Ban Spam
Politicians don’t really get the internet. And governments fear the freedom of expression teh internet provides. Last week President Sarkozy of France joined those calling for the internet to be subjected to governmental regulation, however that could be done. already France has joined other European countries in imposing ever more draconian laws against file sharers to try to uphold copyright laws propping up long business models and forms of production.
But whilst they continue to pursue file sharers, governments seem to turn a blind eye to the one thing they could do to help develop creativity on the internet – BAN SPAMMERS. According to Wikipedia, Cisco reported in 2009 that 7.7 trillion spam messages originated from Brazil and 6.6 trillion from the USA. Surely these countries could so more to stop such misuse of the web. Not only does it waste an incredible amount of bandwidth but forces us to waste valuable time setting up filters and anti spam blockers, rather than being able to promote richer conversations and interactio0ns.
Our spam protection works pretty well on the Pontydysgu site, every day filtering out spam messages which are manually posted (robots are automatically blocked). But this weekend we were deluged by spammers registering accounts, forcing us to temporarily suspend new account registration. We will find a way to block the spammers out and reopen registration for those genuinely wanting to contribute but once more we are being forced to waste ti9me and effort on things we would rather not be doing.
