Re: hmm..

[Barry Shein <bzs () world std com>]

Ah, the "just lie back and enjoy it" point of view...(or at least "if
it comes off in the shower it can't be that bad".)

At any rate, this is all orthogonal to the point. If a spammer was
subscribing nanog to other lists just because he didn't like the
anti-spam discusson on this list that would be wrong, right?

Yes, keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out of
your head.

Spammers steal enormous $$$ from ISPs, and doubly so when their
customers complain about it incessantly and expect some sort of
answer, and spammers add nothing.

It's theft, plain and simple, and in our society we generally consider
theft to be wrong.

If I want to offer a service such as, eg, IRC, for money, that's my
business. If a spammer is trying to ram his business down me and my
customer's throat by sending, literally, gigabytes of unsolicited
email then that's a real problem, that's theft. You have absolutely no
right to make the comparison you make, it's morally confused.


On November 18, 1997 at 23:13 dean () av8 com (Dean Anderson) wrote:
> > This sort of revenge is very common among spammers, in my first-hand
> > experience. Block a spammer from your site and shortly thereafter
> > various malicious things begin happening with disturbing frequency.
>
> I've heard of some malicious things happening to spammers with disturbing
> frequency.
>
> Some people have a tendency to get into personal wars with other people,
> rather than any sort of rational argument.   That tends to bring out
> further anti-social behavior in the people they fight with.  Just like
> schoolyard brawls.  I urge everyone to stop for a moment and consider that
> people who disagree with you aren't subhuman bastards who should be
> tortured and deprived of life without a trial.  Especially since we are the
> ones who generally have the "bats and guns".  We all need to exercise a
> little moderation and restraint.
>
> If "I'm sorry that I published a route that knocked spamford off the net
> for 16 hours, it was a mistake" is acceptable for the things we do, then
> "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have sent that 300K message to your users when 1K
> or 2K bytes would do" should be acceptable for what they do wrong.
>
> Moreover, I would like to point out to people that the obnoxious mail
> relaying is a response to return mail attacks from some ISP's. -- The
> spammers just try to screw the return address and the headers so that those
> automatic programs don't work. Then innocent providers are bombed as
> relays. Twice. Once by the spammer, once by the autoreply scripts.  Both
> parties need to knock it off.
>
> I would also note that (for the US, at least) the postmaster general has
> declared that pyramid schemes and such will be investigated and prosecuted
> even if they are perpetrated over email. Forward copies this emails to your
> local postal inspector c/o the post office. Child porn should be forwarded
> to the FBI.
>
> http://www.usps.gov/websites/depart/inspect/chainlet.htm
>
> > Well, allow me to point out that, analogously, spam is not a
> > commercial thing...
>
> I think a lot of the extreme anti-spam is also a power thing:
>
> > From an anonymous source:
> > I suspect he does it purely in the hope that it will annoy ISPs like
> > me, and no doubt a certain amount of adolescent "no one tells me what
> > to do" (well, spamford, in fact, we do, with our filters etc.)
>
> Adolecent #1 meets adolecent #2.  The funny thing about kids is that
> they'll tell you right away what they did wrong, but refuse to accept
> responsibility for it. "I knocked over the table, but it wasn't my fault"
>
> Since July (July 11 to be precise), I have kept every piece of spam (even
> the duplicates). I now have 658 messages comprising 2.8 Meg, costing me
> 0.017 cents to download, and costing me 20 cents to store.  I estimate that
> it took me 2 seconds to classify and refile each one, for a total of 21.9
> minutes, and at my rate of $90/hr costing $32.85 dollars of my time, spread
> over 149 days (or approximately 5 months). So the true cost of spam has
> been approximately $6.00 per month, due mainly to my stubborn insistence on
> not using a software filter to delete them automatically.
>
> If I deleted all the illegal messages, I think the number shrinks down to
> about a 200 or so spams from companies or people (appearing, at least) to
> conduct legitimate (non-illegal, non-immoral) business, or at least fall in
> about the same category as the junk postal mail that I receive each day.
>
> I think if we are really concerned about net clutter, we should stop irc.
> But people make money off of that.  So screw it. Let them send garbage.
> Charge 'em by the packet or the bandwidth, and buy more hardware.  If
> you're downstream and can't keep up, drop the packets, send back source
> quenches, drop the newsgroups.  But lets stop the silliness, and stop
> bombing innocents.
>
>                 --Dean
>
>
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>            Plain Aviation, Inc                  dean () av8 com
>            LAN/WAN/UNIX/NT/TCPIP          http://www.av8.com
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++