The future of spam
I’ve been thinking about this for a while. What is the future of spam?
What we can predict is this:
1) The technical solutions will continue to change. Expect a lot of innovation
2) We’ll see new types of spam, as the internet changes and new technologies and interaction becomes available
3) Spam won’t quit
Some have been talking about spam in terms of winning the war. They’ve hoped for the day they’d win the war against spam.
I don’t think that’s going to happen. Why?
Think about it, how long have we known drugs are bad? How long has the sale and distribution of drugs been outlawed? Has it stopped?
So, as long as the economical incentives for spamming are still there, spam will still be there. We can’t put a bandaid on it and expect it to stop. IE, we can’t solve it with a technical solution. The best we can hope for is making it less irritating, but we can’t stop spammers trying.
So, how would we be able to stop spam?
Same way we could stop drugs:
1) Remove demand (ie end users)
2) Remove supply (ie no more drugs to be found)
And how could we theoretically stop spam?
1) Remove the financial payoff.
One way would be a global ban on affiliate programs. We wouldn’t stop spam that way, but we’d raise the bar so it would be harder to break into spamming
2) Stop the effect of spamming.
That would mean total spam filtering, and nobody would click on spam links anymore. And it would mean total spam filtering in search engines. Still, some spam might survive.
But tell me, do any of these scenarios look realistic? How long have governments had to eradicate drugs?
Mmmm, didn’t think so.
But going touch on affiliate schemes would be a start…
December 11th, 2005 at 7:35 am
Well, when I think about winning the war on spam it is to prevent spam from being visible. That applies to both email and linkspam. If our technical solutions are good enough it wont matter that a few idiots continue to try to spam.
I totally agree that spammers will never go away. Every country in the world could pass laws that put spammers in prison for life and you wouldn’t get rid of spam. They just aren’t that smart.
All we can do is make sure the fewest people possible will ever see their garbage. That way it will be less profitable to them. To begin with that will just require them sending out more spam, but eventually some will give up hopefully.
If we ever could really win the war somehow users and admins will get lazy since they don’t see the problem anymore and it will cycle back. So there really is no way to stop them.
December 11th, 2005 at 9:42 am
It is great that you’ve made a parallel between already criminalised industry (illegal drugs) and one that haven’t yet (webspam). I hardly doubt that criminalisation have made illegal drugs less profitable (at least not in my country). But I inclined to think that it:
1) Raised a price for a legal drugs.
2) Slow down research in that area.
I’m not sure that (2) is actually bad, but (1) is not acceptable to me.
I think that in case of global criminalisation it will create huge and profitable antiwebspam market in some counties (say Norway). But in case of Russia it will just create yet another reason (a small one but still) for a pressure on citizens for already overpowered security forces (sad that lustration laws didn’t pass in Russia in a early 199X and kudos to those countries: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, etc who did so).
So I vote for the majority of “2) Stop the effect of spamming.” as long term global solution.
Please don’t help my country to go “back in the USSR” mode for a decade or a so in near future and go to the second Afghanistan after that. Global war on terrorism (russian version) and surprisingly on illegal drugs (in the last two years) have already created semi-USSR filling to me (and many others, I think) .
You will not solve problem globally by “1) Remove the financial payoff.” (by criminalising it), but will possibly create long problems for citizens (not a webspammers) in some counties
December 11th, 2005 at 10:09 am
Hmm, I think maybe we’re cross communicating here.
I don’t think criminalization will stop spam. That’s my argument.
But I think laws against affiliate schemes might slow down the spamming considerably. And I don’t see how that would create problems for Russia. If so, could you please explain how?
December 11th, 2005 at 1:10 pm
I think that for a particular country - Russia (but I believe that there are others) any national law penalizing (directly or not) possible reasons, not a person involved in incident itself is an invite to a problem.
It is easy to interpret reasons wider than they are really are. That is especially true for any new thing (e.g. technology is new, drugs are somewhat new). And that is especially dangerous in situation when there is not “as in dictionary” dictatorship but internal security mutated to a legitimate government (e.g. Russia) There is a mixture of commercial interests and a power. And nobody to prevent them (internal security got mutated).
I’ll give you an example applied to an anti-terrorism interpretation (wider than a real):
The fact is - some peoples (particular persons) often called “muslim extremists” were involved in some big terrorist attack.
Does it mean that being authentic muslim is a direct reason and so a crime? - No.
Here is an recent Nalchick incident. It is known internally in russia that about an year or two right above an incident at that place were to much signs of religious repression (even for Russia). In general newspapers and internet (All federal TV companies are property of a government either directly or not and so are not applicable) are either neutral or anti-muslims, but not in that case, it was to obvious
Rumors is that it was possible to become a target for a security operation in case of doing salah “to often” for a too long time (being a possible sign of a muslim extremist in wide interpretation). Being non-muslim by myself I completely don’t understand how salah (exactly 5 prayers) could be done “to often”? And what is wrong with too long?
Of course we could not relay on rumors but the fact is:
In that region it was too much security operation reports without a reasons explained after by officials (besides: there was a signs of terrorists activity).
Russian anti-terrorism laws passed some years ago allows way too much to russian (internal security + government) mixt. It was not possible without global war on terrorism.
Back to the topic:
An every case when
1) Problem is new (in terms of the age).
2) There is possibility to solve it without national laws.
I (as a citizen of Russia) vote for that.
Internet is new (far to new to many citizens to think on their own and not blindingly trust to an officials) and still badly controlled by russian government. This is good for me and for many others Russia citizens.
So the acceptable to me solutions I know of:
1) already mentioned “2) Stop the effect of spamming.”
2) Self-regulatory organisation mandated by international low
(without a possibility to delegate repressions at national level). That for example will prevent censorship over internet that will be defined as proper national reaction to an internal economic crime (or something like this) by a russian officials.
In both cases I hardly understand how your “laws against affiliate schemes” can be implemented.
If too many countries will choose national law way it will be easy used as censorship over internet in some countries. Legal (kind of) censorship.
December 11th, 2005 at 1:42 pm
For me it’s hard to see how the government would falsely persecute people based on a law against affiliate schemes.
Affiliate schemes won’t go without a fight, though. Remember, even Adsense and Amazon uses affiliate schemes.
But porn, pills and poker affiliate schemes are the main reasons many people spam, and we need to address that in some way.
And even Russia will some day get anti-spam laws. Hopefully they’ll get investigators who know what they’re doing, or it’s possible there will be some arrests of innocent people. I’ve only heard of that happening once, though, in Cyprus (if I remember correctly). I don’t know positively that the guy is innocent, but the grounds for his arrest were as far as I could tell weaker than any proof I’ve ever seen leading to an arrest. Hearsay, basically. I wish I knew what happened to that case. I’ll have to do some searching.
December 11th, 2005 at 4:00 pm
Laws and laws that work as expected are different cases. I believe that in in places like Bosnia laws was wonderful during the civil war (1992-1995) at least those laws didn’t allow to kill peoples for fun and profit (if they are ethnically different). It didn’t change anything. It happened not so long ago. USSR in 193X has a wonderful (have you read it?) constitution - It didn’t help my family.
Could you please elaborate on your definition of “affiliate schemes”? It is too wide term to me. I afraid that for russian (and many others) government that simple phrase could resort to:
e.g.
Any traffic comes from within foreign countries (or even all traffic) is a sign of possible money transaction and therefore possible affiliate scheme usage. It is not possible to understand whether this is a money transaction or not without disallowing a crypto (that can’t be decrypted by government) for a citizens. Make crypto usage illegal.
Speaking of russian laws: their IT related part is written in far to old language. I don’t understand how it is possible to turn computer on without commiting a crime
December 11th, 2005 at 4:57 pm
Considering outlawing affiliate schemes would need to be done at the business level, ie you’re not allowed to use affiliate schemes to promote your business, I don’t see how it could be applicable to private citizens.