[extropy-chat] Spam

[Charlie Stross]

On 30 Dec 2003, at 19:17, Spike wrote:

> Recall a Jeremiad which I posted about a year ago:
> if spammers get sufficiently sophisticated, our much-loved
> internet becomes useless, buried beneath a deep pile of
> garbage forever.

I agree with your spirit, but I submit that there are signs that the 
problem is close to peaking.

Open mail relay hosts are becoming fewer, and tools like the open relay 
blackhole database enables network admins to blackhole their traffic. 
Spammers are forced to become more ingenious to sneak around Bayesian 
filters and collaborative spam filtering tools like Vipul's Razor. Some 
spammers turn to worms, using them to take over zombie hosts and use 
them to relay spam (e.g. Sobig-F). And so on.

Now, the reason spamming worked in the first place is because it's 
*cheap*. It displaces the cost of advertising from the producer onto 
the recipient.

However, there are different types of cost; the cost of bandwidth and 
the cost of human ingenuity required to get around sophisticated 
filters, for example. The increased emphasis on spam filtering is (I 
hope!) pricing the small fry out of the market; they can't simply go 
hunting relay hosts, they've got to actually get ingenious, pay 
programmers, develop sophisticated spamming software, and all of that 
costs money.

Moreover, if they get too ingenious they will get whacked, hard, by the 
police authorities. For example, take the use of worms to install open 
relays. That's flat out illegal, under existing anti-cracking 
legislation. Spammers who write viruses are courting lengthy jail 
sentences.

Then there's the issue of the products being advertised by spam. As the 
costs go up, so it loses attractiveness to low-value commodity items. 
But firms with a reputation to protect won't deal with the criminal 
spammers (see virus-writers, above). So we'll gradually see a 
preponderance of illegal pharmaceutical, porn, and loan sharks similar 
stuff replace the more ordinary merchandise. Which means in turn that 
law enforcement has a stronger motive to go after spammers and more 
public support for doing so.

Another example: all those V1A.GRA ads are, technically, a violation of 
the Medicines Act (1968) in the UK, and carry a potential prison 
sentence -- it's illegal to sell prescription pharmaceuticals in the UK 
without a prescription and from premises which aren't inspected by the 
Royal Pharmaceutical Society and/or CSM Medicines Division. So far the 
drugs ads haven't hit the regulatory authority in the UK -- they're 
mostly ads for cheap parallel imports into the US, they're not 
geographically targeted on .uk -- but as spam becomes more of a 
problem, we can expect to see existing regulatory frameworks used to 
nail the companies who buy spam bandwidth at source.

Most spam these days is already sent by a few professional spamming 
companies. If their only clients are the mafia, if their only tools are 
seriously illegal cracking tools, and if they're unpopular enough to 
get legislators hot under the collar, then how long is it going to take 
before the FBI and similar organizations take them down for 
racketeering?



-- Charlie