In a move sure to delight spammers everywhere, Joe Jared's Osirusoft SPEWS (spam prevention early warning system) blacklist database is now off-line. SPEWS survived lawsuits, constant threats and vilification by the press. It was a relentless denial of service (DoS) attack that finally forced Jared to shut down his free service. It angers me that, in the aftermath of SPEWS's demise, people with no financial sta In a move sure to delight spammers everywhere, Joe Jared’s Osirusoft SPEWS (spam prevention early warning system) blacklist database is now off-line. SPEWS survived lawsuits, constant threats and vilification by the press. It was a relentless denial of service (DoS) attack that finally forced Jared to shut down his free service.It angers me that, in the aftermath of SPEWS’s demise, people with no financial stake in reducing junk and infected e-mail are lining up to say, “blacklists are wrong. I’m glad SPEWS is dead.” The spammer’s defense–voluntary blacklists are censorship–is being invoked by people who claim to be opposed to spam.My position on blacklists is simple: As barriers to unsolicited e-mail they are flawed, but they are a ruthlessly effective deterrent. Getting blacklisted forces ISPs to track and kick spammers off of their networks. Spammers knew that as they jumped from ISP to ISP and from one open relay to another, the vigilantes were either waiting for them or closing fast. Bayesian and other client-side filters will scrub your inbox, but none deter spammers by exposing them and making their enterprise too expensive to pursue. The rising noise of spam and “malmail” will silence the content we want to see. Then, e-mail users will throw fits, blaming everybody but themselves for failling to act decisively while the problem was still manageable.Charles Bronson gave vigilantes a bad name. City vigilantes have taken neighborhoods back from drug dealers by patrolling in groups at night, using peacefully persuasive tools like megaphones, bright lights and signs in windows (“A drug dealer lives here”) to chase the criminals out. It often works. Sometimes the thugs won’t go. Sometimes they get reinforcements and fight back with intimidation and violence.Spammers are not only refusing to leave peacefully, they’re resorting to DoS attacks and, it’s believed, test-deploying Trojan horses that turn computers into spam gateways and DoS nodes. Spammers’ reinforcements are black hat hackers. Well, actually, research doesn’t bear this out. A government-funded study found that so-called spammers are really leading-edge independent business owners, unintentionally targeting a handful of users (and filling up their servers’ IMAP folders, interfering with searching and archiving, infecting systems, marking targets for hackers and wasting far more bandwidth than anyone thinks) with unsolicited mail. It is an innocent trade that, at worst, imposes a tiny inconvenience. The solution to spam, which never affected business’s costs or productivity, is in Internet users’ hands: Be selective in purchasing products advertised in e-mail, and use the opt-out links the marketers provide.The preceding paragraph, minus italics, triggers the automatic renewal of my press credentials. Moving on. Now that spammers have blasted away one of the fortress walls, what happens next? Well, when marching doesn’t work, you march with a bigger crowd, you give up, you cry for government help or you do something rash. We’ll see renewed action on all four fronts. The disinterested, and those unable to act for lack of expertise, will be subjected to the “give up” strategy. Their ISPs will impose global port blocks, filters and proxies. This is the equivalent of eliminating drunk driving by taking everybody’s keys and making them ride the bus. It is effective. But who’s driving the bus?Whether you used SPEWS or not, whether you agree or disagree with its approach, lift a glass to Joe Jared. He’s one of those rare people who did something while everybody else just stood there. ——– Technology Industry