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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

That's fine, then the offenders would be the robocallers and the issue can be solved by targeting the robocallers. If it isn't being solved it's probably because they don't want to solve it.

E-mail spammers went to jail, I don't see why robocallers don't go to jail. It's way easier to locate them anyway. If we can fight spam mail, spam calls can be dealt with too.

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We didn't solve e-mail spam by jailing people.

We didn’t solve e-mail spam

Unless you mean 'so we should jail more of them', GP's making the same point. (Not 'I didn't get where I am today by' tone as I initially read it and suspect you may have.)

No, not suggesting jail, just lamenting I get daily spam through my gmail and other email accounts. Not to mention the recruiter spam that would be basically impossible to stop.

Robocalling seems like a much more tractable problem to solve though.

I believe email spam and Robocalling should both be subject to harsh punishments, even more so if it is sexually explicit spam being sent to minors.

If you murder someone, you go away. If you rob 100 million people of 0.00001% of their life, you just did the equivalent of 100 murders. Seems no less criminal to me - in fact more so.

Seems pretty solved to me, at least for hard spam. The soft spam of useless marketing messages from companies that do have a legitimate reason to have my contact info is a harder problem.

We actually did. My gmail get's none

But gmail accomplished that by refusing to deliver legitimate mail too. It's worse than the spam floods we used to have.

My gmail regularly gets spam

Sure, yet I'm quite happy to see some jailed spammers :)

The point is, we are not hopeless. Actually, the e-mail thing was and is quite more problematic with accusations of gatekeepers(domain blacklists) asking for money but at least you know what's happening an how to solve it.

You're happy to see people go to jail for sending spam? This seems crazy from my perspective. It seems to me like a minor offense that wouldn't require jail time (and where jail would be counterproductive).

Of course if you are actually talking about scammers then I can understand your perspective, even if I'm not sure I would agree either.

I don't see it as a minor offence at all, spam distracts me and breaks my flow and spends my cognitive energy and as a result makes me underperform. I like putting all my attention to the stuff I'm engaged with and it makes me very angry when interrupted with something irrelevant. I do often try to track back spam calls or spam mails to make sure that I'm an expensive target.

Some people can be better at dealing with that kind of annoyances, good for them.

You want to send to jail everyone who distracts you and breaks your flow ? This seems extreme to me. Maybe you can take less extreme actions to avoid this, like putting your devices in "do not disturb" mode while you need to work.

No, I don't want to send everyone who distracts me to jail. When someone distracts me in person I tell them to come back later, no jail time imposed. Someone sends me an e-mail about something but I'm not interested? No problem, I'll tell them thanks but no thanks. Call me for feedback on your product I purchased last month? No problem, if I'm available I will talk to you and if I'm not I will ask you to call later - no jail time required. You want to sell me an upgrade to my plan? OK, let me hear it now if I'm available or call me back in few hours of this is not a good time - jail free.

On the other hand, I would like strong punishment for people who make inconsiderate noise(bikes, prayers, street vendors) or directly reach me without addressing me directly(spam mails, robocalls). The problem with those is that they saturate my attention without having anything for me in it. It is very cheap for them and very expensive for me. That's why I try to make it expensive for them too, usually by engaging with them and making it unpleasant and unprofitable conversation and even making them spend money on stuff like shipping only to have it returned.

For those, jail is the civil alternative. I would be completely fine with anything more brutal, I have no sympathy. How can I have sympathy when their engagement is not a human one, its automated impersonal engagement designed to drain my time and resources for their gain.

Excessive punishment for minor infractions is a hallmark of an authoritarian police state, where the government selectively enforces laws in order to jail people it doesn't like.

I don't want to live in that society. I, too, get very annoyed when there's an unreasonable amount of outside noise encroaching into my private space, but the right way to fix that is to address the societal ills that cause people to engage in antisocial behavior. Yes, that's a lot harder than just throwing everyone in jail, but that is the only way you're going to create a healthy society.

It's alright, I don't have any juridicial power. I simply desire their demise(slow and painful one). In case I acquire some, we can discuss what's the proper punishment for spammers.

I'm assuming they are thinking more about fraudulent spam, Nigerian prince's and fake goods and the like, rather than just advertisements for real products spam

Spam is literally attacking communication infrastructure and stealing money. It is a form of cyberterrorism. Not to mention the sexual spam that is sent to minors non-stop. The fact that you think that is like speeding is messed up.

Isn't sending porn to minors already illegal? That should definitely be illegal, but I don't see why all spam needs to be criminalized to the level of cyberterrorism.

Scams are already illegal under anti-fraud laws.

Why should spam that isn't already criminalized (fraud/illegal porn distribution) be treated as a significant crime?

Take 1 life, go to jail. Take .00001% of 100 million lives, go to jail. Seems logical & fair & socially constructive to me, like justice should.

Because the only way to stop it would be at a federal level. If it originates on domestic soil and is traceable, then it could be a states issue with civil punishment, but most spam comes from overseas and the most effective solution would be to treat it as a serious foreign affairs issues and start heavily sanctioning countries that can't get it under control.

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