Push Button Paradise

I just spend way too long cleaning up after a spambot that registers hundreds of MediaWiki logins, then uses each login once to deface your site.

Spam sucks. It's fundamentally antisocial and destructive.

So I'm now in a sufficiently bad mood to write about this so-called "email tax" being pushed mainly by AOL. (The proper name for it is Goodmail CertifiedEmail). Spam is today crippling useful efforts, causing huge amounts of lost productivity, and responsible for collateral damage through spam filtering false positives.

That's the situation today. We need more, not less, experimentation around areas to combat spam. Economics is a vital factor in the spam problem, so economic experimentation is needed too.

Aren't you just a little curious about whether this will work?

The main thrust (other than basic reading comprehension problems) coming from the detractors seems to be abject fear that it really will work, resulting in AOL cashing in, becoming wildly successful with the program, at which point the whole email system collapses in upon itself, etc.

If it were in my hands, I would continue the experiment with one change: all funds collected should be donated back to nonprofits. That one simple change would destroy the majority of arguments against. One would hope. -m

posted at: 00:26 | under: 2006-03 | 0 comment(s)