On April 22, 2004 at 16:05 tthomson(_at_)neosinteractive(_dot_)com (Tom
Thomson) wrote:
First, we still see junk mail on paper. Something like 65% of my paper mail
is junk. So the charge for paper mail hasn't eliminated spam.
So you're saying unless it's zero then it's useless? I think this is
called "making the best the enemy of the good".
Second, who pays the charge? If a spammer "owns" a bunch of zombie machines
scattered round the world, they pay the email charge - he doesn't. So it's
not much of a deterrent to him. Of course it may encourage people to secure
their machines so that they don't end up paying, but I'm not certain that
That's all, you just answered your own question.
that will produce a big reduction in volume - look at the number of critical
security problems published in the last year (by reliable bodies like CERT)
for *NIX systems, or the rather smaller number for Windows systems - and
look at the delays in availability of fixes. There's plenty of window for
the attackers even if people are sufficiently clued up to keep their
machines "secure". Of course it's possible to build very secure systems and
to use multiple layers of firewalls, but the average guy is not going to do
that because it's both extremely difficult with current platforms and very
expensive.
So I assume you have a foolproof, perfect solution to spam?
Or you're just determined to wait until one comes along and let the
status quo be?
My assertion is that if people are abusing free resources in a big way
then charge for them, set up a charging mechanism that deters the
abusers w/o discouraging the honest!
How hard is that to understand?
Third, there's one born every minute. The spammer can recruit people as
spam-mailers, people who believe they will make money by working for him and
won't stop sending spam on his behalf until they have lost a packet (some
won't even stop until they've gone bankrupt). They make the losses, he
makes the profits.
So?
At least their money, or lack thereof, places an upper-bound on the
damage they can do. When they run out of money, they stop spamming,
what a wonderful result.
Just how much of the human condition are you trying to fix via this
topic?
I'd be more concerned about something like child porn on the net, in
general (nothing to do with spam per se), than the possibility that
someone might get conned by a spammer into sending email and lose a
few bucks on the deal. Just as a f'rinstance.
Fourth, we don't know what the value (to the spammer) of spam is. Obviously
different spams generate different returns. The gullibility and greed of
some people is so great that even with a high email price some spams will
remain profitable - and of course this relates to the first point above. So
we don't know how high we have to set the price to get spam down to a
"reasonable" level, and setting the price too high is as bad as the spam -
my email is just as unusable if no-one can afford to email me as it is if I
have to spend too much time filtering out the spam. Maybe over time we can
find the right pricing level, if there is one, but maybe there isn't a right
pricing level to find.
Now you're way out of anything this list could rationally deal with
(unless you're posting from some country with a centralized pricing
board.)
You let the market decide.
Put another way, do you think you and your friends emailing is
comparable to a spammer's? The more noxious spammers probably send on
the order of tens of millions of messages per day. Do you even send
tens of messages per day, upwards of 100? If not, then we're looking
at a millionfold difference in volume, and probably a lot more (the
spammer does it 7 days a week) between your habits and a spammer's.
I suspect that in a millionfold difference there's some room for
pricing decisions.
--
-Barry Shein
Software Tool & Die | bzs(_at_)TheWorld(_dot_)com |
http://www.TheWorld.com
Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD
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