At 12:12 PM -0700 9/8/04, Fred Baker wrote:
At 04:29 PM 09/08/04 +0000, Paul Vixie wrote:
i guess this is progress. the press keeps bleating about stopping spam from being received -- perhaps if they start paying attention to how it gets sent and how many supposedly-legitimate businesses profit from the sending, there could be some flattening of the spam growth curve.
I think both approaches have value.
Consider this by comparison to the "war against drugs". One line of reasoning says "if there is no supply, there will be no market". Another line of reasoning says "if there is no demand, there will be no market". A third line of reasoning notes that with purveyance of such come a multitude of other social ills, and focuses on the "businessmen" in the trade: "if there is no way for supply and demand to meet, the market will fail."
The solution lies in a combination of the two. If enough spammers take enough drugs, they will be unable to spam. Properly propagated rumors may variously suggest: 1. Becoming a spammer will put you into drug rehab at best. 2. Spammers now become a target for no-knock raids by the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Where this gets interesting is with so-called "legitimate spam". At least under US law, if you and I have a relationship as buyer and seller, the seller has a right to advertise legitimate services and products to the buyer. I travel in a vertical direction when I get spam from my employer; I have sat down with the designated spammer and have been told in detail that as a user of that equipment I am a buyer and they have a right to advertise to me, and take pretty serious steps to target and not annoy their audience. There is a part of me that wants to site in an 18" gun using their building as a target; there is another part of me that notes the photography in magazines and on billboards and the little jingles that go by on TV and the radio, and notices that legitimate advertising is in fact treated as (ulp!) legitimate.
And Jerry Springer is a legitimate means of advertising. I will confess that after an especially long, exhausting day at an IETF plenary, I have searched for something as mindless as Mr. Springer to clear my brain for sleep. To the best of my recollection, I have not reached that level of exhaustion at NANOG.