Selling Your Attention to Spammers 307
Dotnaught writes "Can the free market stop spam where technology has failed? As described in InformationWeek, Professor Marshall Van Alstyne of Boston University School of Management has co-authored a soon-to-be-published paper that proposes an "attention bond" -- money put up by email senders that recipients collect only if they consider the message a waste of time. Supposedly, this market-based filter performs better than a perfect technology-based solution, with no false positives or negatives. A company called Vanquish already has a working model. Is selling one's attention the answer to spam?"
Haven't I heard this idea before? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Automated Spam Response (Score:2, Informative)
Wait... the article's
... against your
A "Sorry dude, but I don't think you were reading" is definitely in order.
Re:Haven't I heard this idea before? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Sounds dumb (Score:2, Informative)
When your friends send you email or when you join mailinglists you can of course whitelist them; and if a friend sends you a stamped email you don't have to collect.
The system makes some sense; but it's too complicated. The right answer to stop spam is to not give your email address to spammers.
PDF of paper available online (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Automated Spam Response (Score:3, Informative)
From the article:
Imposing a cost on spammers isn't exactly unheard of. Return Path Inc. uses financial bonds to improve message delivery and deter spamming. The difference is where the money goes. If a participant in Return Path's Bonded Sender program sends spam and generates enough complaints, the sender's bond gets paid to the Internet Education Foundation, a non-profit Internet advocacy group. And since participation in the program is voluntary, spammers can simply forego the greater rate of deliverability they'd get in the program and rely on volume to overwhelm filters.
The idea of making senders pay conditionally upon the recipient's attitude toward the message is so old and tired that the "market-based" aspect of this solution might as well be absent from the article. The interesting question would be how, technically, to set up such a system.
From near the end of the article:
Despite the obstacles, Van Alstyne has faith in the curative power of the market. "If you can assign property rights in the problem, then you get efficient trading on it, then you get a better solution than almost any other possible alternative," he says. "That's why I think it will work."
This is where Van Alstyne really shows that he doesn't get it. If all you have is a hammer...
This has already been done (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Automated Spam Response (Score:5, Informative)
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (*) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(*) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(*) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(*) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(*) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(*) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(*) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(*) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(*) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(*) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
(*) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(*) Sending email should be free
(*) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(*) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Robert Heinlein invented this (Score:5, Informative)
Robert Heinlein in one of his stories required that telephone callers post a bond before the hero would answer the phone. If the hero agreed that the phone call was worth it, he'd reverse the charges.
Ironically, Bill Gates proposed this very scheme.. (Score:4, Informative)
Walt
We've already covered this - attention bonds fail (Score:2, Informative)
* Creates opportunity for traffic monitoring by people we'd rather not have doing that
* Creates money trail alongside email trail, making legitimate anonymity almost impossible
* Makes trolling a profitable business model
* Participants who are poor, or not allowed to form legally binding contracts (such as children) can't have email anymore
* If only applied to email, moves the spam problem to other media without solving it
* Creates obligation for email receivers to actually pay attention to the messages of paying spammers; can't set the price high enough to make that okay, without chilling too much non-spam communication from senders who can't risk being forced to pay a large bond
* Can be used as a payment system for underground economy (porn, gambling, drugs, general money laundering)
* Mustn't allow any communication beyond the bond amount, or else that'll be used for spam; but the bond amount isn't really enough information to make the read/don't read decision
* Senders often don't have the choice of talking to a different receiver on a given subject instead, so system can be abused by anyone you NEED to send mail to (e.g. legal notices, tech support, recipients of emergency communications, etc.)
* Human beings known to behave irrationally when involving transactions in small amounts of money (same reason micropayments fail)
* Creates complicated international payment system with huge numbers of participants; not possible to keep such a system secure. (Like credit cards but a thousand times worse)
* Large companies like Microsoft will use embrace-and-extend to create/extend monopolies and punish users of competing software
* Probably already subject to conflicting patent claims
* Creates need for middleman businesses that have no other function; opportunity for abuse, like the domain name registration racket.
* Escrow system likely to end up using anti-robot captchas (like domain name registration), making legitimate non-human, and disabled human, email users unable to participate.
* Either malware on your machine can make you owe a lot of money to random people, or else spammers can escape having to pay their attention bonds by invoking whatever mechanism protects malware victims.
Re:Automated Spam Response (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The Only Solution (Score:3, Informative)
If you get spam from user1@gmail.com you most likely won't block the whole gmail.com domain, just user1. If you get spam from abcdef-1032@uber-leet-viagra.com, you'll want to block the whole domain.
If honest Joe Bloggs mail client can send email via his ISP, so can any malware installed on his PC. So what happens when you start getting 1000's of emails from [randomuser]@gmail.com. You can't block the whole domain without impacting legitimate mail. You can block each of the aliases which send you spam, but most likely each one would only be used once anyway.
Your solution would not be immune to the majority of techniques spammers use today. A spammer will also have no problems with buying a disposable domain for $10, using it only once, and not giving a fuck if it gets blocked after that. The domain registration fee is a small price to pay for the ability to send thousands of messages before people realise and block you.
Re:How is this a solution again? (Score:3, Informative)