Lessig On Bounties For Spamhunters

An anonymous reader submits: "Digital rights (as in yours, not the RIAA's) guru Lawrence Lessig comes up with a Swiftian idea of how to fight spammers -- $10,000 for the first ubergeek to hunt the offender down. The column is at CIO Insight. Wonder if it'll reach its audience there."

How much...

[T3kno]

How much would I get if I blew up the building that housed hotmail.com?

Take a lesson from astronomy

[PD]

The first one to find a spammer gets to name it. Well, maybe not such a good idea after all...

First Caught Spammer

[DarkHelmet]

I have a bunch of female friends that forward letters endlessly to the point that they're no longer my friends. I'd love to put one of their heads on a stick and turn them in for 10k. Do they count? :)

Re:The opposite is needed

[taernim]

In a related story:

tired of spam?
we am sure you are too! my government has agreed to pay the sum of $34,004,267 to help you fight these spam persons. yes, it sounds much too good. but yes, this is truth. if you would like to join the fight, we only need your bank routing number and complete address. we will soon win by helping you help us help you.

(Check out this article [slashdot.org] if you somehow miss the irony...)

Re:How much...

[Doppler00]

Probably 20 years to life in prison.

Here's MY deal.

[unicron]

"Alright. I'll kindnap him for 50, deprogram him for 50, and I'll kill him for 100!"

"No, just the first 2!"

"Alright, I'll throw in the killin' for free."

Re:How much...

[nizo]

I couldn't tell from the article, do I have to bring the whole body in to collect, or is the head sufficient?

Re:First Caught Spammer

[Anonymous Coward]

like those damn fake warnings about HIV needles in gas pumps. everytime a friend sent me a stupid warning like that, id look it up on google and send them the page. finally they got pissed and said something about it could happen

so i wrote up an asteroid hitting the earth next week warning, because it COULD happen.

Make them pay.

[[e-mail]]

Of course my idea of "make them pay" is perhaps a bit different than the norm. I'm not talking about finding out who they are so they can face the swift hand justice, I'm more of the though of finding out who they so they can face teh swift baseball bats of Guido and Nunzio who, when they're done, break the spammers' fingers so they can no longer type out those emails telling me how easy it is to buy my Viagra.

Hell, I'd be willing to contribute to a fund which promised such results. I want my mailbox back and I'm tired of coming up with new regular expressions to make the spam go away.

Re:First Caught Spammer

[GigsVT]

You've got to understand, women are, in general, stupid and gullible. Religious older women are at least doubly more so. They have no concept of reality, past what is told them, so when someone says that LSD has rat poison in it, or that someone woke up with their kidneys missing, they are likely to believe it. I mean, if they buy the stuff about a big imaginary old white guy that is all powerful and all good, other things are trivial in comparison.

Re:How much...

[fliplap]

Translation: I got owned by some 10 year old with netbus who stole my geocities password and replaced pictures of my wife with pictures of tranvestites.

Re:As annoying as spam

[dubl-u]

The site that article is from is as annoying as spam itself. You go to read the article and you get a banner ad to the right that occasionally "grows" to occupy 1/4th of your screen. You click "next" and you get a pop-up banner.

Sites like these shouldn't be linked to by Slashdot.

God forbid that people on a site for nerds might just figure out how to turn that crap off.