Posts by Stan

The dangers of education

Not all people can be educated, some of them are just plain dumb or ignorant or lazy, etc.

Even if we could somehow manage to turn out a generation of smart people, it would ruin our economy. Most "legitimate" corporations depend on uneducated consumers. The current business model: "produce cheap goods in China, spend some money on marketing" would not work very well without the uneducated masses.

I would shift the focus from defense to offense. Public hangings of spammers and malicious hackers may work as a deterrent, but if not it would still be very entertaining to watch.

Seriously, as long as big companies like ebay insist on sending out emails full of clickable links, they are part of the problem. A plain text email would do fine, all users know how to log in to their accounts, the links serve no real purpose, and very easily imitated by phishers.

Another problem is free email. As long as it's free, it will be abused. Once someone invents a secure way to put one cent "stamps" on emails and the big players like Yahoo, AOL and MSN agree on using it, very few spammers will be able to afford sending out billions of emails. At least it would encourage some targeting, and a real removal system.

The best defense

Is this all we have? Blacklists, security updates, patches and constant fear?

Well I don't know about you, but I'm mad as hell. I spend hours every day cleaning up my online forums after spammers, deleting mail, blacklisting bad words and every possible misspellings of them, installing security updates and so on.

Why can't we find, identify and take out these parasites? I'm a peaceful man, but I would like to see these spammers suffer. As long as they feel safe and go unpunished, we cannot really expect any significant decline in their malicious activities. These people cost us time and money, they do a lot of damage, and they seem to get away with it. I don't advocate lynching, but I would support an anti-spammer law with public hanging for first offense. Maybe it wouldn't completely eliminate spam, but it would be fun to watch...