On Mon, 1 Dec 1997, John R Levine wrote:
The lack of freedom of press for those who don't own the press also was a social problem. As well as lack of clean water.
Are you're going to tell that political methods solved those problems? To solve them the societies needed the technology first.
But it was laws that curbed junk-faxing, not technology. Nobody modified their fax machines to stop people from UCF - fear of prosecution did the trick. If laws are written right you could at least (1) hold any U.S. business responsible for spam promoting their business (2) protect backbone providers from suit for blackholing spamhaus and (3) provide for prosecution of providers such as AGIS, ACIS, Bell Atlantic etc. who refuse to act against these electronic-resource thiefs. If a provider is given notice to shutdown a spammer within x number of days or be penalized for not complying it could quickly become very difficult to keep a link. For the rest without web sites/email start levying heavy taxes and fines against them and sick the IRS on them to collect. In fact if there was a $10 advertisement tax fee for each spam it would probably be the end of a lot of it. Or we could come up with a combination of law and technology somewhere in the middle with the same results and less government. But the providers who knowingly continue to allow spam to spew from their networks need to be held accountable. (The "habitual spamhaus", not the providers who act upon reports of UCE.) How difficult would it be technically to have a filter at your gateway that would shut down or throttle this kind of emailing without killing performance? Could it be done in a future flavor of BGP? Statistically by AS perhaps? - James Wilson