Music to the Ears
Ah, you love to hear stories like this one: mass spammer gets sentenced to nine years in prison for sending 53,000 junk emails in a manner violating anti-spam laws. Unfortunately, it’s not completely good news. First, the sentence is being delayed on appeal because of questions about the constitutionality of the new law (you can guess where I stand on that issue). It is possible that this particular scumbag will get his conviction thrown out, and if not, the judge has even stated that he may reduce the sentence anyway. And even if he does go to prison, that will not stem the tide of spam sent to your mailbox or mine; the law can only apply within the U.S., even just within some states, and spammers in other countries may spew away with glee. At best, the local spammers will be inconvenienced and will have to move offshore; however, it is not really comforting to us that the slimeballs will being doing their work from the Cayman Islands rather than from North Carolina.
Worse news still: reports say that by sending out as many as 10 million spams a day, this subhuman crud (is my annoyance with these people showing?) was able to make up to $750,000 a month. I knew that there were enough idiots out there who not only read spam but answer it as well to make spamming profitable, but I am dismayed that there are so many that the practice can be so wildly successful–and remember, the spammer got arrested and tried only because he didn’t identify himself correctly on the spam. Had he done so, it would have made no difference to those suffering from his onslaught, and he would still be doing it today, as so many others still are.
So, what is the answer? In my opinion, we should begin charging for email, but only in a way that hits spammers. Here’s how it works. A new email network gets set up alongside the old one. But to use the new one, you have to put $5 down for your account. Whenever you send an email to someone, you are committed to pay them exactly one cent–but this money is only collected if the recipient claims the fee. For most personal and business messages, the recipient will not claim the fee, so your $5 is never touched. Even if you get charged every once in a while, the cost to you would be negligible. Spam, however, can be automatically filtered and marked “charge the recipient,” and even when it isn’t, just zapping a few dozen spam messages by hand could earn you a quarter or two from the spammers in the short time it takes to send them to your junk mail box. At the end of a few months, you could buy yourself a nice dinner with the proceeds. The bastard who was sending 10 million spams a day would suddenly be liable to shell out $100,000 a day or get his email privileges revoked, and fast.
There would be setup and maintenance costs, to be sure–but if it could get rid of spammers, I’d be happy to pay the few bucks a year necessary to do the job–especially if blog comments and trackback pings could be added into the system somehow….
Well, its just a matter of time before things get straigtened out. Its a new medium, even at ten years old. International postal treaties just simply need to grow in sophistication to cover international spam.
Spaming is just a form of piracy. Like the original pirates, that might move to some temporary saftey on an island somewhere, but eventually, concern for international commerce and communications rubs them out. The Grand Caymans (not very grand after all is it) does not want to become a pariah nation – it has interests tied up in legitimate trade.
Much can be tied to a matter of intent. An intent to spam would send you to jail.
Eventually, the balance of stick and carrot chases most of these guys away – the stick of no refuge and brutal punishment versus the carrot of more legal forms of entreprenueralism.
As one local columnist has said, after interviewing police detectives and making wry observations, the old crooks used to hold up banks with a gun behind a mask or the more clever ones dig a tunnel into the banks vault, now the new crooks get a degree in law, and hold up banks with a subpena behind the mask of a class action law suit. While in spirit much the same thing, the outcome is much safer for the purpetrator to work inside the law.
Dear Luis,
What happened to the Expat? I miss it! Let us know in an additional comment here.
Thanks
Marina Mecl
Thanks for the note on the Expat. Right now, it is down because of unfortunately regular poor web host service. Every so many months, every single web host I’ve had has yanked one or more of my sites off the air. They often claim that it’s something innocuous (when they bother to give an explanation at all), but the most common claim is “we’ve changed our nameservers, didn’t you get the emails or read the notices in the user BBS? And of course they have never sent emails, and I have no intention of regularly sifting through their BBS to get announcements they should send to my registered contact email address. So the Expat is off the air and may be so for the next day or so.
But The Expat has been suffering from a slightly more serious problem as of late. It began when Sako Eaton contacted me about a year and a half ago and suggested that we start up a political blog for American Expats in Japan. So I got the domain name and started up the site–and Sako very soon thereafter got a new job that made it impossible for him to contribute. I was on my own for a long while until Yamantaka came along, and he helped sustain it until recently. But over time, I have been unable to get the contributors that I had hoped for, and despite Yamantaka’s frequent posts, The Expat did not become what I had hoped it would. For me, it was simply a place to cross-post duplicate copies of my political blog entries, and little else.
I notified Yamantaka a few weeks back that I was losing interest in the blog, and offered him the database to take for himself, either as a personal blog or to use it with others; so far, he has not given me an answer, though soon after I mentioned this to him, he stopped posting, save for one recent entry. So maybe he’s losing interest as well, or just doesn’t see himself as taking over the admin duties.
The Expat started up in August of 2003 (as a web site, that is), and the current web host deal and domain name registration is good to that month this year. Unless something unlikely happens, I will mothball the blog–but whether or not Yamantaka takes the blog database, I’m keeping the domain name. After all, short domain names are valuable, and “xpat.org” was a real find. As of August this year, I will carry the domain name onto my main web host, and depending on what time I have available, I might rework the site into something else, probably keeping the archived blog available in a subdirectory.
I am, however, still open to the idea of a multi-author political blog. At first, Sako’s and my idea was to limit it to Americans living in Japan, but I would be willing to expand that to either North Americans living anywhere abroad, English speakers living abroad, or even to a simply progressive-based blog with authors from anywhere. I’m open to suggestions.
By the way, if it wasn’t just Yamantaka you were hoping to hear from and just wanted to focus on my own political blogging, blocking out all the rest, simply change your bookmark from http://blogd.com to:
http://www.blogd.com/archives/cat__political_ranting.html
That’ll filter out all the non-political stuff.