how to deal with spam for good?

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Dave Horsfall
> Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2005 2:42 AM
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: RE: how to deal with spam for good?
>
>
> On Thu, 10 Mar 2005, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>
> > The only long term solution that is going to work is modding the
> > DNS records to designate an official SMTP server for each
> domain, such
> > a plan has been in the works for a while among the standard bodies
> > that know what they are doing.
>
> Which, of course, will do nothing to stop spam, but only
> forgeries.  This
> issue has been dealt with many times upon the anti-spam lists.
>

Correct, however when I go to the police to report criminal spamming
activity, it gets a lot better response when I can tell them who
is doing it. :-)

Don't be impatient.  There are a lot of pieces that still have to be
placed before the spam is going to start dropping.  We aren't going to
see much change until at least 2010 because by then most of the Windows
XP desktop systems will be flushed out of the network, and replaced with
the next version of Windows which will be much harder to find holes in.

I don't have a lot of respect for Microsoft but I will say that once
they get moving in a general direction, they are like the Borg they don't
stop until everything has been assimilated.  Microsoft only gave lip
service
to computer security until just a couple years ago, but they are finally
moving in that direction, and they are not going to stop for a long time
yet.

Once you see most of the desktops on the Internet behind firewalls and
translators, and being forceably updated with security patches, without
the consent or even knowledge of their owners, a lot of this hit and run
spamming is going to die down.  That will flush out the amateur spammers
that operate out of their garages and make a few extra bucks at it, and
push a lot of the spam to the professionals, who will get a lot richer
and thus make far more attractive targets to the collection of state DA's
who's job it is to go after them.  And the more agressive those people
get
the more the large networks are going to be encouraged to be nasty also.

Red China is pretty successful at filtering stuff that goes into that
country, they are proof that the technology exists to clamp down on
offshore spammers.  It is merely a political problem of generating the
necessary will among the ISP's and their customers to deploy that
technology in the US, but that will is slowly being developed.  It would
have happened sooner but for the "pioneer wild west" mythos attached to
the
Internet in the US, just because it started here, and it's taken a
long time to stamp that out.

Also don't forget too that the war on drugs would be pointless if they
didn't arrest the people buying the stuff as well as the people selling
the stuff.  So far the lawmakers have focused on the spammers selling
the spam, but what isn't discussed is that spam wouldn't happen if people
wern't buying the stuff spammers are pushing.  It's not out of the realm
of possibility to make it illegal to buy products from a spammer, and
a few high profile prosecutions of purchasers would do wonders to reduce
the
revenue stream that feeds spammers, don't you think?

I better stop now before you think I'm a total devil. :-)  But seriously
the
problems with spam are growing to be more of a
political/economic/criminal nature
than a technical nature.  Solutions are going to have to come from the
governments,
not from the techs.  And they will unfortunately be solutions that are
not as
clean as ones the technical community will want to use, but they will be
more
effective, in the same way a club is more effective at opening a door
than
a lockpick is.

Ted