From: Christopher Whipple (crw@well.com)
Date: Tue Oct 01 2002 - 10:04:11 MDT
On Tuesday, October 1, 2002, at 02:58 AM, Damien Broderick wrote:
> I really don't understand the motivation, but then I find it hard to
> comprehend why TV ads shriek moronic crap in my ears and eyes until I
> hit
> the mute and turn shudderingly away.
...according to media mogul Ted Turner, this makes you a thief. :)
> I assume radio and TV `commercial
> messages' with brand recognition must be successful on some marginal
> level
> in inscribing one option rather than another on brains that have
> consciously averted their gaze. But that doesn't work with spam. Each
> day I
> have to hose out a dozen or more items of crapulous gibberish that only
It took me about a month to train Apple's Mail.app to filter out spam
without having any false positives. I just swapped the system over
from training mode to automatic mode - so I don't even have to see the
raunchy subject lines anymore. It's a rather impressive feature.
> someone terminally lonely or stupid would even open and read, let along
> respond to. So why do they get sent? Someone is paying for this
> `service'.
> What in dog's name are they getting in return?
Max is on the right track with "there's one born every minute". In
another thread which briefly touched on the stupidity of users it was
said that there are still some people who give the computer any
information it asks for. Presumably this is because these people
believe the computers to be more intelligent than they are. "Why would
it ask me my real first and last names unless it really needed to
know?" and "Well, of COURSE I need a Passport account if I want to use
the Internet".
If you track back in the archives searching for spam I'm sure you'll
find a previous thread where it was stated that spam will be around as
long as there's a decent probability of making money off it.
-crw.
Also; recently, Lessig suggested a bounty on spammer's heads.
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