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Spam
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- Subject: Spam
- From: "Stefan Bechtold" <stef@n-bechtold.com>
- Date: Sun, 3 Mar 2002 16:52:26 -0800
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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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