Many of you old enough to have seen the excellent movie "Network" are familiar with this battle cry. Nothing makes me feel more like this than the issue of Spam. From what I hear, the best site for information about spam is at
spam.abuse.net. If you read the page at the link above, perhaps you will be as shocked as I am that they seem to not even have hope. Not even hope at stopping pornography from reaching the emails of children. It is unfathomable that we cannot even hope to stop people from sending pornography to our children. I will say this again. It is unfathomable that we cannot even hope to stop people from sending pornography to our children.
I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore.
I would like to hear feedback from anyone who cares as much about this issue as I do and let's see if we can do something.
Let's get our best minds together on these questions:
1. What is our best hope of containing this problem?
2. How can webmasters/bloggers/internet users help make this happen quicker?
My answer to question number 1 is to make spam very illegal, meaning the penalties should be VERY SEVERE, and we need to put tremendous pressure on our governments, local and federal, worldwide, to take the issue seriously and go after these people in the strongest way possible.
My answer to question #2 is that we need legal & government experts in the webmaster community to get together on this issue and offer some good advice on the best program to create to attempt to bring in some regulation and law enforcement on the issue. Once there is an international organization in place that is well-funded and intelligently aims to showcase what laws need to be passed in what countries, and even politically who is behind the initiative and who is not, then webmasters can collectively unite to back this one powerful initiative and put pressure on governments, who frankly are doing pretty much nothing about this plague.
All who are with me, please follow the advice of Paddy Chayevsky and then drop your comments here:
I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's no one anywhere that seems to know what to do with us. Now into it. We know the air is unfit to breath, our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad. Worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy so we don't go out anymore. We sit in a house as slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster, and TV, and my steel belted radials and I won't say anything." Well I'm not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crying in the streets. All I know is first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, "I'm a human being. God Dammit, my life has value." So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out, and yell, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" I want you to get up right now. Get up. Go to your windows, open your windows, and stick your head out, and yell, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!" Things have got to change my friends. You've got to get mad. You've got to say, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!" Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open your window, stick your head out and yell, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!"
