Note: Slashdot picked up this story too, but this is one time at least that I was going to post on it first. I'm just lazy too busy to get entries posted efficiently. Anyway, mea culpa aside, here is what I wanted to say:
Ah, the 15th of the month, which means the delivery of the Bruce Schnier's Crypto-Gram, his monthly newsletter dealing with cryptography and security as well as links to a bunch of interesting stories. Usually pretty good stuff.
This month's newsletter was relatively brief, but had some very good sections. The first topic described how easy it has become to literally flood people with junk mail of the paper kind. Some people are aware of the email spammer who got buried under junk mail after his address got posted publicly and many people signed him up for all the stuff they could find.
Schnier points out that using a google search and a simple script for completing forms it would be very easy to sign someone up for this kind of mass mailing. Here is a brief NewScientist article on it too. Imagine the hassle of getting pounds and pounds of crap in the mail every day and trying to sort through it for the phone bill and whatnot, not to mention what it would take to get off the lists. And if you got signed up for the "ship now, pay later" book or CDs clubs, you could rack up serious debts. Not that you'd have to pay, but you'd have to deal with it.
Your postman would hate you too.
I thought it was a neat hack and instructive about the emergent properties of the technological environment we live in. While this was a rather malevolent product, it really is just yet another example of the surprising things that come out of an established physical system when tied into something like the internet, with its democratization of information access and speed of communication, not to mention the lowering price barriers to entry.
I know we keep hearing the same mantra regarding communication access and speed, cheaper technology, and greater access to information, but I think that at times we hear it so much we may forget that it truly warrants being repeated, as it has these types of consequences.
Back to the topic though, I wonder what effects widespread use of this technique would have? Would it drive mailers into more 'secure' systems of signup that require a human intelligence stage, in spite of the reversal of convenience this would entail? Would they stop offering such types of free mail entirely, thus altering the commercial climate we live in? Would we just have to deal with new script kiddies fucking around and letter-bombing some random address? Who knows? I doubt it will happen, but its a fine topic for pondering around a campfire drunk off your ass, I suppose.
Posted by Nutrimentia at April 17, 2003 07:48 PM | TrackBack