On April 24, 2004 at 20:57 gep2(_at_)terabites(_dot_)com
(gep2(_at_)terabites(_dot_)com) wrote:
But the TRUTH of the matter is that spammers will just do what they've done
ALL
ALONG and shift that cost to others to pay... by making sure that OTHER
users of
the net will pay for the spammers' E-postage. (Spambot zombies, etc etc.)
Yeah but now it's going to begin to cost the ISPs, or the victims, who
harbor such behavior so there's some real incentive to get this
cleaned up.
What you're doing is increasing (by a LARGE amount) the overhead of handling
E-mail, not to mention the HUGELY labor-intensive work of correcting all the
problems caused by the spammers and false charges, and all of those charges
are
going to be borne NOT by the spammers, but by everybody else.
And you think that spammers aren't currently vastly increasing the
cost of handling e-mail now?
I guess as an ISP that's the most frustrating part of any spam
discussion, this idea that well, spam is annoying, but it's basically
free so any cost to clean it up is just an added cost to the service.
Crap.
The other day we were being pelted by a single spam from over 1,500
different IP addresses, presumably all compromised. That's not a
singular incident, in fact the day before a similar incident involving
over 1,000 hosts occurred tho I'll admit numbers like that don't tend
to happen daily, probably the same bunch of criminals in that case,
but a coupla-few times a month? Yes. Hundreds at a time? A few times
per week, etc. Spammers who can switch between a dozen or two IP
addresses as fast as you can block them? Daily.
Do you think that kind of rising tide, while maintaining an acceptable
service to customers, is without cost?
Not to mention all the money which goes into spam-fighting, most of it
nearly useless (firewalls, software, etc), and customer support,
people expect help with this and a lot of the problems they run into
they do not expect to pay for (e.g., clearing up a false positive, how
to deal with an overflowed mailbox, etc.)
So, your point only holds water if we're to agree that the current
situation is cost-free or nearly so, so the solution must be cost-free
or nearly so.
I assure you, we do not agree on that point.
Remember the phone company's assertion that something like 85% of the cost
of a
long distance phone call is the cost of billing you for it. (And THAT is
for a
Yeah, sure, do you have a cite for this, numbers like this along with
the assertion that it costs some percentage like that to collect taxes
are awfully popular urban legends but upon examination tend to fall
apart.
service where it's nearly impossible to "steal" service by billing to the
"wrong" caller...). The result is that you're going to HUGELY increase cost
of
E-mail, and those costs are going to come back onto the LEGITIMATE users...
For many, many years, directory assistance calls were "free". They were
included in the cost of your phone service, and that cost a fraction of what
it
does today.
Phone companies argued that "some people are abusing Directory Assistance!"
and
they said that they wanted to put into place a limit on free directory
assistance... but not to worry, the limit would be high enough that almost
no
legitimate users would ever reach it and have to pay.
As soon as they got the "pay for Directory Assistance" dam breached, they
steadily reduced the number of free calls (now, most subscribers get NO free
directory assistance calls per month) and increased the cost of each call to
LUDICROUS levels. Then they added insult to injury by stopping even TRYING
to
provide phone books at pay telephones, so you have NO CHOICE but to call
directory assistance for the phone numbers you need.
Had they REALLY been concerned about abuse, a better (and less abuse-prone)
scheme would have been: Directory Assistance calls, IF the number is not in
the
current published-and-delivered directory, are FREE. If you call directory
assistance for a number which IS in the published-and-delivered directory
(and
that you thus could have looked up) then there is a dissuasive penalty of $5
per
call. The fact that they charge for ALL directory assistance calls,
INCLUDING
for numbers which are not published in the directory, proves that they were
NOT
simply trying to stamp out abuse...!
Well, your notions of economic justice in directory assistance no
doubt are interesting perhaps you should call your phone company.
This thing about E-mail... "We'll of course give you enough "free" "e-mail
stamps" each month that nobody legitimate will have to pay extra" is only
just a
ruse to get folks to say "Well, in that case... maybe it won't be so bad..."
but
you can COUNT on the same tightening-the-ratchet once the basic "pay per
unit"
scheme is in place... :-((((
But you ignore the downside of not doing anything.
One of my more dire predictions is that the entire email system as we
know it falls apart and ends up in the hands of the phone companies
who as monopolies (regional or otherwise) will just position it like
SMS and charge 15cents/email or thereabouts.
AND, like SPF, you have NOT done anything that will PREVENT spam. So you
have
YET ANOTHER expensive and cumbersome intensively technical/administrative
solution that ultimately WILL NOT SOLVE THE PROBLEM!
Um, this doesn't follow, if e-mail got terribly expensive as you fear
I suspect that one result would certainly be the death of spam, even
if it'd be within a regimen you dislike.
I think I'll chalk your point up to: I don't want to pay and email
sounds like I might have to pay, so keep thinking until you can come
up with a solution that works well and costs nothing.
Well, hey, good luck.
Gordon Peterson http://personal.terabites.com/
1977-2002 Twenty-fifth anniversary year of Local Area Networking!
Support free and fair US elections! http://stickers.defend-democracy.org
12/19/98: Partisan Republicans scornfully ignore the voters they "represent".
12/09/00: the date the Republican Party took down democracy in America.
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