North American Network Operators Group

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Re: hmm..

  • From: Dean Anderson
  • Date: Tue Nov 18 23:25:35 1997

>This sort of revenge is very common among spammers, in my first-hand
>experience. Block a spammer from your site and shortly thereafter
>various malicious things begin happening with disturbing frequency.

I've heard of some malicious things happening to spammers with disturbing
frequency.

Some people have a tendency to get into personal wars with other people,
rather than any sort of rational argument.   That tends to bring out
further anti-social behavior in the people they fight with.  Just like
schoolyard brawls.  I urge everyone to stop for a moment and consider that
people who disagree with you aren't subhuman bastards who should be
tortured and deprived of life without a trial.  Especially since we are the
ones who generally have the "bats and guns".  We all need to exercise a
little moderation and restraint.

If "I'm sorry that I published a route that knocked spamford off the net
for 16 hours, it was a mistake" is acceptable for the things we do, then
"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have sent that 300K message to your users when 1K
or 2K bytes would do" should be acceptable for what they do wrong.

Moreover, I would like to point out to people that the obnoxious mail
relaying is a response to return mail attacks from some ISP's. -- The
spammers just try to screw the return address and the headers so that those
automatic programs don't work. Then innocent providers are bombed as
relays. Twice. Once by the spammer, once by the autoreply scripts.  Both
parties need to knock it off.

I would also note that (for the US, at least) the postmaster general has
declared that pyramid schemes and such will be investigated and prosecuted
even if they are perpetrated over email. Forward copies this emails to your
local postal inspector c/o the post office. Child porn should be forwarded
to the FBI.

http://www.usps.gov/websites/depart/inspect/chainlet.htm

>Well, allow me to point out that, analogously, spam is not a
>commercial thing...

I think a lot of the extreme anti-spam is also a power thing:

>From an anonymous source:
>I suspect he does it purely in the hope that it will annoy ISPs like
>me, and no doubt a certain amount of adolescent "no one tells me what
>to do" (well, spamford, in fact, we do, with our filters etc.)

Adolecent #1 meets adolecent #2.  The funny thing about kids is that
they'll tell you right away what they did wrong, but refuse to accept
responsibility for it. "I knocked over the table, but it wasn't my fault"

Since July (July 11 to be precise), I have kept every piece of spam (even
the duplicates). I now have 658 messages comprising 2.8 Meg, costing me
0.017 cents to download, and costing me 20 cents to store.  I estimate that
it took me 2 seconds to classify and refile each one, for a total of 21.9
minutes, and at my rate of $90/hr costing $32.85 dollars of my time, spread
over 149 days (or approximately 5 months). So the true cost of spam has
been approximately $6.00 per month, due mainly to my stubborn insistence on
not using a software filter to delete them automatically.

If I deleted all the illegal messages, I think the number shrinks down to
about a 200 or so spams from companies or people (appearing, at least) to
conduct legitimate (non-illegal, non-immoral) business, or at least fall in
about the same category as the junk postal mail that I receive each day.

I think if we are really concerned about net clutter, we should stop irc.
But people make money off of that.  So screw it. Let them send garbage.
Charge 'em by the packet or the bandwidth, and buy more hardware.  If
you're downstream and can't keep up, drop the packets, send back source
quenches, drop the newsgroups.  But lets stop the silliness, and stop
bombing innocents.

                --Dean


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