There's a great quote in the movie Batman Begins: "Criminals thrive on the indulgence of society's understanding."
I'm convinced that the world has become entirely too tolerant - too squeamish, too un-willing to hold people accountable for their actions. In fact, I've thought of getting a bumper sticker that says: "Bring back intolerance." Of course, I'm not arguing for cross-burnings, racism, or church raisings - but I'd love to see some accountability brought back into vogue.
Take spam, for example. This whole issue with pump-and-dump spams taking over VAST quantities of bandwidth on the net is a prime example. The people executing these spams/scams are, to a TEE, all criminals. The act of merely trying to falsely inflate stock prices is criminal. Running bot-nets is totally criminal. Criminality - inspired by pure greed.
I wish we'd invest more energy and effort into tracking down these spammers and seriously prosecuting them. And I don't mean giving them fines that amount to making their efforts remain profitable - I mean serious jail time. States seem hell-bent on figuring out ways to tax 'net usage. Why can't the attorneys general of a couple of states set up honey-pot sting operations, track bot-net kings down like dogs, impound their assets, fine them, and stuff their miserable trickster butts in a cell?
Likewise, the article I linked above shows that people actually fall for these schemes. Stupidity - DRIVEN by greed. Spam only works when people click the messages/links. I wish to hell we could find out who these idiots are, and penalize them in some ways. (Maybe each time we find one of these dolts we make them pay a fine ranging from 2-10x what it was that they invested or purchased, as a penalty for encouraging behavior that penalizes the rest of us. This money could then be used to fund the creation of parks, rescue cute kitties, or feed orphans. Of course, there's no way any of this would fly in court... so maybe vigilantes could track down idiots, post their names, and SHAME them into donating to charity ;).
In the last 6 months, my company has received 821k emails. Just over 64k have been let through our spam firewall as legitimate. That's a whopping 7% legitimate mail.
I would pay money to support a "spammer vigilante group" :) Hunt them down and beat them in public.
SMTP should have been rewritten 10 years ago to make spamming difficult. Instead, different companies try to add on to it. Now we have domain keys, sender policy framework, and a dozen other lesser-known methods to legitimize email. What we really need is a new standard.
And as you said, severely painful punishments for lawbreakers. I especially like the idea of punishing those that encourage spam by acting on it. Without them, spam would die off...
Posted by: Jacob Cord | January 12, 2007 at 11:06 AM