We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Possible good news on the anti-spam front Interesting story here that a firm which is said to be behind a lot of the spam messages hitting our mailboxes could go bust. Perhaps, just perhaps a corner might be turned in the current battle against spammers. I used to think that one man’s junk mail message was another’s piece of legitimate advertising, but the relentless offensive and downright moronic crud I have to sweep from my computer each day has made me change my mind. The effectiveness of the Internet as a business and social tool has been seriously blunted by this phenomenon.
I still don’t really know whether spam can be best dealt with legally, economically or through some other means. What I do know is that I won’t be shedding any tears at the demise of one of the most prolific producers of this stuff in the world.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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I think that spam is a technical problem that has a technical solution. If there are open mail gateways it is rational to exploit them. A legal solution would never work, and an economic solution (e.g. charging for mail) requires a technical solution anyway. There are better technical solutions than charging for mail.
One man definitely worth reading if you want to know more about spam is Paul Graham.
Using sound David Friedman principles, libertarians would be justified in banding together and hiring a combat team of nerds to launch massive Denial of Service Attacks on these spam swine. Don’t wait for governments (least of all Bush’s) to do the job. They’re too busy wetting their knickers over imaginary terrorist conspiracies to destroy one of the ugliest nuisances contaminating cyberspace. The Feds can fine a TV network for a ‘wardrobe malfunction’ but are impotent to stop unsolicited deluges of filth and charlatan salesmanship.
What a picture of America the daily deluge of junk conveys: obsessed with the size of its penis, dreaming of winning something for nothing, terrified of falling sick without prescription drugs, itching to watch faked incest or some ‘celebrity’ illicitly filmed in sexual congress. America the Beautiful.
On a similar note, I’ve just had a response from ICSTIS… I’d been receiving a load of SMS spam claiming I had a secret admirer (just call this premium rate number), and was getting a wee bit fed up with it, so filled in the complaint form.
Result – the sender has been fined £25k & barred from sending SMS. Whether that cuts into their profit margins or not, I’ve no idea.
I, however, get nothing other than the warm glow of metaphorically kicking a spammer in the nuts.
Most of the spam I get these days is coming from the far East. In fact, most of the stuff I get to the address I use on Samizdata is actually in Chinese…or Korean or Jovian something. Since that’s a UNIX shell account, the emails are just a merry jumble of unfathomable extended ASCII characters.
A lot of spam is generated from former Iron Curtain countries, in which boiler room operations execute orders from US customers.
The EU has largely succeeded in eliminating spam from within original member states. Bush promised to follow suit but has done nothing.
K9 is free, easy to use, and very effective. Use it in good health.
“I think that spam is a technical problem that has a technical solution. If there are open mail gateways it is rational to exploit them.”
Yes, but is it rational to flood them with meaningless gibberish?
I suppose to some, vandalism is rational…
Ken, they aren’t meaningless gibberish.
Some of what looks like that is Chinese, Korean or other languages encoded in Unicode which isn’t tagged correctly, so your mail program isn’t interpreting it correctly.
As to the spams which seem to contain copies of news reports, or lists of aphorisms, or jokes, or long lists of randomly chosen words, or horribly mispelled keywords, those are attempts to evade Bayesian filtration, which is what programs like K9 use.
Problem for the spammers is that it doesn’t work. That’s why Bayesian filters are so cool.
My cure for spam is a flamethrower applied to the genitals of the guilty parties, but that seems to make people nervous, for some reason.