The Okopipi Project

The real, legal, Garanteed-To-Work answer to the spam problem is to change the economics of it.

I've long advocated reusable digital postage stamps - a cryptographic stamp with some nominal value ($0.02) could easily be attached to emails. This would make it easy for me to reject all mail which doesn't have a stamp.

If the stamps are 100% reusable then most mail is still free, you receive a mail, you send a mail. No cost.

Even if nobody ever sends you any email I'm sure there will be no end of people willing to give you stamps for free, eg. for watching adverts. Digital stamps might even lead to a new era of legitimate advertising via email where users get to keep the stamps sent to them by advertisers who run a real "opt-out" list.

The *only* people who'd be badly affected would be those who send a lot more mail than they receive and aren't willing to absorb the cost, ie. spammers.

Getting back to the subject: Yes, Microsoft could easily implement this, get a few big ISPs involved to give away free books of stamps to their users then solve the spam problem overnight via Windows update. With an open protocol/discussion then AOL, Mozilla, etc. would probably be finished coding before Microsoft is.

If anybody knows a good reason why this isn't being done, I'd like to hear it.

"Does anyone actually know someone that has ever bought something from a spam email?"

Yes. A lady whose neighborhood I used to live in actually called me up and paid me (I'm a consultant) to hook up a "mini digital camera" to her computer. She paid $40 for it, it was worth maybe $3. Held 12 pictures, excruciatingly low resolution. When I asked her where she got it from: "Oh I got this email, let me show you."

This is a lady who, while a tad on the nutty side, is middle class and works the back end of her husband's business - a business which allowed them to live in the house they live in, which is pretty nice.

On a similar note, when we were at closing for our house, our agent was asking me about spyware something or other. She had got hit with Winfixer (I think that's the name), paid the $40 to some company for removal software, which of course didn't remove the thing which prompted her to pay out in the first place. Again, middle-class, not stupid.

People do these things all the time.

Yes, but there's a BIG difference between a law existing and actually being prosecuted.

Sites like Fark and Slashdot take down websites every single day of the week. None of the people who run them are in jail.

Downloading a few hundred images off a site you've got a written invitation to go visit isn't "terrorism" by any stretch of the imagination.

Even if we assume that both the site/spammer fall under American law (unlikely) then how exactly would a spammer bring charges? Is he going to go to the police and say "Hey, some people are attacking my site which sells illegal stuff"?

I'm sure spammers will make a LOT of noise about how DDOS attacks are illegal and how all Black Frog users are going to jail, but it's not going to happen in practice.

Um, look at the IP address? Most spam sites seems to have adverts which say "find nymphos in " these days, we can do the same.

This is also a problem even if you do "one spam, one complaint". A Spammer could use the network against you by spamming people with the web page of a legitimate site. If Black Frog then attacks the site it could generate a lot of bad publicity even though it's demonstrably the spammers' fault.

Creating a network of machines which can attack a web site needs to be done carefully and with strong safeguards.

Forget the Marquis Of Queensbury rules. I want Atilla the Hun. That's the only way to decimate the parasites.