[4118] in comp.os.os2.announce archive
COOA: EDITORIAL: They've Painted A Bullseye on You
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mick Brown)
Fri Jun 5 02:09:06 1998
To: os2ann.DISCUSS@bloom-picayune.mit.edu
Date: Thu, 28 May 1998 02:20:54 -0400
From: mick.brown@newsguy.com (Mick Brown)
Reply-To: mick.brown@newsguy.com
[followups set to news.admin.net-abuse.email]
A long, long, looong time ago ...
I went to a small prep school in Washington State. I also took 21 credits
in mathematics at St. Martin's College which shared the same campus.
Thereafter I went on to attend a famous university in New England.
Last Summer I was contacted by representatives of both colleges Alumni.
Small college's rep discussed some of the changes on campus, requested a
donation, and wished me swift recovery after I indicated that I lived on a
small disability pension and could not contribute. A couple months later
another rep contacted me and we had another pleasant conversation.
Famous college was having a $1.25 billion fund raising drive. The famous
college rep: "Your classmates are giving $1000, can I record your donation
in that amount?" ME: "I'm living on a small disability pension and cannot
contribute." REP: "... $500? ..." ME: "I cannot afford to give anything"
... and so on until the amount was down to $25 or $50. I told the
representative "Please don't call again for donations."
Famous university called again 3 more times. The calls didn't vary. On the
fourth call I blew up and used language I don't normally use and yelled "No
more calls ever" into the handset. IIRC the alumni magazine reported $1/4
billion more than goal was raised.
St. Martin's College handled their solicitations with class--when I am back
at work I *will* send some money their way. OTOH, Famous college's alumni
magazine called the campaign a resounding success, I had other words. Famous
college made me feel like a piece of meat, and I suspect the alumni reading
the scripts over the phone were not personally enriched by substituting for
voice mail.
=========================================================================
This weekend www.iwsc.com / www.1worldcenter.com a IBM Bestteam associate
sent spam to the COOA submissions address and the COOA contact address.
The submissions address never has posted anywhere. The other address has not
posted anywhere in the past 6 months except the Hellenistic Greek language
elist IOUDAIOS.
Since the submissions address was spammed, I assume they scraped the address
from comp.os.os2.announce posts or DejaNews USENET archives or my inactive
website. The spam forged headers and falsely implicated PSI.net origin. IBM
has sent me emails deploring the incident, and said IWSC promises not to do
it again. But I have not heard from the folks at IWSC.
You can contact IWSC at: sales@iwsc.com and webmaster@iwsc.com. If you wish
to send spam complaints send a copy with full headers to fraud@uu.net and
uce@ftc.gov .
===========================================================================
I chose to become moderator of this group to help publicize OS/2, and
because I enjoy reading the advertisements which occupy a large portion of
this newsgroup. My addresses in the footers of messages are to aid
potential COOA posters, not an invitation to every would be entrepreneur or
scam artist.
Ads are an important means of communication. Business interests and
advertising help make the internet an interesting place by supporting the
infrastructure and paying content providers. But many mistrust the internet
because of the incessant outpouring of spam, from the scammers, from the
clueless mom and pop business who bought the spammer lies, from greedy
salesdroids at Symantec, AT&T, and other large companies who have tested the
spamming waters. After a while many people get to the point that they abandon
public discussion areas and hide their contact addresses on their home pages
because they are afraid their addresses will be harvested by yet another
spammer.
My definition of spam is Unsolicited Bulk Email. Spammers are not just the
porn peddlers, chain letter distributors, and obvious frauds. Spammers have
always included folks who just want to make an honest living.
Most of these mom and pop spammers had been sold a line about how easy it
was to market on the internet by some web hosting company and were
disappointed when the world didn't beat a path to their door. Then they
noticed the spam in their boxes. Some of it claimed to be courses in
internet marketing or to be an offer from a internet marketing company. So
they hired a marketer or bought a do-it-yourself marketing kit. The kit or
the marketer explained the benefits of email advertising, compared it to
paper based junk mail... used the magic words "huge list of carefully
targeted potential buyers deliverable for a less than a penny per name" and
shortly, yet another spam landed in tens of thousands of email boxes. Rarely
does the spam result in many sales. Often these folks lose their host for
contract violations and may be "fined" or assessed clean up fees.
Spamming appears incredibly attractive on a cost per name basis. Once you
buy suitable software you can send several hundred thousand emails in a
couple hours on a 28800 connection. This is precisely why unsolicited bulk
mail is bad. If you allow some UBE, then many of the 10,000,000 new
businesses will want to send UBE also, not to mention missionaries,
politicians, etc. Currently, with folks working hard to filter UBE, fine
senders, etc. the amounts of UBE are causing meltdowns of marginal servers,
bounced email due to full boxes, overloaded servers, and erratic throughput
for web and FTP access because circuits and servers are too busy processing
largely unwanted messages. If only 1% of those businesses 100,000 people
per year decided to send UBE that would mean you would have to wade through
about 300 spams a day. That is assuming that there would be enough mail
servers capable of sustaining that much email traffic.
The US Senate has attached an rider to the popular anti-slamming bill.
IMHO, it will increase spam by placing meaningless restrictions on
unsolicited bulk emailing. Essentially the bill at present gives spammers
the right to spam you until you send a remove request, and has no bars to
reselling or trading your address to another spammer. You will have to
remove yourself from each spammers' lists, and since it will be legal,
millions of new mom and pop spammers will hit your boxes who had not
considered spamming previously. For further discussion and analysis see
http://www.ybecker.net and http://www.cauce.org .
Big companies like AT&T and Symantec have already spammed email. Also
the FBI http://www.firstbase.com/fbi.htm , and would be politicians. The 27th
May New York Times CyberTimes section discusses a planned spam in California.
Spam drove me off AOL, and drives many new users off the internet entirely.
People have reported that jobs have been lost because some clueless
supervisor found porn spam in someone's inbox. Spam has caused my desired
email to bounce by filling my mail quota or overloading servers at three of
my ISPs. Erols and AOL indicate that part of their price increases are due to
spam volume. Spam costs ISPs $2 of your $20 monthly fees
http://www.techweb.com/se/directlink.cgi?INW19980504S0003 ... even more if
you have to pay telco charges. Spam knocked PacBell's servers out and
required a $500,000 server upgrade. This Spring spammers so messed up
Netcom's mail that I received one spam 1 month after he sent it through
Netcom's servers.
James Cooley calls this the "Spammish Inquisition." Another calls spammers
"the paparazzi of the net." Spammers diminish your freedom by eroding your
privacy. Spammers get your addresses from USENET posts, unsecured email
lists, message boards, resume sites, IRC, finger, visits to web or FTP
sites, entries found on dejanews, altavista, whowhere, four11, Internic
registries, profiles on AOL and other online services. Some spammers go out
and deliberately remove your spam-block from your addresses and sell them
for a premium, and newer spamware versions will automatically remove the
most common spamblocks.
If you post to a newsgroup or mailing list, you reasonably expect personal
responses or tips related to your post (or even a flame), but you don't
expect to find offers from Symantec, Tiffany's phonesex, Maine Lobsters,
Seattle's Aurora Nissan Dealership, etc. Having a website is not grounds for
endless streams of MCI's Owlsnest.com and similar spammers selling you
overpriced packages to promote your site and "stuff" the search engines.
Entering a IRC Chat or a MUD should not subject you to someone's bot
directing you to a smut site ...
Those who market "marketing services" have targeted your inbox, and Congress
appears about to take away your right to choose until after spammers fire the
first shot at the bullseye on your wallet.
As one marketing spam noted: "Email is the ultimate marketing medium. Joe
Mailbox has no choice, he can't chuck it in the trash unread, he can't press
a mute button, he can't hang up the phone... he MUST read at least some of
your ad or risk trashing personal email... and it's FREE!"
On 21 May William Safire wrote an article "Essay, Freedom = Privacy" in the
_New York Times_.
"We punish criminals by taking away their freedom and most of their
privacy. ... but their punishment is the denial of freedom.
... snipped
Carry this reasonable expectation [of privacy] into your own home.
Suppose you use your credit card to pay for a porno flick; you don't
expect this to make you a target for late-night calls from every smut
peddler who buys your number from the plastic list. Or suppose you are
surfing the Internet; you don't want your curiosity monitored by a
cyberstalker who makes you a target of telemarketers."
-- Mick Brown
We are not criminals, why can't we just say NO to spam?
http://www.customforum.com/pro_internet
Message board, chat room, and links to resources for keeping the net usable
