Re: anti-spam collateral damage

Richard Johnson wrote:
> 
> This is a digression, but you're referencing a shaky source for 
> motivation there.  The EFF is not a legitimate authority on such 
> issues, and their requirements aren't something that needs to be met 
> for a system to be viable or proper.
> 
> Distrust the EFF on that one in particular.  Its abstract says:
> 
> "... Although people on the MoveOn.org email lists have specifically 
>  requested to receive these alerts, many large ISPs regularly block 
>  them because they assume bulk email is spam. ..."
> 
> That's disingenuous at best on the part of the EFF.  In actual fact, 
> not all the people on MoveOn.org's lists had specifically requested to 
> receive the alerts.  Yet MoveOn.org was sending to such victims anyway.
> 
> MoveOn.org was likely either accepting forged subscriptions (by failing 
> to confirm anonymous subscription requests), or was allowing "friends" 
> to sign up unwilling victims.  As a result, MoveOn.org was sending 
> unsolicited bulk email to those unwilling victims.  It thus shouldn't 
> be at all surprising that they were blocked as the spammers they 
> actually ended up being.

good questions.  Having signed up for the move on mailing list, I can 
tell you it was a very simple sign up and confirm system.  Now they may 
have accepted unconfirmed addresses when they were taking money from 
people off the street.  I can easily see signing up for something, 
giving them your e-mail address and then completely forgetting about it 
until the newsletters arrive and thinking that its unsolicited.  That's 
not technology problem.  That's a people problem.  Yes, technology 
should accommodate for the fact that people are stupid, stoned, 
dull-witted, clueless, technology oriented, not technology oriented, 
etc. etc.  but when it comes right down to it, computers are only as 
good as the people programming/operating them.


> In general, while Cindy Cohn is generally a very smart lawyer, she 
> seems to have an institutional inability to understand that speech is 
> not free when it comes postage due.  Our mail servers are our private 
> property, not some kind of commons.  When we say "no unsolicited bulk 
> email is allowed on our property," we mean it.  We can't afford to 
> allow it, as it exponentially increases our costs.  

freedom of speech has two halves the ability to speak without 
repercussion and the ability to listen without repercussion. 
Repercussions cause a chilling effect which will make someone think 
twice about speaking or listening to some content.

I don't think there is any First Amendment lawyers that will argue that 
the ability to deliver your speech should be without charge.  Especially 
in the context of a limited resource.

The stand that mail servers are private property is what I call a 
libertarian illusion.  If you take the stance that contact points 
(telephone, house door, mailbox, mail server) are private property and 
nobody can contact you without your permission, then you will lose the 
advantage of anonymous contact.  And if you don't think there's any 
advantage, think about cards, letters, phone calls, visits from people 
that know someone that you know or you have forgotten about.

I know I have benefited greatly from the ability to send unsolicited 
e-mail to many people on the net not just with computers but with 
astronomy, dogs, amateur radio etc..  My life would be much poorer if I 
did not have that ability.

But I agree with you that the cost of access to my input points should 
not be free.  The cost of sending me unsolicited mail is the cost of a 
postage stamp.  The cost of calling me on the telephone is that of 
making a call (admittedly which is damm near close to 0).  And because 
I'm a strong believer in hashcash, the cost of sending me e-mail should 
be something > 0 and preferably around a 60 second stamp if I don't know 
you.

so for mailing lists, if they are not on the friend list, they must be 
postage due.  Personally I don't see any problem with charging folks 
like move on postage until I have decided to accept their traffic.  The 
cost of free speech is a stamp.

 > In addition, it's
 > severely distasteful to our users for them to be slammed into lists
 > against their will, and they tend to stop paying us unless we protect
 > them from such abuse.  Luckily, we can enforce our ban on unsolicited
 > bulk email by blocking organizations that send it.

as I said, I think this is a problem of people not technology on both sides.

> 
> It is not in the least improper for us to wholly block the sender of an 
> improperly maintained mailing list (commercial or not) off our private 
> property.  Stopping such spammer misbehavior is the very essence of 
> what we're aiming for.  When the spammers stop slamming our users into 
> lists against their will; when they stop sending unsolicited bulk 
> email, we can stop blocking the networks and domains they use to inject 
> their spew.

but you are assuming that 100 percent of their traffic is unsolicited to 
all of your users.  What if it's only 10 percent of users objecting to 
that traffic?  Is it really right to deprive any percentage of your 
users of e-mail they want?

> 
> The EFF is just plain wrong on this particular issue.  Our servers are 
> not their commons.  There is and can be no legitimate requirement that 
> we expend the exponentially greater resources necessary to carry and 
> deliver unsolicited bulk email, even for non-commercial godspammers, or 
> donation-seeking polspammers like MoveOn.org.

I would argue differently.  If you can set up a metric under which some 
wide caster of information can make their traffic has some legitimacy, I 
think it would be a good thing.  I think that hashcash is good for this 
purpose because its nondiscriminatory and is not centrally administered.

personally I felt that move on was making good use of the net for 
communicating political information, the very speech that was designed 
to be preserved by the First Amendment.  Yes, they were whoreishly 
seeking donations but that's the nature of the political process today. 
  It would have been faster and clearer if they just hung out a red 
light but I guess they were trying to be subtle.

So don't paint the move on mailing list as entirely something to be 
blacklisted.  If at least one person wants to get those messages, there 
must be a way for them to get their message.  Which means you have no 
right to block desired e-mail for any user. It's up to the user to 
decide what e-mail they want blocked.  and this is where techniques like 
hashcash and friend lists come in.  If you set the threshold high 
enough, only people that really want to talk to you will do so.  Set it 
really high enough and nobody will talk to you.

> Thus the EFF is not a useful or rational source of hashcash 
> requirements.  Concentrate on doing things properly, instead of being 
> coopted into the EFF's attempts to create a commons out of our private 
> mail servers.

but I think they are accidentally.  They specify a set of laudable 
requirements for communications based on First Amendment principles 
applied to electronic communications.  Mail servers are a boundary 
condition between the public and private.  They're necessarily public so 
we can communicate.  They are private because we pay for their care and 
feeding.

Forgive me for repeating what I've said above but other dual condition 
systems exist such as telephone, physical mailbox, roads, driveway, 
sidewalk, house door, automobile, your face (ears, mouth, eyes).

We have evolved ways of dealing with access conflicts for the physical 
systems but not the electronic.  Taking the stance that they mail 
system's private will impoverish the world in ways we don't quite 
understand yet.  The trick is to find ways of granting access but only 
after someone indicates they have a really strong intent.

---eric

-- 
Question: What's the difference between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War?
Answer: George W. Bush had a plan to get out of the Vietnam War.