Comments on: Legitimate spammers

By: DonBoy

DonBoy — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 05:49:37 +0000

If Jaynes had stolen ten million dollars from the mattresses of retirees in the dead of night, you’d be calling for his head. I think that it makes a difference to our intuitions whether the imaginary version of Jaynes had stolen $10,000 from each of 1,000 retirees (pretty bad), or $1 from each of ten million (less so, although equally profitable to him). Maybe the “correct” way to sum up the damage is not by adding up the annoyance one spammer does to each of a million people, but to sum up the damage that 10,000 spammers together do to one person. Unfortunately, we can only punish one person at a time, so one kind of summing-up does the work of the other.

By: obeah

obeah — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 21:26:45 +0000

It’s not just the time spent by end-users dealing with spam. It’s the bandwidth and disk space it consumes, and the vast amounts of time and money spent by administrators trying to find ways to filter spam so their users’ inboxes don’t become completely unmanageable. Spam is theft.

By: Giles

Giles — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 19:40:38 +0000

“each piece of spam takes 1 minute to deal with ” Ken I cant believe that anyone spends a minute dealing with each item of spam – either it doesnt get through the filter, in which case it takes up no ones time or it does, in which case it normally takes people no more 5 seconds to recognise it as spam and delete it. I think you can therefore lower your estimate by at least 100

By: Cog

Cog — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 19:02:10 +0000

Sympathy for the spammer is absurd. Jaynes is guilty of massive fraud, on the scale of millions or billions of instances—numbers so large they defeat human intuition about scale (“one spam is a tragedy, twenty million is a statistic”). I can only believe there’s some kind of class bias here. Why do people think white collar crimes that cause enormous economic damage should be punished less severely than other crimes? Economic loss is real loss. If Jaynes had stolen ten million dollars from the mattresses of retirees in the dead of night, you’d be calling for his head. If he’d mugged a hundred thousand people coming out of Broadway shows for a hundred dollars each, you’d be calling for his head. As it is, he used computers to deceive millions of people for the purpose of stealing their time and money. Off with the motherfucker’s head, I say.

By: david

david — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 16:19:10 +0000

Just pointing out the amount of other people’s time he’s wasted isn’t going to justify the sentence. Wasting other people’s time isn’t usually thought of as a punishable offense.

By: ogged

ogged — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 16:11:05 +0000

It’s the petty annoyances that really annoy, so although, like all bleeding hearts, I feel bad for murderers and such, nine years seems like a good minimum for a spammer. But…given all the companies and products that have cropped up to fight spam, are we sure that getting rid of it would be a net benefit?

By: Ken Houghton

Ken Houghton — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 16:01:48 +0000

Since the case was limited to servers in VA, let’s limit analysis to same. 30 days of mailings. (7/11-8/9, 2003) at least 3 days in excess of 10K messages through VA servers 27 days with less than 10K; assume an average of 6,000, which is probably low. Approximately 192K spams through VA servers. (Clearly, a low estimate for the volume done by Mr. Jaynes.) If each piece of spam takes 1 minute to deal with (process, upload, replicate into an e-mail program, review, delete, expunge), you’re talking about 133.3 DAYS of lost productivity. For VA alone. For all fifty states, you get something between 14.4 (population weighted) and 18.26 YEARS of loss. In such a context, Mr. Jaynes is getting a bargain—effectively, he is free-riding six months a year. Mr. Jaynes should take the

By: Dubious

Dubious — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 15:40:39 +0000

Nine years does seem crazy to me too. I mean, sure, if you wanted to slap a mulit-billion dollar civil suit on this guy for the value of the the electronic traffic and employee-time he’s destoyed, that’s fine. But nine years of jail (mimimum security, hopefully) time? Crazy.

By: Giles

Giles — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 15:01:13 +0000

I’m sorry but nine years seems a bit excessive – we’re not talking about some one who sent worms or viruses – just rubbish that gets deposited in your junk box every day. Seems to me that this would be more approprately dealt with as a class action suit by employers against Mr Jaynes and his employers – damages would be compensation for time wasted by their employees and IT staff dealing with spam.

By: KCinDC

KCinDC — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 13:40:11 +0000

Because the chance of prosecution is so small, the penalty must be severe to provide a deterrent. Nine years doesn’t seem excessive, considering the mind-boggling amount of other people’s time (many lifetimes) he wasted.

By: David Velleman

David Velleman — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 12:43:18 +0000

Nine years for sending spam? That’s excessive—outrageously excessive.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 12:41:18 +0000

If we outlaw spam, only outlaws will send spam. Too right. The solution is to put industrial-strength spamming technology into the hands of ordinary citizens. The resulting deterrent effect would reduce the flood of spam to almost nothing, as any rational spammer would not risk immediate retaliation in kind.

By: George Williams

George Williams — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 12:16:14 +0000

ahem. If we outlaw spam, only outlaws will send spam.

By: Aidan Kehoe

Aidan Kehoe — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 07:45:05 +0000

But that’s small comfort, since spam can be sent from anywhere.

Given the substantial proporition of spam that still comes from the US, it's actually more encouraging than "small comfort."