On Sun, Feb 23, 2003 at 06:44:32PM -0800, Chuq Von Rospach wrote: > It's failing miserably at dealing with it, actually.
Then we have a difference of opinion: I think it's doing quite well. It's now been made clear to ISPs that providing spam-support services will not be tolerated by the Internet community, and that those ISPs which do -- and thus refuse to behave as responsible members of the Internet community -- will be boycotted. This has already brought some of them to heel and caused them to remove their spamming parasites; others still continue to host them, but no boycott works immediately, and it remains to be seen what the eventual outcome will be. > And legislation will come. And will be watered-down and ineffective and inapplicable on a global basis. Spammers who are relaying through the thousands of open relays in the Korean school system's network to spamvertise a site hosted in China and who have maildrops on Yahoo UK aren't going to care about a US law. Heck, they don't care *now*: there are spammers in WA state sending to WA state residents (thus clearly falling under the WA state law). Either they don't know, don't care, or will make enough money from the exercise that any penalties/fines they may incur (should someone actually be willing and able to pursue the matter) will be covered. > What you call poisoning, people in the real world call > compromise, adn it's that unwillingness to compromise that causes geeks > to get marginalized out of these discussions in the first place, There is no compromise as to the use of MY systems. They are private property, not a public forum. (You may stand on the streetcorner and make your speech: you may not stand in my yard and make your speech without my permission.) The DMA's position thus far is that spammers have a "right" to force their effluent into my (and your) systems/networks: this is an evil perversion of the right to free speech -- one that is clearly motivated only by raw greed and has nothing to do with the lofty principles of free speech that are actually worth defending. Thankfully, court decisions thus far have recognized that no such right exists, and that an essential part of the right to free speech is the right not to listen. Remember, these are the same people who have fought every attempt to stop them from constantly invading private homes via telemarketing -- no matter how reasonable, no matter how much of a "compromise" it's been. Aside: I'm really quite surprised that so many list-managers here seem unaware of just how ugly the spam wars have gotten. You *really* need to tune into Spam-L and news.admin.net-abuse.email for a while just to get some sense of how huge the spam runs are, how many different systems and networks get abused by them, and what some of the non-obvious consequences are. (Example: people with free/low-cost mailboxes often find that they receive so many spams that their mailboxes reach their quota and they can't receive legitimate mail. Thus, the combined volume of spam reaching them effectively performs a denial-of-service on their mail.) ---Rsk
