completeconfusion

Here's a suggestion – appropriately enough from completeconfusion.com - to solve the problem of email spam and let charity raise money at the same time, with a voluntary donation.

It would be a little like the old North American Easter Seals and Lung Society "Stamps" fund-raisers, but usefully updated.

Let the United Way or Cancer Fund (but just one such charity, or one umbrella organization) sell 50 online "stamps" for $5. Email companies such as Google could then allow their users to opt in to allow new contacts only from those who used up such a United Way electronic stamp to do so (or who had been given prior permission or a password perhaps, as well.) Anyone you're already corresponding with gets through free - and if a spammer pays, one click identifying that message as spam removes future messages or imposes a new stamp fee.

Those who send new messages without a stamp get an automatic reply directing them to the charity's web page, and when they've paid the stamp fee, their message can go through.

Individuals who want to control their inbox a little more closely could impose a higher number of stamps as a fee at their discretion.

If new messages were marked as stamped (even if not blocked when unstamped) by cooperative email companies that alone would help all of us, including those recipients who hadn't opted in, considerably.

The economics of the free market suggest that as long as spam is free, it's unstoppable, because the perpetrators can amortize almost any investment in getting around filtering programs.

If you need convincing that there's really a problem, here a couple of recent articles to convince you:

. . .


"Net Watchdog: Seemingly Unstoppable Spam
Spam volumes are rising, and this new breed of junk mail is taking on an entirely new form.
Tom Spring, PC World
Tuesday, December 26, 2006 12:00 AM PST

If you're like me, each morning you greet an e-mail inbox stuffed with a new breed of fiendishly clever spam that somehow manages to elude your spam filters.

Earlier this year we thought the good guys were winning the war against spam. Back in January, I talked to spam fighters who were claiming victory in the spam wars. One company told me that the volume of spam had stopped growing at double-digit rates for the first time.

But that may have changed. Researchers and IT managers are now complaining that spam levels have risen significantly in recent months--some organizations have reported increases as high as 80 percent. Overall spam volume has increased 67 percent since August 2006, according to Barracuda Networks, an enterprise security appliance vendor." .... - PCWorld.com

. . .


"The menace in your inbox
Jonathan Weber used to face spam with equanimity. Now he wants to take a harder line:

Unlike many of my friends and colleagues, I've generally had a fairly relaxed attitude about Internet spam. Unwanted e-mails in your inbox? Just delete them – it takes a lot less energy than being an anti-spam vigilante.

But I sure don't think that way anymore.

The spam in the inbox has reached a level that annoys even me – sometimes 40 or 50 a day despite the spam filters..." - TimesOnline

Labels: charity, email, fundraising, spam

Finally saw United 93, on DVD, the controversial movie that raised the question "Is it too soon to begin 911 Denial... or too late?" Judging by the initial reaction of public horror that a movie acknowledged the disaster had been made, some of us just can't get those rose-colored glasses wedged back onto our faces fast enough. The "special feature" is a nauseating apologia for making a film that includes any part of the reality we've lived in for half a decade - which "special feature" was hopelessly dated by the time the DVD came out, and thoroughly exploits the families to make its now deadeningly obvious point.

The flick is very well made, but I could have skipped it this lifetime. Anything that brings back the tension and abject fear from my childhood is generally a bad entertainment choice for me, so I should have guessed that much, I suppose.

The overall impression I took from the film is the overwhelming intricacy and complexity, intelligence and cooperation within Western Civilization, accumulated over thousands of years; starkly contrasted with a staggeringly profound religious bigotry and indifference to violence also accumulated over thousands of years.

But as infuriating watching the pig-headed hijackers was, it was worse witnessing the countless instances of human herding on the American side, as the infinite weight of habit, again and again, turned nearly everyone involved from an intelligent human being into a billboard screaming "Incompetence!"

There are far too many instances to name, but a few quick examples will give you the thick flavor of human idiocy that permeates the film. Because no-one has hijacked an airliner within the U.S. in forty years, no-one believes it can happen now. (Whatever happened to the Gambler's Fallacy?) The fighter planes scrambled to intercept the airliners were given the correct headings, but turned in the opposite direction and flew far out to sea... because they were in the habit of turning in that direction during previous interception exercises. The fighters were still one hundred miles away when the last plane hit the ground. The FAA endlessly delayed flight clearance for the fighters because they weren't in the habit of doing anything so unusual... and on and on and on and on...

It's so lucky that, like, the planet isn't at risk, say from environmental problems caused by human habit... Oh, no, wait...

Free the average person and immediately they are slaves once again... to habit. "Let's just stay on the plantation."