Lessig On Bounties For Spamhunters 317
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."
Re:How much... (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing. The spam doesn't come from Hotmail. Spammers forge hotmail.com dropboxes into the headers, but typically spam through dedicated machines hosted by spam-friendly providers.
If someone were to go apeshit with a SuperSoaker full of saline solution in ELI.NET's or Level3's datacenter, for instance, your load of inbound spam would probably decrease substantially.
There are some "ISPs" allegedly in Mexico and Brazil (but hosted via US-based backbones) that are no more than spammer fronts.
Lessig has not done his research (Score:2, Informative)
First of all, SPEWS doesn't block anything. SPEWS only provides the list of scumbags. Its users then decide what they do with the information. Some block Email, some flag Email for filtering by end users, some use the list as evidence of anti-spammer evils.
Second of all, there is an appeal process. The spammer just needs to stop spamming.
Thirdly, he seems to imply that it would be common to be listed in SPEWS by mistake. This is simply not true at all. Usually a spammer has to exhibit a pattern of abusive behavior to get listed. There appears to be a human process involved in getting listed by SPEWS, which seems to be very effective in weeding out mistakes and joe-jobs.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. The slower, the better. The more painful, the better. Remember, knees first, so they can't run away.
Ferguson vs. Friendfinder (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What an asshole (Score:4, Informative)
Re:True (Score:3, Informative)