Re: opt-out registry comments

Martin Potgieter said on Monday, August 01, 2011 :
> On 01 Aug 2011, at 7:01 PM, andre wrote:
> > No. Spammers are low life common law thieving criminals. Whether they
> > are stealing 1c or R10 makes no diffirence. Steal 1c from 1 million
> > people and it becomes R10 000 - If 1000 people steal 1c once per day for
> > a year all of a sudden it becomes a R3 650 000 000 (R3 Billion rand)
> > industry.
> 
> We need separate what the ISP's benefit from SPAM (i.e. additional
> bandwidth revenues), and how the spammer actually benefits. So although
> the spammer is costing you additional bandwidth, this money that is being
> "stolen" goes to the ISP. The spammer only benefits by the people that buy
<snip>
Good point, but the spammer knows that the consumer will be paying
to receive his unsolicited marketing at the time that he presses the send
button.  So not only is this an indication of causing intentional financial 
cost to consumers but it is doing so in the hope of profiting therefrom.

This is just plain theft... 

Now if you also consider that Universities such as UCT actually teaches
that it is okay, and in fact quite acceptable to send out one spam email to a 
million or more people that is quite scary that a once respected University
would train people to become low life spammers.

And that is why we also have an "opt-out registry" because there are
low life, low moral, selfish, greedy 'make a quick buck' types all
around and because the amounts involved are small individually and 
because people seem to think that they have a right or entitlement to steal
other peoples money.

If things were good, balanced and fair there would be an opt-in
registry and something called a 'direct marketing association' would
be illegal and would not exist.

As Moeletsi Mbeki wrote, there is a race between the good and the 
bad in SA. In the example of an opt-out registry and spam imho, the bad guys
are winning and to quote the borg: resistance is futile.

The techs focus on filtering and other non confrontational solutions, the
freedom faeries are all over the quantity, quality and safety of information
and the rest of the folks are along for the ride.

> the service/product he has spammed about. I think what Bretton was trying
> to point out is that spamming exists because it is a cost effective means
> to market certain products, not because the spammers are "stealing"
> bandwidth from you. Besides this argument becomes more moot as the cost of
> bandwidth decreases, while the irritation persists or gets worse. So if
> you have an uncapped account, the spam does not cost you more than if you
> didn't receive it, yet the irritation is still there.
> 
The other costs such as CPU cycles, software maintenance, etc. we
have not even discussed. Whether the bucks is stolen from Google, your ISP,
your mail host or in terms of bandwidth, software costs, time spent, etc. is
not so relevant as is the fact that there are people stealing it and doing so
without you being able to stop them and there are many who think there is 
nothing wrong with stealing (Not that this is an uncommon thing in this 
country)  Neither is the amount, whether it is 1c or R1 Billion rands, the
principles we teach our children and our society should clearly identify
wrong, lable it as evil (and criminal) and it should be illegal. Our children
are educated enough to know that spam is evil, the fact that we allow it
is a reflection on the state of our society to compromise on petty theft
and in doing so we engender a culture of looseness, moral compromise
and the unstable continuing decay of our own morals.

An opt-out registry is evil, wrong and in some future time it will be disabled
by a more advanced society.

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