Re: I know I'm in the minority here, but....

> Not sufficient, when unchecked spammers could flood the Internet backbones
> with enough spam to choke any conceivable mail server. There isn't enough
> CPU power to run filters against the trillions of emails that could happen
> if spammers weren't subject to ANY sort of control.

This stopped happening a couple years ago :) It was a big problem. Now the spam is either from Internet biz newbies or people in unregulated countries like Nigeria.

> Ten years ago, AOL estimated that $2-3 of their monthly fee went to fund
> the servers and bandwidth to keep up with the spam threat.

10 years ago there were no spam laws. Why would you listen to scammers like AOL anyway? AOL claims that they can justify charging you a chunk of change every month to reduce the quality of the graphics you get, and oh yeah, they can justify the expense of the three dozen or so AOL CDs I've received in the mail and used as coasters and thrown away.

> What an unnecessary waste of money!

I agree that AOL wastes tons of money. I'd estimate the waste at 50% because their retail price is at least 50% more than their service is worth.

> One of the best ways to filter spammers is to track them, get them booted
> from their hosts, and let them discover bulletproof hosting in China or
> Costa Rica or Korea. And then blacklist the entire country they've flocked
> to. That gets met with cries of "racism" by the countries
> involved. Sigh..

Ok, I'll just blacklist all of the spammers in the USA, then drive them to China. Then I'll blacklist all the billion people in China. I know exactly which button to push on my secret control panel.

> And the spammers are MUCH more criminal than that anyway.

Spammers are more criminal today than in the early days when their main desire was to flood servers to the point that they stopped functioning? No, I think most spammers today are newbies who want to get out of poverty.

> Most virus
> payloads nowadays are custom-written spam-relay engines installed on the
> victims computers, on US_based broadband networks, that spam merrily away
> all night while the computer's *former* owner sleeps.

From my experience, most viruses today are fairly harmless Java spyware, unless you're talking about the viruses that routinely arrive in my inbox after having been detected by three levels of anti-virus software.

> They're called the botnets, or the zombie armies.

Are you talking about remote control trojans like Back Orifice and NetBus? That's what it would take to make my computer a zombie. I think I'll know when that happens to me, and fortunately I make backups of all my data in case I need to reformat my hard drives.

> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/20/rise_of_the_botnets/
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/30/spam_biz/

Ok, I'll agree that there are probably 75,000 computers on earth that are overrun with viruses in any given day. But the people who own those computers don't know about security. So what can I do about that?

> Current price to buy the IP address of an infected client PC? 2-4 PENNIES
> per PC.

You're wasting your money. Few computers have a fixed IP address. A computer's IP address is based on the MAC address contained in the ethernet card as negotiated with the nearest DHCP server. I'll sell you my IP address for whatever amount you want. Email me those pennies.

> GetResponse used to allow dirty lists of some size to get uploaded, and
> they got blacklisted as a result. Now they're clean, and a happy part of
> the anti-spam community.