[AceJohnny2]

> Aw hell. How many things do I have to set up just so that I can send e-mails from my own domain?

... said every spammer.

I'm sorry for your pain, and I'm in the same boat.

But it's important to understand that any sufficiently large, distributed-agent system (like federated email), will see the rise of parasites that will pump resources and diminish the value of the system.

What we're seeing here is an "immune" response to those parasites. We all pay for it.

I think this is an important lesson for anyone designing a distributed-agent system [1]. How do you design it so as to keep the bad actors out, or at least so their impact is negligeable?

[1] imma make my own email system! With blackjack, and hookers! oh wait...

[assimpleaspossi]

>>parasites that will pump resources and diminish the value of the system.

Countries' legal systems really need to do something about them.

[zbentley]

I don’t think they can. Spam, like speeding on highways and drug sales, is such an asymmetric enforcement area that I have very limited confidence that legal enforcement would make a significant dent in the volume. It’s far too technically easy to anonymously, repeatedly break anti-spam laws. This is an area where consortium enforcement (like the big inbox providers pushing solutions like DKIM2) is probably the most effective.

Don’t get me wrong, there are tons of areas where countries’ legal systems have no excuse for not enforcing the law more stringently (e.g. flagrant corruption in multiple regulatory bodies’ failure to enforce investment/wire fraud). But spam is part of the other category—technically difficult enough to crack down on that legal action is a waste of time. There are ways to change that, but they’re all either more centralization-prone, worse for privacy/liberty, or extremely expensive.

[inigyou]

They keep finding that huge spam campaigns were run by one guy from his bedroom. I can't remember which specific spam campaign was recently caught, it might've been the phone spam about car insurance. It was one guy with a huge botnet.

In total they are a finite set, and even catching 5% of them will scare the rest.

[zbentley]

I interpret that the opposite way: if a huge spam campaign can be run by a guy in his bedroom, there’s no way that larger spam operators can be effectively killed by legal action. They’ll just employ different guys in different bedrooms. The same thing is true with phone phishing scams—they’re not individually hard to eradicate, but the combination of lucrativeness and rapid-rebootability means that legal crackdowns in the past have not been effective at scaring the rest out of business.

[inigyou]

Did you know you can stay out of jail if you tell the police who's paying you?

[xtajv]

I think about software engineering as virtual construction.

In the physical world, we can have police that go after criminals who break down doors. But builders also have a responsibility to install locks.

And negligently failing to build a lock is actually not a great look if you want police to give you the time of day.