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Politech is the oldest Internet resource devoted to politics and technology. Launched in 1994 by Declan McCullagh, the mailing list has chronicled the growing intersection of culture, technology, politics, and law. Since 2000, so has the Politech web site.
It's getting so that you can't even *joke* about spam anymore. I subscribe to the cypherpunks list, which gets more spam than usual because we maintain an anyone-can-post policy. That allows folks to participate via anonymous remailers. One benighted would-be spammer, Ganesh Acharya (ganesha@icode.com), a "marketing analyst" at Icode Inc. in Virginia, sent a query to cypherpunks asking us for help in spamming. Excerpt from Icode's query: "We are looking forward to conduct a Bulk e-mail (HTML) campaign targeting the SMEs and hence a bulk e-mail service provider." (Note to self: Don't ever trust Icode's "privacy" policy.) I responded, dryly: "Cypherpunks are well-known providers of Bulk-email HTML spam campaigns. As a 'marketing analyst,' you've clearly come to the right place." Sending such a query to cypherpunks is, after all, a little like asking Planned Parenthood to help you code the HTML for your Nuremburg Files site. That was enough to prompt a censorhappy -- not to mention humorless -- sysadmin, J.A. Terranson (measl@mfn.org), to send a message to UUNet, my upstream provider, accusing me of spamming. Terranson's message to UUNet was four words long and blunt: "Please muzzle this idjit..." Terranson appears to be a syadmin for Missouri FreeNet. UUNet duly forwarded this censorial nastygram to my primary network provider, Rackspace. Rackspace's Melanie Fussell sent me what was certainly a form message: "Investigate this issue immediately and confirm that this issue has been resolved." All this for a rather mild joke about spam? What, we can't poke fun at clueless spammers anymore? Sheesh. It's clear that spam is getting worse. Ancedotal evidence suggests the volume is increasing, and I wrote an article recently saying that more spam is coming from overseas. What's more, reliable sources tell me it's unlikely that the House bill that the Commerce committee approved this week will go anywhere. "It's going to be ambushed on Judiciary," one source says, and apparently just about all the staffers who successfully steered the bill through the House last year have left the Hill. Slashdot ran a thought-provoking piece not so long ago about how anti-spam measures (that I have long endorsed) like the RBL and its progeny are moving from blackholing spammers to blackholing sites with software that *could be used* to spam. While that's a private activity, it's treading the same path that Rep. Bob Goodlatte is with his plan to criminalize software that could be used to send bulk messages. At least the RBL is limited by market pressures: If it goes too far, ISPs will stop using it. But while free markets are the best way we've found yet to order society, they're hardly perfect, and RBL could overreact and restrict some folks who are undeserving in the interim. Here's a dark prediction: Spam will become so noxious we'll see more half-baked proposals -- like Goodlatte's -- arise in legislatures. If there's one thing you can count on Congress to do, it's to overreact in a perceived crisis. I don't know what the answer is, but I wrote a column for econlib.org recently that might be relevant here. It talks about fighting spam through technology, and, well, economics. Here's an excerpt: http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/McCullaghspam.html >To an economist, all of this sounds familiar. From an economic perspective, >spam is just another form of pollution, an activity that imposes costs on >people without their permission. Like all pollution, the polluters -- in >this case, direct marketers -- impose these costs because of the benefits >to them -- in this case, the profits they make from sales, however few. -Declan http://www.politechbot.com/p-01870.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if it remains intact. To subscribe, visit http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------