Bloody Vikings

Amadán is sick of spam.

In the meantime, though, I am deleting anywhere from 3 to 20 posts a day from [expletive deleted] spammers. And the effort it takes to prune any blog comments of comment-spam is a significant discouragement. I would really, really, really like to see some innovative technology developed to do something to those [expletive deleted]. Imagine what the computing power of the NSA could accomplish if turned to good

A couple of days ago I found out that all (legitimate) mail to me from The Phoenyx was bouncing because of a new spam-filtering technique implemented by my hosting provider, which was unfortunately generating too many false positives.

Patrick Niesen Hayden of Making Light has been hit by 2500 email spams, almost all of which are bounces caused by the spammer faking his email as the reply address. Commenter Erik V. Olson remarks:

For all intents and purposes, the spammers have won. Nobody talks about stopping them, we all merely talk about how we shuck and jive and filter and block to keep email a valid means of communication, and more and more people are deciding that this is way too much effort for way too little gain.

I'm still fighting, with my own mailserver, but this domain will be my last one ever. If it gets spammed into oblivion, then I'm off the net, because I have better things to do than maintain block lists and spam filters, and [expletive deleted] if I'm paying for bandwidth so that the spammers can spam me.

I think any serious attempt to reclaim the Internet from the spammers can't just focus on improved blocking and filtering techniques. It's got to focus just as much on shutting down the spammers. Let's have enough spammers in jail (or messily murdered) that the rest are sufficiently discouraged and find some other avenue of employment.

I don't think you can make 'spamming' illegal as such; I think 'Opt In' vs. 'Opt Out' vs. 'Existing Business Relationships' contains too many grey areas to be meaningfully legislated for, as well as raising some free speech issues. What I would like to see is a lot of the methods and techniques used by the worst spammers made extremely illegal across all nations connected to the internet. I'm talking about the sorts of things no legitimate business could defend using, but without which the current level of large-scale spamming would be impossible.

Things like the following:

• Deliberate repeat violation of the TOS (Terms of Service) of any internet provider.
• Use of somebody else's email address as fake return address.
• Use of false personal information when registering a domain.
• Use of any insecure third-party proxy servers without permission of the owner.
• Not just the creation or deployment of viruses to create 'zombie nets' (which is probably already illegal), but the use of these zombie bots.

I'd also like to see all existing laws regarding hacking and DDOS attacks specifically exclude sites run and owned by known spammers.