The Pessimist

I've been hearing in the news lately that we are losing the war. Three years ago, war was declared -- on SPAM (bet you didn't see that coming). Bill Gates declared that SPAM would be defeated within two years.

And actually, some progress was made. After a couple of years, the quantity of SPAM actually decreased for the first time ever. Shutting down source sites and identifying SPAM mail early and deleting it before it was propagated were two techniques that started to turn the tide.

But the bad guys are ever clever and ever adaptive. They got around being IDed by sending their sputum via stolen PC resources. Instead of originating from a server, which could be shut down, they used viruses and trojans to create a clone army of unwitting PCs to do their bidding. They got around having their messages identified by hiding them in images. The text of the SPAM is now in gif files, which are harder to identify than text messages. And to make them even harder to identify, they vary a few pixels in each image, meaning there is no "fingerprint" to be used to delete the millions of similar messages. They used judo on the spam cops. Like captcha (the image of text characters you are asked to identify when you register for a blog comment or forum site, or whatever --that a human can read but that a robot can't), these image spam are difficult for robo-cops to identify.

So now more SPAM than ever is reaching our in-boxes. Thanks fuckers. The laws need to be changed so that the penalty for making money off of SPAM is made stiffer. Something like:

• forfeiture of all of your worldly possessions
• imprisonment in a gibbet without food or water until dead
• the live streaming video of your death broadcast live over the internet as a message to other SPAMmers.

I think that might work. And to hell with extraterritorial jurisdiction. Make this a world law, enforceable where ever the SPAMmer is based -- offshore, Russia, Nigeria, where ever.

ThePessimist is optimistic that this might actually stop SPAM.