Michael S. Lorrey [retroman@together.net] wrote:
Geez, this anti-spam meme virus sure is virulent.
>I don't know if you are purposely being ignorant or not.
See why I'm so amused by your comments? You guys bring up laws when you
don't even know what the laws say. The law was passed well before
widespread caller ID, and the law forced everyone to put a phone number
on a fax. The law which Netsurfer said had nothing to do with anonymity
*banned anonymous faxes*. And you call me ignorant.
>Your error in logic is to assume that anonymous mailers might be
>financially
>dependent upon the spammer customer base.
See, you don't even have a clue about what anonymous remailers are or how they work. Anonymous remailers take an incoming message, decrypt it, and send it on. They don't charge -- though at some point, if you anti-spam folks don't get them banned -- they probably will do. They have no way of telling whether a message is spam, and they don't care. They don't censor because it's not their job to do so.
>If this is true, and they see nothing
>wrong with that, then they are colluders,
THEY DON'T HAVE A CLUE AS TO WHAT THE MESSAGES PASSING THROUGH THEM ARE,
OK, MIKE? Do you get it now? They get an encrypted message, they decrypt
it, and pass it on. The outgoing message may well be encrypted, the
incoming message may well have come from another remailer. The only
way they can stop spam is to read every outgoing message, decide whether
it may be spam according to the recipients subjective perception, and then
decide whether to pass it on. If the message is encrypted, they're screwed.
So any such law will kill the anonymity that some of us have fought so
hard to create. It will kill secure encryption, because no ISP will want
to let users send out messages which might be spam and with which they
might be considered to be 'colluding'.
And all for the sake of 'protecting' you from having to press the delete
key.
> so screw them.
"We've gotta destroy freedom in order to save
>I can still be pro market and pro freedom while being anti-spammer.
You can... but only by arguing for free-market solutions rather than arguing for the government's right to censor the Net.
>Its your
>stuborn refusal to promote market base solutions or to even acknowledge
>that
>spam is a problem that is preventing you from dealing with reality.
The free-market solutions are so obvious and widespread that I hardly consider it a point worth discussing. You filter, you charge for email from unknown email addresses, you bounce email which isn't signed by a known sender, etc, etc. There are a thousand solutions for individual users, that's the glory of the free market.
Mark