"mc" wrote in message
...

As long as they can keep getting paid, they'll keep doing it. It's
like
the war on drugs - it's like stopping the tide.

Maybe there should be a law against buying things from spammers.

Well, WTF? There's already a law against spamming, and it doesn't do
any good. Why would _you_ think your law would do any better????

And a law against knowingly providing credit card, banking, or
Internet (web
hosting, email) services to spammers.

Especially the last of these.

Well, every ISP or ASP has a clause against spamming in their policy.
But the problem is they ignore it, and sign 'pink' contracts with
spammers. The worst offender by far is UUNet - part of MCI (was
Worldcom) See www.spamhaus.org.

One big problem is that no one wants to bite the hand that feeds them.
The UUNet system supplies connectivity to so many ISPs - it's
everywhere - that disabling it would put a serious dent in the
connectivity in the U.S. Like, 800 pound gorillas tend to get their
way, don'tcha know. :-O

Speaking of connectivity. Yesterday I was walking down the street and
noticed the manhole covers had the XO ground off, and replaced by Level
3. The FO companies spent zillions of dollars putting all that FO in
the ground, and they couldn't get enough of it leased to pay the loans.
So the only alternatives were either bankruptcy or merger. Perhaps this
is why the ISPs are too lenient on letting the spammers keep on
spamming. Money talks, and big money talks loudly. :-/

Wow. I just watched Sunday Morning (CBS). They had a piece on the guy
who invented the intermittent windshield wipers. Turned out he
eventually won $20 million from Chyrsler and $10 million from Ford for
stealing his idea, but ended up paying most of it to the lawyers. For
those who don't know, it's a SCR and a few other electronic parts that
trigger the W-W intermittently.

One thing is certain: the world would be _much_ better off if the LEAs
would enforce the existing laws. That sentence implies that they are
not being enforced at all. Well, we get an occasional sensational
headline that says, "Spammer Convicted"
(http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,118493,00.asp).
But they say there are only a couple hundred spammers that are
reponsible for most of the spam; if the FTC would simply crack down on a
few score, or even a few dozen, it would put a serious dent in the spam
traffic. I'm not holding my breath, tho.

Someone should start a donation fund to pay for law enforcement
personnel to track down, arrest and prosecute spammers. I heard that
Microsoft and some other agency have a reward out for spammers. If
people would just put up the money, the spammers could be decimated.