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112 Comments
- Topher06, on 04/16/2009, -14/+50The whole email system needs to change to assume ALL email is junk, and then the recipient of the email must authenticate the sender to continue to receive email from them. Look at the popularity of Facebook and Twitter and the fact you must add someone as a friend before you send or get information to and from them, the idea isn't crazy and most people have accepted it as a requirement of social networking.
Email must become social, the idea that email needs to continue to be an open communication medium needs to end and it becoming a closed social loop needs to start becoming a reality.
In a closed system, spam is not possible unless someone in your social network abuses that privilege, and then you can remove them from your loop and end the spam instantly. In a closed system, email is refused by the server if the sender is not found on an authentification list. Sure this complicates the whole email system, but when you require high performance servers to filter out millions of daily junk mail, having a server maintain an authentification list is trivial.
The inventors and progeny of email need to grow up and mature and realize that the spirit in which email was created is utterly gone and continuing to treat email as an open communication system is juvenile and idealistic nonsense. - scubaninja, on 04/16/2009, -4/+33This post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may
have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal
law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential
employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Spam content just migrating from messages to friend requests
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been
shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
(x) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. - EMFK, on 04/16/2009, -6/+31Spam sucks.
- Gruul, on 04/16/2009, -1/+22That makes a lot of guys with an enlarged penis !
- Hollow5, on 04/16/2009, -1/+19Just block Africa so we can end this chapter.
- SpoonMSU, on 04/16/2009, -0/+15Dugg for math.
- artfiend77, on 04/16/2009, -1/+15"According to a report released this week by computer security company McAfee"
I'll wait for an unbiased report, thanks. Those numbers seem a little too high. - eqrunner, on 04/16/2009, -1/+14Spam is the cause for the high bandwidth usage! Why should I have to play for a bandwidth cap when its the spam that is hogging down the bandwidth across the world. Spam needs to pay!
- inactive, on 04/16/2009, -0/+10I don't honestly understand what the purpose behind 75% of the spam I receive even is.
- inactive, on 04/16/2009, -0/+10You're *really* dumb.
- liamfriel, on 04/16/2009, -5/+15Just in one year - damn spammers are environmental terrorists
- ray4389, on 04/16/2009, -0/+9Let's institute the death penalty for spam.
- enderklein, on 04/16/2009, -0/+9 out of 62 Trillion, if you only achieve a .01% response rate, thats still the entire worlds population... wow
- j035u5, on 04/16/2009, -0/+9No, the spam just goes to my spam folder. It's been a long while since I got spam in my inbox. The current system works, people just need to stop falling for the scams, it must happen or they wouldn't do it. Its less of a nuisance to me than junk mail, and less harmful to the environment too surely?
- inactive, on 04/16/2009, -0/+8Thank god for gmail spam filters.
- inactive, on 04/16/2009, -3/+11Do we actually need that continent? It doesn't like... hold Europe up so it doesn't fall in the ocean, does it? We should just get rid of it all together. Save a few pyramids, though, those are cool.
- chrismakk69, on 04/16/2009, -1/+9The problem with that is you will need to re-educate all users to do this.
I would be all for it, but I run a free e-mail service (city.com) and my end users constantly have questions and I find it hard to believe it would be easy to train everyone.
The best thing we've been able to do is just turn our filters up to the top setting possible, check against all spam lists and if anything does come through it goes to Junk rather than the inbox.. - PityDaFool, on 04/16/2009, -1/+9It takes the power of 2.4 million homes for a year to drive one car around the planet 1.6 times?
- Ersh777, on 04/16/2009, -3/+10Holy hell! That's 9,253 spam messages for every man, woman, and child on this fricken' planet!
- scheibs14, on 04/16/2009, -0/+7And Gmail manages to block every one
- below413, on 04/16/2009, -2/+9Spam doesn't suck so much. It's the morons who actually click on stuff and make spam profitable who REALLY suck. If nobody ever clicked on spam links or responded to spam email it wouldn't be worth it.
- Zcrubby, on 04/16/2009, -0/+7That was awesome, I'm saving this one
- SpoonMSU, on 04/16/2009, -2/+9i won't comment much on spam but here how would you like to make your schlong bigger?
http://makeyourschlongbigger.blogspot.com - ilovegarnet, on 04/16/2009, -0/+6Actually, a lot has been done so far with filtering. These spam mails almost never reach our inboxes.
- KevinLiu, on 04/16/2009, -2/+7If there weren't spam, an entire anti-spam industry would go under. McAfee would never let total spam eradication happen.
- Dumbledorito, on 04/16/2009, -0/+5Given that a lot of malware comes with their own SMTP modules, this won't help. Further, they can spoof trusted e-mail addresses, and all it takes is a handful of merchants you can't avoid eventually using (i.e. computer suppliers, Apple, Best Buy, etc.) having a "you agree to let us spam you" clause somewhere, and the system breaks down.
- forevernomad, on 04/16/2009, -0/+5I'm getting 80k a year at my current rate: 210 in 24 hours.
- enderklein, on 04/16/2009, -0/+5Yea, that doesn't seem equal at all...
circumference of the earth x 1.6 = (about) 37,500 miles
Assume your car gets 25 mpg, that is about 1,500 gallons of gasoline
Where are these homes that can be powered by .000625 gallons of gas per year ???? That's really really green! - angusm, on 04/16/2009, -1/+6http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2009/04/study ... questions the assumptions and methodology of the study. Their analysis of the report suggests that the biggest share of the energy cost is related to users manually deleting spam. In other words, it's the difference in energy use between a PC sitting idle and a PC being used by someone going through his mailbox and throwing away the spam.
There are plenty of reasons to hate spam, but energy consumption is way down the list. You might as well start worrying about the damage done to the environment by people playing Minesweeper or World of Warcraft. - EclipseGSX, on 04/16/2009, -0/+5Wait... 1.6 times around the globe is 39,808.9856 miles.
39,808.9856 miles / 2,400,000 homes = 0.016587 miles per home
So, for every 87 feet, 7 inches that the car drives, it could power a home for a year? - Wolfbeta, on 04/16/2009, -0/+5I think by "homes" they meant the refrigerator boxes that people are living in.
- FredFredrickson, on 04/16/2009, -2/+7How do you personally authenticate a sender if you can't see what they are sending first? How will you even know they exist?
I do agree with you though - if they added a layer of authentication *somewhere,* spam would stop in a day. The only problem is, you lose anonymity. - Dumbledorito, on 04/16/2009, -0/+4That's a very reasonable and quite uncontestable point. However, the douches at your local ISP are more likely to cap your usage because they know where you live, as opposed to the spammers.
- KoldKalamity, on 04/16/2009, -0/+4seriously, i wonder if any of these sick ***** even see any ACTUAL sales from their *****. >:C
- Angel511J, on 04/16/2009, -0/+4E-mails = mc^2 ?
- Phillyz, on 04/16/2009, -1/+5The sad thing is, spammers still make a profit. How dumb are the people that fall for their antics? I mean honestly, 95% of email services provide a spam filter, and there is the occasional one or two emails that slip through into the inbox, but how can someone honestly believe in the BS that they're looking at?
I mean come on, world. My newest spam email:
http://img254.imageshack.us/my.php?image=spamd.jpg
How can we fall for that? - minder49, on 04/16/2009, -0/+4That solution would be fine, if only individuals were involved. Think of what your plan would mean for businesses, governments, charities, etc.
Lets say I run a business selling some service. A potential customer wants to ask a question and tries to email me. Your system would block me from getting the email till I authenticated them. Now I spend more time authenticating email than I do running my business. Not an effective, or efficient use of time and resources. - NJank, on 04/16/2009, -0/+3and Scarlet Letters for those who click on stuff and make it profitable.
- Psara, on 04/16/2009, -0/+3I wonder what the carbon footprint for duplicate articles is...
- inactive, on 04/16/2009, -0/+3They must, otherwise they wouldn't do it. The world is full of retards who respond to this stuff.
- neillawson, on 04/16/2009, -0/+3African children should be thankful they don't have computers
- draxenato, on 04/16/2009, -0/+3That's not quite true. The machines used to generate and send the spam use power. The mail relays they use, the routers they go through, the servers they wind up on and the finally the clients machines all have to process that crap. Bandwidth is consumed, maybe causing a backup line to kick in. CPU cycles are used which draw power in their own right but also increase the load on the routers relays and servers, which generates heat which has to be cooled. It's micro-amps to be sure but it does add up, 62 trillion times.
- wthulhu, on 08/29/2009, -0/+3My grandma would fall for that. And probably has. She'll click and do anything if something is telling her to do it.
what a nightmare. - neillawson, on 04/16/2009, -1/+469
- Haplo, on 04/16/2009, -0/+3Oh, wow. Do we now get those annoying elitists slashdot ***** here as well? This was maybe funny last century, but it was getting old in 2001.
- Rudegar, on 04/16/2009, -0/+3plus the power saved by ½ of nigeria turning off the computer and getting out and do stuff in the nice weather :)
- neillawson, on 04/16/2009, -0/+3Not mine...
- remino, on 04/16/2009, -0/+3Why aren't anyone talking about all the junk we get by post mail? Flyers, pamphlets, credit cards... Surely, that can't be helping either.
- chrismartens26, on 04/16/2009, -0/+3When you look at how much space a typical spam email takes up, it is generally just a few KB because most of them are just a bit of text and a link to somewhere. Most stopped including any type of pictures or attachments. Even when multiplied by trillions, those few KB barely stack up to video streaming, pictures, torrents, online advertisements, etc.
- juliohm, on 04/16/2009, -0/+3I completely agree. Social networks based on trust have been around for a number of years now. No one complains to the fact we have to verify the identity of a person on Facebook/MySpace/Whatever before we start receving crap from them. Personally, I don't care if I get crap messages from people, as long as I know who they are.
Hitting the trillion spam mark should really serve as warning to how inefficiently the Internet is being used today. Seriously... 62 TRILLION! And all that spam is created by what... 0.001% of all users of the web. How much worse does it have to get?
I don't think it matters how great your anti-spam algorith works... with hundreds of trillions of spam messages you are bound to miss thousands or millions as false negatives. Of course there are stupid/naive people all around, but leaving things as they are, completely unregulated and wide open will only make things worse as time goes by. -
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