Spam is Back With A Vengence 510
Ant writes "The Red Tape Chronicles reports that just last December (2006), the FTC published an optimistic state-of-spam report. It cites research indicating spam had leveled off or even dropped during the previous year. It now appears spammers had simply gone back to the drawing board. There's more spam now than ever before.
In fact, there's twice as much spam now as opposed to this time last year. And the messages themselves are causing more trouble. About half of all spam sent now is "image spam," containing server-clogging pictures that are up to 10 times the size of traditional text spam. And most image spam is stock-related, pump-and-dump scams which can harm investors who don't even use e-mail. About one-third of all spam is stock spam now."
Failure Notice (Mail Sub-System) (Score:5, Funny)
To get a hard copy of this message please send $1 to Happy Dude, 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield.
Promotional consideration has been provided by the Russian Mob.
Re:What can I say? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:new spam methods (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Stock scam spams - 3n14rge yur SC0X ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What can I say? (Score:1, Funny)
Let's all cripple our email! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The solution (Score:5, Funny)
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(x) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
(x) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Re:Spam filters can still cope (Score:2, Funny)
Four years ago my company and some clever guys solved the spam problem by solving the "noise" problem ~~and no-one wanted to know~~ Why? Spam makes money. Lots of money. Carriers charge for it. Service providers charge for it. There's an army of people Protecting You From It, and another industry of pundits and consultants Telling You About It. And now there are stock brokers who also make money out it due to extra trading activity.
We couldn't raise money for our spam cure because investors would always refer to the guys who make a living from spam - directly or indirectly. And they'd always say "impossible" / "risky" / "temporary fix" / etc almost always without even knowing what we had.
It's like the giant machine of the governments-police-courts-insurance companies-news media and the rest in whose interest it is NOT to have a real reduction of crime (more accurately, a real reduction in the conditions leading to crime). So we always focus on mitigating the effects of crime rather than dealing with the causes.
So too spam. I wonder how many other people have solved this or that only to find that the problem is fully institutionalised?