more on Why Technologists Should Stay Involved with SPAM Legislation

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Hear hear!!! djf

From: Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb () guppylake com>

Dave -- First of all I couldn't agree more with the premise that 
technologists need to stay involved in the legal efforts against spam (not 
just legislation but, now, regulation, and soon, investigation, 
enforcement, and evidence), and it's what I'm spending the majority of my 
time on these days.

The bottom line on spam-fighting technology is that there are lots of good 
ideas and no silver-bullet ideas.  Unfortunately, people love to fight the 
battle of the "best" approach to spam.  I believe that  we have to stop 
seeing them as either/or propositions, as in "my spam solution is better 
than yours" and start trying to implement as many of them as possible, as 
cooperatively as possible.  This applies not only to competing antispam 
technologies, but also to the competition between technological, legal, 
economic, and educational approaches to spam.

In this case, Rich's objection can be significantly dampened by "spiking" 
the do not call list, which I think the FTC is smart enough to do.  Far 
from a magnet for spammers, this list could be the mother of all honeypots 
-- you would essentially set up a regularly changing stream of new email 
addresses that it would be a felony to send email to.  (Heck, you could 
have all such email forward directly to the local police station nearest 
the originating IP address, if we also improved IP address tracing...)  And 
while I don't know which antispam philosophy Rich subscribes to, the odds 
are very high that it can be implemented in *addition* to the do-not-call 
list, as opposed to *instead* of it.

There are dozens of clever approaches to the spam problem.  Rather than 
argue over which is best, we should try to work together to do as many of 
them as we can without stepping on each others' toes.  -- Nathaniel
---
Nathaniel S. Borenstein, Ph.D.  <nborenst () us ibm com>
Distinguished Engineer, IBM, Lotus CTO Office
Phone:  +1 (734) 395-9828 or +1 (989) 739-8243 

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