Por @Alvy — 17 de Mayo de 2005

Lo que faltaba: más y más basura que se une a la existente, ahora en los servicios de telefonía de voz por IP...

Combating Spam - Spam is back in the news, and it has a new name. This time it's voice-over-IP spam, and it has the clever name of «spit» (spam over Internet telephony). Spit has the potential to completely ruin VoIP. No one is going to install the system if they're going to get dozens of calls a day from audio spammers (...)

VoIP spam joins the ranks of e-mail spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, instant message spam, cell phone text message spam, and blog comment spam. And, if you think broadly enough, these computer-network spam delivery mechanisms join the ranks of computer telemarketing (phone spam), junk mail (paper spam), billboards (visual space spam), and cars driving through town with megaphones (audio spam). It's all basically the same thing -unsolicited marketing messages- and only by understanding the problem at this level of generality can we discuss solutions.

Bruce Schneier comenta un detalle curioso: el «coste» de molestia que supone toda publicidad para todo el que no se ve influenciado por su mensaje. En el caso del correo basura, enviar publicidad por correo tiene para el spammer un coste claro (bajo) y también un beneficio (por eso existe), pero ese otro coste de la molestia es cero, no supone nada para los spammers.
In general, the goal of advertising is to influence people. Usually it's to influence people to purchase a product (...) Advertising does this by implanting a marketing message into the brain of the recipient. The mechanism of implantation is simply a tactic (...) So far, so good. But the cost/benefit calculation is missing a component: the «cost» of annoying people. Everyone who is not influenced by the marketing message is annoyed to some degree. The advertiser pays a partial cost for annoying people; they might boycott his product. But most of the time he does not, and the cost of the advertising is paid by the person: the beauty of the landscape is ruined by the billboard, dinner is disrupted by a telemarketer, spam costs money to ship around the Internet and time to wade through, etc. (...)»
Parece claro que no habrá una solución en la carrera armamentística anti-spam hasta que no haya cierta «reingeniría» de cómo funciona Internet. Aun así, en la situación actual muchos productos con filtros anti-spam, GMail en especial consiguen evitar esas molestias de forma razonable.

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