Using our powers for good instead of stupid. (Score 1)

I'm sure this has been suggested before, but why don't we utilize the dread Slashdot Effect for good? We could have a "Spammer of the Day" feature where a link pulled from a random (or not-so-random) spam message gets posted to the front page. The only way to actually stop spam is to remove the financial incentive to send it in the first place. If enough of the 0.01% of users who actually click those links can't buy the product because the commerce server in question is being gang-banged by a zillion /. users, then perhaps that would at least discourage some of the more faint-of-heart spammers. We could rank spammers by the moral bankruptcy of their tactics, so that spammers who use unsubscribe requests as address confirmation, subject-line obfuscation, and other sneaky/deceptive tricks would get reamed more often than the lesser evils. Higher-volume spammers should get hit more, too. The smarter rodents might start blocking requests by referrer, but there *has* to be a way around that, maybe a mailto: link with the spammer link pre-coded into it. You want traffic? You got it!

There should also be fines for unsecured mail relays, imposed if not by the government, then by the ISPs, who have a vested financial interest in the non-wasting of their bandwidth.