AnarchoCyphertopian technologies (wasRE: [extropy-chat]Reccommendations for a mailing list)

[Mike Lorrey]

--- Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 12, 2005 at 11:23:19PM -0600, Brian Atkins wrote:
> > Mike Lorrey wrote:
> > >You aren't looking at the opportunity cost. If yahoo didn't have
> so
> > >much of its bandwidth (and disk space) soaked up by spam, it could
> 
> The bandwidth spam requires is negligible, ditto also applies for
> disk space. I can easily get 0.19 EUR/GByte, for major providers
> with peering arrangement traffic is effectively free.
> 
> Single hot spots (mail servers) is where it's at. Spam filtering is
> crunch-intensive (even more so than scanning for malware), and hence
> should be moved to the periphery.
> 
> > >afford to give me 10 gigs of disk space for free.
> 
> Do you think the system allocates 10 GBytes for every user, and it is
> just sitting there idle, slowly filling up? That would be a lousy
> business strategy.
> 
> I'm not sure people realize how far the prices in storage have
> fallen. Single drives go up to half a terabyte in size these days.

Cost of the drives isn't what opportunity cost is about. Opportunity
cost is what opportunities are foregone because of a choice or event.
In respect to this situation, a mail service offering 10 gigs of space
would attract more users than one that offers 250 megs of space. This
reduces the ability of the mail server to sell ad space etc.

Spam today represents as much as 85% of all e-mail sent and received,
according to the U.N.'s International Telecommunications Union, up from
approximately 35% just one year ago. Spam is a true global phenomenon,
not limited to the U.S. If an e-mail address exists, sooner or later
the spammers will find it. 

What this means is that the the incremental cost to yahoo for each real
message I receive is six times larger than it should be. This means
that they need to charge six times as much for the ads that appear on
the pages my browser loads than they would otherwise, they make six
times less profit, or offer me six times less features to me, their
user, or a combination of all three. Essentially spam is sucking all
the profit out of the dot com industry and is directing it to the
owners of bandwidth, who get paid whether the bandwidth is used by me
or by spammers.

This is not an accident. I've investigated several email and fax
spammer sources. This started one day when my office was inundated with
phone calls from people who wanted their names 'removed from my list'.
Turns out that a fax spammer (the biggest spammers do both fax and
email spam) had put my company's 800 number on the bottom of their
faxes for people to call to have their names removed. I investigated
the other numbers on the fax and found that SBC is sheltering the
identities of these spammers, they wouldn't disclose them without a
subpoena, even when presented with this prima facia evidence that their
clients are violating fax spam law by giving a false remove number and
wire fraud by using our 800 number.

It is my conclusion that the telecom industry is colluding with
spammers to soak up unused bandwidth and getting their legitimate
customers to pay for it.

=====
Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=Sadomikeyism


		
__________________________________ 
Do you Yahoo!? 
Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. 
http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo