A Bounty on Spammers (CIO Insight) [LWN.net]

A Bounty on Spammers (CIO Insight)

Posted Sep 26, 2002 8:37 UTC (Thu) by rmdirms (guest, #2659)
Parent article: A Bounty on Spammers (CIO Insight)

I'm pretty much all for a bounty, too. However, I can see some serious privacy issues here. In order to make the bounty validt, the true identity of the originator of the spam MUST be unequivocably known. Since many misconfiugred servers or hapless victims abound, then ALL machines's CPUs or NICs (non-changeable) would have to be known. It's bad enough that our SSN is used for utilities and telco billing, even for cable subscriptions.

So, while I DO support bounties (why not create a company called: CORRUPT CEO BOUNTY HUNTER CORPORATION to go after some dirty bastards pillaging their companies, lying to the public and the investors, fudging numbers, and more.. I suspect that at least 80% of US corporations engage in this, heck, maybe even my prior employers. After all, most corps despise government intervention, so it is not out of the realm of possibility that MOST if not all US companies regularly engage in deception, deceit, misstatements, off-shore hiding, and more, even round-tripping on their books. If this is true in the chips and networking industry, some MAJOR shockwaves will thunder their butts out of the circut pathways...)

Anyway, a friend of mine who got laid off also is thinking of a corrupt ceo bounty hunter plan...) the use or support of bounties would imply a massive rethink and concession to the loss of anonymity (relative anonymity), the loss of anonymizers, and maybe even 1984 style laws. Maybe the ISPs would be the waystation for fingerprint access to bband, DSL, or dialup access, instead of the use of passwords. Then, there'll be laws that every transmission must be tied to a sender, via retina, thumb (or other digit/finge recorded by the US states' DMV field offices...) to make sure the senders are found...

Just some thoughts.. I am REALLY tired and need some serious sleep...

Regards,

David Syes

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A Bounty on Spammers (CIO Insight)

Posted Sep 27, 2002 20:32 UTC (Fri) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

I don't see why one has to tag the originator of spam in Email.

Spam is made to sell something. It doesn't matter who sends it, eventually the responsibility lies with the originator. To make a buck the originator must include contact information in the spam, phone numbers, email, or URLs. This contact information can be used to track the spammer down by law enforcement.

As for your other comments, as a CEO, I won't answer on them...

Cheers, Joachim

No, better sender information is still needed

Posted Sep 28, 2002 20:09 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

>This contact information can be used to track the spammer down by
>law enforcement.

This misses the point of the article, that enforcement would be done by private individuals (with the help of civil courts), and the point of the comment, which is that this means private individuals would have to have more information about other people than perhaps they should have.

I don't see anything wrong with having an anonymous email option. As with the properly labelled advertising emails, I would route all my anonymous email to a bin where I would scan it quickly every day or two, while leaving my regular mailbox open for mails that deserve my full and immediate attention. Much as my telephone routes anonymous calls to voicemail.

(I have email routing like that set up today, but due to the lack of clear labelling, it uses a formula that sometimes routes important email to the bulk bin).