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Yes, "spammers should not be punished by the government for destroying businesses" is bound to be a minority opinion, even if some among us are sympathetic. Pr

Yes, "spammers should not be punished by the government for destroying businesses" is bound to be a minority opinion, even if some among us are sympathetic. Protocols and system designs which make abuse impractical and thus prevent spam before it starts are surely desirable, although they often come with their own tradeoffs (user friction, privacy, false positives, maintenance costs, etc.). If spammers can be deterred by improving along other axes all the better. But the general problem of spam is that computing resources allow for massive amplification of malicious actions, and that's never going away — it will be an arms race between spammers and their victims forever.

sneak 6y ago
I didn't claim they shouldn't be punished; I claimed that spamming is not sufficiently damaging for a reasonable response to it to include violence, which is what arrest/prosecution necessarily entails.
- rectang 6y ago
  It all hinges on whether or not you can protect the populace and effectively prevent spammers from causing harm. If you can't protect people, you will lose their faith. As someone who battles spam on the small business front lines, I hate it. It fills me with fear and a sense of loss-of-control, that spammers may be commandeering our systems at any moment, possibly causing us to lose money, time, and reputation, cutting us off from vital services. It takes hard work for me to overcome that and to recognize the humanity of spammers. Even now, I'm wondering, "Is sneak a spammer?" Rationally I don't believe it, but that's the kind of resentment that builds when people are left unprotected.
  - sneak 6y ago
    Quite the opposite: I've an opt-in email list of thousands that I've never sent a single mail to because I haven't yet crafted a draft email that I consider to be sufficiently valuable to warrant appearing in someone's mailbox and requesting a few seconds of their time. I've also run my own mailserver since 1997, and have lost dozens of days in my life over the decades to battling spam. I hate spam; I just hate violence more. I don't consider solutions to problems that involve violence to be solutions. Violence is, after all, the last refuge of the incompetent.

sneak 6y ago

I didn't claim they shouldn't be punished; I claimed that spamming is not sufficiently damaging for a reasonable response to it to include violence, which is what arrest/prosecution necessarily entails.

rectang 6y ago
It all hinges on whether or not you can protect the populace and effectively prevent spammers from causing harm. If you can't protect people, you will lose their faith. As someone who battles spam on the small business front lines, I hate it. It fills me with fear and a sense of loss-of-control, that spammers may be commandeering our systems at any moment, possibly causing us to lose money, time, and reputation, cutting us off from vital services. It takes hard work for me to overcome that and to recognize the humanity of spammers. Even now, I'm wondering, "Is sneak a spammer?" Rationally I don't believe it, but that's the kind of resentment that builds when people are left unprotected.
- sneak 6y ago
  Quite the opposite: I've an opt-in email list of thousands that I've never sent a single mail to because I haven't yet crafted a draft email that I consider to be sufficiently valuable to warrant appearing in someone's mailbox and requesting a few seconds of their time. I've also run my own mailserver since 1997, and have lost dozens of days in my life over the decades to battling spam. I hate spam; I just hate violence more. I don't consider solutions to problems that involve violence to be solutions. Violence is, after all, the last refuge of the incompetent.