OSNews

Well, more than 90% of today's mail amount is spam. It's worth thinking about why this is.

This could be a problem because many users "just" running a PC at home are spammers - or at least provide the required functionalities for spamming so an external attacker can easily occupy their PC and use it for spreading spam (collect mail addresses, scan subnets for mail servers, get private mail address book, send messages etc.). Seriously, users are running "spam servers" and don't know. Should they get punished? Yes, of course.

Ah yes, and the software manufacturers that make it "too easy" to set-up a PC that can be compromized that fast should be punished, too. I'm not putting the name of such a manufacturer here. :-)

Spam is never a "thing on its own", it's used for marketing (or at least for stupid advertising). So the firms that want to sell their products via spam advertisements should get punished, too. This is because such firms pay criminals to do the spamming, so they're involved, too.

Regarding dead or alive - alive, please.

As you may know, death penalty (in general) doesn't scare criminals very much. They tend to think something like: "Oh yeah, I do the big deal, and if they get me, I go asleep without any pain, that's no problem." No, make it more scary: Known spammers will have to go to prison for more than 10 years (otherwise they don't care), but not in Europe, not in the USA - no, they are exported into a foreign country where human rights are a no-go. The "helping hands" I mentioned above would have to be treated the same way, maybe with a prison in their own country or for not so many years.

This will teach them.

No word games, please. Good points, otherwise.



Dead is much cheaper, and if you're going to spend money, better to spend less of it on people who will resolve the problem much more quickly and easily.



Well, I'm not interested in "teach[ing] them."

The death penalty doesn't scare criminals much *nowadays* for several reasons, all of them related to the stupidity of well-intentioned voters:

1) We go out of our way to make it quick and painless.
2) Even then, we don't really bother to use it much.
3) At which point we give them free room&board, with a/c and cable.

And, naturally, this requires lots of money.

If you're looking for fear, there's no need to export them into another country or put them into a jail system where you seem to be accepting inhumane treatment as the norm. Put a 50,000 USD bounty on a large spammer, and think about what will run through that person's mind when going out to a restaurant or walking into a convenience store.

If you think 50,000 USD is a lot of money for one criminal, I encourage you to do some fact-checking about how much money it takes to put a criminal behind bars and keep him/her there for 10 years.

Personally, I don't care about making them feel anything. Just set it up so that they keep dying. No need to waste others' time or money in the legal system. We've had dead-or-alive working just fine in our legal system with notorious criminals. Bring in one positively-identifiable corpse, and collect your money. Little more is necessary.

Of course, there'd probably be some human rights group out there demanding full-scale investigations into every death, drumming up charges that the spammers may have been tortured, etc.

That would be why I said I was half-joking. ;-)

So it sounds like the consensus so far is that death would be too good for spammers, thus slow torture would be much more appropriate.