On Thursday, July 31, 2003, at 09:12 AM, Lee Larson wrote:
> On Wednesday, July 30, 2003, at 10:04 PM, Jerry Yeager remonstrated:
Chuckle!!!! Did I come across as being severe? grin.
>
>> The end buyer (in the traditional advertising as you refer to it)
>> also pays for the advertising, it is a markup add-on that goes into
>> calculating the retail product price. See a commercial on regular
>> broadcast tv and buy the product? Part of the money you spend goes to
>> pay for the commercial (both making it and airing it) that sold you
>> the product. So really you get to pay twice, once for wasting the
>> time watching (or listening if you are a radio fan) commercials, then
>> again when you do buy something. Advertisers don't absorb that cost
>> as just part of doing business.
>
> But, in the traditional case, you only pay when you buy. In the spam
> case, you pay whether or not you buy. I don't like paying with time
> and disk space for breast enlargement ads, although I'm happily
> expecting that shipment of uncut Nigerian diamonds to arrive any day
> now.
>
Did you order that to be shipped via ground?
>
>>> I think the ultimate solution to spam will be some sort of
>>> micro-payment scheme in which it costs perhaps a fraction of a cent
>>> to send an e-mail. This will go unnoticed by most of us, but will
>>> end up costing spammers real money when they start sending a million
>>> messages. I'm sure the ISPs would like to start collecting 1/100
>>> cent for every message sent through their servers.
>>>
>>
>> I like the idea as a starting place, but how do you avoid the problem
>> gateway maintainers holding email hostage until the tax is paid? Who
>> would be responsible for doing the bookkeeping? Also with the
>> additional overhead for accounting is a charge of 1/100 cent per
>> message realistically achievable or would it end up being more like 2
>> or 3 cents per message? Lastly, this would slow down the small shops
>> that employ spammers, but how effective would it be against larger
>> outfits, other than making them insist that spammers are more careful
>> at verifying email address before the junk is sent.
>
> I think it can be done more or less automatically on the backbones.
> That's what computers are good at doing. Suppose everyone paid an
> Internet "tax" of $10 per year linked to a personal account. Every
> e-mail linked to that account debits the $10 by $0.001. That would let
> you send 10,000 e-mails before the $10 runs out. Without a valid
> return address, mail can't be charged and can't be sent. Use open key
> crypto to avoid spoofing. (It's about time everyone got a key pair,
> anyway.) Use the money to finance Internet research and the e-mail
> system; it's about time we started rolling out IPv6.
>
IPv6 would help in in many ways beyond what you are suggesting here
(heck we might even be able to stop a virus attack at the source!). I
really like the idea, but I do think that implementing it would cause
someone in the middle to squawk loudly, and then silencing them would
only be done by raising the fees (and the money marked for research
would disappear). Case in point: Network Solutions, now a semi-private
organization, was created by Congress as an entity to regulate the
internet. Monies flowing into it were supposed to go to research.
Instead the monies seem to be funding some very nice pensions for the
board of directors some of whom apparently very seldom direct.
> If spammers had to verify the addresses to which they were sending
> their stuff, the problem would go away instantly. I'm getting spam on
> my cell phone because they don't have to verify addresses. They just
> send to all 10,000 addresses of the form 502741nnnn at vzw.com and
> automatically pick up the few cases where nnnn works out to be a real
> phone number. The others are just part of the non-cost of doing
> business because it's there's no cost for trolling.
>
Yeah that is what I was referring to by the idea would slow down the
small shops that employ the spammers, but the bigger ones will stay in
business (casinos are big businesses as is the porn industry), I think
it would just cause them to change the approach slightly but not enough
to keep the junk out of our inboxes.
Jerry
>
>
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>
| The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will
| be August 26. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>.
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