fplanque: Techno

Cédric posted some interesting thoughts about whether or not to unsubscribe from spam.

Cédric advocates that unsubscribing has become less a trap than it used to be, basically because spammers are better off collecting new masses of addresses than preventing their mailers to automatically unsubsribe people who'll never buy from them anyway. And also, because there are legal risks in spamming twice someone who asked to be removed.

Cédric also says:

Another thing I can see coming in the near future is that these "do not spam" lists will one day be forced to be shared among spammers. In other words, any "do not spam" list you are a member of right now might end up in having your email address removed from others as well.

=> Well actually... this is precisely the point: some day spammers will have to share their "do not spam" lists...

Oh... actually they do it already! It's just that they do not share, they resell... and they donto not call them ~`do not spam'~ addresses, they call them ~`qualified'~ addresses! 8|

The buyer can spam you without worrying too much... after all you haven't yet asked to be removed from this one!

The problem with spammers is that they are dumb and smart at the same time! :crazy:

It's already making me sick... and it's only the beginning :(

Mobile SPAM is coming in all flavours! First there is SMS spam. Your phone beeps in the middle of a meeting as if you just received an alert, you check what's going wrong... but no, it's just an ad from your carrier!

Then there is voicemail spam. This is even worse. You are driving and suddenly your phone beeps as if you just missed a call and got a message. You actually try and find a place to pull aside and listen to the message... but that was a worthless effort: you just got another f*ing ad from you carrier!

Right now, carriers can afford this because it's virtually free for them. But sooner or later, more companies will be willing to pay for that kind of mass messaging! And this is far worse than e-mail spam: it really interrupts you in whatever you are doing! (Something like instant messaging spam!)

I have called my carrier (Bouygues Telecom, France) numerous times demanding they stop it. Nah! Everytime, after a month or so, spam comes back! I am wondering what kind of bozo there just makes that stupid decision to reset the opt-out flags! So eventually I cancelled my contract! (With the added benefit of being able to get a new (smart)phone cheaper when I sign up for my new contract... but I would not have gone this way if those guys had been a "little" more customer respectful!)

Anyway, I guess we'll be able to install SMS/MMS spam filters on future "programmable" (smart)phones... but I wonder how we'll be able to handle the voicemail issue... :-/

Vraiment détestable! Sur ma collection d'adresses e-mail, deux nouvelles viennent d'être spammées.

Pour la première, il s'agit de comments@... (l'adresse que j'utilise quand je poste des commentaires sur les autres blogs... et c'est clair qu'il fallait que je m'attende à ce qu'elle soit spammée :-/)

Pour la deuxième c'est vraiment désespérant! Il s'agit de blog@... "'( Le seul endroit où j'utilise cette adresse, c'est dans mes feeds RSS! Ils vont donc chercher les adresses jusque là ? Hum... remarque c'est logique, les feeds sont linkés à partir du site...

Je vais donc probablement détruire ces deux adresses et ne plus signer mes commentaires et mes feeds RSS autrement qu'avec une URL... mais je ne sais pas combien de temps je vais pouvoir tenir encore avec ce type de mesures préventives. Je commence vraiment à envisager de m'équiper avec un vrai filtre à spam... :(

Il y a deux raisons pour lesquelles un tel filtre ne m'enchante pas:

• Tout d'abord, parce que je préfère prévenir que guérir... (ça économise de la bande passante et des traitements)
• Ensuite parce que les filtres font des erreurs...

Selon une enquête de Aladdin Knowledge Systems, en janvier 2003 les professionnels IT évaluent majoritairement des solutions anti-spam (60% d'entre eux!). Ils ne sont que 51% à évaluer des solutions anti-virus et 40% à évaluer des solutions de détection d'intrusion.

Ou plutôt, comment on-t-ils récupéré votre adresse? Résultats d'une étude très intéressante sur JDnet.