From: Jamie Lawrence <jal(_at_)jal(_dot_)org>
On Sun, 20 Apr 2003, John Fenley wrote:
> Spam evolves.
...In the same way as car crashes do; in response to the infrastructure.
Bridges, highways, and dense urban areas have all caused car crashes to
'evolve'.
Torturing analogies does not make them stronger.
Spam actively evolves using darwinian "survival of the fittest" methods.
Bacteria do this, car crashes do not.
This is not an analogy, this is the actual mechanism for the way spam
behaves.
> Spam foats around randomly untill it finds someone who will allow it to
> spread.
In the same way car crashes lurk with evil intent until some unsusecting
automotive administrator approaches a curve. In other words, it doesn't.
I'm belaboring this because the point is important. Disease eradication
efforts are very different than harm reduction efforts. Attacking spam
is a harm reduction problem.
Spam "reproduces". One generation's succeses and failures give rise to
Memetic diversity. The thing that must be combatted is the mechanism for
it's propegation, not it's symptoms.
> >Incorrect. Businesses recieve spam, and are made of people. People
> >buy stuff from spam.
>
> ok, so they are a vector.
> the point is, my system is not aimed at the buissiness user who must
> recieve orders and requests daily from strangers.
> It is aimed at the majority of new internet users.
> I don't see this "problem" as a reason why it will not work for them.
Please, feel free to peddle your approach to whomever you please. Other
approaches incrementally solve problems, work for businesses, do not
require government intervention, approach solving bandwidth issues,
and are not annoying.
An incremental overal aproach just gives an opportunity for spam to evolve.
It is similar to the over-use of antibiotics the medical profesion is having
to deal with now.
> The details are important. Everyone here responbed to the "address
> verification" performed by this list. This was a Challenge, and all of
you
> Responded. C/R.
>
> You wanted something more than it inconvinienced you to respond.
Sure. It is a fine mechanism to weed out subscription bombs, and
has a nice side effect in that the utterly clueless usually can't
seem to manage it.
Exactly.
That it works for one purpose does not make it
appropriate for pushing down to every initial email contact.
Why not?
> Yes, the government has the funds to make a plan into reality if that
plan
> can realy solve the problem.
That governments (the "s" is important) have taxation authority does
not automatically make them desirable entites in a given persuit, even
one with a social good.
I'm not going to write yet another long essay on why regulation of
email is a Really Bad Idea; that has been covered here enough times
already.
I am not going to be sucked into another meaningless argument against one
particular way of funding the project I propose.
Propose an alternate means of funding if you wish to have that argument.
John Fenley
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