From: Dean Anderson <dean(_at_)av8(_dot_)com>
...
No one has demonstrated any cost to spam, other than annoyance and
infrastructure costs which are passed on to users[1], and it seems there
is very little to add.
That's a ridiculous overstatement. Spam may be too cheap to meter
for an individual user, but if you have 30,000,000 users or only
30,000, you'll find that the total costs are substantial, particularly
when you need to double the size of your systems to deal with a doubling
of spam.
...
Vixie and other radicals also continues to ignore Shannon's theorems. ...
While it's true that proving the non-existence of covert channels
is hard, you've not related that theorem to anything related to spam.
Even if covert channels or the relation among power, noise, bandwidth,
and information have something to do with spam, you've not shown
any connection to dealing with the spam problem.
A good rule of thumb is that only people who don't know much about
major theorems like Shannon's and Godel's quote them as proofs in
discussions like this. I think you should have chosen some other
beautiful bit of archana such one of the fixed point theorems or
Fred J. Cohen's Forcing and Generic instead of something that more
than a few people around here know about such as covert channels.
...
[2] I would suspect that this could be a "normal" virus infection, but the
following text in the virus message wasn't in the message I sent:
> Get your FREE av8.com account now! <
So, it seems to be someone intentionally trying to infect me, or perhaps
defame Av8.com, but failed.
My but aren't you Very Special! Some of the rest of us who received
that stuff got it without any recent messages to this list. Our
copies no doubt came thanks to familiar mechanisms that don't depend
on our Specialness.
If this noise must continue, could it please move to somewhere that
it is vaguely on-topic, such as the ASRG mailing list? I hate to say
that, because the flood of clue-challenged, chest-thumping noise in
the ASRG mailing list has tailed off in recent weeks.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com