Spam has been a significant problem for roughly 10 years, plus or minus.
ASRG has been operating for a couple of years.
My feeling is that the list continues to be consumed with that "fame
and/or fortune" lust which a significant breakthrough in spam fighting
might bring someone.
Unfortunately, we still don't really have very good or generally
accepted definitions of the problem we are trying to
solve. Consequently, there's no good critical framework within which
to judge whether some proposal makes progress. If you don't know where
you're going it's hard to tell if you're getting closer.
I realize some general definitions have been nicely documented here
which mostly amount to "email I don't want" and drops back to some
broad notion of "permission-based e-mail" since that would seem to be
the logical negative of "email I don't want" (i.e., a method of
limiting receipt to "email I do want".)
But even that implies a very specific agenda, namely that the only
important focus of spam is what hits an end-user's eyeballs.
To use an analogy, what if people were breaking into the phone system
and ringing your phone 7x24 with sleazy ads? Would the problem be the
ads on your phone, or that someone has compromised the entire phone
system?
Well, a little of both, perhaps, but you'd have to admit that there's
something more insidious about someone "breaking into" the phone
system and no one being able to stop them.
That's where we are right now with spam.
The internet has been seriously compromised.
The very concept of the internet has been seriously compromised.
This is why the spammers are effecting a sea change in the operation
of the internet, ending for example end-to-end services such as being
able to deliver your own email w/o use of an intermediary "official"
server (aka port 25 blocking.)
The ads themselves are perhaps just big annoyances, as would your
phone ringing off the hook day and night (unplug it and it goes away!
get an answering machine with filtering, put your calls through a
human answering service, etc.)
But not being able to stop people from seriously compromising the
entire phone system seems to me like a big problem. And there's
nothing special about the phone system, injecting their own ad flood
into your radio or TV programming would do as well, etc.
What I'm leading towards is that it's time we began laying down some
boundaries which recognize the underlying problem: The vast compromise
of the internet. And it's not just email so I won't add that
qualifier. This corruption has affected DNS, SMTP, virus activity,
bandwidth considerations, WWW services, and even IP and TCP spoofing,
and that's only the direct effects.
Put another way, it's not the spam which is a problem, it's what makes
it impossible to stop, short of abandoning fundamental assumptions
about the medium, which is the problem.
--
-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
The World | Public Access Internet | Since 1989 *oo*
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