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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/
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?
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!
you have all that spam, taco, becuz we all put your email addresses when providing info for various downloads and pron adverts.
Spammers, imo, are people who disagree with the federal government. Come on, spammers aren't rapists or pedophiles or deadbeat dads.
I'm going to assume your first sentence is a typo, because I can't make anything sensible out of it. Spammers are people who send unsolicited bulk email.
It's true that spammers aren't violent criminals, and shouldn't be treated as harshly as, say, murderers. But that isn't an argument for letting them off easy, either.
Collectively, spammers cost us $9 billion per year. Like con men, market manipulators, perpetrators of fraud, and common thieves, they are out-and-out parasites. They did nothing to build the internet, but make their living by stealing our time, money, and attention.
Just make it illegal to forge headers, and when spammers are forced to use regular headers, we can
filter them that much more easily. And then it won't be so bad, right?
Wrong. First, you still have to pay the costs of receiving and filtering the message. Second, everybody who received email then has to make sure they have some sort of filtering just to get rid of something they never asked for. Third, it's not obvious how this would help the common problem of "whack-a-mole" spamming. Fourth, spammers have managed to work around every technical solution now in place for spam prevention; it's safe to assume that they'll do it here, too.
So yes, anti-spam laws are needed. And yes, they need criminal penalties as well as civil penalties.
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.
----
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
Huket on fonix wurced four mi.
I'll be more careful in the future, in the meantime, go eat a peech and chill.
KFG
It always strikes me as hypocritical that people who say that they're for freedom [...] throw all those values out the window just so they don't get inconvenienced with extra email
Like the rest of humanity, most of slashdot's readership is in favor of laws that benefit them and opposed to ones that might harm them. And like most of humanity, they'll say it's all for high-minded reasons. There are exceptions, of course, but too few.
However, it's still possible to have an intelectually coherent position like this. I am strongly in favor of freedom of speech and strongly opposed to spam. This makes sense to me because I'm not opposed to the content of the spam, but rather the behavior of forcing me to take something I don't want and making me pay for it, just so that they can make a buck.
Similarly, I take intent into consideration when dealing with hackers. If somebody breaks into my system and leaves no trace but a little note saying "gotcha!" then I'm impressed; they've done me a service and done something cool. If some script kiddie breaks in and uses my boxes to send spam or warehouse the mp3s and pr0n that his mom won't let him keep in the house, then I come down on him like the wrath of god.
I'd love to see what happens if Kevin Mitnick started up his own spam service. There'd be soooo many confused script kiddies.
Heh. That's a good idea. 2600 can do their summer subscription drive that way.
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!
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
Well, unless it's spam. Censor away!
The banning of spam has nothing to do with censorship. Spamming is a behavior that has nothing to do with the content of the message. The fact that most spam contains commercial advertising has confused some people, though.
If I stand outside your house and rant into a megaphone at 4 am, you can call the police and have me hauled away, even if I'm reading the bill of rights out loud. Why? Because whatever the content of my speech, my behavior is against the law (and also pretty rude).
EFF co-founder John Gilmore runs an open relay mail server at home, which, to anti-spammers, is among the most evil things that you can do.
Suppose he runs an open shell account server that keeps no logs but allows people to break in to your boxes? Is that also virtuous?
Back when nobody spammed and everybody played nice, open relays were swell. I miss the days when the Internet was one big community and pretty much everybody was playing positive-sum games. And the times I've met John Gilmore, he seems like a great guy. But these days an open relay can and will be used to hide the origin of spam.
If I leave my front door unlocked, the cops won't say boo. But if a bunch of crackheads use my open house as a base of operations to steal from my neighbors, then Johnny Law will have some things to say to me about it.
Personally, I don't like the anti-spam groups, because I don't want some lynch-mob arbitrarily deciding what is spam and what isn't.
Well then bug your reps to get some laws passed. I'd rather spend my time doing other stuff, but as long as spammers are stealing resources and gumming up the works, I'll be doing what I can to stop them. Vigilante action is a poor substitute for the rule of law, but it beats anarchy by a mile.
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.