At the risk of merely becoming a syndication site for O'Reilly, there's an interesting piece over there about spam vampires, programs which are intended to attack spammers by raising their costs of doing business.
I am not pleased by these tools, but I can sympathise hugely with those who want to use them.
There are ethical considerations, but my biggest objection is that it is actually polluting the internet further. Spam traffic accounts for a dispiritingly large percentage of what is sent across the internet at any given moment, thus slowing down everybody's experience. This spam vampire activity simply increases the amount of traffic attributable to spam, further reducing the bandwidth available for actual communication.
It's not increasing the signal, it's increasing the noise.
I still do not know what the global answer to spam is, but I do not think that spam vampires are any kind of solution.
Posted by Dunx at December 3, 2004 01:22 PM
I agree that these efforts just muddy the waters, although at this stage I'm not sure I care too much about the ethics. I do think that economics is very much on the spammers' side, since their enterprise is founded on the massive cost imbalance between sending and rejecting this stuff. Deleting a spam takes vastly more energy and effort than sending it, let alone trying to retaliate.
I am pretty sure what the answer is, though: violence. Reason counts for nothing with these people, so it's time for vigilantism: punishment beatings, kneecapping, fiery necklaces and beheading with machetes. Dislodge the subhuman vermin from the pampered sanctuary of virtuality and into the real, physical world where venal, malevolent actions have terrible consequences and they'll soon see the error of their ways.
It's the only language they understand.
And the Lycos one has now been pulled. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4073547.stm
This issue is a specific example of a spoiling of a commons by those driven by greed and selfishness to abuse the freedom of the commons and reduce it to waste. The question is simple: is the best strategy to preserve a commons a defense or an offense.
We've tried defense, but unless we turn to a system of key exchange or something similar, the battle is lost--greed drives invention and spammers are very greedy. No commercial entity will implement such definitive and owerful email protection since it reduces their and their 'partners' ability to market to us consumers and for them to sell services to marketers. This is why Microsoft cannot not fix security holes completely (they desinged Windows to have many 'backdoors' for their use) and why WMA is allowing the RIAA spyware assault: commerical entities cannot be trusted with our security because security for us makes us immune to their encroachment on our privacy and they refuse to give up that power.
As an analogy, we have PGP not because we passively accepted government restrictions nor because a commerical entity stepped in to 'do the right thing', but because a passionate individual led an effort to provide a solution for privacy for individuals. Neither the government nor industry, more and more the same group of people it seems, is interested in the freedom of the individual since there is less profit to be had when we are free not to consume (this emcompasses for the MPAA and RIAA as well as the DMCA as well).
So we does this leave us. Only offense is a viable strategy now.
While 'fighting fire with fire' is deemed ethically reprehensible to some, there is a principle that must override such concerns: if one is to preserve one's freedom, sometimes one must take up arms to do so. In this case our munitions are clear and the enemy is obvious. Anything less than war is surrender. After all, what is unsolicited email but a slow DoS on my email targetting me as an individual and burying the information in my mailbox in noise?
The spammers are certainly winning, but only because of the complicity of the "legitimate" corporations that assist or tolerate them. And that's only because the public doesn't know. If the public knew Yahoo's role in supporting the Nigerian fraud industry, there would be regular pickets outside their headquarters and it would be a national news story. Yahoo would be forced to change. If the public knew AT&T's and Sprint's and MCI's role in connecting the corrupt Chinanets that host the big spammers, they'd be shamed into enforcing their peering agreements.
It's not happening because "anti-spammers" are under the same delusions as the general public about the morality of corporations. We think we can "convince" them to do right. That's about as reasonable as expecting to convince a shark not to bite you. A shark has no mind and its purpose in life is to bite you. Corporations *kill people* as a normal part of doing business. They have all the morality of a Mafia don. But the ones that do retail business care about their reputations. We anti-spammers have utterly failed to attack those reputations, the only place where these monsters are vulnerable.
We've also made the terrible mistake of acting like the spammers are the real bad guys. Spammers are cockroaches. They're mindless. Urban cockroaches are nature's response to the open ecological niche of dirty kitchens. If a building has cockroaches, it's not the cockroaches' fault, it's the fault of the businessman who *decided* it would be more profitable not to keep the kitchen clean. Spammers are the fault of the businesses that tolerate their operations.
We can still win the spam war and save the public email system. But it will take setting aside the "free market" ideology that excuses corporations for the crimes they commit and recognizing them for the malevolent monsters they are. And it will take a *real* public relations campaign. _Sixty Minutes_ is not going to just, out of the blue, let Steve Linford explain why there's spam. They'd offend their advertisers. It's not a "business friendly" story. But Amy Goodman would. Why hasn't Steve Linford been on _Democracy Now_? _Sixty Minutes_ carries stories after they've broken in the noncommercial and offshore press.