The universal spam solution critique

Your company advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid company for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down! 

Amongst these facts is this: 200 million blogs are no longer updated. Go figure!

Ain’t it Cool News has a long series consisting of fans asking Sly questions, and some of the answers are just comedy gold, and not because I’m laughing at him, because I’m laughing with him, at the questioners.

You’ll have to check out the whole set, but here’s a sample answer:

Please reconsider writing your autobiography! If not, would you consider writing a sequel to ‘Sly Moves’ which would focus primarily on mental health & attitude instead of physical health? I’m picturing a Stallone version of ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’ - what do you think?

curiousvinnie Mahwah, NJ

Thank you very much. I’m flattered that you think I’m a candidate for stable mental health. But the truth be known, I am insane with long, horrible fits of sanity. Now, if you can make insanity work for you, that’s actually called creativity. If you can’t, that’s called a menace to society. Thank you.

Find the rest:

Round One
Round Two
Round Three
Round Four
Round Five
Round Six
Round Seven
Round Eight
Rounds Nine and Ten
Round Eleven
Round Twelve
Round Thirteen

Can’t say that you’ll read them all, but there are some gems in there.

(PS - apologies for the silly quote layout; I’ll be fixing that sometime soon)

It’s video, so don’t bother, on a slow connection.

Update:

The file at the original location was moved, so this Youtube link has it. If I find the better version again, I’ll upload it and host it here.

Justice vs. Simian: We Are Your Friends

Update again

The link is fixed, it’s a local file now. Will work ‘til doomsday.

Some favourites:

This is the scary one — it should probably be posted in most banks, office buildings, my building, and Britain.

Perhaps those times when you’ve got a project due the next morning “all of a sudden” even though you never let things sit that long?

My life, according to Shaw, some days.

I can just picture this hanging in an effete coffee shop, over books by Sartre, being studiedly ignored by a gaggle of pseudo-intellectual first-year philosophy students.

Seen over the magazine rack containing US, Cosmo, and Maxim.

I think I should get a shirt with this one on it

Events since Duke Nukem Forever was announced.

This is a bit of a sobering list of things that have happened since DNF was announced nine+ years ago. The truly jarring one is the fact that NASA — amongst the most legendarily ponderous bureaucracies in North America — “proposed, authorized, announced, designed, launched and successfully landed [the two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity] upon Mars where they have been exploring the surface for over 2.5 years.”

Wow.

On Canada Day, “A” was stabbed.

“A” is a chef, by trade.

Odds are good that “A” will be receiving one of these, delivered to him more-or-less anonymously.

Life is full of the funny, sometimes.

This is primarily due to work, today and yesterday. This isn’t a condemnation of my job, by any means; that’s still excellent. Rather, I blame WebSphere. More specifically, I blame certain extension methods for its security infrastructure that are rendering me insensible.

Ah well. Such is life.

On the more amusing site of the software world, someone who is as geeky as me (and as interested in software design methodologies) should read the conference site for Waterfall 2006. This is some seriously good stuff. Trust me.

From here.

Good times were had.

It doesn’t have the same linguistic flair that, say, Talk Like a Pirate day does, but it’s still something that I’ll approve of. Apparently, joined by many others, although most of them have left the blogging thing — or at least re-done their links — since they participated, so no links.

I guess this stems from an ad campaign that PETA used a year or so ago associating animal slaughterhouses with the holocaust, which is pretty nasty even to my jaded eyes. So, eat some meat for PETA on the 15th! Hell, why not start today?