FTC chief warns against 'unnecessary' Net regulations

TalkBack 10 of 21:

Next »

« Previous

• Thread View
• Flat View

spam history way off

Get your facts straight before posting an Internet history lesson.

"In the early days of the Internet," there was essentially no email spam at all. There was one famous incident where a guy at DEC tried to sell some furniture. Then nothing, for years.

The threat was *never* that spammers would be mailbombed, it was that they would immediately and permanently lose their access. Every connected organization took the National Science Foundation's Acceptable Use Policy seriously. The public email system was effectively self-policing until the rapid commercialization in 1995.

The current exponential growth in junk email began when Sanford Wallace and his cronies convinced the morons running AGIS, formerly Net99, that "email advertising" was the wave of the future and they shouldn't disconnect him for it. AGIS' technical staff resigned, and the "entrepreneur" types they left behind were unable to keep the network running very well. On top of that, networks worldwide began refusing their email traffic. Those problems drove all their non-spammer customers away and they went bankrupt.

These days the largest Internet carriers ignore spam traffic on their networks. The main check we have is blocking lists. If a network puts out nothing but spam, well run networks worldwide block their traffic, and they lose their legitimate customers. Denial of service attacks have *never* been an effective deterrent, and they still aren't. They tend to do more damage to the originating networks than to the targets.

Today's spam source is diffuse. Almost all spam comes from trojan-infected MICROSOFT PCs, mostly in consumers' homes on cable or DSL. You have no way to correlate a particular spam with a particular consumer's email address, so you could not mailbomb the sender even if you wanted to.

Today the #1 spam source worldwide is Comcast's customer farm. What are you going to do, mailbomb Comcast's corporate office? It's well fortified.

Posted by: cls@...   Posted on: 11/07/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

Alert moderator to an offensive message

Subscribe to this discussion via Email or RSS

SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads

• Live Webcast: Activate Today! Realize ROI with Intel(r) vPro Technology and Symantec Altiris Intel Join the team from the Intel vPro Expert Center for an informative Webcast ... Download Now
• Virtualization: Architectural Considerations And Other Evaluation Criteria VMware Of the many approaches to x86 systems virtualization available in the ... Download Now
• On-demand Webcast: Quickly find the best accounting solution for your business IBM Discover the smartest way to acquire, use, and manage the accounting and ... Download Now