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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.
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?
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.
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ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
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!
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.
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"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