Re: [ot - sort of] spammer bites the dust (goodbye gtcdrom.com)

[Frederick Noronha <fred@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Biju, I respect your views. Permit me to explain my stand:
1. IMHO we are needlessly swallowing wholesale, and as natural,
a number of arguments from the West about what constitutes spam.
This may be relevant for their context; I'm suggesting it isn't
necessarily true or the same for us.
2. Anti-spam arguments are premised on the presumption that spam
is a violation of my privacy since I have not asked for it.
While everyone would value their privacy, the primacy given to
this one aspect of life over everything else, IMHO, would and
should differ in societies as different as the West and ours.
Just like approaches towards proprietory software, making a
million, paying back towards society would differ from
individual to individual (and more importantly, society to
society) from the US to Finland to, say, India. That's perhaps
why we are here in the first place.
3. I too pay for my internet access by the minute. So what? I
also pay -- directly or otherwise -- for incoming phone calls,
snail mail I receive, visitors who drop into my home-office
unannounced, or people whom I meet but who don't result in a
publishable story! I pay for all this, often indirectly, in
terms of time spent to cope with all of these. And for a
freelancer like me, and I guess almost every one else of you
too,  time spent is money lost. Do we argue that all these people
phoning, writing, dropping in unsolicited or meeting are
indulging in spam? Why this different set of standards for
email? I would argue that getting unsolicited
calls/letters/visitors/email is part of the game. Beyond a
point, everything gets irritating. The question is: what is that
point? Should we simply apply arguments from elsewhere to our
context? 
4. I am not saying that "fighting spam is somehow
un-Indian". All that I'm arguing is that we need to be careful
of any logic before we accept it. Is it relevant to us? Would we
be unfair to others by applying it mechanically to them? 
5. As someone who likes to swim against the tide -- and I'm sure
most of us belong to that category, that's why we're here -- I
am not "tolerating spam" but simply questioning the implicit
assumptions that go into defining it. 
6. Biju, when you say you are being deprived of "control
over" your mailbox, what exactly do you mean? These are cliches
which mean little. Do you have any "control" over who drops in to
visit you at your home? Did you have any "control" over the fact
that you would meet me at the IT.Com in Bangalore ;-) 
Don't get me wrong, Biju. I respect your hard work, and the
fact that you'll guys have built ILUG-Bangalore into the
phenomenal force that it is. My writing has tried to reflect
this. What I am pained by is when one part of the gang starts
fighting with another -- howsoever convincing the arguments on
which the infighting is based might sound. -Frederick. 
-- 
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