However, there already are Digg and Myspace spammers and the software they uses is more and more flexible to spam any social network.

Google does however move incredibly slowly as an organization, or so it seems from the outside. But I’ve also noticed that Froogle has disappeared from their named listings as that, too, has basically failed to keep out the mis-leaders and spammers.

The best way to close down the spammers is to really close them down. I really liked the suggestion of shutting down web sites guilty of spam via browser, though I can easily see this being abused - that is, all I have to do to close down a competitor or get revenge on an enemy is to spam-promote their URL! Imagine what the Vietnam Veterans for Truth folk and their ilk would do with that. You’d see more spam for moveon.org than you’d have believed, and none of it would be from them… and I’m sure there’d be all sorts of manipulations like that.

More direct might be a group of dedicated revenge artists going after the clear, human-judged spammers and SHUTTING THEM DOWN one way or the other.

But I think the real solution is to press for law enforcement to really get involved. That means pulling the FBI off their important jobs of investigating the Quakers and the Sierra Club, and putting them onto fighting organized crime again. Working with Interpol and other police organizations, they could make it very unprofitable for spammers anywhere in the civilized world. I suspect they could even go into Russia, China, and Nigeria (not to imply that these countries are uncivilized) and root out the worst spammers there. However, there needs to be a political will to do this, and unfortunately right now most people are not considering spam and organized crime as political issues. (Indeed, when it was revealed in Congressional hearings that Reagan’s people had used the Mafia as friends and allies, there was absolutely no political fallout.) Instead, we have issues like abortion, gay marriage, profiteering, and war shaping political fights.

I guess my conclusion after all this is that spam is a political struggle as much as a social and IT struggle. Going after the spammers in some clever, shut-them-down way might work; it seems to have worked in the past for e-mail spam on a limited basis.

For that matter, rooting out Windows could even be helpful, since the great majority of spam is, or so I’m told, coming from compromised Windows computers. But then we’ll need better security in Linux and OS X (both of which are apparently already far more secure than Windows, but do have vulnerabilities).

I started thinking of this because I was wondering if there was a way to do it with email. Most of these spams have a link that they say will take your email out of their database but when you click the link and sign up really all you are doing it signing up for more spam. If there was someway to mimic an email bouncing as though the address did not exist then again, maybe they will take the address out of their database because the opportunity for profit is not there.

Hopefully this makes sense enough for someone to take it and run with it.