CNET (formerly Wired) tech writer Declan McCullagh wants to spam-proof his Politech mailing list, so suggests he will start obfuscating the email addresses of his correspondents. Net luminary John Gilmore responds:
Have we
reached a Brave New World in which we all start rewriting online
history to suit today’s prejudices? That sounds like what you propose
for the Politech archives.
For the record, please keep my email address intact in the Politech
archives. I don’t want my communications to be “obfuscated” in the
historical record.
Unwanted communications would exist even if every “spammer” was flayed
and burned at the stake.
He suggests that the only answer is to filter your email. “It’s the only viable solution because only the recipient knows what they are interested in.”
The anti-“spam” crowd seems to think
that there is a category of communications that NOBODY is interested
in, and that therefore should be suppressed. That is obviously false
with regard to commercial spam, or the “spammers” would not persist in
sending it, since they wouldn’t make any money from it. Since some
people ARE interested in it, it’s our job (if we choose to accept it)
to create a cheaper way for senders to reach those people — cheaper
than sending a copy to all of us as well as the recipients who desire
it. We cannot compel people to stop communicating, unless we break
the basic foundations of our free society. Good luck at finding a
cheaper way; my efforts are going into reducing the cost to recipients
of unwanted communications, rather than the cost to senders.
He is also not impressed with Declan’s groaning over the volume of spam he receives, and Declan’s suggestion that he might have to change email addresses. For one thing, he points out that the load from bounced virus-forgeries using one’s email address as a ‘spoofed’ return address will soon drop off if it hasn’t already [Will it ?? — FmH]. In any case, he seems to be saying, learn to live with a terrible and worsening signal-to-noise ratio in your email, there’s no way around it.
Gerard van der Leun jumps in on Gilmore’s side:
The Zero-Spam Tolerance cult is just another manifestation of the Nanny Culture where individuals want someone, somewhere (aka “The Government”) to solve their quite stupidly simple and simply stupid problems by “passing a law,” “making a regulation,” and then “enforcing it” across the World Wide Wimpdom. This from a group of users who can actually go in and wade through the process of correcting the Windows Registry? Simps and weaklings the lot of them. Cowboy up, dudes and dudettes!
Indeed, the flaming anti-spammers are more and more looking like online’s version of the real world’s envirowhackjobs who need to torch anything on the landscape that doesn’t map to their fantasy of a perfect humanity free world. “Oh, if only there were no SPAM what a bright cyberworld this would be! EXterminATE them!”
Everybody who is spending endless cycles on SPAMrage needs to step away from the keyboard, take some Tantric breaths and ask themselves…
Two questions:1) Just how much easier do SPAM filters have to be for you to use them, First Grade or Kindergarten?
2) What do you think God made the ‘Delete’ key for?
I tend to agree that the only legitimate point at which to stop spam is with the enduser. This is from both a practical and an ideological perspective; as van der Leun reminds us, Gilmore said, “”The Internet interprets censorship as system damage and routes around it.” Certainly, email communication is not what it was two years ago but, then, what is? I have a couple of good trained filtering watchdogs sitting between my email account and my eyes, which are taking care of around 90% of the unwanted mail I get; for the rest, the face of the ‘delete’ key on my keyboard is fading from wear. But I also think that having harvestable email addresses unobfuscated on my website had made me a marked man, and I have recently expunged them all as best I can. (You might notice that the Enetation commenting system, if you are concerned, disguises your email address.)