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Spam



Hier mal eine erfrischend andere Sicht zum Thema Spam von John Gilmore:

> To: declan@well.com, gnu@toad.com
> Subject: What to do about spam in general?  Use reader-oriented tools.
> In-reply-to: <5.1.0.14.0.20020228091447.00aaf810@mail.well.com>
> Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002 15:23:03 -0800
> From: John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>
> X-UIDL: 6bd80e4b026e0f30ba641a9bd6afdd04
> 
> It may be stupid for politicians to send spam, because it is 
> unpopular, but is it illegal?  In California, it is only 
> illegal to send unsolicited *advertisements*.  Political 
> speech, including requests for votes, would not seem to fall 
> into that category.  And if you have ever voted for a 
> Democratic candidate, or talked with a Democratic politician, 
> you have had prior contact with the Democratic party, so a 
> message sent by them isn't unsolicited, by the legal 
> definition (in California Business & Professions code section 
> 17538.4).
> 
> EFF has long advised against anti-spam laws, partly because 
> state after state makes the same kind of mistakes.  What is 
> objectionable about "spam" is that it is uninteresting to the 
> recipient and sent in bulk.  Whether it is an ad, a plea for 
> charitable donations, a call for political action, a request 
> for votes, a patriotic declaration during a national 
> emergency, or an incomprehensible rant, people don't want to 
> see it in their mailbox.  That doesn't mean it should be a 
> crime or a tort to send it.  Furthermore, singling out 
> particular categories of messages BASED ON THEIR CONTENT is 
> far more likely to be unconstitutional, yet the laws 
> invariably distinguish ads from other bulk messages.  These 
> laws also bring up harsh jurisdictional issues: if California 
> can legitimately impose rules on what everyone in the country 
> or world can send to Californians, then Bolivia or Palestine 
> or France can do the same to American email senders -- of all 
> kinds of email, not just bulk mail.  And if California can't 
> impose local rules on non-locals, then those who want to 
> evade the local rules will simply send their messages from 
> another jurisdiction.
> 
> The part that virtually nobody understands is that spam isn't 
> going to go away.  It's like the drug war -- the more you 
> ratchet up the penalties against innocent people, the more 
> innocent people are hurt
> -- but there's still money in it for the malicious.  People 
> are clearly sending spam because it works for their purposes: 
> even if it pisses off 99.99% of recipients, they make back 
> their costs and more, from the tiny minority who DID wish to 
> receive it.
> 
> We have built a communication system that lets anyone in the 
> world send information to anyone else in the world, arriving 
> in seconds, at any time, at an extremely low and falling 
> cost.  THIS WAS NOT A MISTAKE!  IT WAS NOT AN ACCIDENT!  The 
> world collectively has spent trillions of dollars and 
> millions of person-years, over hundreds of years, to build 
> this system -- because it makes society vastly better off 
> than when communication was slow, expensive, regional, and 
> unreliable.  150 years ago, warriors killed civilians and 
> each other for months after the combatants had signed peace 
> treaties, because the news of peace had not reached them yet. 
>  Even a decade ago, a friend of mine died of a rare cancer, 
> because the existing Japanese research paper that showed how 
> to treat it wasn't findable in time by his US doctors.  These 
> are just the tiny tip of an iceberg of problems and 
> inefficiencies that rapid cheap worldwide communication has solved.
> 
> Yet despite this immense value, it should not surprise us 
> that most of the things that others would want to say to us 
> are not things that we wish to hear -- just as we don't want 
> to read the vast majority of the books published, or the 
> newspaper articles.  The solution is not to demand that 
> senders never initiate contact with recipients -- nor to 
> demand that senders have intimate knowledge of the 
> preferences of recipients.  Neither of these "solutions" 
> produces a workable society; they also violate freedom of 
> association, speech, and privacy.
> 
> Nor is it a workable solution to impose liability for 
> unwanted communications on intermediaries such as ISPs or 
> mail forwarders; that's just "shooting the messenger", and 
> encourages the intermediaries to do even stupider things than 
> the endpoints.  As an example, dozens of my friends who 
> happen to have addresses at Earthlink simply cannot receive 
> personal emails from me.  When they send me emails, I can't 
> reply.  Earthlink has decided that as an intermediary it is 
> going to censor the email its customers can read, and has 
> also decided that I am a suitable object of their censorship. 
> I have tried, and Earthlink customers have tried, to get this 
> fixed; Earthlink refuses.  Perhaps their Scientologist 
> founder takes a perverse pleasure in censoring an EFF 
> co-founder's personal email.  At any rate, I have no recourse 
> to this blockage except to use some other form of 
> communication (like phones or postal mail) to persuade my 
> friends to stop being Earthlink customers, so I can swap 
> email with them again.  (I could trivially circumvent their 
> blocking technology, but that wouldn't solve the social 
> problem -- which is that they feel justified in deliberately 
> censoring their customers' communications, even against their 
> customers' wishes.)
> 
> What makes the Internet so valuable to everyday people is 
> that you can reach anyone, on ANY email system, through it.  
> There were many email systems before the Internet, but they 
> didn't catch the broad public interest.  If we continue the 
> current process of anti-spam-driven Balkanization (I can send 
> email to Joe, and he can send to Nancy, but I can't send to 
> Nancy myself, because Nancy's ISP is filtering me), we will 
> destroy the value that we created when we linked all these 
> networks with a common email protocol.  We might as well go 
> back to having separate un-linked networks, like MCI Mail and 
> Compuserve and AOL and UUCP and BITNET and FidoNet.  You'd 
> just have to become a customer of that provider, and use its 
> idiosyncratic interface, if you want to send mail to its 
> customers.  Remember that world?  If not, you're lucky.  But 
> your luck is running out, because the "solutions" that people 
> continue proposing and backing and implementing to "the spam 
> problem" will result in that.
> 
> THE REAL SOLUTION is to build and use mail-reading tools that 
> learn the reader's preferences, discarding or de-prioritizing 
> mail that the reader is unlikely to care about.  Every person 
> can choose what
> tool(s) they want to use to read their email.  This is a very close
> relationship; I spend hours every day with my mail-reading 
> software. Most of the info is already there about what I 
> prefer, based on what I do with each message as I see it; the 
> software just has to start remembering and using it -- unlike 
> the extremely uninformed relationship between you and 
> everyone who might want to send you email.  If your software 
> throws away an important message, you have nobody to blame 
> but yourself (or your vendor), and you have the ability to 
> fix the problem (perhaps by changing vendors).  If your 
> software shows you too many uninteresting messages, again you 
> have both the incentive and the ability to fix it yourself.  
> Your preferences are kept locally, under your control, rather 
> than having your detailed "profile of interests" handed over 
> to people like advertisers, governments, or your 
> (kind-hearted I'm sure) ISP.  In such a system, knowledge of 
> your interests will only be used to benefit YOU, not those 
> third parties.  You don't need to let anyone else know that 
> you have a fetish for shiny leather boots, or that you 
> secretly like People magazine.  This is a far better solution 
> than trying to impose the cost of "filtering out the mail 
> that you wish not to see" on your ISP, on every other ISP in 
> the world, or on every other sender in the world.
> 
> Also, such mail-reading tools provide far more useful 
> capabilities than merely filtering out spam.  Have you ever 
> dropped out of a high- volume mailing list because you really 
> only cared about a fraction of the messages in it?  A 
> competent interest-based reader would let you still read the 
> fraction which you care about, while shielding you from the 
> intermingled irrelevant messages.
> 
> Being the sort of person who puts his money where his mouth 
> is, I have been funding a talented programmer to build such a 
> mail reader, called "grokmail".  It lets me assign interest 
> rankings to each email message, applies those rankings to 
> each word in the message, and combines these word rankings to 
> find new incoming messages I'm likely to be interested in.  
> It can keep multiple interest contexts (like work-related 
> messages, those from personal friends, relating to hobbies, 
> etc).  It will be free software, once it works well enough 
> that its author wouldn't spend all his time doing tech 
> support rather than development.  It is research -- barely a 
> prototype now, and I don't even know if the current design 
> will turn out to ultimately select the messages I really want 
> to see.  But at least I'm trying to solve the real problem -- 
> while meanwhile fending off the rabid anti-spammers who try 
> to censor me or get me kicked off the Internet for 
> disagreeing with their approach.
> 
> This overload problem is not unique to email; it will come up 
> with instant messaging, with phone calls, with postal mail, 
> and with any other medium whose costs drop and whose reach 
> improves.  I'm sure the intelligence agencies have this 
> problem in spades -- though as with encryption, they aren't 
> sharing their technology with the rest of society, even 
> though the benefits to the rest of society far outweigh the 
> minor problems caused by releasing the technology.
> 
> A hundred research labs and companies should also be 
> experimenting with various approaches to solving similar 
> problems, so that we as a society can continue to shrink the 
> costs and increase the bandwidth of our communication 
> capabilities, without drowning ourselves in irrelevant information.
> 
> Instead 99.9% of the energy goes into blacklisting 
> technologies, censorship laws, and bitching about what other 
> people are "doing to us" by sending us email.  Redirecting 
> even a tenth of this effort toward real reader-oriented 
> solutions will invigorate our world society, by enabling 
> every person on earth to make more effective use of our 
> existing and upcoming communication tools.
> 
> 	   John Gilmore
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------
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