Spammers have screwed up so much of what was once usable.
Yet most users of the Internet are entirely unaware of it. They
see spam only as part of being online. They think it's like other
advertising, and some even think it's their ISP doing it.
William R. James March 10, 2003 |
Oddly enough, I remember a time when closing a relay was considered
extremely rude. In the early days of the Internet, everyone who
connected to it took some responsibility in helping to ensure that
all the Internet's traffic was routed to its destination. Some places
had better connections than others and some connections were
unavailable at times for various reasons. So part of connecting your
machine to the network was sharing the load and donating little bits
of bandwidth here and there so the Internet ran smoothly for
everyone. Relays were important because sometimes a user's home
server was unavailable.
Then came the spammers. Because they abused the relays, like they
abuse everything else, the relays had to be turned off. They found
that they could abuse the relays and cost others hundreds or even
thousands of dollars, but it prevented them from losing the $10
dialup account or free NetZero account. It's like a thief who steals
a $1000 wedding ring with priceless sentimental value just to sell it
for a $20 cocaine fix. Old software which ran perfectly well had to
be replaced just to close the hole which was so important to leave
open before. Yeah, thank the spammers for that.
But that's not the only thing the spammers have ruined. Free ISPs
were growing. These services weren't perfect, they came with ads
which were intentionally in the way, but that paid for the service,
so it was OK. Over all, NetZero's service was actually pretty good
even if it did have that open window in the way. But spammers
learned that they could abuse those too, and their mind-set is "abuse
it quickly before it goes away" knowing that the abuse is what will
make it go away. But each spammer wants to be the one to milk it dry
before the next spammer does, and all of them combined make it
useless. Thanks, spammers, thanks a lot.
Try querying any database which has email addresses anywhere in it.
They have to either make it pay only, or make you type in something
associated with an image before you can retrieve data. Why? Because
spammers found out there were valid email addresses in them and
started hammering the servers with automated software, grabbing the
entire database, using up all the bandwidth 1000 times over, just to
harvest a handful of addresses from it to abuse as well. So to
defend themselves and keep their servers from crashing, database
owners had to make it impossible to query automatically. Thank the
spammers.
And let's not forget Usenet. Munging addresses was once considered
blatant abuse. Now very few people post with a valid address. If
you want to discuss something off-line or off-topic with a poster,
you either can't do it via email or you have to manually "decode" and
type in their address. Thank spammers for that too.
The spammers claim to be running legitimate businesses, but
legitimate businesses who ask for email addresses when you download
their product get 99.9% garbage addresses now. Sign up for anything
online and you have to use an email address which you don't expect to
keep. The trust is rightfully gone. Again, that's something else
for which you can thank spammers.
If you happen to run an authentic, legitimate business, you can't
even post your own email address on your web site anymore. If you
do, any addresses you publish for use by customers are instead
harvested and added to thousands of spammers' lists. They become no
longer usable in a very short time. So even though it may mean fewer
orders, and the customer has to type more and may lose trust in your
business because you can't give them an email address, you have to
use contact forms and hide your address. Thanks, spammers.
And what about those contact forms? They are also targets for abuse
by spammers. Spammers go to a lot of trouble to find web forms with
security holes they can exploit so they can send their spam through
your server. You pay for the bandwidth. You get blocked. You maybe
even lose your web hosting. But the spammer got a million spams
through before it was knocked down, so never mind the cost. It was
"free" just like the spamming ads say. Thank the spammers for that
too.
How about dialup pools? Many ISPs use them. You might be using
BellSouth, Earthlink, NetZero, Tekplex or any one of the others and
dialing into the same pool of modems. One spammer might abuse that
so much that others have to deny emails from the pool just to protect
their systems. But the spammer got his unsolicited and unwanted
garbage sent out while it lasted, so he's happy even if everyone else
is now having problems in his wake. Thank the spammers for that one
as well.
If you email from a server with a dialup connection, much of the
world will not accept your email even if neither your server nor any
other server in your network block has ever been used for spamming.
But it's impossible to know in advance that it won't be, so ISPs
almost never allow mail servers on dialups. So no matter how
legitimate, you can't operate a mail server without a permanent
connection. Thanks, spammers.
AOL announced a few days ago that they finally hit the "one billion
emails rejected" mark. In one day they dumped over a billion spams
from their servers. And that doesn't include the spams which got
through to their customers. AOL estimates that something like $5 per
month of each user's fee goes to pay the costs of handling the
bandwidth and other associated costs of handling all the spam. Gee
thanks, spammers!
And what of freedom? It's becoming less and less acceptable to use
anything online without constant monitoring by someone, be it an ISP,
a government agency, or merely a librarian. If you want to use a
computer online, you have to ID yourself. Your actions have to
monitored to an increasing degree. Will the day come when government
reads all your email and decides your rights online? Perhaps. When
that day comes, thank the spammers for it.
And you wonder why I fight the spammers? I wonder why you don't.
Not necessarily you specifically, but the millions of users of the
Internet. If only 2% fought them hard, if only 10% of the ISPs
blocked ALL traffic to and from spam friendly hosts (not just email,
but web pages too, for example), the spammers would have no one
willing to connect them. So why isn't that happening? Have people
become such sheep that they just accept abuse and the concept that
ruination is the natural path? Or are too many people just too lazy
to become involved? I'm not sure. Whatever the cause, there will
always be spammers and similar thieves looking for a quick buck, and
unscrupulous ISPs willing to cater to them while they abuse if they
can get away with it. But when email is no longer usable, when
people have to go back to long distance telephone bills or carrier
pigeon, thank the spammers.
Then again, thank those who were willing to do business with the
spammers, buy their products, sell them connectivity, and host their
web pages. Also, thank those who looked the other way and continued
doing business with the ISPs who harbored the spammers. Is that
you? If so, thanks. Thanks a lot. I hope whatever you got from it
was worth it.
William R. James March 8, 2003 |
Thank the Spammers started as a letter to my daughter after
she had discovered her email was bouncing due to an open [mail
server] relay on her ISP's network. After some explaining and
discussion, I wrote it in attempt to explain the scope of the damage
spammers and their supporters have done, and continue to do, to the
Internet. She replied partly with the following, posted with her
permission:
When I was working in relay, I relayed a call from some poor little old deaf lady who didn't understand why she couldn't get into her AOL account anymore. The call was to AOL customer service, who (aside from the folks at Social Security) are the LEAST helpful, rudest people on the planet. Apparently somebody had hacked into her email account and sent 500 spam emails on three separate occasions in one day, so AOL shut down the account. She didn't understand what was going on, she kept insisting she hadn't been online in a week and she hadn't sent the emails, and AOL was basically telling her to stuff it. So now you've got some little old deaf lady who just wants to IM her grandkids so she doesn't have to talk to them through a relay operator, and she can't do it because some jerk decided sending 1500 unsolicited emails was more important. I'm starting to understand why this ticks you off so much.In case you aren't familiar with "relay" in the context used, it is a system which is used by the hearing impaired--allowing them to use a telephone. The deaf person uses a terminal with the relay service. The person working the relay translates voice-to-text, and vice-versa, between the deaf caller and the party on the other end. William R. James March 11, 2003 |