From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sun May 19 2002 - 14:06:59 MDT
On Sun, 19 May 2002, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
> Now Microsoft is doing the same thing with their HotMail accounts.
Yep, I caught that. Yet another reason to never buy Microsoft
products if you can avoid it. They just don't treat the customer
with respect (of course they could always argue that if you
are getting something for free -- you have to pay for it somehow).
> My main concern is not so much the information selling, but the
> fact that almost none of their customer know it is occurring.
Go over to http://www.spamhaus.org/ and read the discussion about
what is going on in the EU about SPAM being legal/illegal.
At least some people are aware of the problem and generating
enough heat to roll back the business interests. Lets hope
that they succeed.
The nice thing is that many of the ISPs are wise to this and
see no point in carrying the spammers' traffic since it cuts
into their network responsiveness. At some point I expect
an upper echelon of ISPs will evolve that simply refuse to
connect anyone who allows SPAMers to connect to the net.
Kind of an ISP code-of-ethics. Then the SPAMers will start
to pay distributed folks (e.g. AOL'ers, ATT'ers) to send
their SPAM for them. But I would expect these people to
wise up very quick and develop traffic pattern recognition
techniques or filters so that this type of behavior gets
shutdown very quickly.
Robert
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