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Anti Spamming Act 2001 Proposed
JiveDonut writes "Our friend Rich Boucher (D-VA) along with Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) have introduced the Anti Spamming Act of 2001. An article can be found at the Roanoke Times site. Penalties include up to 12 months in jail and fines of $15,000 or $10 per e-mail. Bi-partisan support to reduce spam. At least the parties can agree on something." 30-40% of my mail is junkmail (most of which is caught and filtered). I'd like to know more details, but this could be great if done properly.
Look at the way it handles spamware:
"E) intentionally sells or distributes any computer program that--
`(i) is designed or produced primarily for the purpose of concealing the source or routing information of bulk unsolicited electronic mail messages in a manner prohibited by subparagraph (D) of this paragraph;
`(ii) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to conceal such source or routing information; or
`(iii) is marketed by the violator or another person acting in concert with the violator and with the violator's knowledge for use in concealing the source or routing information of such messages'"
This is about as benign an anti-software law as you can get. It only criminalizes software that is produced "primarily" for forging addresses, that has only limited commercially significant use otherwise (so you don't need to worry about general email tools), and that is marketed specifically for this purpose by the distributor or his agent.
In other words, this isn't criminalizing sendmail and a shell script; this is only going after programs which the seller markets as spamware and don't have any other value. This is lightyears more sophisticated than the $*@#! DMCA.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/charities.cron/
No I don't like spam, but its still a technical problem at its core. We're not seeing the 'true cost' of spamming, at least system admins and ISPs aren't. Bandwidth, diskspace, cpu time, etc. The internet community has been spoiled by promise of 'mail all you want.' I don't see why there aren't caps on email messages per month to lower internet access costs and offer premium accounts to mail crazy users.
I know we're heard close open relays a million times, but even that doesnt seem to help when free email accounts are readily available. Keep spam and spam lists legal but make the law force them to put a string in the subject like or somesuch for quick and easy filtering straight to the garbage or bulk folder. Let legitimate ISPs offer their services and sell expensive premium accounts like 100,000 emails this month = $1500.
If this was done we'd see legitimate business using spam and the fly by nights take off and people might actually scroll through their 'bulk' folders looking for deals from Sears and Crate and Barrel, etc and consider spam more like mail coupons instead of the crap it is today.
...but one part of the article makes me doubt it's effectiveness:
" It would make it a criminal offense to fraudulently use another individual's e-mail address to send spam, or to continue sending spam after being notified by a recipient not to do it anymore."
In other words, they are trying to make spam lists *opt-out* instead of *opt-in*...so anyone can send you spam if they want to, but they can't send you any more if you tell them to stop. Problem is, spammers rarely send spam from the same address more than once or twice, and almost never honor unsubscribe requests.
Also, if the article is being true to the wording of the proposed law, and the law really does make it illegal to "fraudulently use another individual's e-mail address to send spam," then it would still be perfectly permissable to send spam from a *fake* email address, as long as that address doesn't belong to an actual individual. I could send as much spam as I want by making up a completely different fake email each time, and advertising different crap. Who's going to really take the time and effort to find out if bob@fakeaddress1.com telling you to make millions by calling 1-800-CHEAT-ME and joe@fakeaddress2.com telling you to send this letter and a buck to ten other people are really the same person? Is the FBI going to investigate every single piece of spam that gets sent every day to determine it's origin, so that if someone asks to be unsubscribed and then gets a different piece of spam from another address which ends up being the same guy, they can fine him $10? Yeah, right...
DennyK
I have to go to your homepage to find your e-mail address
I didn't do that to avoid being spammed. I admit that I did that to advertise the presence of my homepage, in the hope that someone may find out what I do, get interested in it and maybe hire me for a project.
As an example, when posting on Usenet, I use my real email address. By the way, munging the email address is considered a major faux-pas in the German part of Usenet.
But having your own domain aren't you immune from much of this? Filter, filter, filter.
As pointed out by many others, filtering is no cure. The moment a message arrives at my mail server, it already created the additional traffic that I have to pay my ISP for. I could filter it so that I do not see it, but I'd still have to pay for it.
That's why I prefer not to filter, but instead to file a complaint against the spammer with his ISP.
It was a strange kind of honour when I found out that all of my public email addresses were listed in a "do not spam, will complain" list that some hacker found on a spammer's computer and posted on the net.
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You may like my a cappella music
Personally though, I think you're a bunch of whiney bastards. Just deal with it. If you get too much spam, stop frequenting porn sites, and signing up for stupid crap. How about not using AOL?
I don't do any of those things, and I still get lots of spam. I've been using the internet for more than a decade, and the amount of spam I get steadily increases despite all my efforts to prevent it. These days I even get spam in foreign languages for products only available on other continents.
As far as I can tell, the "just delete it" argument is just putting your head in the sand. Immense amounts of time and money are already wasted on dealing with it. How bad does it have to be before you acknowledge a problem? 10% of your total mail? 30%? 50%? Or even 90%?
Left unchecked, spam will continue to grow as a percentage of real mail. Eventually, it will reach a level where even you will demand action. Why not stop it now?
Two ways:
1) Government finds someone in the U.S. doing spam; it goes after them.
2) An individual finds someone in the U.S. or not doing spam, sues them under the civil liability provisions of the bill, all their U.S. assets are attached and used to pay the damages (esp. if they don't show up to court).
Although not every fly-by-night spammer will have U.S. assets, they could never visit the U.S. or operate a U.S. business, their assets in banks owned by U.S. companies might be seized,etc. You'd have to be a pretty small-time operator to be completely secure from U.S. jurisdiction.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/charities.cron/
Not only is it unenforceable in the case of spammers ("Hey, look a bogus FROM line. We'll have to prosecute these guys. If only we knew who they were!"), but it makes it illegal for individuals to use software like Freedom 2.0 from Zero Knowledge Systems to protect their identity or send protected email.
Please remember that who you communicate with is just as much a privacy issue as what you say to them. Give up on the first part, and you may as well give up the whole game.
Gee, let's give the government a tool to force open all of our private communications. What a great idea!
These politicians are NOT doing us any favors. They push these bills for their own reasons and then try to rationalize it by painting a veneer of public service over them.
It's a lie and a trap; don't trust them.
Now I hate spam as much as anyone but look at it like the crap I find in my mailbox everyday. It's just one of those things that you learn to deal with (As Taco mentioned...) with filtering.
That said...think about this (I'm not being paraniod, just throwing this out, wondering what others think) if this law gets passed and they start going after the smart spammers who do what they can to hide thier identity. How are they going to go after these people? More than likely with the same controversial tacticts that have been discussed here before. This may not be thier intention, but when the people whose job it is to stop this get going, they are going to want thier job to be as easy as possible. Will this include "Wire Tapping" suspected spammers email?
We have all seen lists of what Carnivore will/is supposedly looking for, i.e. bomb, gun, anarchy, etc...why not add "work from home", "be your own boss" and others to the list?
Will there be a commision that defines what is spam and what is not? What if companies started putting in the fine print something like "...by agreeing to this you also agree to alow COMPANY_X to send you email with store information" or something along those lines. That was a lame example, but I am sure some sleazy lawyer could figure out a way to fool people into aggreeing to accept spam.
I would love to see less spam, but stop for a second and think about 5 years down the road after this bill is enacted.
Remember it, write it down, take a picture, I dont give a fsck!
is the biggest waste of the 21st century. In an ideal world I'd like to see Congressional hearings in the United States investigating the practices of commercial advertising overall.
The practices of telemarketters especially should be a major focus of this investigation.
The common factor extends to panhandlers: "Pay, pay, pay, and I'll leave you alone" {Or will they?]
FWIW, my ratio of paper junk to substance is greater than my email,and a burden, reflected in increasing taxes, to the recycling authorities who have to deal with it. [Unread]
An intersting corollary:
At approximately the same time, bigspending advertisers [translation: major global multinationals} are complaining that banner ads on websites are a waste because only two people out of a million click'em, and neither one buys anything.
Perhaps this means the pavlovian certaintainty of advertisers so unquestioned in the second half of the last century is dying, along with equally-outdated capitalist myths.
We live in interesting times. The commies threw out their bullshit artists in 1989 [1991 in Russia itself} In America, we still have ours.....for the time being.
give me a
spammers should be put on their knees and shot in the back of the head.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
you have all that spam, taco, becuz we all put your email addresses when providing info for various downloads and pron adverts.
What these list sellers are doing is selling a list that states or implies that you enjoy or at least don't mind receiving SPAM.
Fight Spammers!
There should be penalties for list sellers.
People shouldn't be able to freely share information with each other?There should be the contact information for the list sellers.
So anonymity should be available to everyone else, just not those filthy spammers?
It always strikes me as hypocritical that people who say that they're for freedom, who defend network intruders as people just wanting to explore (or that they're doing them a service by showing them their security holes!), don't hesitate for a second to throw all those values out the window just so they don't get inconvenienced with extra email. Just so you know, I'm not characterizing the poster to whom I'm replying, just pointing out the general mood.
I'd love to see what happens if Kevin Mitnick started up his own spam service. There'd be soooo many confused script kiddies.
Cheers,
This article reeks with clueless people attempting to explain what they don't understand. How is sophistication related to sending more emails?
There is no question that spammers have become more sophisticated over the years. The first spams were stopped with simple filters (e.g., blocking certain phrases, header fields, or originating networks) and the culprits were easily tracked down. Some even wrote books about their efforts. These days spammers use a variety of techniques to mask spam as normal mail and to make it harder to track them down.
This sophistication allows them to deliver more email by bypassing simple filters and by evading accountability for their actions.
Sure try bringing someone over from a third world country to prosecute them for sending spam.
That won't happen, of course. But your analysis is too simple. First off, most of the spam I receive appears to be for US-based companies; I frequently talk to spammers who say, "but there isn't a law against it."
Secondly, developing countries often look to developed nations for legal models to follow. If we don't have laws against spam, China will hardly take the lead.
Having laws here also allows us to exert pressure on the operators of foreign networks. "It's against federal law" sounds much better than "we think it's not nice" or "it's against our AUP".
I would expect it to be less than 1%. Indeed, if you actually look at some usage logs, you'll probably find that all email and news traffic don't come to a tenth, or anywhere close.
Most net traffic is pr0n or MP3 trading. Other web traffic is the next largest draw. Email and newsgroups are at best a distant fourth.
So, let's say that SMTP and NNTP traffic is 10% (which I suspect is rather high) Then even assuming that 30-40% of news and mail traffic is spam (which I highly doubt-- for me it's less than 5%) then we're only talking 3-4%. I suspect the actual share of mail and news traffic is less than 5% (we are talking plain text here) and the percentage of spam is more like 10%. In that case we're talking a half-percent of bandwidth usage, not 10%.
If you're careful about who you give your email address to, spam really isn't that big of a deal. I've had the same email address for three years now, and I get less than one piece of spam a day. The trick is to just not give out your personal email address to people you don't trust. Set up a second email address to give to web sites and other public places. And change that every year or two if it starts getting bombarded with spam.
Furthermore, if the bandwidth usage is as large as you claim, ISP's themselves will start shutting spammers down, and will begin to institute measures to prevent this abuse of their networks. No ISP wants to waste precious bandwidth on a usage that's going to piss off their upstream providers.
This idea means licensing them so that they are properly registered, meaning that they can be billed for use of service, etc. and jail those not properly licensed. and also means that we can send bill collectors and tax collectors hunting after them.
The bottom line is that IF we can make it profitable to go after these guys, someone will make a business of it. We just go to figure a way how.
Then we get to use the scum of society, such as bill collectors and tax collectors, and turn them to some good, going after spammers. And we can use the money collected to subsidise the cost of the Internet.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I thought i'd share this gem with you.
I received unsolciited advertising mail and this was at the end:
This is not a SPAM. You are receiving this because you are on a list of email addresses that I have purchased for marketing.
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ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
where in the constitution does it say that we, or more specifically those bastards in congress, can make laws that restcict one's freedom just because their actions make someone else's life inconvenient?
Restricting my freedom to buy stuff and stick you with the bill certainly makes your life more convenient, but it's quite inconvenient for me. Since I'm sure there isn't a hypocritical bone in your body, I'll expect you to be sending me your credit card number any minute now....
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
On a lighter note, I recently had a message on my answering machine, which was a voice recording from a senator urging me to contact my local representative to tell them I was in favor of a particular bill.
:)
From what little I could tell I was NOT in favor of the bill.
I thought that it was ruled illegal for a telemarketer to leave a message on your answering machine (at least in New York).
And to top it off, the message got cut off, half way through the phone number they wanted me to call
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Huket on fonix wurced four mi.
I'll be more careful in the future, in the meantime, go eat a peech and chill.
KFG
Damnit get a clue! We can't let this happen. You cannot censor anyone, ever, even if it's the rat-bastard spammers. By supporting something like this you're allowing the man to take another step at total censorship. I hate all the spam too. I really do, I'd like to find some of these assholes and really hurt them but I don't. I'm the kind of guy who pretends to be interesting in the telemarketing calls just to keep the caller busy for as long as possible. I'm the guy who tells Time/Life "sure you can send that Year in Revue" book I'll gladly put it on the coffee table but I'm not going to return it nor am I going to pay for it. When they say there's no obligation I explain that there is indeed an obligation. I must take the time to package the book up and ship it back or write out a check and send it to them. Either way they are obligating me to do something I don't want to do and they don't have that right. (They've stopped sending those books BTW) These are the types of techniques that can be used to make them stop. If it's not cost effective then they'll quit.
/. is going to shut down for a few hours due to a move to a new facility. They smartly decide to send every registered /. user an email warning us of this. Cool... not spam right? But what if at the bottom of this email there's a sig that says: "Visit VA Linux Systems for all your computing needs" ?
/. made up this outage as an excuse to spam us? I'm sure someone can come up with a better scenario than this. But here's the point.
/. and confiscate and hold their equipment for years while the investigation goes on. But hey they're just spammers right?
What exactly is spam? Let's say
Now is it spam? Maybe
Who decides what is spam? The courts? That's a great fucking idea let's hire some more lawyers and corrupt ourselves even more. Or lets setup a government task force. Of course how could the task force monitor our emails for spam? Are they going to just have us forward any emails we don't like to them so they can track down the senders and take action? Now that's not a very efficient method is it? So their next step will be to setup even more carnivore type of monitoring stations all in the name of saving us from those horrible spam messages. People like CmdrTaco might even be ok with it, given enough time and after enough conditioning. Think of all the tendonitis insurance claims and wear and tear on our keyboards/mice and bandwidth this will save worldwide. The task force will have to have a very broad range of powers in order to be effective. They could bust into
There is only one way to fight spam and that is to ignore it. If spammers weren't getting results then they would just stop. Unfortunately too many people read the spam, click on the link and spend their money.
The other way to fight spam is to fight back... figure out where the spam came from and ping fuck them to death. Yes their ISP would loose revenue from the downtime but I bet after the third of fourth time, the ISP's would beef up and enforce their agreements quite a bit. Of course to fight back like this is illegal anyway and no one would think of breaking the law.
Censorship is censorship even if you're censoring assholes. Who knows your ideas might be unpopular 5 years from now and then you'll fall victim to a law you promoted.
G
90% of my spam comes from US spammers. It is true though that most of them hijack foreign mail servers ("relay rape").
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You may like my a cappella music
It is the responsibility of every American citizen to be paranoid about the government. It was * designed * to be that way and ceases to function as intended if the citizenry are not ever alert and ever * distrusting * of the government.
Go read the Federalist papers, for God's sake.
No wonder the nation is in such a mess.
KFG
Wow, that's some impressive stretching. Careful you don't pull a muscle!
I'm pretty sure that most folks don't have a personal relationship with a bunch of news anchors or their producers.
But they have a compiled list of thousands of their email addresses?
A huge proportion of spam that I receive arrives at my mail server from foreign machines, but more often than not, the foreign machines are merely open SMTP relays that have been used to try and obscure the original source - (usually a UUNET dialup customer), in addition to using a forged From: field.
Even if the spam originates from a foreign machine, the service they're offering is quite often located in the US. If they advertise a website, or the spam includes a submission form, it's relatively easy to locate the ISP that's hosting the spammer's site. Quite frequently, this is a violation the ISP's AUP, and a notification to the ISP will result in the spammer's site being removed (thus all their spamming efforts were wasted!).
There are utilities such as spamcop which are designed to assist in identifying the true source of junk emails. I generally do things by hand (traceroute, etc...), so I can't say whether or not spamcop is any good - just thought I'd mention that it exists.
Strags
Furthermore, how effective are anti-telemarketing laws? This is the same concept: anti-telemarketing laws allow you to "opt out" by telling the telemarketer to quit calling.
I've had situations where I've told telemarketers to quit calling and they don't. They just get more and more aggressive.
Sure, the laws are a deterrent to legitimate companies. I worked for a telemarketer who made their opt out database (DNC list, do not call list) a really big thing. But how many spammers are running legitimate companies?
I'm sorry, but anti-telemarketing legislation has been very ineffective, I wouldn't expect anti-spamming legislation to do any better, especially when it is framed in exactly the same manner.
My journal has hot
You are a troll right?
I don't sign up for stupid crop nor do I frequent porn sites.
However, I use usenet, have my own domain (with an whois entry), run several web pages. All these are the main sources for email address collectors.
Just look at your article. You have to munge your email address to avoid being spammed. You call that freedom? Let me guess, you are wearing Groucho Marx glasses when leaving your house.
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There are several bills working their way through Congress. And there's one that addresses spam in SMS messages. You can read about it here. If you want to see a list of several bills pending in Congress, CAUCE has a page describing them.
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
I hope the bill is more intelligently written than that. The above description legitimizes the 'opt-out' defense. It also has no penalties for companies like Ebay and Amazon that don't forge mail addresses. And since many spammers use throwaway dialup accounts, they could start using the true mail addresses of these accounts and be within the law.
Worse, the above description includes lots of mail that isn't really spam. If you send an email to Digital Convergence protesting their policies regarding the Cue-Cat, isn't that an 'unwanted and unsolicited email'? (Hopefully you'd be exempt if you didn't forge the from address.) The idea of bulk seems to be missing.
I hope the law is not as stupid as this article implies. But I've never had high hopes for government anti-spam measures - in the end they'll be just another tool used by the rich and privileged to protect their position.
The so-called "Anti-spamming Act" (HR 1017) was introduced a full month *after* the much better "Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail Act of 2001" (HR 95), in an apparent attempt to weaken antispam law.
Goodlatte's copycat "Anti-spamming Act" (HR1017) takes away service providers' rights to enforce their policies: The "Unsolicited Commercial Email" act (HR95) preserves that right..
The "Anti-spamming" act gives spammers free run of your server, until you explicitly tell them to stop. The "UCE" act lets admins proactively keep spam off their system. (Note: Goodlatte's Virginia constituency includes AOL, which has fought hard for the right to spam for several years, and which pushed to defeat last year's HR3113.)
(Both bills allow end recipients to sue, both require valid sender information, both penalize forgery. Both ostensibly mandate opt-out -- i.e., you have to tell the spammer to stop before they're forced to -- but HR 95 allows service providers to supersede that issue by setting their own policies to equal opt-in.)
Don't be fooled. Rep. Goodlatte's "Anti-spamming" bill is a mandate to spam: The "UCE" Act (HR95) is the real thing.
But don't take my word for it. See what others have to say:
- US legislation pages for The Suespammers Project
- US legislation pages at spamlaws.com
- Suespammers discussion list
--Tom Geller, Founder and Administrator, The Suespammers ProjectTom Geller
- There should be penalties for list sellers. Otherwise, you have to notify each spammer.
- There should be the contact information for the list sellers.
- There should be penalties for SPAM service companies -- companies that do spamming for others.
I don't trust the remove information on any spam. Even those it's the old way of confirming email addresses, it is still used. The newer way is with web bugs in html email, src="xx.com/sucker.cgi=victim.address.Fight Spammers!
I don't see how this can really help us - I mean, 70-90% of the spam I get is from country codes out side of the US.
Anyway, basically all this does is make it illegal to hijack someone's email address to send spam, and to remove someone from the spamming list when asked. But, if you're like me, I never reply to spam - that's the one way that the spammer knows that the address is live.
Net gain to most net users = almost 0.
Think about this bill for a second. CmdrTaco, I understand your email is 30-40% spam. I sympathize. However, but passing these bills, you're opening the gates for the government to pass other internet restrictions. Think about what you're doing first.
The right legislative approach is to extend the existing law prohibiting junk faxes to E-mail. That's a successful law, and would work.
By using the domain of a third party in the "Reply-to:" field, like this.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Personally though, I think you're a bunch of whiney bastards. Just deal with it. If you get too much spam, stop frequenting porn sites, and signing up for stupid crap. How about not using AOL?
Oh, wait, that isn't how this "Free" country works. Our real freedom is that we're free to give up our freedom in the most mindless fashion possible.
I've convinced myself, this is a good idea after all!
I get unsolicited dead tree mail every day. The right to send me such mail is garunteed under the Constitution.
I'm sorry, but spam is no different. Speach is speach.
What'll be next? Making it illegal to say Hi to someone without their permission first? Think his is extreme, it'll never happen? At Antioch college it is agaisnt the code of conduct for a husband to kiss his wife without explicitly asking permission first. It's a slippery slope people.
And consider this, how is anyone supposed to GET permission to send e-mail without e-mailing to ask permission? Do we all need to walk around carrying " opt in cards " that have to be hand signed before the sender can send us mail?
Anti spam laws are a cure much, MUCH worse than the disease that will limit us all and see totally innocent people prosecuted and have their lives destroyed.
Banning forging headers might be a step in the right direction, but only if it can be done in a way that presents no double standard with respect to snail mail laws. It would be pretty easy to write an anti spam bill that would do the equivilent of making it illegal to send someone a postcard saying " Guess Who?" on it. Is that what we really want?
Speach is speach is speach. You want to keep trading files over Napster, distributing DeCSS, posting derogetory articles about Scientology, fighting patents on abstract ideas?
If so, then spam stays.
KFG
Hmm..somehow you didn't refute my claim that email spam is no different than junk mail.
I'm glad to do it, then. There are two big differences.
One difference is in how the cost is paid. The sender of junk mail pays 100% of the cost of creating the junk mail and delivering it to your door. Spam is parasitical; most of the cost is paid by the recipients.
The other difference is that spam costs a lot less per unit to send, suggesting that we'll get a lot more of it.
Spammers and junk mailers both do what they do because the money they receive in sales allows them to pay for their unsolicited garbage. Because paper mail is expensive, you need a reasonable (e.g. > 1%) response rate to make it practical. Despite that, about half of my paper mail is junk.
Spam, on the other hand, is orders of magnitude cheaper, especially when you make others pay most of the cost. Response rates for spam campaigns thus are orders of magnitude lower, meaning that a lot more spam has to be delivered to put a dollar in the pocket of the spammer.
This suggests that spam, left unchecked, will be a much larger percentage of your inbox than is true for junk mail. Because of this, I think spam requires special legal treatment. The laws should at least be equivalent to junk faxes, but I favor stronger ones.
===
You do have a point with the ecologic costs of junk mail. But this is a problem endemic to our system of pricing; the true cost of resource depletion, polution, and disposal is hidden from consumers. Better to solve that problem directly, rather than solving this one tiny symptom.
The text of this bill is available by searching http://thomas.loc.gov for "spam".
(thomas.loc.gov is the first site that I've encountered that not only uses temporary URLs for search results and uses POST forms for searching, but also won't accept the form if I tell my browser to GET it instead.)
The shareholder is always right.
Please don't mistake this for flame bait.
But, it seems like there are some major double standards going on on slashdot. Legislation to kill spammers is ok but legislation to prevent people from steal^H^H^H^H^H sharing music is not. Spammers should be fought with technology not laws.
So many slashdotters scream for smaller government and bitch whenever the government passes a law dealing with technology but applaude them when they pass a law that they like. Please people, make up your minds (Esp. you CmdrTaco).
-crispy
<SIG>
I think I lost my work ethic while surfing the web. If you find it, please email it to me.
My sig has a broken link in it.
Ah, thank you. I thought something wasn't right - I read it as referring to the address it's sent to.
Geez! This is 2 articles in a row that have messed up Rep. Boucher's name! This guy is doing something "good" for us, the least you could do is get his name right! You started out calling him Dick Boucher last time!
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
In general telemarketers pay money to call you. Maybe not to you, but they pay the cost of call and the salary of the person making the call. SPAM on the other hand costs nothing to send.
There are no-call lists for telemarketers. There are restrictions on the times calls can be made.
The same with collection agencies. Collection agencies must be registered. Employees of those agencies who do not use their real name, must have a listed alias.
In both cases, the calls are traceable in some manner. Not the same with SPAM!
Fight Spammers!
I'm sorry, but spam is no different. Speach is speach.
This is blatantly wrong. Good anti-spam laws focus on behavior, not on content. Even an empty message can be spam.
Consider a real-world example: If I have a political message, I can hand you a copy of it on the street. I can tell it to you as you walk by. I can even stick a copy of it to your door. But I can't force you to listen, and i can't break into your house to convey it to you.
Suppose I buy the biggest megaphone I can find, and then I and my pals set up camp outside your house and read our political messages to you around the clock at 140 decibels. If it bothers you, you need not soundproof your house; you can call the police and have me hauled off.
In front of the judge, no amount of waving the Bill of Rights will get me off. Why? Because although I may have a right to speak, you have a right not to be forced to listen. The right to freedom of speech is a requirement that the government not impede communication between willing parties, not a right to make as much noise as you want just because it could be considered speech.
Penalties for this are a joke and anyone in the justice system who is going to attempt to waste their time going after one spammer will spend more tax dollars taking them to court, then the justice system would gain via fines and jail times.
Nicer solution would have been to sanction ISP's, uplink providers, and hold them for some accountability with the actions generated from their networks. e.g.: Provider gets warning first 20 times then fines subsequent to every infraction thereafter. This would certainly piss ISP's off and force them to open their eyes and see their is illegal actions (spoofing emails, wire fraud believe it or not) stemming on their networks, which they would have to fix or else pay hefty fines per infraction.
Think about it for a second, this law sounds like it intends the greatest good for us who hate spam, but think about someone sending spam outside of the U.S., it won't have any effect. Just try attempting explaining to a jury of homemakers how someone used proxy A, to jump through proxy B to end up in Thailand in order to send bulk spam. It just won't work.
That must be a hefty load of spam. I've worked in enterprise environments of over 5,000 people, each receiving mailing lists stuff, spam, friends mails, etc., and am just annoyed by it, never once crashing my systems. She must be targeted or using some cheesy systems that spammers are crashing. Let's at least be honest about it, sure we hate spam but crashing your system
This article reeks with clueless people attempting to explain what they don't understand. How is sophistication related to sending more emails? It doesn't take a sopistacted user to search on google for "anonymous email" and "relay". Now had she mentioned illegally relaying to unauthorized servers, via nefarious means such as TCP/IP spoofing then I'd be impressed or more attentive to her story.
Sure try bringing someone over from a third world country to prosecute them for sending spam. Then again with the lax security abroad try obtaining log records from these sources, who's only income may be from spamming mind you, and you'll be ignored since they don't have to follow the U.S'. laws
360 degrees of Karma
The only real solution to the spam problem is via network user agreements and technology.
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich