In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Ivan Pope <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>Ivan, you need to take more lessons on ``spammer speak''. You just aren't
>>getting the essence of it. You need to hang out in
>news.admin.net-abuse.email
>>for awhile. If you do, you will learn that spammers (and the folks who in-
>>directly make money from them, like you) always talk about ``free
>speach(tm)''.
>
>Ron,
>The problem here is that of course I don't 'need' to 'hang out' in any
>newsgroups for a while to learn to moderate my language, or learn how to
>talk in a politicallly correct way. I don't need to learn to talk the
>correct language.
You do if you want to learn _exactly_ how to sound just like a spammer.
You've almost got it down, but not quite.
You've already got the ``free speach'' part of standard spammer-speak down,
so that's a start. Now you need to learn how ot also whine about yet other
irrelevances as you condone theft of services.
Practice makes perfect!
>I was there and I remember well when the whole Internet consisted of people
>like you - everything was a club and there was a huge resistance to 'making
>money'.
Hey! You _are_ getting the hang of it! Time to whine about allegedly anti-
commerce zealots!
Look, I have no problem with you or anybody else making money on the net.
I just ask that you do it _honestly_, and without *stealing* other people's
resources and bandwidth for _your_ advertising.
>And you seem to have a desire to make your living in the arena of 'Spam'.
>Which of course means that you have to be an expert in this area. Which of
>course gives you an incentive to spend all your time working out your
>position on things.
>I, on the other hand, run a business that has to do with domain names.
You also, apparently, run an E-mail forwarding service.
That's what this whole things is/was about remember? (Did you really for-
get so soon that you also had this _other_ business going?)
Now if you can't be bothered to ``take the time to work out'' your position
on whether or not you will condone and allow people to use that service of
your's for illicit, illegal, or unethical purposes, then fine. Just shut
down that part of your business and nobody will ever hassle you about it
ever again. But if you _do_ plan to keep running that E-mail forwarding
service, then you _do_ owe it to your fellow netizens to _think_ about what
sort of sensible policies you should have in place for dealing with spammers
that are using _you_ and your service as an integral component of their little
shell games.
Oh yea... and you also owe it to your fellow netizens to at least answer
your damn E-mail when people tell you that you have a customer who is steal-
ing from them.
>I will of course try my best to avoid sarcasm, put downs, zealotry and
>abuse. I don't think anyone knows what the answers are...
I know you don't... and that is where you are just plain wrong.
Some people _do_ see clearly where this spam stuff is taking us (and the net)
and it doesn't take a pair of bifocals or a magnifing glass or microscope
or a pair of binoculars to see whet the net is going to degenerate into if
everyone were to show as little concern about what they are doing to the
place as you do. Eventually, the whole thing... the Internet itself...
will be reduced to a worthless mass of crap advertising that NOBODY will
have any desire to touch with a ten foot pole. Oh and by thw way, that
will affect YOU TOO. By tolerating spammers (and helping them, as you
apparently have been doing) you are fouling your own nest! Only an idiot
would do that.
Do you still plan to be in the Internet business in five years? If so, then
you had better get busy and start zapping spammers, instead of helping them
(as you have been) or else there won't be anything left here that ordinary
people have any interest in in five years, and _you_ will then have to go
off and sell earth shoes or something.
It doesn't take a genius to see this possible future as *the* most likely
future of the net. All you have to do is to take a look at the trend line
for spam, and its slow but stedy increase over the past 2-3 years, and then
extrapolate that upwards slope out into future years. This isn't rocket
science for God's sake! And if you ``don't think anyone has any answers''
then it is only because you haven't been paying attention.
The answer is: ``Yes, if left unchecked, spam will make the entire Internet
utterly worthless within five years.''
Now, you can either be a part of the solution, or continue on as you have
been, being a part of the problem. Take your pick and then live with it.
Just stop whining about it if other people don't approve of your sleezy
fast-buck approach and/or if they decide not to exchange packets with you
on account of that.
>...and there are as
>many views on it as there are people involved.
>I don't know much at all about the history of Spam control, but I would
>assume that there are different sides and different positions and lots of
>arguments.
More spammer speak.
Nice try, but you can't so easily cloud or muddy the issue... not in the
presence of intelligent people anyway.
Anyone who has above-moron intelligence and who has been on the net for
the past several years _knows_ that the spam trend line has an upwards
slope (still) _and_ they can infer the obvious implications of that.
Of course some of the real fresh newbies don't understand (yet) and some
other folks (like you) will try to feign below-moron intelligence levels
as a ruse in the hopes of that excusing their own short-term business plans,
but I think its safe to say that even you understand where this spam stuff
is heading, _and_ that it ain't very pretty.
>I would be highly surprised if your attitude or the attitude on
>news.admin.net-abuse.email is somehow the official or only line, however
>much you might like it to be.
There you go again. More spammer speak. Don't try to argue the obvious
facts on the ground. Instead try to pick a fight about the degree to
which this party of that party is or isn't an ``authority'' on the subject
matter at hand.
Read what I wrote, above, again. It doesn't take an ``authority'' of any
kind to know where this spam stuff is heading. Plot a trend line for YOUR
OWN spam, and then extrapolate it out five years. Do you like what you see?
Do you think that _anybody_ is going to like what they see? Nope. Hell!
If people just want to be advertised at, they can sit in front of the TV
and have it done to them FOR FREE, rather than having to PAY twenty bucks
a month for the privledge of being blasted with other people's ads.
In short, wise up. This isn't a matter of your position or my position,
or the ``politically correct'' position or the position of the majority
fo the denizens of news.admin.net-abuse.email. The fact that we will all
soon be drowing in spam (if nothing is done about it) isn't a matter of
interpretaion or of one's personal political leaning. I could show a
six year old kid the spam trend line and even _he_ would be able to tell
me which direction things are headed in.
>Therefore, my approach, which is one of 'I don't like holier-than-thou
>systems which impose one person's value system on everyone else'.
Right. And thus, by _your_ set of ethics, if you saw someone dumping toxics
into a river some dark night, you wouldn't get involved, because you don't
want to appear ``holier-than-thou''.
Swell.
(I believe that it was Albert Einstein who said that the world is a danger-
ous place... not becase of the evil men in it, but because of all of the
_others_ who stand by and do nothing.)
>That's my view and I reserve the right to have it.
Fine. You've got it. It's your opinion, and you're stuck with it.
>Plenty of people get vilified for not taking the party line, but that
>doesn't mean they are wrong or evil or anything.
See above. This has nothing to do with the party line... unless you call
it ``the party line'' to hold out some hope that the Internet might still
be here, and might still be a place worth visiting in five years.
>And why don't you send me the definition of spam that you use for these
>discussions?
I already sent it to you.
Spam is unsolicited advertising of a product, service, politician, political
cause, religion or religious belief, charity or charitable enterprise, which
is sent from one party to another where the sending party had no pre-existing
established relationship, either business or personal, with the recipent,
and where the recipient has taken no overt action which could be construed
(by a reasonable person) as constituting an overt ``opt-in'' or an explicit
requested to receive the solicitation or type of solicitation in question.
There. Happy now?
-- Ron Guilmette, Roseville, California ---------- E-Scrub Technologies, Inc.
-- Deadbolt(tm) Personal E-Mail Filter demo: http://www.e-scrub.com/deadbolt/
-- Wpoison (web harvester poisoning) - demo: http://www.e-scrub.com/wpoison/
"Ping can be used offensively, and it's shipped with every windows CD"
-- Steve Atkins
