Thursday, January 08, 2004
Spam
I realized that the few posts have been a bit more serious than I ever intended this blog to be. I actually had another topic in mind for my tone tonight, but I've decided to post something a little more lighthearted. Just because I say it's lighthearted, though, doesn't mean that I'm not as firm in my stance. And that stance is that spamming should be considered a felony.
This is not to minimize the heinousness of other felonies. But hear me out. First of all, think of spamming as theft. It's theft of time and bandwidth. As well all know, time is money, and, well, so is bandwidth. Grand larceny is a felony (I think, and I'm too lazy to look it up), so why isn't spamming on a large scale considered a felony?
To tell you the truth, I think spamming is a bit worse than grand larceny - in many cases of larceny, someone has to concoct a plan, and execute it - it takes at least a bit of work, and frankly, we're all pretty impressed by an enterprising thief. They definitely deserve bonus points for creativity. On the other hand, how easy is it to send out spam? It's absurdly easy to steal my time and inbox space. Not only that, but have you ever actually looked at most of the spam? It's usually the lamest advertising I've ever seen. Blatantly pandering and completely unoriginal, I don't even understand why it's ever effective at all. And there are usually tons of misspellings and plenty of broken links and low-quality graphics. Does anyone click on them? Maybe those people are the ones we should lock up - after all, if they didn't exist, then eventually no spam would ever be sent. Of course, because it's so easy to send, there's really no natural selection at work - TV commercials may be pretty uninspiring most of the time, but because there's a whole bunch of overhead in creating them, usually they're moderately interesting to watch at least once. But spam? It just sucks. And it needs to be eliminated.
Secondly (there's been a long delay since "first of all"), making it a felony would probably be a big enough deterrent to stop people. Most would likely still be able to get away with it, but would it really be worth it at that point? Would you risk going to jail for years at a time in order to send out a million penis enlargement advertisements? I know, I know, enforcement would be an issue, but just allocate one FBI dude to the problem and one prosecutor to the case. Even if there's a slight, but very concrete, risk of being convicted of a felony, it would be a deterrent.
The other approach is a technological one, and I've heard plenty of ideas. One idea is to make it more expensive in terms of computer cycles - if your computer has to waste some cycles performing a task in order to send out an email, then a spammer might not have the computational power to spam everyone, day and night. At the very least, it would stem the flow. I'm not sure how feasible this is - there's always a way around roadblocks you throw up on a network, and it also seems like it'll end up being more complicated than just requesting the solution to a problem before allowing the email through.
There used to be a silly email going around about how congress was going to pass an email tax. It was fake, of course (as are 99% of all forwards), but I'm not so sure it's a bad idea. I generally send email and get email from a relatively small group of people. Why not just use a "whitelist", you say? Well, frankly, I worry that if I get used to a whitelist, I might end up ignoring emails from people not on the whitelist - people who change their address, new people I meet, addresses I forget to include, etc. You might claim that there's a small risk of this, but it's larger than I'm willing to accept. Emailing programs are software - they should do what I want without me having to work too hard.
So, what if we all started using an email client that charged people, say, 1 cent (or even less), to send an email to someone? Now, if I know someone, I can tell my client to never charge them. This would be the equivalent of a whitelist. If I forget a couple of emails, no biggie - it's just a couple of cents. What about the people who I haven't yet met? Well, that's also just going to cost them a couple of cents to mail me, at least for the first time. And if my client's smart enough, maybe it'll automatically "whitelist" them if I reply to them. Maybe it'll end refund them the cost of sending the email - minus a small fee for the person who developed the software, of course.
It's probably not a foolproof system - go ahead and poke holes in it if you'd like, but I think it might be a start. But I write software by day - I'm certainly not going to be doing it as night as well. Instead, I'll be petitioning congress.
This is not to minimize the heinousness of other felonies. But hear me out. First of all, think of spamming as theft. It's theft of time and bandwidth. As well all know, time is money, and, well, so is bandwidth. Grand larceny is a felony (I think, and I'm too lazy to look it up), so why isn't spamming on a large scale considered a felony?
To tell you the truth, I think spamming is a bit worse than grand larceny - in many cases of larceny, someone has to concoct a plan, and execute it - it takes at least a bit of work, and frankly, we're all pretty impressed by an enterprising thief. They definitely deserve bonus points for creativity. On the other hand, how easy is it to send out spam? It's absurdly easy to steal my time and inbox space. Not only that, but have you ever actually looked at most of the spam? It's usually the lamest advertising I've ever seen. Blatantly pandering and completely unoriginal, I don't even understand why it's ever effective at all. And there are usually tons of misspellings and plenty of broken links and low-quality graphics. Does anyone click on them? Maybe those people are the ones we should lock up - after all, if they didn't exist, then eventually no spam would ever be sent. Of course, because it's so easy to send, there's really no natural selection at work - TV commercials may be pretty uninspiring most of the time, but because there's a whole bunch of overhead in creating them, usually they're moderately interesting to watch at least once. But spam? It just sucks. And it needs to be eliminated.
Secondly (there's been a long delay since "first of all"), making it a felony would probably be a big enough deterrent to stop people. Most would likely still be able to get away with it, but would it really be worth it at that point? Would you risk going to jail for years at a time in order to send out a million penis enlargement advertisements? I know, I know, enforcement would be an issue, but just allocate one FBI dude to the problem and one prosecutor to the case. Even if there's a slight, but very concrete, risk of being convicted of a felony, it would be a deterrent.
The other approach is a technological one, and I've heard plenty of ideas. One idea is to make it more expensive in terms of computer cycles - if your computer has to waste some cycles performing a task in order to send out an email, then a spammer might not have the computational power to spam everyone, day and night. At the very least, it would stem the flow. I'm not sure how feasible this is - there's always a way around roadblocks you throw up on a network, and it also seems like it'll end up being more complicated than just requesting the solution to a problem before allowing the email through.
There used to be a silly email going around about how congress was going to pass an email tax. It was fake, of course (as are 99% of all forwards), but I'm not so sure it's a bad idea. I generally send email and get email from a relatively small group of people. Why not just use a "whitelist", you say? Well, frankly, I worry that if I get used to a whitelist, I might end up ignoring emails from people not on the whitelist - people who change their address, new people I meet, addresses I forget to include, etc. You might claim that there's a small risk of this, but it's larger than I'm willing to accept. Emailing programs are software - they should do what I want without me having to work too hard.
So, what if we all started using an email client that charged people, say, 1 cent (or even less), to send an email to someone? Now, if I know someone, I can tell my client to never charge them. This would be the equivalent of a whitelist. If I forget a couple of emails, no biggie - it's just a couple of cents. What about the people who I haven't yet met? Well, that's also just going to cost them a couple of cents to mail me, at least for the first time. And if my client's smart enough, maybe it'll automatically "whitelist" them if I reply to them. Maybe it'll end refund them the cost of sending the email - minus a small fee for the person who developed the software, of course.
It's probably not a foolproof system - go ahead and poke holes in it if you'd like, but I think it might be a start. But I write software by day - I'm certainly not going to be doing it as night as well. Instead, I'll be petitioning congress.
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