[Tutor] A NOVEL IDEA- no more spam! (Offtopic)

[Scot W. Stevenson]

Hello Kirk, 

> OK, recently I saw a site with an interesting idea. SPAM PROOFING.

You will not be able to stop spam with any technical means, however clever, 
ever: Spam is not a technical problem, it is a legal (social) problem 
caused by the inability or rather the unwillingness of the United States 
government to pass laws that protect its citizens' interests in the face 
of business pressure. 

This is how you /really/ stop spam: In Germany and other parts of Europe, 
using other people's resources (fax paper, computer hardware, metered 
phone time, etc) for your own business purposes without their permission 
is /verboten/, because it is basically a form of theft. In the last year, 
I received one (yes, one) piece of spam from a German source, and I sent 
back an email citing the appropriate federal laws and asking the 
originator:

- To inform me which data concerning my person he is in possession of
- To delete all said data from his data base
- To confirm, in writing, that he has done so
- To give me the name of the person who gave him my data
- To do all this inside a certain time frame

and to smile when he does it, or else I'll send his address to the state 
agency for data protection (or whatever /Datenschutz/ would be in English) 
and sue his ass from here to the French border for violating my right 
under German federal law to determine what happens to my personal data.   
I also sent a copy of the mail CC to his provider's  postmaster address. 

Worked like a charm, works every time.

So if you really want to do something against spam, stop wasting your time 
coding something they're just going to outsmart anyway and write a letter 
to your congressperson, pointing out three things:

1. That spam is degrading productivity in U.S. companies, because U.S. 
employees have to wade thru tons of spam in their email boxes, while their 
European counterparts don't, at least not to that extent;

2. That storing, relaying, and filtering spam is costing the U.S. billions 
of dollars in hardware and manhours; 

3. That spam is destroying email as a communication form in the U.S. the 
same way that it has almost destroyed newsgroups.

You'll have to write an actual letter, tho, since your congressperson 
probably doesn't read his or her email anymore - too much spam, you see. 

On this note, I would like to point out that the amount of spam from the 
U.S. that I have received to this address has dropped to almost zero in 
the last year, hopefully because somebody in the address selling business 
(which, I should point out, is illegal here, too) finally has realized 
that if somebody in Hamburg, Germany is going to get a penis enlargement, 
he's probably not going to fly to Dorktown, Idaho for it. Or maybe 
American companies finally realized that they are getting ripped off when 
they pay for addresses with a .de (or .uk, .fr, .nl, .it, .es, .no, etc) 
at the end. Or, of course, my provider might just have brilliant spam 
filters installed.

It would be nice, you know, if the U.S. finally made the .us domain 
mandatory: That way you would help spammers make sure they only reach 
their target audience (which is good for whatever reasons they're telling 
you spam as such is supposed to be good for you) and the rest of the world 
doesn't have to suffer thru what is basically an Internet disease 
transmitted by American providers. 

Now _that_ is a technical solution that would solve spam problems for 
millions and millions of people...

Y, Scot

-- 
   Scot W. Stevenson wrote me on Sunday, 15. Sep 2002 in Zepernick, Germany   
       on his happy little Linux system that has been up for 2152 hours       
        and has a CPU that is falling asleep at a system load of 0.08.