Cavalcade of spam
Good piece in today's N.Y. Times on the continuing explosion of spam: "America Online says the amount of spam aimed at its 35 million customers has doubled since the beginning of this year and now approaches two billion messages a day, more than 70 percent of the total its users receive."
Anti-spam tools emerge, the spammers figure out a way around them, better tools come along, the spammers adapt -- it's a perfect example of what my friend and colleague, Andrew Leonard, described as "the technodialectic" in his fine book, "Bots."
Me, I'm getting upwards of several hundred spams a day now. It's the curse of having had public e-mail addresses on the Web now for eight years or so. I like my e-mail addresses; I refuse to give them up. SpamAssassin is doing a pretty good job of filtering out 99 percent of the crap right now.
What's notable in Saul Hansell's piece are the absurd self-justifications and defenses proffered by the spammers. Here's what one says:
"These antispammers should get a life... Do their fingers hurt too much from pressing the delete key? How much time does that really take from their day?"
Last weekend I received nearly 1000 spam messages. No, my fingers don't hurt. SpamAssassin is my friend, and I know how to hit "select all," then "delete" in my filtered-spam mailbox.
But at this pace of spam growth the burden on the Net's infrastructure will at some point become insupportable. Spammers are "free riders"; their defenses are ludicrous, and their abuse is a classic instance of the "tragedy of the commons." The Internet is our commons. We need to keep working on better ways to keep it from getting choked by spam.
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