Meeting on spam and viruses in a free society

We had our meeting last night about email spam and computer viruses in relation to the free society that we live in.

The discussion was diverse as usual.

I proposed my two ideas for fighting spam email.  One is to charge for email so that at one or two cents per email, it will not cost normal users a lot but it will incur significant cost for spammers who send out millions of emails with the hope of getting a few replies.

While this initially was well received, on further discussion, it became clear that it will only work if somehow everyone has to pay for email and not just the ordinary users.  If it is the Internet Service Provider that is doing the charging, then the spammers will find some way to send email free.  Worse yet,  the ISP may give discounts for volume users which then negate the whole idea.

My second idea of coming up with an app or program to allow us to send a reply to the spammer once an hour for the next ten days was met with more approval.  The idea is that if the spammer is looking for the few replies out of the millions of emails sent out, and a significant portion of the recipients reply repeatedly, then it will jam up the spammer.

However, the significant thought came from Mano who asked why is it illegal for an aggressive business to advertise themselves?  Do they not have the right to send out advertising in a free society?

My thought was that never mind an aggressive business,  in a free society,  shouldn't anyone of us be able to contact and communicate anyone without the authorities telling us not to?

If that is so, then businesses have every right to try to tell us about their business and products.

Spam may be irritable but if we somehow make it illegal to send widely distributed emails,  then we may start banning billboard advertising next.  What comes after that in the banned list is up to our imagination.

So irritable as it is, in a free society, it may be up to us to change the channel on the TV station that we don't want to watch rather than trying to ban that channel from coming on the air.

Therefore, we may just have to keep ignoring the spam email that we don't want to maintain our freedom to communicate with other members of our society.

Deceptive practices is another thing.  Emails that pretends to be from someone else, lies to get people to send money, messages trying to get people to give up their passwords are all in the deceptive category and our legal system should catch up to them.

There was discussion about the various bad viruses around but Joseph mentioned that hackers can be broadly divided into two categories.  The first is the teenager that tries to break into someone's network just to cause trouble.  With a firewall and antivirus software, that should make that teenager move on to the next easier target.

The second category is the serious hacker working full time at his craft.  He is after databases in banks, large businesses, and governments so that he can turn around and sell whatever information he is able to steal and sell that information at a profit to someone else.  These professional hackers have no interest in the average computer user and we have nothing to fear of them.

Freedom comes at a price, junk mail is part of it!