If you don’t like Spam, you must be a fringe minority, according to terrorist-friendly John Gilmore, the airline button boy we love so much:
Citizens want cheap communication; they call their friends, they email their family and their interest groups; they flood their elected officials with email or faxes for or against proposals. They post notes around the neighborhood for-or-against politicians or issues. They advertise their own products and services. They want to be able to send any message they want, to any people they want. They just don’t want to receive all the messages that the other six billion people want to send THEM. “Free speech for me, not for thee” is what’s going on here. The entire idea of regulating the sending of email should be dropped.
Standing by what he believes, Gilmore operates a free spam server. Helluva guy, right?
UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis hears Douglas Rushkoff pounding the pro-spam tom-tom as well.
replace “Standing by what he believes” with “From my biased and aggressive perceptions of Gilmore, I’m interpreting his comments to mean he is for spam, not against it”.
Because that’s how it appears to me.
A quick google on John Gilmore and spam shows many of his writings are not pro-spam at all, but only show vigorous concern for the definitions and legislation of anti-spam email, which is something everyone should be involved in.
False positives, how to manage expected and welcome unsolicited email, etc…these are things that should all be part of anti-spam legislation.
Sty, what part of “The entire idea of regulating the sending of email should be dropped” do you not understand?
Any e-mail that comes to my inbox from someone not in my address book goes to the junk mail folder. If it sits there more than X days, it is erased. Besides the bandwidth used, the ISP server space required to buffer it until I download it, and the client space required to store the junk mail folder, what’s the big deal? All those things are relatively cheap.
Can I stop the US Mail from bringing me unsolicited junk? No; I’ve tried to get my name off the junkmail lists and it doesn’t work. Even with the “do not call list,” can I stop all commercial telephone solicitations? No; especially not from anyone with whom I already do business. And probably the most analogous example: Can I stop anyone from sending me junk faxes, even though there is a law against it? No; unless I’m willing to spend more time and money than it’s worth to pursue it. That’s really the bottom line, isn’t it?
California can make a law against spam, but they can’t prosecute those outside California. The US can make laws against spam, but they can’t prosecute anyone off-shore. There will always be somewhere to locate a server with an internet connection to spam the world. So give it up, already.
I’m clear on his sentence, although it’s confusing when given his part arguments. It’s confusing that he has been for legislation in the past, yet that sentence seems as if he’s not
I’m not defending Gilmore, I’m defending the need to examine anti-spam legislation closely, just like I have defended my right to punch every operator of an RBL in the goddamn nose when machines I have run have been listed wrongly and spent months of needless hoop-jumping to get off of them. Anti-spam legislation is sorely needed and warranted, at the very least, until SMTP or something similar can deal with the problems of unsolicited email. Analogies to snail-mail letters and other forms of communication that Gilmore makes are just bad.
But his other point to include the recipient in legislation is a SMART idea. Of course I can see this smaller point he makes and skip over his other remarks because I guess I’m just a glass-half-full guy, and don’t let other things that Gilmore says bother me.
The US can make laws against spam, but they can’t prosecute anyone off-shore
If there’s an international anti-spam treaty we can, and if American businesses use off-shore spam services we can too. My solution to spam is replace SMTP with a protocol that requires authentication, but I can see the privacy nuts freaking out over that too.
No doubt, Sty, any law should be written narrowly on any subject, but the details of the drafting wouldn’t seem to be Gilmore’s issue, at least not today.
It’s hard not to be convinced that a very large dent can be made in spam just by simply increasing the amount of reliable detail (via a new or changed smtp protocol) in the way each part of the smtp exchange.
One of the main reasons why spammers get away with what they do is how email headers can be rendered useless. There is no real audit trail, as there is with other protocols. One option mentioned awhile back was that each MX record had to be registered with known and good contact info before email could be sent, and SMTP servers could cross-reference that before accepting mail.
While I’m not sure it would totally work, it wouldn’t bring up such individual privacy/authentication issues.