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Comment by mac-attack | Hacker News Reader

At what point does an article shift from giving insights -> giving a step by step to start your own spam farm?

Praising the device and stating how cool it is? Highlighting how inexpensive it is? Screenshots of how it works? Saying where you can buy it from?

The line is blurry but this article has all of that. Here's to responsible journalism and being inundated with more spam on my phone so that a newsletter gets more clicks.

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I doubt a random blog post is enabling this. If you are at the point of dropping thousands of dollars on a spam farm you've got the ability to find this stuff yourself. If anything it's highlighting how this stuff works to the average person.

This problem isn't going to be solved by making information about the devices more obscure. It's going to be solved by technical preventions and legal action against the senders.

I do not think that the blog is the reason why the practice exists. I am stating that the blog's framing of the issue is a counter-productive way to cover an illegal activity that 99% of citizens actually hate.

The author probably turned up everything in the article by searching on google so it's probably not helping anyone unless they want to turn to the dark side right this second

I can do a google search for ghost guns too, but once I compile my information and it goes viral on an unrelated site, isn't that still contributing to the visibility (and potentially distribution) of ghost guns?

So what's the solution? Prohibit talking about the subject? That doesn't seem like the right answer, not to mention it would run afoul of the First Amendment.

I think the author does a good job of showing how commoditized this kind of crime is. There are no special insights here that someone who wanted to do this thing couldn't easily find on their own.

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