's just coming to you.
Isn't he thinking backwards here? Here's a clue: people have to store and transmit Usenet posts, just like they do with email, and they have to pay for the time and the storage, just like they do with email. The only difference from email for our purposes is in the opposite direction from that which he implies.
So when he says that Usenet spam isn't something that's "just coming to you", he's confusing the issue: the real difference from email spam is that it's not coming just to you. The spammer gets to make thousands of people pay to read their one ad, instead of having to go to the trouble of sending an individual message for each one.
You're going to these message boards for whatever reason,
Sure. And 99 times out of a hundred it isn't to get told about how to find a green card.
and although it may be true that mass posting to every Usenet group in sight wasn't good, I still don't see how it is nearly as intrusive as receiving 300 pornographic e-mail solicitations every day
Which makes it quite all right, of course.
<bad-taste> "News.com has an interview today with the surviving lawyer who spammed Usenet with multiple "Green Card Lottery" posts in '94."
You mean someone got the other one? :) </bad-taste>
The anger in the community over spam. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that line begins somewhere in the early 1990's.
Anyone using email in that timeframe (who was new to it) looked forward to each communication received via the wires - they were special and important somehow - they were EMAIL!
Then came spam and an eagerly anticipated epistle of import became just so much crap.
I think that many of us have simply replaced disappointment with anger.
I know I have.
Re:should charge one cent per email (Score:3, Insightful)
I really hate it when people propose things without thinking them through.
Okay, lets say they did. What would be involved? We would have to create a structure, both technological (finding a way to bill you your pennies) and sociological (finding a way to get people to tolerate their government charging them for sending email)
Let's say you get your wish. There are certainly people working on both fronts right now to grant it. Now what? "Only a penny" right? But then, in the name of national security, we are going to have to raise it to a nickle. You aren't on the terrorists side, right? But Rush Limbaugh says that businesses are going to be hurt by this "tax" so GE and Disney will be exempted. They NEED their email. And [insert powerful liberal equivalent of Rush here] will point out that the health care industry NEEDS its email, so that will be exempt, too. To make up the shortfall, we'll have to raise it to a dime.
Once you allow the government to tax your email, you are foolish if you think it will remain at a penny. It is hard to create a new tax. It is easy to raise an existing one.
Re:What really makes me angry... (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is wierd because most people who realised back in 1994 that the Internet would be huge commercially and acted on it are millionaires today. Canter could have been Amazon, or at the very least CEO of a startup that went under but only after making the founders ten million or so in the IPO.
Instead Canter was disbarred from practising law in the whole US as a direct result of the SPAM incident. He dosen't mention that of course. Most lawyers would think $200,000 to be a pretty poor return for something that causes you to loose your license to practise law. Admittedly Canter's case was overdetermined, he had been previously disbarred in another state. However the Arizona bar chose to bar him for the SPAM and bringing the profession into disrepute rather than failing to inform them of disciplinary proceedings in another state.
The fact is that on the Internet you don't do so well by using sharp practices. The guy who wrote the Perl script for Canter disputes the claim that they made any money. The ratio of genuine to false responses was way to high for it to be economic. However Canter and Siegel thought that they could make a fortune by conning others into spamming.
Canter and Siegel managed to wreck Usenet, but it probably would have gone down anyway. I had a look at soc.culture.british last night, not a single substantive post. Almost everything there was political spam from various varieties of fascist in support (or opposition to) some war criminal or other.
Fixing USEnet is one of those things that lots of people keep trying to get arround to. It is pretty clear that there is a need to have some form of authentication on the posts and that some form of moderation is necessary. I originally became interested in Slashdot after Jammie told me about the moderation scheme. Thing is that Slashdot is a very narrow resource compared to UseNet.
Oh and I do mean fixing USEnet, not just NNTP, although NNTP's flood fill routing is broken too.