[OFF-TOPIC] spam and all that (was: Re: [MPlayer-dev-eng] to michael)

[Romain Dolbeau]

Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski <dominik at rangers.eu.org> wrote:

> Spammers operate so quickly that by the time you react to a spam outburst,
> millions of e-mails will already be banging at mailservers all around the
> world and the spammer will already be gone.

I'm not dumb you know, I know how spammers work.

> So, are you willing to pay for everyone's wasted bandwith when we turn off
> the filters? If not, come up with a better way to keep the Internet clean
> of spam or STFU.

The usual argument. Short-term neofascist solutions where only big name
ISPs can send mails, and a complete refusal to try and understand why
it's wrong and why a better solutions should be investigated. It's so
much easier to simply block and go home.

The better solution is easy : educate the end-users on one side (to make
UCEs a losing money operation), and on the other get the governements of
the world to sit at a table and outlaw UCEs worlwide and establish an
interpol division with the manpower to do something about spam.

Don't tell me it's utopic, I know it already. But I'll never accept
neofascism and privately established censorship as valid solutions.

(and I think we really should stop polluting the list with a completely
irrelevant flamefest, so I won't be posting on this list on that subject
any more).

-- 
Romain Dolbeau
<romain at dolbeau.org>