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Norway Bans Spam
nordicfrost writes: "Everyone in Norway has aquired a law-given right to say "no" to spam. This is also happening in other countries like Germany. The spammers have to check that the people they send advertisements to aren't on the "opt-out" list, a list centrally operated by the government's National Data Register. This means that anyone sending me something I haven't requested, faces fines and up to six months of jail time." Recently a spammer got one of my addresses and is spamming me 10 times a day. Forged everything, random everything, many different messages, only a similiarities in the subject line to tie them together. At least I can filter it, but I'd love to see this ass get 6 months of jail time, especially if he's doing this to thousands of others.
When spam is made illegal in brand-name countries, it will just move, and you'll start hearing terms like "off-shore spammers" and "swiss spam accounts". If it isnt obvious, this paralles the drug trade, where drugs were made much more profitable.
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
Hey dumb fuck, my cell phone has an e-mail address. I don't have to forward anything. If e-mail is sent to that address, it appears on my phone. Because of spammers, I dare not give that address out -- but what right do spammers have to render useless a feature included with my cell phone service?
You also act like the spammers have a right to waste my time by making me set up filters and compression so that I can access my own e-mail. Maybe your time is worthless, but mine is not.
By the way, Mr. Wizard, do you know that your ISP is passing the costs of spam on to you and every other subscriber?
(try using exim and its filter forward rules)
I use VAMP (Very Advanced Mail Processor). Exim only runs under Unix/Linux and that's not what I use on my mail server/firewall/ftp server/etc. machine.
P.S. If you are so skilled at filtering your e-mail, why doesn't your e-mail address appear with your posting?
The first amendment (free speech) is one of America's most basic tenets; something people do not take lightly. That's why you can still buy Nazi memorobilia, KKK literature, etc. It's generally accepted in this country that limitations on speech are very damaging, and should only be applied in extreme circumstances.
Limiting any kind of electronic communication could quickly become a slipperly slope, and free-speech advocates would most likely fight this (even though it would mean having to deal with spam).
There is a noticable difference between "Free Speech" and spam. I can walk away from Free Speech. I don't have to listen. And if the speaker continues after me, it becomes harrasment, which is not constitutionally protected.
Spam, on the other hand, cannot be as easily avoided. Yes, I can block certain e-mail addresses, or just redirect them to trash, but I have to continually update that, or I get swamped. And some mailer don't have that option. Hotmail, for instance, only allows you to block 50 e-dresses, last I checked.
Spam is not free speech...
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
Let say it takes 3 seconds to process each item of spam in your mailbox. The spammer has just wasted 3 seconds of your time. No problem, right?
Spammer has sent this spam to 1 million people, wasting 3 seconds of each of thier time...
Thats 3 million wasted seconds, or about 37 days.
How would you feel if the spammer kidnapped you and held you for 37 days? Thats exactly what he is doing, only its distributed among a million people.
I think 6 months in jail for a 37 day kidnapping is not enough.
Reality has a liberal bias
As a personal rule, I do not accept telephone solicitation. For many, filtration software is a needed tool for communication sanity. Too often, the Attention Market has you at a disadvantage, ready to commit you to a purchase, legally obligating you to a recorded whisper of "okay." Meanwhile, you often have no such record of their verbal promises, if you have need of committing them to rendering services. And while Spam on email at least gives you written record, the company's credentials are often every-bit-as-nebulous.
If nothing guarantees success like having Human Attention lavished on a project, then does Love indeed make the world go around?
The trouble with that position is, it assumes there has to be cost involved with spamming. As long as it's possible to hijack someone else's account for spamming, or use a throwaway account while paying a flat rate, the cost is effectively dumped onto the recipients. That is the whole _point_...
at least in Denmark. It is part of the marketing law, which regulates what you can do to advertize your products. One of the rules is that you cannot take direct electronic contact (email, fax or phone) with individuals for the purpose of sale without their prior agreement. At least in Denmark, you are still allowed to spam people with "Jesus loves you", and you are still allowed to spam companies with adds.
With regard to your friend, your prior contact with him would probably get you free, you are not selling anything so you would not be covered by the law, and finally, it is not criminal law in Denmark, so you would not get in jail (even though spammers should be shoot).
Maybe the future is more about web sites, boards like Slashdot etc. and less about 'commercial email' or even 'this is very important to you' email.
I know that if every single political fringe, environmental activist group, union, whatever that I AGREED WITH AND SUPPORTED felt free to send me email whenever something happened in the world that interested me, I would STILL BE BURIED in email and my email account would be unusable. I can't overemphasise this. It's not about my consent or interest in what's being sent, it is about the fact that the world contains more information than I can process, and always will. In this light, mass mailing of _any_ sort is a disturbing mechanism to me, because it always keeps the potential to go right off the scale and become impossible volume.
I think it's time to redefine email as 'private communications only'. There's no way to consider it a public resource without causing trouble. I can have an email account on my web page about Stratocasters, but this doesn't mean that everyone who sells Stratocasters can proceed to email me about what _they_ want to sell. The trick with the internet is that one aspect to the loss of privacy means that sellers can research and identify potential buyers: in the future ten thousand people a day can research what I really want and need, and then email me entirely personal letters asking me to buy something that I specifically want. That doesn't change the fact that ten thousand emails a day is still impossible, unmanageable... the ability of the world to produce RELEVANT information is far greater than the ability of a person to process it.
THAT is why spam is a crime. In a peculiar way it is more akin to rape than theft. "You _are_ going to love my special offer now! Your attention belongs to me now. Don't try and get away!"
If your list is tainted, possibly because its opt-in procedures allow or once allowed abuses, why not throw it away and begin assembling a new one? It sounds like your list is tainted.
This much appreciated endorsement of Sneakemail was not solicited or sanctioned by the management of Sneakemail in any way.
8-)
All shameless promotion of Sneakemail on
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
> they can find them all on a government provided
> list!
I don't think the Norwegian government provides such a service, I suspect anyone can set one up. Someone else refered to the Norwegian phone company.
One solution, endorsed by CAUCE is to instead rely on a "NO UCE" banner added to the mail server's banner. This has some obvious drawbacks (it's not per-user and requires administrative intervention).
A slightly better solution for an opt-out list (I won't argue the merits of opt-out versus opt-in) would be a list of the MD5 hashes for each email address. The downside would be that this would prevent regular expressions to handle any and all valid variants of an address. One partial fix would be to require that the spammer query a number of variants of a given address. For example, if the address were "erasmus@foobar.invalid", we could require that the query both "erasmus@foobar.invalid" and "@foobar.invalid" for MD5 matches.
A slightly different alternative would be a query-only list maintained by a trusted party. So internally the list might have "erasmus(\+[^@]*)?@foobar\.invalid" but all the spammer would get back would be a "do not spam this address" when they attempt to query "erasmus@foobar.invalid", "erasmus+foo@foobar.invalid", and so forth. The downside is that this requires a central authority that can be trusted with email addresses (not too hard) and is extremely competent with security (much more difficult).
so could somebody provide a rough (even just a partial) translation or the article? I don't think Altavista knows Norwegian.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Check out SpamCop for a great way to help deal with spam. SpamCop is free to use, but you can also sign up and pay them money.
Really, paying them money is to support their work, but you also get a spam-free email forwarding service where yourname@spamcop.net gets forwarded to your favorite mail drop without any of the spam (which they do a very good job of filtering).
I'm using harmil@spamcop.net now as my primary "public" email address for things like slashdot and USENET, and it works pretty well.
Their spam reporting service is very cool. It tracks down the ISP of the spammer, submits the IP address of relays to ORBS, and also tracks any URLs in the spam body. Plus, ISPs who play ball with SpamCop can mark accounts as deleted and otherwise feed back into the system to reduce their request-load. Such things can be appealed by paying SpamCop users, but for the most part, ISPs are pretty good about it.
For the record, I'm just a customer.
The spammer would just leach addresses from the list. Who said spammers have morals?
Spam is certainly very annoying, but is it sacrificing too much of our Internet Freedom to let governments fine and even jail people for spamming? I mean, everyone always talks about freedom on the Internet, keeping it unregulated, etc. Why should this be different? This is a huge regulation. Who is to say exactly what spam is? And what would prevent the state from jailing me for sending a friend an unsolicited email about a product i recently saw and thought he might like to buy? A little far-fetched, I admit, but this just seems like a dangerous road to go down. I say turn the filter on and keep government out of the Internet.
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Warning: I don't speak/read/understand norweigan.
.no redirection service that doesn't add any special header or footer to the messages?
Does anyone know if this legislation covers email redirection? If so, does anyone know of a good norweigan
--
All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
All the free speech concerns aside, this stilly has some pretty scary implications. What constitutes spam? Is it unsolicited commercial email? Is it harrasment? Or will this turn out to be abused in much the same way the (very necessary) sexual harrasment laws have been?
Does anyone have an Eigo translation of this article so that we can get the specifcs? The fishy don't do Norweigan.
"Sir, you're under arrest for spamming your coworkers."
"But they *asked* me to send them 'The Big List of Blonde Jokes'! Honest, officer!"
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Your list of blonde jokes would not be covered by the anti-spam law, however annoying these kind of emails are.
The article isn't very specific, unfortunately. The Danish law is pretty specific, and leave out a lot of cases that are usually considered spam, such as non-commersial UBE, and UBE directed at companies rather than individuals.
And what is this about opting in and opting out, anyway? I think what we're seeing is that the email protocol is just too trusting and open-ended for the current net environment. I mean, lots of sites will tell you I 'opted in' to receive their junk and a bunch of others', and, if I don't believe it, I can go back and [find and] read the small print that was hovering closeby when I tried to download something or other. It would seem that we're constantly letting other people define 'consent to receive spam' for us.
Disposable email addresses are the way to go -- by this I don't mean a hotmail address or something like that, but, rather an address that is only good for x uses. My favorite site for this is www.spamgourmet.com (free and ad-free) because the addresses are created as used -- this means there's no maintenance on the site, and, theoretically, you'd never have to go back to the site unless you changed your forwarding address, or whatever. The psychology behind this is that taking control of my inbox away from the spammers has to be easier than receiving and deleting one piece of spam, and I have to perceive this fact at that critical moment when I'm signing up for something...
From the faq:
Q. How do I create a disposable email address?
A. First, set up an account here, if you haven't already, and save your real email address in the space provided (don't skip this important step!). Remember your username. Later, when you need a disposable email address, just think of a word (any combination of letters and numbers (20 characters max), provided you haven't used it before), and decide how many messages you want to receive at the new address. Then, put the word, the number, and your spamgourmet username together with dots to form the disposable address. For instance, if your Username is "spamcowboy", then you could make a disposable address like so:
someword.2.spamcowboy@spamgourmet.com
Then, you can use the address to sign up for your favorite spam-prone website, get a confirmation message, get your password in the second (and final) message, then smile and consider for a moment that no one, no-how is going to send you email with that address again.
Please note: This service summarily deletes any message that doesn't pass muster with the forwarding rules, rather than preserving it for future viewing -- I love this!, but you may prefer something that saves your spam -- you may have to put up with ads or small payments to accomodate the higher cost of saving the spam, though.
who's moderating the meta-moderators?
The price is too high. I hate spam just as much as the next guy. But this solution is worse than the problem! Government registry of personal email addresses! Do you understand what this means? Have you thought it through? Is preventing spam the legitimate role of government? Does it even come close to being legitimate?
Spam is an annoyance. Government registration of internet users is the foundation for technotyranny. I'll gladly put up with the former to prevent the latter.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Go away and read your spam. It's not like your time has any value.
First, let me say that yours was a very well-written and argued post. I do think that there is an important distinction to be made between liberal and conservative regulation of personal freedoms:
Liberals tend to limit personal freedom to protect others from things like secondhand smoke and gun-violence.
Conservatives pass laws to impose their religious and moral beliefs on others.
The latter is indefensible in a society that purports to have a separation of church and state.
There is.
#1, it is opt-in, not opt-out (despite what the submission text says).
#2, what is the problem? Political spammers are just as bad as any other kind of spammer, and deserve to be shoot.
In any case, enforcement is unlikely to be an issue. Only Norwegain spammers are really covered by the law, and the main effect of the law will be that a nice letter will make them stop, without the need to involve law enforcement.
#3, please reserve your paranoia for US politicians, and in any case, who cares about their motives as long as the do the right thing (as in this case).
BTW, in Denmark we already *have* an opt-out system for unadressed junk snailmail, it has worked well for years. We also recently god an opt-out system for direct snailmail, and I haven't received any since I opt'ed out.
Nor can you simply add "unsoliciated email advertizing" , as I've seen spam that is generally a plea for help, though poorly targeted and still going through the classic spam patterns. The content of the message does not guarentee it being spam.
And of course, you can't simply add how headers and recieverships might be hidden or such, because there are spammers that actually follow proper protocols -- they don't stay very long at one ISP, mind you, but they do continue to spam.
I think that any spam punishment provision must include the fact that if the person attempted to out-opt and yet recieved the spam from the same people after a sufficient timeframe passed for the opt-out request to be processed (2 weeks), then if they are spammed again, then the penalties start. This would allow those that run mailing lists, for example, to be free of concerns of ruthless subscribers, as well protecting casual one-time emails, while most spammers, who'd refuse to prune email lists, would be caught pants down.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
- If there really is a public opt-out list available on the list, it helps spamers getting email addresses.
- Every law that can hardly be enforced potentially leads to ambiguity. Investigations will not be done for every spam mail, instead investigations will start with unpleasant people. Thus for a crime done by thousands of people only a small group (e.g. activists who spam a political essay) will be imprisoned.
- It is ridiculous to assume that the goal of politics is stopping spam. I still get about 2kg (4.4 pounds) of snail-mail spam a week. It would be easy to enforce a ban on it, and it could save me a lot more time compared to saving 1 second dedicated to deleting an email.
- They just want to show that they care for the "internet generation".
- They try get into regulating the internet, getting a long list of potential internet-delinquents.
I think people are so much concerned about spam, because they feel watched. They get email from a website, that they wanted to deny having accessed.I suggest 2 other explainations:
Such laws are completely ineffective. Firstly, why assume opt-in and force users to opt-out ? I would have thought that most users would prefer opt-out, so it seems to make a more sensible default.
I can also see problems with the opt-in thing though. One problem would be how to decide what is and isn't spam. I often get unsolicited email that is written to me personally (sometimes job offers from publishing companies for example), and I certainly wouldn't want the senders charged. I would propose that for a spammer to be charged, several complaints should be brought against them. (in other words, it really has to be bulk mail for action to be taken)
I propose that for email to be spam, it should satisfy the following:
I cannot believe the moderation that this troll has gotten; people have been moderating down natalie portman naked and petrified with grits and honey for so long they don't recognize a real troll, I suppose. (Clue: thinly explain parallels that claim 'this is just like commies' or 'this is just like nazis' are either Trolls or Fanatics.)
Anyway, the reason this whole post is not worthy of its rating is that, a) we passed the unsolicited fax law in the U.S. and we have not yet joined the communist bloc, if there even -is- a communist bloc anymore, and b) we have lots of laws like 'do not steal' and 'do not speed' but we don't tag everyone with remote transmitters to enforce those laws. Neither does outlawing UCE necessitate that we will pass laws to monitor every computer. If you're worried about it, join the EFF to make sure privacy issues are watched in any anti-spam legislation.
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
Also, ISP's should be allowed to sue individuals who use their services for spam. Network bandwidth usage, and spoofed domain names cause monetary damage to ISPs' business.
The Norwegian authorities were tripping over themselves to hand over the guy who wrote DeCSS; I reckon the US State Department owes them a couple of spammers in return.
Spam is annoying. I expect to delete as much of it these days as I receive in real mail. At last count, I have been spammed in 7 or 8 languages, some of which I can't puzzle out even a single word of. It uses bandwidth, wastes disk space and takes up my time.
But I will not concede to any government the right to determine what can and cannot be considered unwanted e-mail. When the intent is clearly something that would be criminal when done by other means, such as death threats, fraudulent stock scams, etc., certainly those should be illegal. Consider how far anti-spam legislation may go. Do you want to jail time for a message like this:
To: Not Yet Clueful Newbie <new-b@domain>
From: Open Source Hacker <hacker@lug>
Subject: Come to our meeting next Thursday
Hey, I'm the Linux zealot you met at the
bookstore Saturday. Since you were local I
just fingered the local ISPs for someone with
your name. Are you interested in coming to
our Linux Users' Group meeting next Thursday?
I shouldn't have to consult a lawyer to determine the legality of every action I take.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Opt-out means that I have to send my address to a register in order not to receive spam. Sweden has this system, and it does not work well.
Norway has chosen an opt-in system, which means that I have to actively request the advertisement from the spammer. If they can't show that I've requested the mail, they are acting against the law.
The translation mentions opt-out, which is wrong.
Norway's new law also covers advertisements sent via SMS, the instant messaging service in the GSM mobile telephone net.
There are some federal laws wrt. do not call lists and all though. I wonder if you could get something like this through here. It'd be a lot easier to prove the spammer was intentionally breaking the law if there were a single federally maintained do not call list...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Hi!
Everybody hates spam. Everybody thinks spam is a pain in the neck. Everybody thinks spam should go away. And those inclined to expect the government to do everything for them will--not surprisingly--tend to expect the government to protect them from spam.
Which may be a good thing, except for one little detail. If the government is going to protect you from "spam", the government is going to define what "spam" means. And you may not be happy with that definition--because as sure as the fact that the sun is coming up tomorrow, any government is going to figure out a way to protect itself with its definition of spam.
Remember "Junk Fax"?
Back when fax machines first appeared it didn't take office supply companies, delis, and a horde of other advertisers to figure out that they could send you virtual flyers with a local phone call--substantially cheaper than paying for postage.
Lots of people objected to junk fax. Lots of legislators climbed on the bandwagon--junk fax came to be viewed by politicians as an easy target: nobody was in favor of (euphemism) "unsolicited commercial fax."
Then a funny thing happened--except that it wasn't funny at all if you are old enough to remember watching it on CNN. Students in the People's Republic of China staged a demonstration in Tianamien Square in Beijing that quickly became a serious challenge to the authority of the Communist Party. At first the authorities dismissed this as an annoyance--but as the protest continued, the government got more and more scared. The government ultimately crushed the protest with tanks and machine guns--no one in the West knows yet how many students were killed.
What was significant about the "uprising" was that the Chinese government was right about one thing: the PRC kept insisting that the protest was being directed by "outside agitators". They were right--Chinese dissidents, in the U.S. as graduate students, were directing the protests across China from an office in suburban Boston--via fax. The PRC finally figured it out, and blocked phone traffic from the Boston area--but they never figured out concepts like call-forwarding, etc. The students were able to communicate with very little restriction right up until the end.
In the aftermath, the Communists decided that "the people" needed protection from "unsolicited fax". They required every fax machine to be registered. They enacted laws spelling out draconian punishments for unregistered fax usage. They tried their damndest to prevent anybody ever doing this again.
Now the Internet is here.
And try as the Chinese Communists might, they're having a tough time preventing people from getting information. The PRC has worked diligently to block access to foreign news sites, foreign chat sites, etc.--especially anything published in Chinese. I'm certain that one dimension of the PRC's reported enthusiasm for Linux is that they can be certain that the U.S. doesn't have a trap door in their computers--and that they can install a trap door of their own. (Somehow, I'm sure the PRC will--what a surprise!--forget to distribute the source code of their distros.)
But they can't block e-mail.
I have mail in my in-box from a young Chinese man. He and his wife are deeply fond of my mother--she and my late stepfather helped them escape from China in the immediate aftermath of Tianemien Square. They are still actively in touch with friends and relatives back in China--by email. And if the need ever arises, they can maintain those communication links: through open relays; through "anonymizer" relays; through throwaway accounts--in short, using exactly the same techniques as the spammers.
We live in a free society--with the advent of the Internet our freedom of expression and (if only virtual) assembly are practically limitless. It doesn't work that way everywhere in the world. There are places in the world where defaming the Imam earns you a fatwa--a price on your head. There are places in the world where refusing to pledge allegiance to the Dear Leader and embrace the "scientific truths" of Kim-Il-Sungism means that your family doesn't get food rations, and is left to starve. There are places in the world where billions of people are "protected" from "unsolicited fax" and other such dangers.
Those places all have governments that would be more than happy to "protect" their citizens from "spam."
Yup. Spam is an annoyance. By golly, I have to press that Delete key four, sometimes five times a day. And I'm sure that having the government decide what email I can see, and making sure that I only see "unsolicited" mail from people they approve of, will make my life so much more enjoyable. So much more buoyant--so much more vibrant--so much more liberating. At least, right up to the point where I want to send or receive messages the government doesn't approve of.
Thanks, but...
For me and my household--we'll just use SpamCop, and the Delete key.
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Or course, this is rarely sucessfull since most spammers don't disclose recipient lists (I'm assuming they just BCC everyone) so I rarely see the address used to get to me, but it works every now and then.
Postfix has a Delivered-To header that will tell you what mailbox it was delivered to, so even if it's not in the headers, since it was in the envelope you'll know.
--
forward your spam to the e-mail address spamcop@spamcop.net
You will get a reply back that will allow you to parse headers and send a complaint with just a couple clicks. Try it, and you'll never go back to reading headers yourself.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Over time, I've seen quite a few people talk about their mail bouncing techniques. Invariably, these people have scripts for UNIX mail programs. Is there anything for Windows? Ideally, I want something that works as follows:
* Operates as either a plugin for my mail client (Netscape), or more preferably:
* Operates as a local POP3 server, thus any mail client can use it.
* Can be configured to grab mail from multiple POP3 servers.
* Can utilise ORBS/MAPS
* Will allow me to review my email before accepting it. Any suspect emails to be placed in a separate list which I can check for bouncing as if the email address were invalid. Perhaps integration with spamcop.net, although they alreasy provide similar services.
IMO, this works much better than munging your email address, as the fake address does work (as opposed to having a legit email sender try to figure out how to demunge your munged address), and it's rather easy to turn off the mail feed for a particularly spammed account.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
The Spam Bouncer, a procmail script to identify incoming spam and either tag it, move it to a different mailbox file, or bounce it.
SpamCop, to file official complaints about the spam that gets through.
Sugarplum, to stick lots of irrelevant fake email addresses (and the addresses of other spammers) up on my web pages. If spammers want to harvest addresses from MY pages, they're going to fill up their databases with useless data and end up spamming each other.
And finally, Web Ad Blocking is a site which provides a new 'hosts' file which redirects major web page ad sites to 127.0.0.1, which removes a whole lot of banner ads from web pages.
I do this now since every single mail send to any address in my domain is forwarded to my one 'main' address. I usually fill out froms with emails such as spamfromrealaudio@domain.com or spamfromebay@domain.com with the intent of finding out just who is leaking my name. Or course, this is rarely sucessfull since most spammers don't disclose recipient lists (I'm assuming they just BCC everyone) so I rarely see the address used to get to me, but it works every now and then.
Finkployd
Base Price per month $17 for 10 hours Cost for additional hour $2.90 per hour
The truth shall set you free!
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Neat way for the government to get a complete list of national email addresses.
It's interesting that there are steps afoot to outlaw electronic spam already, after all the www is not that old.
Dude, get a fscking clue! WWW is not the Internet. E-Mail dates from the early '70s.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
From their website: http://www.sneakemail.com - Neat.
------------
CitizenC
Oh, and the difference between junk snail-mail and junk email is who pays for it.
The sender pays for junk snailmail. YOU pay (in increased ISP costs, and -- for europeans -- connect time) for junk email.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
...The spam-banning is a very good idea, but it has to be implemented very carefully, so as not to tread on freedoms.
The way I'd do it is as follows. All advertising sent over the Internet, solicited or not, must have the option attached in some manner to not receive advertisements from that company at any future date. Whether this is via a Web form, replying to an e-mail with specific commands, or whatever does not matter, so long as the option exists.
Once a user opts out, they are sent one final message confirming this, as a sort of receipt so they can prove that they opted out. If the company ever sends them advertising over that channel again, they can be held liable for harassment.
Another possible implementation of this would instead require all direct-marketing advertising to be opt-in; a company may not send advertising to someone who has not previously given his or her explicit consent. This one leaves more of a bad taste in my mouth, though; it has the potential to set some rather nasty precedents.
A third approach would be to ban direct-marketing outright, on the grounds that it is necessarey to violate a person's privacy in order to obtain the requisite data. This one's only arguably good, though. It's true that no speech is actually being banned (you simply have to resort to mass-marketing techniques in order to say it, in the case of advertisements), but again some very dangerous precedents could be set here.
The fact is, we do have a right to free speech, and this is a Very Good Thing. But we also have the right to not be harassed, and that's basically what spam does. It's all about striking a good balance. I'm not sure what the ideal balance is. Anyone else have thoughts on this?
----------
This is an implementation of an EU regulation. Norway is not a proper EU member, but is a member of the broader EFTA group, and tend to implement EU regulations even more than most EU member.
There is also an article on The Register about Europe considering a ban on spam.
I've also got a collection of Spam resources, along with details of WIndows spam prevention and details of spam filters.
Richy C.
The submission text is misleading, you have to explicitly opt-in in order to get spam.
Denmark has a similar law, allthough it only covers UCE, not UBE, since it is part of the marketing law. We also have an opt-out system for snailmail, including a central list for direct snailmail.
That would be great to have at home, wouldn't it? You get a range of 100 telephone numbers, and you can assign them how you like. Based on the incoming number (and the caller ID too, if you like) you can give an engaged signal, direct to a screening service, have the phone ring with one of several identifying tones, etc. The possibilities are endless! Pity it's only available on ISDN-like connections, and usualy only the really high bandwidth ones. Still, sooner or later...
But this whole "identifying marks" thing is something you can use in a broad sense. I'm one of the privileged many (many on Slashdot at least) that can create new email addresses at whim because I have one or more domain names and administrative control over the mail for that domain. But how about physical mail addresses?
I use a PO Box, of course, but that doesn't stop companies sending me junk. But what I make a policy of doing now is tainting every postal address I'm obliged to give out. The address for a PO Box is very short, and it usually gives me one spare line to fill in with irrelevant data. I use this to fill in a "care of" address. Thus, if I'm obliged to give my postal address to buy-a-cd-online.com because my employer gave me credit there as a Christmas gift, I tell them that I'm "Air Supply, c/o C.D.Overmeyer, PO Box blah blah etc". The "C.D.Overmeyer" guff is enough to remind me who I gave that address to, and to write "return to sender" on unpoened envelopes to that address if they start spamming me postally.
As an aside, the most annoying junk mail I get in my PO Box is the stuff that the Post Office puts there, having accepted money from someone else to do so. I think if I'm paying for the box I should be able to say no to this, but I've yet to take it up with the staff. In the meantime, I hurl said junk back through the PO Box onto their floor. Why should I put their junk in the bin for them? Always aim for the bottom line. If everyone did it, they might at least ask us all whether we wanted the junk in the first place instead of stuffing it straight in.
I hate spam, in all its forms.
AirSupply: go ahead, cut me off.
The submission text is misleading.
Even if US and EU banned spamming, what would be the result?
Small spamming companies would be founded in Cayman Islands, I guess.