spam, was Horrible Service Agreements

Root netsurf at sersol.com
Tue Dec 2 06:49:02 UTC 1997



On Mon, 1 Dec 1997, John R Levine wrote:
> > The lack of freedom of press for those who don't own the press also
> > was a social problem.  As well as lack of clean water.
> > 
> > Are you're going to tell that political methods solved those problems?
> > To solve them the societies needed the technology first.

But it was laws that curbed junk-faxing, not technology.  Nobody modified
their fax machines to stop people from UCF - fear of prosecution did the
trick.  

If laws are written right you could at least (1) hold any U.S. business
responsible for spam promoting their business (2) protect
backbone providers from suit for blackholing spamhaus and (3) provide for
prosecution of providers such as AGIS, ACIS, Bell Atlantic etc. who refuse
to act against these electronic-resource thiefs.  If a provider is given
notice to shutdown a spammer within x number of days or be penalized for
not complying it could quickly become very difficult to keep a link.  For
the rest without web sites/email start levying heavy taxes and fines
against them and sick the IRS on them to collect.  In fact if there was a
$10 advertisement tax fee for each spam it would probably be the end of a
lot of it.  

Or we could come up with a combination of law and technology somewhere in
the middle with the same results and less government.  But the providers
who knowingly continue to allow spam to spew from their networks need to
be held accountable.  (The "habitual spamhaus", not the providers who act
upon reports of UCE.)  

How difficult would it be technically to have a filter at your gateway
that would shut down or throttle this kind of emailing without killing
performance?  Could it be done in a future flavor of BGP?  Statistically
by AS perhaps?  

-
James Wilson





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