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Spam Is A Thousand Times More Horrible Than You Can Imagine
from the seems-a-bit-extreme dept
We all know spam is bad, but is it a thousand times more horrible than you think? That's the opinion of the guy who runs The World ISP, which was one of the first public ISPs around. Most of us are angry about spam, but this guy seems to take the offense personally. He believes that spam isn't really about spam. It's really a cleverly designed denial of service attack against the internet. He also takes the extreme (and somewhat questionable) view that if his spam filters say something is spam, then it must be spam. He refuses to even discuss the idea that there might be false positives. Since everyone knows that there are false positives in any spam filter, this is a bit disturbing and should clearly worry you if you use The World as an ISP. I can understand his anger, but when a customer calls him up to ask why emails that are clearly not spam are bouncing, his response is completely out of line. It seems that too many in the anti-spam world have become email dictators.
Reader Comments
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WOW!
Wow! Barry has completely flipped! I used to use The World as my ISP years ago (long-distance, since there was no local ISP at the time.) At the time it was a small business and Barry answered the phone himself.
He seemed quite rational at the time.
Apparently the spam problem needs to be resolved before the managers of ISPs start turning into raging lunatics and blowing things up...
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ISP manager going postal?
While I'd switch ISPs immediately after hearing a speech like that, I'd also throw in a few bucks towards a legal defense fund towards anyone going postal at a mega-spammer. Frankly, I'm suprised the one who's home address got posted on slashdot is still breathing or for that matter, has a home with T1 to spam from. If I were on a jury deciding the fate of someone going after a real spammer, I'd vote to acquit regardless of evidence.
As far as I'm concerned, any of the about 200 people who send out the majority of spam on the Net is a declared enemy of humanity and doesn't have to be dehumanized, the very nature of that method of making a living places this person outside either the human consensus or any rights of citizenship that kind of person thinks he has.
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Re: WOW!
Barry "flipped" (got overly angry and sometime irrational) sometime within the last decade; before that I had worked with him on a very minor project and he wasn't like that.
I think he should be viewed as being on one extreme of the bell curve, although his denial of service point is spot on. That may or may not be intended, but that's the effect, and if we don't *somehow* stop it the "killer ap" (email) of the Internet will get irreparably damaged.
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