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Senator Says Spammers Have First-Amendment Rights
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), while joining Rep. Gephardt (D-MO) in a discussion of how Democrats are the "guardians of the New Economy," noted that opt-out is better, because it gives companies their first ammendment right to contact you. I agree, companies do have a right to contact me. But they should be required to pay "postage" for that right. I think spammers should pay a penny per k to both me and my ISP. A 5k spam would cost a dime. Still less then a stamp, but it'd make me a few hundred bucks a month for my time, bandwidth, and hardware costs. Spammers take away my property and happiness. Isn't that a right too? And opt-out is a joke. I've opted out of countless things, but I still get a hundred+ spams a day. Thank god for mail filters.
you idiot. now they can charge more for your email address when they sell it to other spammers as "verified."
I agree, you have a right to express your opinion -- any opinion at all.
But don't force your free speech down my throat! I think the right not to hear other people's free speech should be the next amendment to the Constitution.
Generally, unsolicited free speech should be limited to public spaces only. Not my windshield, not my doorknob, not my front lawn, not my snail mail box, not my email box, not my telephone. In fact, why not designate free speech areas in cities by zoning. So those who want to hear other people's free speech can go to the town square or Hyde Park or wherever it might be.
Marko
A human being wrote the spam and pushed the send button, or executed the mass mail script. A "company" did not. Companies don't have fingers to type and click; therefore the speech in question was not produced by a company, so whether they have First Amendment rights is not the issue. Or are you saying that working for a company shrinks a person's freedom of speech?
if spammers have to pay to send email, then everyone should have to pay to send email. i'd rather deal with the bullshit.
Move to NY. Sen Bruno passed one last month. They create a list and tmkteers are required to to put us on their do not call list or they can be fined. Best thing he ever did.
j0vlth7001@sneakemail.com
I assume that that's your real e-mail address. It must be, since you don't mind getting spam. I encourage everybody here to send you an e-mail thanking you for sticking up for the spammers. In fact, all 300,000 Slashbots should remind you how cool you are at least once an hour, and maybe tell you how you can MAKE $$$$ FAST.
-Yours,
Bernard Wooley.
- A.P.
--
"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?"
Sure. Why not?
In the olden days, we lived in villages or towns. There's only so many people who can _try_ to contact you in a village- and in fact there's case law where if someone in the village decided to bang on your door and shout in your windows 24/7, they'd be harassing you and the law would tell them to stop or be stopped.
The difference between now and then is technology and the expansion of possible contacts, and nothing illustrates this better than the Internet.
When every stupid peddler in the world can 'contact' MILLIONS OF PEOPLE with relative ease, the rules have changed. Any given peddler may or may not have a 'right' to 'contact' me, but the CLASS of stupid peddlers obviously do not have the right to perform a denial of service attack on my email account, or for that matter to consume many hours out of my day while I grovel through the thousands of emails to try and look for actual communications from people I need to talk to. Filters don't completely solve this, either. They don't scale that much better than hitting 'delete'.
I don't know exactly what needs to be done to give stupid peddlers the capacity to market to people (maybe *gasp* BUYING ADVERTISING?) but in a situation of hyperconnectivity, 'cold calling' is no good. They just hook up a big machine and cold-call EVERYBODY, just like the telemarketer machines that dial more numbers than the operators can handle. Technology brings the connectivity to a point where the old rules don't make sense any more. We need new rules better suited to the situation.
Then you're against the court system and the law (at least in the US) which gives commercial speech a lesser level of protection.
Why don't all slashdot readers send Ron Wyden some spam mail. You know, tell him how he can get rich by working at home, or how he can lose weight real fast.
Most of the spam I've gotten lately has been offering me merchant accounts for accepting credit card payments. Maybe if I forwarded one of them to Wyden, he could set himself up with a merchant account and accept bribes by credit card! Far more convenient than the old brown paper bag full of twenties!
Yep. I chagned, first to voicestream (Accually I had Verizion for a while but didn't like their service) for my phone service. Since I can't afford cell prices for my comptuer I eventially moved. Around Minneapolis there are three local monopoly phone companies that I know of. (Qwest, TDS, and sprint/united) There are also cable and satalite for computers, and wireless is coming. I'm sure not everyone has the latter option, but if you look you could be surprized.
Sounds like my cell phone. If you've got telemarketers calling your cell phone number all the time wanting to introduce you to the wonderful world of pay-per-play pornography over the phone don't you think you'd be a little perturbed as well considering you pay for calls you receive? Just like e-mail.
Well I agree with Social Security, but Federal Income taxes do *some* good.
If you drive on an Interstate Highway, most state highways and most bridges in the US, then your taxes are helping to pay for them and thier upkeep.
If you like your imported beer/food/cars/whatever, tax dollars are spent to keep the sea lanes open, the costal waters safe and make sure things are inspected at various Federal levels, with some of that Tax money.
Since 1945, Income tax dollars have gone to defending Western Europe, Japan, Australia, and the US so we can buy all these neat things and sell them fewer neat things than we buy from them.
I've always had to argue with people that saying "my tax money is wasted", because in most cases, people in the US get something back for thier tax dollars.
As for the Free Speech aspects of spam...I've got to think about that.
According to Senator Ron Wyden's web site (http://wyden.senate.gov/), he wants you to fill out a form rather than send an email as he get's too many emails and that will be the fastest way to get a response... hmmmm, I wonder if he get's too many spams. Judging by the source of his mail page, his email address is: senator_wyden@exchange.senate.gov. Of course, he has staff filtering emails for him. Too bad his personal email address isn't so easy to find... adding it to lots of spam lists might just change his opinion. He obviously does not care for individuals, just corporations, or else he would have been talking about "opt-in" lists, not "opt-out". Not only is he siding with corporate spammers, he's wasting taxpayer's money on staff who have to filter the spam from his inbox!
So they defend the right of a company to not make a profit and burn through cash faster than a pothead burning weed after being deprived for a week? Well, if that's their choice, it's fine with me.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
After trying various complicated ways of screening out spam before it hit my inbox, I now simply use a procmail filter which puts any email containing any of the following phrases into a 'spam' mailbox:
:-)
"remove" in subject line
"remove" in the subject
'remove' in the subject
removal instructions
remove in subject line
remove in the subject
to be permanently removed
to be removed
to be taken off
to get off the list
to get off this list
to get removed
to remove yourself
In a month of using this filter, it's reduced the spam I get by 2/3 (it caught 300 of the 450 spams I received in the past four weeks), and it hasn't yet accidentally marked even a single non-spam as spam. I add new phrases as I see new spam slip through the filter. (Next up: I need to add "S.1618" and "S. 1618" to the list.)
Each one of these is wrapped in a simple procmail recipe, as such:
:0
* B ?? to be removed
/home/brian/spambox
It's not the most efficient thing in the world, but it's simple and it works. I hope this idea is of use to others.
Its illegal to yell "Fire" in a crowded theater. Does this also limit free speech?
--Storm
Furthermore, why is the only solution to party difficulties "bipartisanship"? As if they're the only two games in town.
:-)
Annoys the hell out of me.
-l
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
Yeah, pretty much. I'd like to see Texas (where I live) switch over to proportional congresscritters. I need to read more on the subject, but last I read, the Founders were against a two-party system, but the States ended up encouraging it (intentionally or not) through the winner-take-all stakes that you mentioned.
Now if we just had referendum rights here, too...
-l
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
Legal measures, like requiring the opt-out to actually work, might get somewhere. It would be good if spammers had to be cautious to avoid fines because they sent you spam after you opted out. (and yes, I think just a fine, not the death penalty or anything would be appropriate, since honest mistakes could happen. If the penalty is too harsh, spammers might not get fined if they can show that there was some kind of honest mistake. If there's a 100 $ fine that they have to pay, no court wrangling or bullshit like that, then they'll behave.)
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
Just double the size of the hash you want to compute every 18 months. Call it "Back's Law" and send a beer to Moore every 18 months while you're at it.
If we got rid of the small time spammers we'd get rid of 90% of the spam out there. Do you think it's companies like Yahoo and IBM that are sending you messages about the latest Britney Spears video?
--
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
After reading all of this SPAM stuff, I went to go visit http://www.orbs.org/ only to find this:
Due to circumstances beyond our control, the ORBS website is no longer available.
Does anyone know what's up with that?
Why can't some clever judge or lawyer find a way to stretch 47 USC sec. 227 to cover spammers sending unwanted "facsimiles" of the original of their email that they typed up to every address they can get their hands on? Facsimile meant a close approximation or copy of something long before there were wires to transmit them over, and the original intent of the writers of that law was to prevent cost shifting.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Naturally, the direct marketers are trying to control the debate by controlling the terminology, harping on the (deceptive) meme: Advertising is Speech.
I offer a counter-meme: Advertising is Pollution.
What is pollution? It's stuff that's introduced into an environment where it doesn't belong or isn't wanted.
Empty beer cans don't belong in the street. They interfere with the flow of traffic. They are an eyesore. It reduces the street's utility by getting in the way of where you want or need to go. They are also a health and safety hazard. Even if there weren't laws against littering in the street, social forces would operate to compel people to not litter. It is, as best, impolite; at worst, monsterously destructive to the environment and quality of life.
Advertising is nearly identical. It interferes with the normal flow of information. It's an eyesore. It reduces the utility of the info-sphere by interposing itself between you and what you want or need to know. It is also intentionally deceptive. Yet purveyors of advertising portray themselves as a necessary, indispensible part of modern captialist society, when in fact what they're doing is willfully polluting the info-sphere with stuff they know isn't wanted by anyone.
Tell me: How is cold-calling me at dinnertime trying to convince me to switch long-distance carriers a benefit to my household, the community, and society as a whole? How is stuffing my snailmail box with pulp paper coupons offering 3% discounts on crap I've never tried a good thing for me? How many lovely trees have been killed to print and mail this garbage which, in my case, goes straight into the recycling bin, unread? Why should I support wasting bandwidth to distribute deceptive scams and snakeoil, bandwidth that I could be using to lose at Quake and HalfLife?
Just as there are appropriate places for empty beer cans, there are appropriate places for Internet advertising. The social order of the Internet has unequivocally decided that advertising is pollution, and when it appears in unsanctioned areas, it will not tolerated. Period.
You have a right to speak. You have no right to pollute. Get over it.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Right on. Passing laws about spam just makes legislators think it's okay to pass laws regulating other aspects of online speech. I'd say it's worth a little extra annoyance to keep government net regulations *which are inevitably dumbassed* from being passed. The idea that we need the government messing in our private affairs because self-regulation is too hard (waah!) is just falling into the trap that keeps professional politicians in business. Either get a technical work-around, learn to live with spam, or simply stop using email. Just fer chrissakes, don't go whining to the government.
My no solicitors sign at home gives me the legal right to refuse to admit them. Of course the 1/4 mile driveway and 3 big dogs might have something to do with it also. With a little work you can return the favor to any spammer, have auto-responder will travel. Just take sometime to find the legitimate source and respond with 2 or 3 thousand remove requests :) Hard to do business with an email account over quota :) This assumes of course you got a handy T1 to use :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
check out 50megsfree.com. They have exactly the program you are speaking of. Use our service, receive our approved mailings, opt out and your site is deleted. Is easy enough to block the mailings and 50 MB is a nice size free site :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
there are a group of us try to define and implement a proof of work postage stamp that is reasonably resistant to attacks by dedicated hardware. The basic cryptographic concepts are explained at:
http://www.cypherspace.org/hashcash/
in a nutshell, a hashcash coin is a nonreusable cryptographic expression of work. The message sender would generate the hashcash coin by spending approximately 10 to 15 seconds of CPU time solving a known mathematical problem. A message recipient would be able to verify the coin very quickly and decide how to handle the message based on the presence or absence of a valid coin.
obviously, there would be a need for a white list filter for mailing lists and people one frequently communicates with as well as methods for handling folks without hashcash capability but we have solved most of these problems and are moving forward.
Hashcash is not intended as a perfect solution to the spam problem but it is a very good way of raising the cost of spam for the spammer.
contact me directly if you want to contribute by generating working code for the first generation implementation of hashcash.
It's disturbing how hypocritical so many slashdotters are about free speech. It's perfectly fine to throw it out the window when you're pissed about spam but you'll be damned if you can't post DeCSS or cracked mattel databases or whatever we're rallying around today.
But the fact remains that speech is either protected or it's not, and when you say spam is illegal what you're saying is illegal for a corporation to contact an individual, and that is crossing the line on the first ammendment. So you say that they're using your resources... excuse me, but why exactly is it that you left port 25 open? By having an email server and address you are implicitly permitting anyone who wants to send you email. In other words, would you like to get sued every time you send someone an email without their permission?
I don't like spam any more than the next guy -- but I would rather see a technical solution than a legislative one. Hash Cash (as discussed above) is one idea, but seriously, why not just mandate the use of PGP on everything sent to you?
Actually the 21 million addresses email was kinda interesting for me. I monitor and run websites for a large number of customers and am hooked into most of the webmaster and postmaster messages for each site.
The other day, I saw waves being sent out on this 21 Million Addresses scheme. Scary thought though is that they hit at least 70% of the servers I monitor.
Another interesting thing though, was that the systems that weren't hit, weren't registered through network solutions. So I think I can guess where the list came from, and judging from the spam I get from network solutions, I'd also hazard a guess that the spammers "are" network solutions.
Lando
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
I guess it must be legal for me to call the senator at his house 400 times a day. IT'S MY RIGHT.
I guess that I can knock on his front door 400 times a day too. I just want to sell him some subscriptions to a pr0n site.
We need more senators like this, expanding the rights of Americans everywhere. Anyone know his address? I want to personally deliver a dump truck of spam and manure to his home address. That's my right too.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
that would be a completely worthless email account - nothing left to do but cancel it, print new biz cards, inform friends/family/associates of new email address, etc, etc, etc. I'd never waste time sorting thru 100 emails for the 5-10 useful ones. Of course it would be my fault for using it to 'sign up' for 'free' stuff instead of a disposable. We added an email acct from our ISP for one of our staff, Rebecca@ourdomain.com, only to find it was already on lots of porny lists. She was not a happy camper!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
If a person has the right to send spam, then honoring an opt-out list is purely optional.
I understand that we have a right to speak our mind in any forum, but there is no constitutional guarantee of an audience. It's pure crap that we have to pay for the priviledge of being an audience for garbage communications. It'd be one thing if the internet were provided to citizens free of charge, but the same way it's illegal for telemarketers to call cell phones, it ought to be illegal for spammers to contact those who do not actively seek advertisements. Apparently the first amendment doesn't apply to cell phones, setting the precedent for restricting unsolicited e-mail on the internet.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
And to think the Republicans are the ones who are supposed to be so pro-business.
Bet you don't get any more spam from the companies that you ``opted out'' from. Only problem is that those companies probably accumulate a list of opt-outs and sell it to some other company so they can spam you. ``Hey, Ted, how's it going? Nah. Wish I could but I can't. I have a golf outing. Say, I gotta list here of people who don't want our junk emails any more. Maybe they won't mind hearing from you. How much will you give me for it?''
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
What, you mean my internet access is supposed to be free? Those dirty cheaters at my ISP told me I have to PAY for it already!
But facetiousness aside, we ARE paying for it. It's often on a flat-rate basis (much like local phone calls and basic cable TV services) rather than a "per-packet" basis, but it is paid for. Spammers can use the same services - though I get the impression that just about every ISP has a service agreement that says [to paraphrase] "our service is not for sending spam, so don't do it or we'll kick you off". (I suspect ISP's who DON'T have this in their acceptable use terms in the contracts get blacklisted pretty quickly...)
---
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
I have the impression that in the past year, US politicians and US political advisors looked at the spam issue and started to think of unsolicited email as their future tool in election campaigns.
Now, they are trying to make it legit. For political campaigns, of course. They may outlaw it for commercial spam, but there will be attempts to legitimize political spam.
And trust me, unless there is a real outcry against it, there will be political spam in the future. Already now, despite the fact that nobody likes telemarketing (do you?), the Bush campaign relied heavily on it, even used pre-recorded messages and questionable procedures that are usually considered a bad thing in telemarketing - and the Bush team later called it a valuable and working tool.
There have already been a few small incidents of US politicians spamming. Most of these attempts backfired, but from what I read, it appears to me that even after some "net oldtimers" protested, the political campaign teams did not actually think they did something wrong.
------------------
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
Great, isn't it?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Not Gephardt. Can't you even read the little blurb on /. (much less the article itself)?
As for happiness: there is no such right. What fools these mortals be. Even the pursuit of happiness you have no Constitutional right to, though Tom Jefferson liked the phrase as a substitute for the more controvertial "property".
Even if there was shown to be some compelling government interest in stopping spam, any law to that end would still have to deal with strict scrutiny from the courts. And in this case, technical means can deal with the problem. I think they can do so adequately now, but perhaps it is too hard for most people. Even so, they should do so fine in a year or two.
Let us regard the long sweep of time and realize how foolish it would be to sacrifice even a tiny chunk of our right of free speech for a few years of the security of slightly less spam.
They can't defeat filters. There is an extremely pain in the ass way to configure your account, but it would keep even this service from reaching you. Set up a whitelist, so that only emails that you approve of reach you. Yep, it would be difficult for someone new to contact you, and there would have to be some way to let people who you hand your email to reach you, but that can be setup (possibly with an alternate email account).
Jeff
but please don't give me this "depriving me of my property" bullshit. It's as bad as the Reagan Years' war on drugs rhetoric that if you try marijuana once you are guaranteed to become a heroin addict. Tell a lie and you lose your credibility.
Did you have the use of your computer before? Do you still have the use of your computer? Sure, until you delete it, the spam message in question may occupy a few k on your 20 GB hard drive. Have you really lost the use of it?
To extend this logic you can say that people who send unsolicited mailers through the USPS have denied you the use of >1.0 cubic inch of your physical mailbox, and have thus violated your rights. It's silly to make such a claim.
I don't have an easy answer for spam other than this, DELETE IT.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
You wouldn't believe how many times I've heard that. ;)
It great working at a company with a giant banner like that by the front door, though. And it looks ten times more evil in black on a red background.
æeee!
It works in combination with our Micropay server (connected with Paypal and eventually a number of other money transfer systems) so that the spammers can essentially pay you postage for sending you mail. We're about to release a Windows client (only days away), but a Linux one is in the works...
Take a look at the product sheet here for more info
æeee!
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
You don't pay for junk mail or flyers on your windshield, but you pay for spam. That's the difference.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Great idea - that will piss off administrative assistants and clerks all over Capitol Hill. Senators don't care about this stuff because they never read email. Heck, even the President has quit using email (although in his case it was apparently so as to not leave a paper trail) - it will be a while before the people running things ever "get it" WRT the spam epidemic.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
I'm amazed - for once one of the Prez' dumb utterances has turned around and I now agree with it in a certain sense. I hope that doesn't happen too often :)
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Are people who instantiate Denial of Service attacks also protected by their first amendment rights? And what about 4th amendment rights?
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" (expanded to cover privacy in general usage)
Neither of these are even political speech. Anyone have their real email and home (Not office!) phone numbers?
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Agreed that solution must be technical. But I think solution is digital signatures combined with (collaborative?) reputation database.
Not signed or sig invalid? Your mail is in /dev/null.
Signed but nobody knows you? Sorry, I won't see that one either.
Signed and you've demonstrated that you're a real person? I've got mail!
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Actually, you can (and some people do) opt out of a number of those things. But when you do, they don't send the money back. That suggests that something unfair is happening.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
If you are running a server that happily and consentually accepts the connection, then it's hardly force, is it?
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I agree that spammers have the right to send mail to anyone who is willing to receive it. And if you're running a SMTP server on the Internet and it accepts mail from anyone, then that means you're willing to receive spam.
BUT I also assert that using fake return addresses is a form of fraud, and the First Ammendment does not give you the right to defraud. If it does, then I'm going to start selling bridges and Florida real estate.
Don't fake your headers, and you're in the clear. Of course, the whole reason for faking headers and using open relays is to avoid accountability, because you don't want your "potential customers" to talk back.
The First Ammendment assures you're allowed to say it, but it doesn't assure that you're not responsible for what you say.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
And that's the appropriate answer. What's needed is improved filtering software, not more laws. They have the right to talk, but we don't need to listen.
More laws is usually a very bad answer. I think that this is another case were solving a problem by throwing laws at it is a bad answer. But private entities have the right to not transmit things. Private individuals have the right to not receive things.
Mail programs would also need to be a bit more intelligent. They would need to be able, e.g., to decide to not download large messages without explicit approval. It would be best if they were able to download the first part of a message and examine that before deciding whether or not to continue. Say, a 5KB chunk of the message. Anyone should be able to say enough in that space to allow the recipient to decide whether or not to download the rest.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
As far back as 1995, he co-authored House bill HR1555, an anti censorship bill to be tacked onto the Telecom Reform Bill.
Waaaaay back in 1996, when the Communications Decency Act was first kicking our asses, he made a campaign against it one of his platform issues.
I think I see the problem here.. He's consistantly FOR free and open speech, and doesn't want laws infringing on it. I just think he needs to be convinced that junk email should fall under junk fax laws-- not junk phone call laws.
Dear friends, Corporations are not citizens of the US. They are chartered, temporary agreements so business can get done in an expiditious way. They have no right to the freedom of speech.
one penny to both the user and the ISP.
5k mail, 5 cents to the user, 5 cents to the ISP.
Telemarketers are regulated. There are strict laws that they must follow (In the USA, not sure about laws in other countries, maybe someone will post with other information). If they do not follow these laws, you can sue for damages. I see no such laws regulating spammers.
Information about laws regarding telemarketing and mass faxing can be obtained at http://www.tcpalaw.com as well as how to sue for damages, if you wish, if they did not follow said laws.
For a good time call www.sawkie.com
I found 2 quotes on similar issues, both apply here.
"[They] have come to court not because their
freedom of speech is seriously threatened but
because their profits are; to dress up their
complaints in First Amendment garb
demeans the principles for which the First Amendment
stands and the protections it was designed
to afford."
Federal Judge Stanley Sporkin , Turner Broadcasting v. FCC
And:
"Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen
to or to view any unwanted communication,
whatever its merit. . . We therefore categorically
reject the argument that a vendor has the right
under the Constitution or otherwise to send
unwanted material into the home of another...
We repeat, the right of a mailer stops at the outer
boundary of every person's domain."
No name to accredit it to, but: Rowan v. U.S. Post Office
Quotes taken from http://www.cauce.org/about/faq.shtml#censorship
Please support the effort to outlaw spam. See CAUCE for more information.
For a good time call www.sawkie.com
Good idea. After all it's a First Amendment Right. Let's fill up those servers!
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
the 16th amendment was never ratified by all but two of the states. BUT, it wasn't challenged so it remains.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
If they get their right to free speech, then I get my right to property.
I'm charging $100,000/bit/millisecond for every piece of spam that hits my mailserver. After all it's taking up my disk space. That's the "rental fee" I'm going to charge them. Not to mention what I can tack on for the use of my processor to process the mail delivery. How about another $100,000/bit?
Yes, you have a right to free speech. No, you do not have a right to be heard. You can say whatever the hell you want, but you can't say it in my house, unless I let you in.
-Wintermute
Right, so lets go censor things we don't want on television too, since they're 'invading' your home through the non-essential service you voluntarily use.
Wrong. First off, there are many people for whom email *is* an essential service. It would be awfully hard for my employer to function without it for example. Secondly, most TV is funded by commercials, therefore they are integral to the service. My email is *not* funded by spammers. In fact, their spam puts more burden on my ISP's backbone, thus increasing their costs, and trickling down to increase mine.
If I turn my TV on to the local Fox affiliate, I am choosing to watch that station, whatever they may show me. When I set up an email address, I am not implicitly consenting to being contacted by moronic companies I would never buy anything from anyway. Television commericals are much more like banner ads. I choose to go to the website, so I see banner ads. Companies certainly have a right to put what they want on *their* web page. Spammers want the right to put what they want in *my* mailbox.
-WintermuteYour right to "view a movie you purchased, with DeCSS" does not obligate "the movie industry" to provide you "hardware" on which to exercise that right.
You're right. They aren't required to provide me with "hardware" to do it with. But, that's not what the DeCSS case is about. It's about the right to create our own "hardware" with which to play it with.
The MPAA chose not to make a Linux player avaliable. They have that right. They should not have the right to prevent others from making a Linux player avaliable.
-WintermuteAll these people claming spam is free speech, and thereforce sacrosanct, need to go back and re-read the interview with Dan Ravicher. Allow me to quote:
The amount of protection given particular speech depends upon it's content. While some speech can easily be categorized as political, commercial, verbal acts or otherwise, First Amendment analysis often looks at the speech's expressiveness as opposed to its functionality to determine the corresponding level of protection. Purely expressive speech regarding public affairs, politics and government (think "F--- the draft!" on the back of a jacket worn by an individual with no intent to cause imminent lawlessness) gets heightened First Amendment protection, while purely functional speech (think "Do you have any drugs?" to an undercover police officer or "I accept" to a party which has offered a contract) gets little First Amendment protection. This leaves speech which is both expressive and functional, such as commercial speech (think "Eat at Joe's!"), lying somewhere in the middle. Further, indecent speech (think adult porn) gets very little protection while obscene speech (think child porn) gets no protection whatsoever.
That's the actual lawyer saying commerical speech does not have absolute 1st Amendment protections. Sorry, thanks for playing.
-WintermuteYou agreed to accept whatever it sends you the moment you connected to it, just as you agree to accept ads by turning on a television set.
Is that true? Hope you remember you said that if you ever get DoS attacked, get a virus on your computer, or get your computer cracked. After all "the Internet is a public forum. You agreed to accept whatever it sends you the moment you connected to it.
-Wintermutesounds to me like the good Senator has a bit too much bandwidth on his hands.
Spam is NOT protected speech because of the following criminal and civil violations:
The First Amendment to the American Constitution does not in any way restrict legislators from passing other laws to protect the rights and property of other people. I cannot legally break into the home of prospective employers to read them my resume. I cannot legally deface buildings with messages I consider important. I cannot legally erect an advertising billboard on someone else's property without permission.
So why should spam be treated any differently?
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
I had a truly evil idea recently that might just work.
We can address the spamming problem by spamming the DMA. They list e-mail addresses on the Internet on this page:
http://www.the-dma.org/aboutdma/contactthedma.shtm l
What we can do is compose an anti-spam message and send it to all the addresses listed on this page. The following guidelines are needed for maximum effectiveness and legality.
The point of the exercise is to give the DMA a practical demonstration of the perils of an opt-out marketing campaign.
The DMA will eventually start requesting removal. Comply with all requests. At this time you will need a new message, with new From, Reply-To and Subject headers, and new content.
If enough people do this, we can disrupt the DMA's e-mail system, and give them a practical demonstration on the problems that unfettered spamming will cause.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
There are tens of millions of companies just in the United States (and hundreds of millions in the whole world). If you manage to opt-out thousand times a day, you won't even keep up with all the new companies that start that day and all of them will want you to know about their exciting products.
not true. Since sending email is effectively free, many spammers use the Rumplestiltskin Attack to guess email addresses. If your Hotmail email is something common like joe@hotmail.com, you will probably get more spam than mr_gerbik_23423487@hotmail.com.
cpeterso
> I'd like to get rid of the "I'm HOT and WAITING for YOU" spam.
Maybe what we need is a law saying that you are entiled to a free sample of anything you receive an UCE ad about?
On second thought, since most of those messages are sent by guys pretending to be girls, I think I would want to "opt out" of that kind of offer too.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I thought the New Economy worked this way:
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> I think these senators don't comprehend the reality with spam; that is, 99% of it has false origin information and has an opt-out scheme that doesn't work or only results in more spam.
Yes, clearly these guys don't read their own mail, or else they'd know that you would have to "opt out" in a 1:1 ratio with the number of spam messages you get.
> Adam Back has an interesting proposal called Hash Cash.
I was thinking about a program that would compute my (mutable) e-dress from the current time and a secret key. I would change my e-dress on my end every day or so (more often, if necessary), and give the program and my personal key to my family and friends so that they could calculate the proper address at the time they launched the message.
If I built the program into a mailer, they could just enter the key into their database once, and then the mailer would automatically convert my nominal e-dress into my current actual e-dress for them.
This scheme does have a few problems. The biggest one is that it would make it impossible for people without your key to contact you, even for legitimate purposes. Another is that a down server might delay your friends' mail long enough for the destination name to change. Yet another is that it would make things hard for mailing lists, though in principle there's no reason they couldn't use the translation program; you would just include a key in your opt-in subscription message.
At any rate, it's the core of an idea. Maybe someone can work out a solution to the problems it poses.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> everyone I know are put in my white list and automatically get sorted in a "Safe Inbox".
.doc attachments, just to delete them afterwards.
The problem I have is that I'm still on a dialup connection, and I get tired of spending several minutes downloading huge HTML-saturated messages with
I guess I need to find/write a front end that will identify spam on the server and delete it there without ever downloading it.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I just think that the spam sent should have a proper subject/from address, period.
You should *absolutely* be able to respond to the owners using the same medium they used to contact you (email), and the subject should not be misleading in any way. If they are offering you cheap loans, the subject should be 'Cheap loan offer'. Not 'Hey bill, check this out!'
I have several email accounts. Never been to a porn site. And my HOTMAIL account has more porno spam than any other. So, methinks your theory about surfing prOn = prOn spam fails to hold water. . .
The postage (bulk rate) that snail-mail spammers pay covers the cost of transmission of the spam to you. If you are in an area where you have to pay by the bag to have your trash hauled away, no one expects Sears to reimburse you for it.
The postage (bandwidth) that email spammers pay also covers only the cost of transmission of the spam to you. You are not billed by every router between you and goatse.cx, why should a spammer?
Spamming is market-driven. As long as people continue to see spamming as a profitable venture it will continue to happen. Laws against spamming should NOT be designed to limit commerce, but instead should focus on theft of service (hacked mail servers) and privacy issues.
Oh so thats why I always confuse Halloween and Christmas. Sigh (Yes I know the joke, just playing along :)
Wow, that other guy destroyed it. Anyways
"So why can't computer programmers tell the difference between Christmas and Halloween?"
Because Oct 31 = Dec 25
Actually I should have said Oct(31)=Dec(25) Or something like that. Its a joke that really has to be said outloud, and as "Oct" not "October" and "Dec" not December.. Reading it though causes one to want to translate in their mind to dates.
Where in the First Amendment does it say that a company/person has the right to invade my home/place of work with information I do not want?
They do pay. They pay their ISP to carry their traffic, just like you pay the post office to deliver your letter.
I think the telemarketer is the correct analogy for this situation. Just like a telemarketer pays the telephone to contact you, the spammer pays their ISP to email you. The only difference is that it is quicker and more efficient with computers.
As I have stated above, spammers do pay (their ISP, not the recipient) for their usage of the hardware medium. You keep saying that spammers should pay, but you don't specify who thay should pay. Do you mean that they should pay the recipients of their emails? Telemarketers also use your resources without prior permission, so should you be able to charge them for calling you?
Why do you say that they are using the government's resources for most of the email's journey?
IANACS (I am not a constitutional scholar :P), but 1st Amendment rights to free speech/press etc. is one thing, "freedom" to try to get you to part with your cash to purchase my product or service is another.
SPAM legislation shouldn't (and doesn't so far as I know) attempt to regulate unsolicited political, religious, philosophical, or just plain stupid content. I think there would be some genuine 1st amendment issues in the U.S. if it did.
A question:
- would it be the 1st amendment rights of the companies that would prevent us from legislating away their ability to send us junk mail in meatspace?
I think Taco's half-serious(?) suggestion to impose "postage" on UCE points to one of the root problems of UCE: damn little cost for the sender. Even if we could incorporate some of the opt-out facilities available to us with meatspace junkmail, i.e., contact the DMA (direct marketing assoc?) and basically opt-out of receiving junk mail from all/most(?) of their member companies, that doesn't address the thousands/millions of individual, fly-by-night companies, MLM schemers, etc. who can't afford the 3rd class postage to bludgeon the universe with paper junk mail but can sure afford to click the send button on their email client.
Legislators are wrong to think that opt-out insofar as it may work for paper junk mail and phone calls applies in the same way to UCE.
I already do something similar, but much more low-tech, and get on the order of one or two UCEs per week. Every email address that I post on a web site, or on usenet, or even give out to people I don't know well, is disposable and almost unique. I might use the same one to sign up for three or four web sites. As soon as spam starts appearing, the address is terminated. Only my good (trustworthy) friends, work, etc. get my real address.
I've been thinking of a spam removal idea that I'd like to implement (and might actually get around to, now that I've been "transitioned" out of a job). The idea is that if you are on a whitelist (my family, friends, work, school, etc.) your email goes through with no extra work. If you're on MAPS or ORBS or the email looks like spam (i.e. has more than 5 exclamation marks or dollar signs in the subject, or a 5 digit number at the end of the subject line) it is held for special processing. You would get an automated reply, asking for confirmation that you're a real person. Perhaps you'd have a special web site to go to and confirm your identity. The only messages this system would lose are those from fake email addresses that look like spam or are from someone on MAPS or ORBS.
Right now, my mailer puts an X-RBL-WARNING at the top of email from someone in ORBS or MAPS but doesn't delete it. In my case, all mail from RBL'd sites is either spam, or from one person (my girlfriend) who could be whitelisted. With my idea, almost all of my real email goes through, almost all of the spam gets blocked, and it only inconveniences the very few people who are RBL'ed and sending me email for the first time.
Let me know if you have any thoughts on this idea...
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
Several points.
First, I would be more than happy to get rid of a lot of the small-time spammers. I'd like to stop getting "30 million addresses!!!!!!!" spams sent from some teenager's basement. I'd like to get rid of the "I'm HOT and WAITING for YOU" spam. I think Hash Cash could help here.
Second, the argument that hardware gets cheaper and faster everyday doesn't negate any benefit of Hash Cash or similar schemes; I'll just charge more every year. Last year you needed 16 bits to send me an email, now I want 25 bits. (Based on Moore's law, inflation should be around 160% / year.)
Third, lets say I require you to use about 10 seconds on a decent current desktop machine. If you want to send me an individual email, I don't think you'd mind waiting the ten seconds. I certainly wouldn't. Once I find out you're not a spammer, I'll let you send me email for free. Now, let's say a spammer wants to send out 1 million emails, and that he's got 10 decent desktop machines solely dedicated to computing hashes. It's going to take him more than a week to send out his email, at which time his angelfire webhosting account and hotmail email address will be long gone.
Even if companies like IBM, Sears or Microsoft want to get a huge farm to compute hashes and send out spam, I'd be reasonably confident that traditional measures (i.e. phone them or email them and tell them to stop bugging you) would be effective.
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
However, I don't believe in making laws against spam. They'll always be outdated and interfere with legimate uses of email, since it can be very hard to define exactly what is spam. (Someone taking my address from a newsgroup posting and trying to sell me printer toner is spamming, but how about an email from a company I bought something from a year ago?)
Adam Back has an interesting proposal called Hash Cash. The idea is that if you want to send me an email, you have to burn some CPU cycles to compute a partial hash collision. I choose how many bits are required. Friends and family can send me email for free. I'll charge a few bits for the store I shooped at last week, and even more for people I don't know. If you're in ORBS or MAPS, perhaps I'll charge even more.
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
Opt-out will never work - Just browsing the web gets you on lists. I've now getting span on a private e-mail address. Must have turned on javascript or something one time, and Bang they got it. They sold it. It propagates faster than roaches in a taco stand on the spammer lists. What we need is a better POP3 mail system. That way they never deposit mail in my mailbox to begin with. Pretty soon they will do like the telemarketers, and generate names-on-the-fly.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
I would suggest getting more of us 'geeks' in the house and senate, but who of us want to be a politician?
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
I'm not American so perhaps someone else with some American history can answer this question.
Were constitutional rights instituted with corporate as well as citizens best interests in mind. I don't consider a corporation to be anything like a citizen. They have a different set of interests (profit/share value as opposed to freedom/quality of life). Why should they be given the same rights?
So if I overload a server with a bunch of IP packets, it's Denial Of Service. If I do it from a few different locations, then it's DDOS. But if those packets contain useless email advertisements, then it's speech and it's OK?
I throw it away. It really does not cost me anything. the people sending it pay for it's delivery. It does not piss me off; that is because postal spam has yet to flood me to the point where I have to spend an hour destroying mail just to be able to open my PO box.
actually it does cost you. its an indirect cost similar to the indirect cost spam has on the consumer. consider each person in a city of 20,000 gets 1 lb of junkmail each week. your trash service then has to process 20,000 lbs of extra trash each week.
some of this is recycled, but a large portion will go into the landfill. so it is also fairly taxing on the environment. now consider a large city of say 500k or 1mil people. imagine how much waste they have each year that could be reduced by preventing junk mail.
i agree that spam costs people, but i also think junk mail costs people. i think to say both donot is silly and short sighted.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
Well, at least you can rest easy knowing that President Bush agrees with you.
"There ought to be limits to freedom!" - George W Bush
---
"He may look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot." - Duck Soup
I don't know exactly what needs to be done to give stupid peddlers the capacity to market to people (maybe *gasp* BUYING ADVERTISING?) but in a situation of hyperconnectivity, 'cold calling' is no good. They just hook up a big machine and cold-call EVERYBODY, just like the telemarketer machines that dial more numbers than the operators can handle.
Including people who could not possibly buy their products in the first place. Because the stuipd peddler only peddles to people withing a few hundred miles of where they are. But sprews their junk to the entire planet.
Email spam comes from one-man operations - some dork who bought a CD of emails and spam proggies of Ebay for $10 - and his 486. Together, they pump out thousands of emails a day. It is the very ability to flood email boxes with spam for no cost that separates it from other forms of unsolicited communication.
Maybe a better analogy would be someone setting up a pirate radio station to hawk their stuff...
How can we honor both the first amendment and a right to privacy, to keep from being spammed? This really is quite easy, because of some of the inherent nature of spam.
The first amendment "right to contact me" is an illusion. No one has a right to contact me under applicable law, except in a traditional public forum. However, the government cannot, and should not be able to either: preclude speech on the internt, nor to impose an obligation to engage in speech of a particular type on the internet.
Most spam regulation is losing on at least one of these points. Either the spam regulation says that, because of the content of my spam, I cannot send it to you. Or the spam regulation says that, because of the content of my spam, I must send it to you with a message labelling it.
There is adequate authority, at least, to raise credible first amendment arguments in each case. Certainly enough to challenge legislation and slow down meaningful regulation.
BUT THERE IS A WAY TO DO THIS. Constitutionally, and effectively!
Instead of REQUIRING a label for spam, or BARRING the mailing of spam, simply make it a crime to MISREPRESENT how the message was sent.
First amendment law prohibits government regulation of truthful speech, but it CLEARLY permits regulation against false speech.
So we pass a law making it a crime to send spam designating the message as non-spam!
Why would that work? Because after that law is passed, we make it an internet convention to tag almost all mail as non-spam! If everyone does this, we can now filter for spam, at least the spam that is sent by people who are concerned about violating the law.
I'm working on a white paper now to spell out the details. And there are quite a few details. But the gist of this works.
Of course, it doesn't stop the traffic, at some level. On the other hand, it DOES stop the incentive to spam, and thereby allows stopping it at significant choke points.
And all it requires is the will of the net infrastructure to label non-spam as non-spam -- a process that can be made automatic and virtually trivial.
In commercial settings give out a different email address that map to the same mail box each time rather than having just one. You'll be able to tell if it was your mom or the phone company that got you on a spammers list.
I'm sure there's a business model in there somewhere.
Although I guess it SHOULD be a company's right to call me (I hate it, though) at least make them pay for it like every other means of bothering me without my permission.
He's not talking about limiting speech, just making them pay for their usage of the hardware medium they choose. They can come to my door for free and speak all they want. They shouldn't, however, be able to use the computer resources _I_ pay for to bother me.
IANAL, but I play one on
As for your other arguments, the mailbox is actually government property (even though you paid for it) so the money goes to the govt when they send junk mail. Also, it doesn't cost you anything to receive mail does it? There is a small upfront cost of the physical box, but after that there is no cost to you for the mail put in there. With email, every message uses resources you pay for (ISP, email address, your hard drive space) every time (small amounts, sure, but still it costs something every time). So, there is both an upfront charge (your computer) and a per message charge with email; that is the difference as I see it.
The garbage service is probably required wherever you live anyway (apt complex, housing addition, etc) regardless of the junk mail you receive or the amount you receive. If it isn't required, you can always dump it at the local bin behind the supermarket (don't even make an extra trip, just do it everytime you go shopping somewhere). That costs you nothing (if you don't make a special trash trip).
IANAL, but I play one on
Besides, there are many "free" ISPs out there that spammers can use. They can also borrow someone else's account or use one account for 50 people at the same time (firewall networking). You can't really do that with Telemarketing or Junk Mail. One email sent to 1,000,000 people only uses a very small amount of "their" bandwidth. Once it leaves their mail server, though, it uses the bandwidth of 1,000,000 people. Telemarketing and Junk Mail costs the company one "item" per person it contacts. Spammers are only charged one "item" per bulk email (possibly millions of people).
IANAL, but I play one on
I forgot to answer the question about whom they should pay. That is a very hard question, but I guess the only fair answer is the govt since they are using their resources for most of the email's journey. I don't want to get paid per SPAM, I would just be happy to make sure they paid a fair amount to SOMEONE for annoying me.
IANAL, but I play one on
So, if Opt-Out is the way to go, when can I opt-out of paying Income Tax and Social Security? Neither one is doing me any good. The government will have their First Amendment rights, while I'll have my Fourth and Tenth Amendment rights.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
I agree with you. However, being an American means you also have the inalienable right to be hectored by moralists and immoralists of every stripe and cajoled by an array of hucksters. It's all in the great search for a sucker from whom money is easily extracted. If you are a sucker, you have the right to be found and stripped clean.
--
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
This makes me glad I run my own mail server. All I want/expect from my cable-modem provider is a fat pipe to the Internet. All the spam in the world can go to foo@lvcm.com; it'll never show up on my machine. (Then again, I'm using a commercial account, so there wouldn't be much point in spamming it anyway.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
At any given phone, this might only work for a little while. I once tried this tactic against a group of gun-grabbers. Four calls got through before they started blocking calls from the payphone I was using.
I suppose you could go hunting for payphones and tie all of them up...with people who (for whatever reason) want to get through unable to do so, maybe this would still qualify in some small way as a kind of DoS attack.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
I haven't seen it said here yet before, and it's a damned good idea.
- "When I say dance, you'd best DANCE motherf*cker!" -Violent Femmes
What this clueless congresscritter needs to learn is that spamming is NOT a free speech issue, it's a property rights issue.
MY computer, and MY fax machine, are not a public utility for "Make Money Fast" scammers to use at their convenience. I'm sure they'd love to break into my house and paint a billboard on my living room wall too, but I'm not about to let them do that.
If an advertiser wants to contact me, they can do it at their own expense by buying legitimate advertising placements.
This senator needs to be buried in an avalanche of letters.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I noticed the complete and total lack of an email address of any type on his site. I found "gephardt@" using Google.
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
We just need to make corporations not-people again.
Sony has first amenedment rights? Sad but true. And wrong.
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
From: "Gephardt, Richard"
To: (me)
Subject: RE: test
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 18:37:55 -0400
Thank you for your e-mail. I appreciate hearing
from you.
Due to the high volume of e-mails my office receives, I cannot guarantee a response to every message. However, if you reside in the Third Congressional District of Missouri, which I represent, and would like a written response, please resubmit your comments through
http://www.house.gov/writerep. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
If you reside in the Third Congressional District of
Missouri and wish to request Capitol/White House tours, or if you have a problem with a Federal agency, please contact one of my congressional offices.
St. Louis: (314) 894-3400
Washington, D.C.: (202) 225-2671
Festus: (636) 937-6399
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Because the DMA's lobbyists contribute more to campaign coffers than you and I can ever hope to.
> If you made Spam illegal how else would they meet attractive barely-legal teens in nearby colleges who need to meet men?
Funny, I thought that's what Congress was for.
The right to swap h0t t33n 1nt3rn pu55y for political favors is part of the package, is it not?
Send your comments directly to Ron Wyden. Also, please send him a bunch of SPAM.
e-mail:
senator_wyden@exchange.senate.gov
web mail:
http://wyden.senate.gov/mail.htm
--
microsoft, it's what's for dinner
bq--3b7y4vyll6xi5x2rnrj7q.com
it's a sig, wtf?
As long as they mailed those two nickles (one to me, one to my ISP) via First Class mail ($0.32), I'm fine with this!
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
I bet some of those specific exceptions include pornographic pictures (I notice that my Fax Machine and my Snail Mail Box are not cluttered with Porn Pictures, but with non pornographic junk ads).
90% of the Spam in my inbox is something I consider to be pornographic.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Telemarketers pay their phone bills, and are regulated - they must identify themselves. If I tell them to stop calling, they have to. Spammers do not.
Spammers lie (forge messages) and steal (exploit open mail relays). Wait until your company's mail server is crashed by a spammer trying to send 10,000 Make-Money-Fast messages from his PC, which is dialed into a Bellsouth dial-up line. Then tell me that spammers are honest businessmen and contributors to society.
Your niece probably doesn't get such spam because she simply hasn't been on the Internet long enough, or because she knows not to post her real e-mail address except when necessary. The spam-scrapers will pick up any e-mail address that they find on USENET or the Web, and they certainly do NOT go to the effort of checking whether the person at that address has visited porn sites before selling that list to a porn site.
It is entirely possible that DoubleClick somehow manages to correlate cookies with e-mail addresses, but if an email-list seller relied exclusively on data from DoubleClick he wouldn't get nearly enough addresses to advertise "1 MILLION E-MAIL ADDRESSES JUST $199.99!!!" Spammers get addresses from any source possible, not one particular source.
You sound disturbingly pro-spam, with your attempt to make it seem like it's the user's fault for recieving spam, and it gives you a nice ad-hominem attack against the original poster as well. The tone of your message implies: "Well, you wouldn't be getting all that spam if you weren't a PERVERTED PORN FIEND."
Spammers will spam anyone and everyone possible. They cannot and do not go to the effort of attempting to target their advertisements.
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Not a defense of spammers, but rather food for thought:
Most of us have cable of one form or another, which means we pay to receive nominally "free" channels (broadcast network stations). Plus, there's the cost of the electricity that powers our TVs. And of course you just had to drop a few grand on that gorgeous new high-definition set . . .
So, do advertisers have the right to bother us with their messages on our television sets? (Those of you with TiVO can stop snickering now.) After all, we bear some of the cost of transmission of those messages, so in one sense we're paying to be spammed via our TVs.
But most of the cost of transmitting those ads are borne by the advertisers and the stations/cable/satellite companies, and in fact they depend on the revenue generated from ad sales to be able to provide "free" TV, so it balances out. But many users are just consumers on the Internet, much as they are consumers of television: they pay a monthly fee to get email/Web/etc. access, and the ISP and its upstream providers handle the rest. (Well, this is true in the US; it may be very different elsewhere.) And don't think that spammers are sending out their mail for free--there's the cost of their firehose software, access charges, having to change ISPs every other week . . .
So the exercise for the week is: how do you shift the financial burden for sending UCE to the originators?
I say that on a massively distributed system like the Internet, you can't do it, at least not accurately. Some networks will spend more resources to handle spam than others (think AOL vs. your local ISP), but how do you pass those costs back to the originators, and how do you collect such costs?
Since there's no practical way to implement a fair cost structure for UCE, we'd rather make it illegal. Not exactly an elegant solution, and not much of a deterrent, either.
What other alternatives are there?
Be careful about using that argument. Taking away rights works both ways, you know. Whether they're your rights or the rights of society at large makes no difference.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Heh. Look at Wyden's HTML... there's an e-mail address specified as part of the form action.
So that's senator_wyden@exchange.senate.gov, it looks like.
Gephardt, unfortunately, seems to require users to go through the "Write Your Representative" cgi-bin, which isn't nearly as revealing.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Happiness is not a constitutional right, but the pursuit of happiness is..
-no sig-
The First Amendment does not establish the right to send me e-mail.
I agree...but i'd go so far as to say the First Amendment doesn't give anyone the right to even talk to you if you don't want them to. I feel that the first amendment promises that should I want to say something, people may CHOOSE to listen to me. But they may also choose not to. Of course this right to speach also implies the right to listen.
No, its not their legal right to contact you. Maybe one time, and if you tell them to fuck off, they do not have any right to contact you. Are you trying to tell us that ANYONE that wants to talk to me has a legal right to do so??? I don't think so...
senator_wyden@exchange.senate.gov
gephardt@mail.house.gov
Someone you trust is one of us.
Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans will help on this issue. If you made Spam illegal how else would they meet attractive barely-legal teens in nearby colleges who need to meet men?
Someone you trust is one of us.
Screw laws against SPAM... I want a law against being harassed by telemarketers.
--
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
The Internet is a public forum, however, my inbox is not.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
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HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
I normally respond to spam with a message similar to yours, but in addition to that, I also try to contact every admin who's machine the offending message bounced through. Sure, it takes a while, but I also get less and less SPAM as I do this more and more. I'm actually seeing an improvement. Contacting the ISP the SPAM originates from also works wonders.
Why, oh why, must people too stupid to comprehend obvious sarcasm respond to my posts?
Well, if the democrats want to guard the spammer's right to cost me and my company money, I think I'll be calling my Republican senator, asking him to slap them around a little.
Of course, in a week I will be threatening vote for a democrat if he doesn't stop advocating internet censorship bills...
Well, there is a difference in the mail that spammers send and that I send. I send emails to people I know and who *want* to recieve email from me. Spammers send to who ever is on thier list. While the one spam I get does not cost me much it does over time; it also costs the ISPs who have to recieve and store the large numbers of unwanted emails. Aww but all those emails you send that people want still cost the ISP money.. If we are charging spammers, why not charge everyone? When it comes down to it, its all still just bits... Actually they are abusing that. The email is definatly *not* free (from an ISPs stand-point). When a spammer tries to dictionary attack your mails erver or sends a 100k spam to all 10K+ of your customers, you quickly find that cleaning up after a spammer is not cheap Dictionary attacks to suck... sure punish network abusers..or write a program to reconize an attack coming in tryin to email every possible user and deny those IP's...u can figure sumthing out.. if it becomes illegal.. you really think that will stop spammers?? True, but if you are sending these people uncolicited bulk email, don't be shocked when they complain. I never said people would'nt complain(i don't bulk email personally) but what i'm saying is why draw the line at "bulk" as opposed to 1 or more pieces... you set bulk at 400 pieces and wham! spammers will send 399..... again legislation is not an answer... Spam *is* that infuriating to an admin who has to come in to the shop at 4am to work on a mail server that has hung trying to process a boatload of spam. See above a few comments.. spend more time beforehand securing your networks.. personally I've had much greated problems at work than our mailserver having problems. I throw it away. It really does not cost me anything. the people sending it pay for it's delivery. It does not piss me off; that is because postal spam has yet to flood me to the point where I have to spend an hour destroying mail just to be able to open my PO box. Sure it does! it costs the cost of trash recyling(assuming you recyle it and dunt add to our gian trash dumps irresponsibly). It pisses me off to no end.. I radther get an electronic add than i can hit one key and delete instead of having it clutter up my house and have trees destroyed so people can send me the latest coupons for acme supermarket. Well, I guess you have never worked on a high traffic mail server or had to deal with abuse issues. :)
Nope, mostly part of the international voip network i deal with going down at times.. much more important than some spam in my inbox which i can ignore, filter or delete.
I prefer a much unregulated interent... the more its regulated, the more its turned into AOL or other MAJOR controled online services where everything is sterile and nothing is new....(granted AOL gets ton of spam funny enough)
Colin
Author says: But they should be required to pay "postage" for that right. I think spammers should pay a penny per k to both me and my ISP. A 5k spam would cost a dime. Still less then a stamp.
... if we start charging people does this mean if i receive an email from someone i don't like I can now charge them for it?
:)
A few major problems here...
1. If they pay for email, you should have to pay for email you send anywhere as well and then we will be back to having a regulated postal service.
2. E-mail is arguably free.. Its a system of networked servers designed to pass messages from one user to another.... they are using that.. why do you assume there is a level of personal privacy there? I can send an email to anyone! bob@yourmomsuck.com president@whitehouse.gov cmdrtaco@slashdot.org
I guess where do draw the line? is spam that infuriating to you? Personally it doens't bother me.. I have a few different pop accounts i use, with one i give out to people so i can read messages from and one for mailing lists(usually one per mailing list) and one for signing up for dumb stuff online where it sounds like i'm gonna get spammed for it...
What do you do about postal spam? Personally i can't stand that.. I get over 2 pounds a week of trash mail in my mailbox that some how now I AM RESPONSIBLE to recycle or throw away.. My name is Not Postal Customer, or Recipient... i've fought with my post office and left the junk mail in my mailbox.. that does nothing unfortunately.. those are the people who should be paying us for email... if you get some spam... thats reason #45628 the DELETE key was invented...
I think theere are highly more pressing issues to worry about then some junk mail...
Just my thoughts...perhaps losing some karma now
Just force everyone who mails you to encrypt the message to your obnoxiously long GPG key. If everyone did this, it'd take a lot more commitment to spam people.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Really, what I am waiting for is ISP-approved spam.
Heh. My university (JHU) already has done that. Not super often (unless you count the enourmous number of idiotic "here's the stupid activity of the week" emails), but on a few occasions places have spammed the entire campus, and I would bet anything that they bought the lists from the university.
The only reason spam includes an opt-out is to check the validity of an address. People credulous enough (no offense Rob) will gladly opt-out, only to get more spam in return, their address having a "checked" mark just right to them.
Given the speed at which spam evolves (I don't count how much spam I receive in languages I cannot even read, like Russian or Korean), I hope initiatives from politicians (like those from California) will pop up soon.
I don't expect anything from ISPs like UUNET deliberately supporting spammers by not taking any action against them.
"Naughty, naughty, naughty, you filthy old soomka !"
Perhaps the proper way to educate them is for non-constituents to call them collect with their opinions on the matter. Alternatively, fax them an opinion if that's legal in your area (fax spamming doesn't enjoy first amendment protection, either).
I can't think of a more appropriate analogy for what they propose to let spammers do to my internet service.
There are very good reasons why permits are required for certain demonstrations, and why there are laws against inappropriate dumping of waste.
Spammers have the first amendment right to put up an internet site with their free speech. They have no rights to use any service for which I have paid without paying me a big, whopping fee first. And the unsolicited money must precede the unsolicited spam.
Its because there is a huge imbalance when it comes to spam. It costs virtually nothing to send out loads of spam in comparison to snail-mail advertisiments. (the only cost is their connection and hardware). When they are mailing you something, it is a tangible peice of paper that costs them money to print and to send. However, if they send spam to you those costs are wiped out. Therefore, they can send more spam to you than mailed advertisments. I think it should be regulated more, they need some constraints to prevent such large amounts from being sent. Actually, what they need more is to be hit in the head with a cluebat. Spammers don't actually understand that nobody actually looks at their crap.
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
The Federal Trade Commision regulates interstate telemarketing. Unsolicited faxes, and calls to pagers and cellular phones, or any number that will mean a charge to the person being called are banned by the FTC, and for intra-state calls by many state legislatures.
The rules for faxes are very clearly opt-in:
- Advertisements for any goods or services cannot be sent to your fax machine without
your prior express permission or invitation.
- Permission to send unsolicited faxes is presumed to exist if you have an established business
relationship with whomever is sending the message.
- You can end this relationship by telling the company that you do not want to receive any
more faxes from them.
nformation that must be placed either on the first page or on each page of a fax:I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Gephardt's got a page here. Same deal. No public e-mail address given.
Pair up in threes. - Yogi Berra
No I don't want bigger breasts. (obviously not very well targeted spam)
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
This is another example of what is beginning to irritate us users who are not residents of the US of A. The senates decision means exactly zilch where I live, but I still get spammed and spammed by US companies sending links to porn sites that are in theory illegal in Australia. To me, spams are like virii. The are uninvited and consume resources on my system. If a person can be prosecuted for creating computer based item that places itself unwanted on a third parties system, then shouldn't that apply to all such cases. If I didn't ask for it, and it is now in dirrect and immediate response to my action (like clicking on a web link) then it should be considered an intrusion.
Cmon Taco, think about what your saying.
You think spammers should have to pay postage but (i assume) you think everyone else shouldnt.
Why should people pay *artificial* taxes.
Why should people pay the government when the goverment is doig nothing.
I dont see what the problem with spam is anyway, i just ignore it and it doesnt bother me. i dont see why others cant do the same.
And while im on my highhorse, if you cool with censoring spam, you should be happy for slashdot to be cenrored. (which i would hate to see more of)
It's a scam. Sorry.
-Legion
Opt-out is an invitation to spending your whole life as an opt-outer.
Oh not necessarily. You can ignore that address, ie ask all your friends to send to another address (of course, this is best used on free emails).
That reminds me, I left a few Hotmail accounts unchecked for a few months now. I wonder if it's filled up already?
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Agreed. The operative legal phrase is "captive audience". For all intents and purposes, you are a captive audience of your email - your job, your lifestyle, and more depend on you checking your email. Indeed, in some cases, your email is the equivalent of small-scale corporate emergency services (you're paid to respond immediately when an alert comes in), and is analogous to phone numbers you can ask companies not to call (including wardialing telemarketers if you have an unlisted number).
There is a clear legal opinion that First Amendment rights do not extend to being able to address captive audiences. (The case that comes to mind is a KKK rally that the would-be host town objected to, where the sound of the rally would penetrate even closed doors and windows such that there would be no place in town free from the rally. I may be misremembering this, though.)
Under the legacy of common law which we share with England, a corporate body is considered a person for most purposes, thus they can be sued, taxed and held accountable for their actions.
illegitimii non ingravare
Otherwise, they send a mail like the above to everyone I listed, telling them that someone (i.e. me) has a crush on them.
They have a legitimate-looking privacy policy, but I just don't want to take the chance that I could be selling out my friends' email addresses to some bulk commercial mailing list.
I've been burned by this sort of online romance exploitation before-- a certain paid personal ads site placed fake ads in mailboxes of people listing free personal ads on Yahoo!. I got one that said something like "You sound interesting and attractive! Come read my profile on http://..." and of course I couldn't read their profile until I gave all of my marketing information to this paid personal ad site. And once I had turned over my vital statistics, it turned out the owner of the profile didn't exist. When I went back and reread the original message, I realized how generic it was. It could have applied to 80% of the personal ads on Yahoo!.
But that's a different story. So what do you think, /. users? Cyber-cherubs or email address harvesters? I think I've gotten too cynical to risk it. It really bums me out how some money-grubbing spammers will even exploit the loneliness of others to get what they want.
Of course, if you're really cynical, you'll assume I just posted this message as a heavily disguised ad for CyberLink. Heh. -Caitlin
I actually have an idea. Whenever you get spammed by someone with an 800 number call... repetedly... give them some costs too...
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In order to protect a company's first amendment rights, they can only be held guilty for spamming once an individual specifies that they don't want it, as opposed to emphasizing an individual's first amendment right not to have someone else's speech imposed upon them.
Obviously, since this favors the corporate world and they pay the politicians to do their bidding, this is the logic that will prevail as it does with telemarketing.
- tokengeekgrrl
the only people who define spam this way are the spammers. most people realize that it's a sham.
spammers aren't exercising free speech. they're interfering with free speech by trespassing into private fora, distrurbing private communications, and stealing resources that do not belong to them.
if the first amendment protects spammers, it also protects those who want to walk into my house uninvited for the purpose of nailing advertisements to my walls.
maybe someone should find out where the senator lives, and drive up and down his street at 4am playing advertisements for ponzi schemes over a loudspeaker.
I've said it countless times, you cannot have it both ways, the internet can be a public place or it can be regulated. It's nice that you want freedom for the things you want to do, but want restrictions on the things the YOU don't like others doing, but it's hypocrytical. The internet is here by consensus, not by fiat. I like the fact that the net is frontierland and it turns my stomach to see regulations of any kind being enforced by the government of any country.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Again and again and again... the internet is a public place. If you leave your mailserver set up as an open relay tough shit on you if I send mail through it. Not that I personally would, but you're the idiot that doesn't know how to configure a server. The internet should not be ruled by legislation of any kind, but by consensus. Hence organizations and concepts such as the RBL, IF you are stupid enough to leave you're mailservers open to relaying, we'll put you on this public list... available to anyone who wnats to ban incoming mail from your servers. This make sense and it works. Why involve the government? Because people are too used to whining and complaining that someone should fix things instead of fixining them themselves.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
It's the way the net was built in the first place, so I'd safe I'm still pretty safe here in the real world, where are you?
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Wrong boyo, forcing someone to capitulate is democracy, it's called majority rules.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Spam | Posted by CmdrTaco on 15:02 Thursday 21 June 2001 I think spammers should pay a penny per k to both me and my ISP. A 5k spam would cost a dime. At a penny per k, wouldn't a 5k spam cost a nickel?
If someone stood up at the senator's press conference, jumped in front of his mike, and started pitching printer cartridges to his audience, would he say "oh, that's ok, he has free speech rights"?
The issue here is what forum you can exercise free speech at. Anyone who wants to talk at a forum they paid for or otherwise obtained the rights to speak at, that's free speech.
If you go and steal someone else's time, money and resources, forcing them to listen to you, that is *not* free speech. That's theft and public disturbance.
not true!
corporations now have all the rights of private citizens.
isn't the US of A wonderful?
that's why corporations can make "donations" to politicians in exchange for favors
(like, hey Mr Bush, I think we might have a few million to "donate" to you if you let us pollute in your citizens' back yards)
Cause they certainly exercise 1st Amendment rights, even as huge corporations...
But you knew that...
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
It becomes obvious how difficult it would be to legislate this issue when you first try to define what spam is. I'm sure there won't be a consensus to be found on this forum.
If I email a friend but got his/her email from another friend, is that spam? What if I email someone who posts to slashdot in order to talk about the new version of Perl? What if I email everyone who posts on slashdot for the same reason?
If I email a professor who's class I attended 4 years ago to ask a question/say hello, is that spam? Does it matter where I got the email address from? Does it matter if I'm calling just to chat or if I want to sell something?
If it matters whether or not I'm trying to sell things, then is all economic-related email not spam? What about students sending out an invitation to fill out an on-line survey for academic purposes?
Where do you draw the line between conversation/speech and selling porn?
Yes, it would be a restriction of freedom if these companies were prevented from placing ads on their own site. Free speech entails certain responsibilities. I'll rely on the shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre argument to explain that one. If a door-to-door salesman doesn't have the right to wander round your house trying to advertise, what gives spammers the right to invade your PC? Okay, that's not a very good analogy - the fact remains that there are (at least today) limits to how free speech really is.
You mean there are still people out there who haven't yet caught on to the fact that "New Economy" was nothing more than a buzzword used to sell the .com hype to gullible investors?
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
The problem I have is when you "opt-out", only to have the mail bounced due to an invalid email address, presumably due to spam from the account. Or if you end up on a Japanese spam list, and the email & all linked pages are unreadable by non-linguists, so you *can't* opt-out.
jred
www.cautioninc.com
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
This might be a little too late to get modded up. I work for Chase Bank in the collections department. Why isn't OUR legal right to contact people whenever we want, with whatever frequency we want. The fact is, we're contacting them for legit reasons, they owe us money. But if we contact them more than 2 times a week, and outside the hours of 8am-9pm it's considered HARASSMENT. Why can't spam be considered the same thing? I consider wasting of my time and bandwidth on someone i don't owe anything to harassment, and when there's no way to stop or track it, thats even worse. The fact is, spam might be free speech, but i have the right to not view that speech and spammers take that right away from me, because i have to read that speech just for the chance to be removed from it, and chances are even after i ask to be removed i won't be.
Delete spam before you open it, then move on with your life.
--SC
You read fiction? I write it! Lemme know what you th
Dear Mr. Taustin, We are sending you this request to ask for your support. As the chairman of the "Make Loosenut Millions" Party (licensed under FEC document 591), we would like for you to donate a small portion of your income to our cause. In exchange for a $100 membership donation, you'll receive our FREE pamphlet, "How to Retire NOW", and a complimentary T-shirt with the Party Logo. Thanks for you time, and remember to bend over when we come knocking on your door.
Your right to free speech does not obligate me to provide you a forum in which to exercise that right.
I think spammers should pay a penny per k to both me and my ISP. A 5k spam would cost a dime.
Rob, repeat after me:
1 x 5 = 10^H^H5
1 x 5 = 10^H^H5
1 x 5 = 10^H^H5
A penny times five equals a nickel. Hell, I'm even Canadian and I still know that much"...
--
"It is NOT their legal right to send me unsolicited links to pornography and a graphic description of exactly what I'll find via said link, which I get on a daily basis. They have no idea whether I'm an adult or not. "
But what THEY DO KNOW is that you visit adult sites, therefor they believe it is ok to send you that kind of email. My neice (11 years old) surfs the net everyday, and gets no pornographic spam. Is her mail being filtered? No, she uses the same ISP as I do. The difference is, she doesn't look at pr0n. There are databases out there linking your personal information to cookies about where you go.. this is sold to the spammers.. period. You don't have to give your email address to a porn site to get porn email.. you just have to give it to a doubleclick friendly site and then go cruise some porn sites.. then the email starts rolling in.
So.. you want to end spam coming to you that says "young teen sluts waiting to suck you dry", then stop going to sites that show "young teen sluts", and they'll stop emailing you asking you to stop back in.
-gerbik
If a spammer got charged a dime to send an email,
should I get charged a dime for every email I send? ISP's could still argue that it is cheaper than a stamp, but I doubt most would consider it fair...
Actually, it was at one time considered against the constitution to levy taxes against the people, although it wasn't a free speech issue. If you check your US history, there is a famous supreme court case (Pollock, 1895) in which Taxes were deemed unconstitutional. Of course, congress just turned around and added the 16th amendment which made taxes constitutional:
:-)
"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration."
So Opt-In is the nice and legal way to go, except as pertaining to Taxes
Save a life. Eat more cheese
So there I was, juggling apples and small animals, when I accidentally bit into the wrong one...
I think spammers should pay a penny per k to both me and my ISP... it'd make me a few hundred bucks a month for my time, bandwidth, and hardware costs. Spammers take away my property and happiness.
I hate spam as much as the next guy, but unless you're paying for your Internet access by the minute, I doubt you're actually paying to download spam.
How do you figure you have hardware costs? Are you storing your spam? Saying spammers should contribute to the cost of your computer is like asking telemarketers to contribute to the cost of your fancy new phone.
And you can't very well charge spammers for your time. Think of all the legal advertisments that take up your time. You have to sort ads out of your mail, flip through ads in magazines and newspapers, endure commercials on TV, and hang up on telemarketers, after all. Can you charge a company every time you have to see their name on a billboard just because it makes you unhappy?
Just playing devil's advocate here. I support anti-spam laws similar to the ones that govern telemarketing--requiring spammers to use "do not email" lists (though I suppose it'd be unlikely to work in practice). I can't see requiring spammers to pay individual recipients. Do you really want the U.S. government to meddle in the international Internet that much?
Force people to tell us where they got our address from. IE require them to say "we bought this address from a database owned by yahoo.com".
I wouldn't be surprised if the free mail providers themselves sold our addresses for a buck. I started getting spam to addresses I've never even used from yahoo(by registering for a my.yahoo account). We could make them if not responsible, at least accountable.
Synergy is your friend
I guess someone should sue on the anti-fax junk mail laws and see what happens, or offer to fax all four hundred hot sexy barely legal teens porn spam to either one of these guys.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
This message was unsolicited and contains no "remove" instructions at the bottom, qualifying it as "spam" email. Spam email is now illegal. Please see to it that you never send spam email to the email address "(my@email.address)" again, as it will be reported.
Ok it was a little harsh, but I was trying to break my caffeine addiction, and as such I was a bit cranky. :P
People shape laws. Not the other way around.
Um, "Pursuit of happiness" is not equal to "happiness". Or do you think that anyone who makes you unhappy is violating your rights?
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
CmdrTaco apparently thinks happiness is a right!
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
Especially when, after getting I thinkthree or four this morning, the reply address given for "removal" from getting any further mailings is bogus. Do opt outs just have to be offered, or do they actually have to work?
But opt-out simply doesn't work. It just puts you on the "live fish" list, for which the spammers can charge extra money. I'm more for fraud charges against spammers who insist on concealing their identity.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I agree, companies do have a right to contact me. But they should be required to pay "postage" for that right. I think spammers should pay a penny per k to both me and my ISP. A 5k spam would cost a dime.
If you want entities to pay you to email you, set up an email account which forces this. If you want to make exceptions for certain "from addresses", you can do that too. Seriously, how difficult is that? If you want your email address to be private, stop giving it away to the public, and stop accepting email from random sources. It's really that simple.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
I hope that in the future we can truly stop the kind of spam that has spoofed headers and is bounced off some non-U.S. mail server.
Is digitally signing every e-mail going to be the only way to completely stop spam?
For the companies that offer valid "opt-out" options, I have no problem with them as long as they work.
For the companies that offer "opt-out" options but don't work, they should be fined and both myself and the ISP get a cut.
What is the long term solution to ending spam?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Here's more information:
This list is enforced by the Missouri Attorney General.
http://www.moago.org/
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
1. Postal spam... I send it back with some "goodies" in their postage paid envelopes.
2. Where do we draw the line? Well, think about it in the terms of operating a business. I have several domains for my business and my customers. I often receive e-mail to my webmaster accounts which pisses me off incredibly. It's totally untargeted and it's not meant for spammers to waste my time by sneding spam to it.
3. I agree on the charging bit. If we charge spammers, that sets precedents to charge everyone for e-mail. However, we can fine them for breaking rules.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
If it's digitally signed by verisign or some other authorized company, the spam should be traceable and the sender accountable right?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Advertising is slightly different than free speech.
If I was getting spam about overthrowing the American Government, fine... That's free speech.
But when I get spam advertising unsolicited crap products (low mortgages, cheap ink, infinite supply of viagra) that I just don't want it sucks.
Here are some precidents (sp?) for ending unsolicited spam.
1. Missouri now has a do-not-call list. It's enforced. If a telemarketer gets caught calling my house, they get in big trouble. It went into effect a week or so ago I believe and calls have ENDED! Honestly!
2. When I get credit card(and other advertisement) offers in the mail. There are a few rights that I have...
a. I know exactly where they came from.
b. I can "usually" get off the mailing list.
I'm not saying necessarily that it needs to be government regulated, but we need to design and bulid an email standard that will stop unwanted mail with tough to trace headers.
Once this sort of mail server is in place it should also have the option of only accepting mail from other mail servers that follow these standards.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
There was one called "Rowan v. Post Office," some years back. The USSC ruled that a junk mailer had absolutely no right to send mail to Rowan.
(The case that comes to mind is a KKK rally that the would-be host town objected to, where the sound of the rally would penetrate even closed doors and windows such that there would be no place in town free from the rally. I may be misremembering this, though.)
Never heard of that case. Most of the First Amendment case law I've heard of involving Klan rallies ended up saying that cities had no right to bar the shitheads based upon objectionable content. The US courts tend to be very unfriendly to content-based restrictions, but fairly tolerant of content neutral "time, place, manner" restrictions.
I have 2 proposals.
1> Get an AOL account and go into the people connection for 5 minutes.
2> Get a different AOL account and _don't_ go into PC.
3> Get a hotmail account.
Lets see how much spam you get within a week of being online & what kind of spam you get.
I would rather have spam, then bulk mail. The costs of spam to society are nothing compared to the costs of bulk mail ads that are sent out. If you are really conerned about costs, fight bulk mail.
OTOH I would like to see a law get passed that every piece of spam has to have included in it a spam idenitfier, so the people have the right to decided if they want to be advertised to through there computer.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
by your logic we should not have a limit on the number of billboards are put along the road, or the placement of any advertisement.
We have a right to not be bothered in our homes. The rights were created for the people, not for the companies.Hence "We the people..." and not "We the orporations..."
Some speech is limited, and for good reason.there are also different "levels" of free speech, also for good reason.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Senator Wyden will be holding town meetings in Oregon. Surely enough Slashdotters livbe within a few hour's drive?
Saturday, June 30th 12:00pm - 1:30pm Lake County Town Hall Lakeview Senior Center 11 N. G Street Lakeview 4:00pm - 5:30pm Curry County Town Hall Port Orford City Council Chambers 555 W. 20th Street Port Orford Sunday, July 1st 2:00pm - 3:30pm Lane County Town Hall Cottage Grove Community Center 700 E. Gibbs Avenue Cottage Grove Monday, July 2nd 4:30pm - 6:00pm Benton County Town Hall The Corvallis Fire Hall 400 NW Harrison Boulevard CorvallisDon't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
If you don't want the credit card ads, they are very easy to stop. Write the 3 credit bureaus, and tell them to stop marketing your credit info. After 60-90 days, it should all stop. I think I've seen 2 offers in my mail box in the 18+ months since I did this. When you get a copy of your credit report at sometime in the future, it should be marked with something to the effect of "Not for promotional uses"
have fun...
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2
Congress is once again proving how out of touch with reality they really are I wonder how much money the DMA (Direct Marketer's Alliance) contributed to Senator Wyden and Congressman Gephardt?
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Okay, why not a really simple solution? First Ammendment gives free speech. Nothing about anyone having to listen. So why not say all unsolicited advertising email must have a "SPAM" header. You can have your computer filter it. Your ISP can filter it. The spammer's ISP can filter it on the way out. Saves a lot of bandwidth and hassle. Violators could be punished by being forced to pay the recipient for his ISP that day, and the ISP for the bandwidth that day.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
That's interesting. I guess then you charge all the grocery stores in your area to deliver the weekly ad's to your house. What about that catalog of garden supplies you got last week. Ohh how about we charge the power company to deliver my bill...
one cent to him, one to isp
Let's say I have a 684Kb/s DSL line and I pay it monthly. This means that (taking into account overhead) roughly 68KB/s of bandwidth. Per 1K, a spammer should have to pay me 1/68th of a second worth of bandwidth, electricity, hardware depreciation, etc, plus money to every single router and line owner along the way. While it seems like only a little money, the price would add up quickly. It wouldn't take much changing to Cisco IOS to setup some sort of calculation for this (it's just separating spam from non spam) as protocols like IGRP, EIGRP, and OSPF use bandwidth as a metric so figuring out cost per K or packet or frame or whatever the case may be wouldn't be hard. Needless to say, this will never happen at least not anytime soon and at least not with legislation. Spammers infringe on MY First Ammendment rights therefore they should have to relinquish theirs.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
I have asked them for what is factually incorrect, but they have refused to answer! What on the site is factually incorrect?
Fight Spammers!
Email is a push technology, not a pull technology. If someone posts it on Yahoo, or banner ads, you are making a request for it. If they stuff it in your in-box, then you have not requested it on your equiptment. This pop-up/under ads are questionable.
Fight Spammers!
Where in the First Amendment does it say that a company/person has the right to invade my home/place of work with information I do not want?
Right, so lets go censor things we don't want on television too, since they're 'invading' your home through the non-essential service you voluntarily use.
NO CARRIER
>It partly is the user's fault for signing up for these things>
Pardon me, but this is crap. I have NEVER signed up for ANY mailing lists [other than technical] and DO NOT belong to ANY pr0n "club" yet I am spammed 50+ times per week with messages stating that I am recieving this crap due to my membership or other erroneous horseshit.
How can I get IDENTICAL emails with five different return addresses [designed to defeat filter i presume] each claiming that I am getting info I "requested" when I have done no such thing? I have traced several of them back to the fact [as mentioned by another poster] that my wife tried to "unsubscribe" from these lists - the resilt being a 4 fold increase in my alleged "requests".
All of this exists soley due to the fact that enough congress-creatures were paid off by the "advertising" industry such that they are allowed to do this to people as long as they offer the "opt out" feature: read this as the ability to resell a "live" account for their profit at our expense.
Next time I hope congress "entitles" all citizens to free K-Y jelly so we are prepared for their brand of "help"
Your physical e-mail inbox, if you're using POP, resides on your computer. The storage area on the server is usually the property of the ISP. As for the "trespassing", e-mail is just information coming into your home/business/whatever via a wire (in most cases). It is specifically addressed to you. This is the exact same thing as an unsolicited telephone call, which is legal in most places. You make the conscious choice to pick up or not up the phone if it rings, just as you make the conscious choice to read e-mail sent from spammers. Some spammers will even leave voicemail, which is the same thing as having e-mail downloaded into your inbox. If you know something is SPAM on sight, then just set up e-mail filters to get rid of 90% of it. Scanning your e-mail is just like scanning your calls. As for the original suggestion that the spammers pay you for having sent you the message, that's ludicrous. Just because you're advertised to, doesn't mean you're entitled to be paid for it. You buy a Tommy Hilfiger shirt and you're going to see the logo and name every time you put it on for the rest of your life. It doesn't mean you're entitled to anything for it, contrary to what some brain-dead youth group in Vancouver seems to think. Beyond that, you don't get paid when junk mail comes in via the post office, so why would this be different? You don't get paid when someone puts a flyer under your windshield wipers eithers, but it's the same thing.
In CompuServe v Cyber Promotions the court stated quite clearly that the spammer's first amendment rights DO NOT trump the recipient's property rights. This was not a novel result, but was consistent with past rulings, including US Supreme Court rulings.
There's really nothing more to this than that - The Senator is wrong. Plainly, unambiguously, and inexcusably wrong. The only thing newsworthy about this is the degree to which the Senator has embarrassed himself.
--
Don Dugger
VA Linux Systems
Don Dugger
"Censeo Toto nos in Kansa esse decisse." - D. Gale
I post articles to newsgroups now with the return address spammenot@federal.gov.au
I assume this is sending a reasonable amount of spam at the Australian federal government. The way I see it, the government's laws would require me to pay to download advertising, but this way they are paying LESS than I would, as they buy internet access in bulk, and as they probably don't have to download the entire add - just the intended recipient, and then issue a 'no such user' error message.
I'm not really sure of the legality of this - I remember seeing somewhere that it may be illegal to impersonate someone else - but I'm not exactly impersonating someone else - just Mr spammenot...
Maybe this approach will help the government to see that its people don't appreciate the position it puts most good people in in comparison to what it's doing for the scumbag spammers.
What do people think about this approach - including my legal position. (Note that I'm posting to slashdot with a bastardised verion of MY email address for now).
Dan
It has been established that companies do not have to allow free speech in the workplace. Every company has the absolute power to coerce their employees to follow standards and policies.
I think that as long as companies are allowed to deny their employees the right to free speech at work, they themselves should not be able to avail themselves of any 1st Ammendment goodies, whether its advertising or anything else.
Now, before you flame me, I think it's good that employers are allowed to exercise some control over their workplace environments. I guess this leads me to conclude that, well, OK, companies shouldn't have any 1st Ammendment benefits, period.
This _will_ work as long as most people are subject to a broadband monopoly, either Cable or DSL, or whatever's next. This won't fly if there is true competition in broadband access (and don't tell me that the DSL market is truly open).
DJ
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
This page explains the situation quite nicely.
Basically, a group of people involved in junk snailmailing claimed the same First Amendment right to spam. But in U.S. Supreme Court Appeal 397 U. S. 728, the Supreme Court ruled the exact opposite way. They said that "a man's home is his castle" and that if he doesn't want to receive junk mail, he has the right not to.
Sure, this ruling applied to snail mail, but it is similar enough to email that it is very likely that the Supreme Court would rule the same way here.
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DOOR!!
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Under the First Amendment, you have every right to leave information on my doorstep or hang a flyer on my doorknob; doing so does not prevent me from getting into my house and I can always throw away your item or I might read it. You do not have the right to plug something into my wall socket and use my electricity to run your printing press. Nor do you have the right to make me provide the labor for free to bag your circulars. Nor do you have the right to dump your circulars as garbage on my doorstep.
This is where the issue ends: those who send spam(bulk unsolicited messages in enormous quantities) to people are using the valuable property of others without their consent in a manner that also deprives those owners of the use of their own property, e.g. their e-mail boxes.
If someone writes a message in a newsgroup or some place and I disagree with him, a single letter or two from me related to that is part and parcel of what represents freedom of speech and is not unreasonable. But he is under no obligation to read what I have to say, and in any case, it can be implied by his posting the message in a public place that he is willing to accept comments about it.
But if I harvest his address in order to send him a message about something unrelated to what he wrote, I am violating his right to be left alone under other circumstances. The First Amendment gives people the right not to be prevented by the Goverment from speaking out. It does not give me the right to force private parties to listen to me, and certainly not in a matter that deprives them of their right to use of their property.
If I picket a store in a mall, and don't stop people from using it, and don't harass other people there, I am not preventing them from transacting business in the mall and I'm not preventing the store I'm picketing from doing the same. Therefore the First Amendment overrides what would otherwise be trespassing claims.
But a First Amendment right to picket a store in a mall does not allow me to beat up people who cross my picket line and doesn't allow me to prevent the company I'm picketing from continuing to operate.
There is a fine line between what is allowed as far as what can be done where private parties are concerned and ability to communicate; the issue goes on all the time between those who would try to prevent others from saying things they don't agree with on their property (like shopping center owners) by claiming trespass, and those who disagree with their tenants (such as a store in the same mall that sells non-dolphin-safe tuna, for example) by claiming the right to use the First Amendment to picket peacefully.
It is not a very fine line between someone using someone else's property such as their corridors or front space, in order to picket or to complain of their actions, and acting in a manner that prevents them from enjoying their rights too.
If spammers were operating honorably, they wouldn't need to hide behind fake e-mails and other schemes to hide their identities in order to keep from having their accounts closed due to overloading other people's mail systems with unwanted material.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
But you don't have to pay extra to receive television commercials. If you use an ISP, that ISP has to pay for it's bandwidth usage, which raises the costs for the consumer. The advertisers are making you pay more for your internet acces, there is no doubt of that.
Josh Sisk
1. Politicians are cluless
2. Politiciens are for sale
I am normally not of a libertatian frame of mind, but in this case...
We should not be asking Governments to solve problems relating to spammers, hackers or any other cyber space related activities.
That's what things like the RBL are for. You can opt in for protection
As for the good senator, he is most likely going down in flames as we speak.
Question Reality
You said it. I have my own mail server too, and it makes life grand. I still use my ISP account for many things though... I can't switch 100% to my own system because as soon as I do the cable modem cops will wave the TOS at me shut down my server... murphy's law.
Ever been pissed off at the phone company? So which other phone company did you switch to, I'd like to know because I hate mine...
Anyway, if all the major ISPs adopted this there would be *nowhere to run to.* Frankly I am surprised that it isn't happening already.
I said it might be excessively cynical, you were warned.
[WARNING: This post may be excessively cynical.]
Really, what I am waiting for is ISP-approved spam. If the right to send spam is legally upheld, I think this is what awaits us in the future:
- Major ISPs set up "commercial email facilitation services."
- Spammer contacts the ISP. Spammer signs up for the service, and for $0.0X per email address the ISP guarantees delivery to the end user. How many users does home.com have? Or Earthlink?
- ISP makes a bundle.
- We all start getting 50 approved spams every day (the ISP would be smart enough not to redistribute pr0n spam)
- ISP rewrites the TOS so you can't complain about it or opt out.
- ISP monkeys with subject and sender headers to defeat mail filters.
- ISP defends their actions by claiming that spam was costing them $X million a year and this is the only way they can recover costs.
Obnoxious? Yes. But with the huge money to be made I think it's only a matter of time before things go this route. Non-spamming ISPs will become rare... only small ISPs will want to refuse the income, because their small user base won't make it worth backlash. But as more and more small ISPs get bought out or go under, there will be fewer and fewer places to run...
Are you willing to pay 2 cents per e-mail? I know some of us are (especially those of us who send less than a hundred e-mails per month). What about the maintainers of e-mail lists/newsletters? This would add a significant cost to some big open source projects with large newsgroups (like bug lists, announcement lists, etc). If you impose a 2 cent tax on business e-mail, you have to impose a 2 cent tax on EVERY e-mail (at least those that cross between companies/individuals - two AOL users obviously would not have to pay, just like two Microsoft users).
Sorry, I'd rather put up with spam than give up free e-mail.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Look at it.. spam is there to perform a "function", to get you to buy stuff or whatever. Well DeCSS is a function in just the same way. If Spam is protected free speech, DeCSS should be too ;).
SSL Certificate
I hope nobody thinks these guys actually sift through their own mailboxes. If they did, they wouldn't be fighting for the rights of downtrodden spammers to fill them with spam.
Quoting from memory, it states that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..."
The First Amemdment does not force me to provide you a stage from which to speak! Get that through your yammerhead skull, and then think about the implications as far as spam is concerned. Under the First Amendment, Congress can't prevent spammers from writing an e-mail, or even sending it to folks who have told you that they want to hear from you.
When you invade my in-box, you are, as others have noted, committing criminal tresspass. It's really just that simple.
Liberty in our Lifetime
That's right, folks. Not only are we going to simultaneously cut Department of Defense resources while actually incurring EXTRA EXPENSES, but we will also virtually give away the airwaves, YET AGAIN, to large corporations, for them to do with as they please, namely MAKE MONEY AT THE GOVERNMENT'S EXPENSE. This kind of corporate subsidizing makes me sick, especially so since it is a supposedly liberal Democrat who is proposing that we do so.
--
< )
( \
X
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
In other news, congress has said throwing bricks with ads tied on them through Neema's windows is also part of the first amendment.
In any event, it seems likely the same legal thinking will apply to any anti-spam law. Since most email spam is, in fact, commercial ads, that would appear to be something that can be banned. Chain letters (that are not other wise illegal, like Ponzi scams), political messages, even ones asking for donations, and many other kinds of email are going to be protected, in the end. Or so it looks to me.
Having to sit through commercials is the price I pay for watching something on TV. I can accept that. But spam is intermixed with my legitimate email. That is not something I should have to accept.
Managing programmers is like herding cats.
Look at the Libertarians. They have a plan for paying for all those good things without income tax.
wishus
---
wishus
---
That has got to be the most ignorant thing I have seen posted here yet, and that's counting all the penis bird trolls! Do you realize that if you break into my house, I have the legal right to kill you? I have the right to put up a "No Solicitors" sign, and have anybody who ignores it arrested for trespassing. I have a shitload of rights when it comes to my property. Without property rights, there can be no capitalism.
The fact is, if you get DirecTV or pay for cable, you get innundated with commercials in the comfort of your home through a medium that YOU pay for, using electricity that YOU pay for, on a TV that YOU paid for. Sure, it's regulated. But there is still a shitload of it, and you still didn't ask for it.
Actually, dan@uglyfish.dhs.org , when you pay for cable TV, you ARE asking for those ads. The ads are like web banners - they pay for the content that you want to get at.
Spam is more closely analagous to sending somebody a fax, or leaving a message on their answering machine. You are using their resources to finance your advertising.
Sorry dan@uglyfish.dhs.org but you are not correct about this.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Yuck. I hate that when I miss a closing tag. I'm pretty sure most of you can sort out that the two pro-spam paragraphs are quotes from dan@uglyfish.dhs.org anyway.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
In almost all phone markets in the US, it is possible to have "all solicitations" blocked from your line, and it is illegal for a marketer to try get around it.
Tell me where I have order that feature for my e-mail account, and you win this argument.
Can't do it? I guess you lose.
As for shirts with logos on them, you knew the logo was on there when you bought it, and the retailer is probably willing to sell you the shirt for less money, because you will be a walking billboard for them. If you wanted a Tommy Hilfiger shirt with no logo, you would probably be expected to pay more for it. (And if you are paying a premium to advertise for them, you're just a rube.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Actually, they do a lot more than just "filter". If somebody calls a number with this service, they get a message informing them that the number does not accept solicitations. If they attept to circumvent that system, then they violate local laws.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
As for "staying on topic", I believe I did. Read my response again.
Unscrambling your e-mail address was just a way of making a point: You stand up for spammers, and don't seem to think anything should be done to reduce it, but you clearly don't want to get it yourself.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
However, if a company sends an advertisement to your fax machine, that's illegal.
These same laws should be extended to e-mail.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
(By the way, leaving a note on my windshield is illegal if my car is parked in the garage. Ditto if it is parked in the lot of an apartment complex which forbids solicitation.
E-mail is not a public accomodation. I own my e-mail account, just as I own my fax machine and PCS phone. Just as with those devices, the person who is paying for the service should have final say in how it is used.
You have no First Amendment right to make "first contact" with you via mobile phone. Nor do you have a right to send unsolicited ads to my fax machine. On my land-line phone, I can use the phone company's service to opt out of call solicitations. These same rules should be made to apply to e-mail. There is no Free Speech case here.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
An e-mail box is not a USPS mail box. It is a privately owned data file which is leased for the purpose of being able to exchange data with others. Your example of putting a billboard on somebody's lawn which faces their window is particularilly cogent.
Opt-out is a whack-a-mole game, because when you tell an advertiser you don't want to hear from them, they can come back as another company in a week anyway. Most spammers are fly-by-night scams anyway.
The First Amendment does not establish the right to send me e-mail.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
We should institute an internet-wide Karma system! Every e-mail account on the whole 'net could have a karma associated with it... if you post enough bad e-mails you get zero karma on your e-mails... then I could set my e-mail reader to only view posts/e-mail with +2 karma.
//
--// Hartsock
Live to Code, Code to Live!
Hello fellow /.ers. I'm not a legal scholar, but please hear me out.
/.ing a senator's video-voicemail box at home?
I think if the supreme court was asked weather I had the right to make a war-dailer script to call everyone in the country and harass them (and somehow do it for free without direct stealing of telco services), the supreme court would say no. If they were asked if I could hire 100,000 political 'activists', to manually dial/call every phone number in the country, and speak to them in an interactive, human voice, the decision might be different.
Before you go off on my first point, please read on:
Companies that Spam are not doing anything that the constitution was designed to protect, nor the first amendment. Freedom of speech, while it has been expanded to several media forms beyond the original spoken-word/printed-text, does not mean random harassment. I'm sure if you stood outside of a school-building screaming profanities for months on end, the school/courts/supreme-court would prosecute you. If there isn't a law now, they would write and approve one!
Freedom of speech is simply a ploy by companies to excuse their behavior. While the common company party-line is 'to provide you with useful services' - think of the long term effects of digitally-created/automated 'freedom of speech'. What would keep us from
What would keep us from generating real physical mail by the thousands of pieces, and mailing it to a politician just to 'spam' them, or essentially perform a DOS attack on them.
The reality, as an earlier writer mentions, is that: Spam is a form of speach that denies people access to:
Peace and Quiet
Sanctity of the home
their own useful information
Sometimes, in a real society, philosophy and idealism has to give way to reality.
Until computers are sentient, they do not have freedom of speech.
There is a national list and blocking services for telemarketers.
.01% hit rate(percentage of people who earn the spammer money) to profit, you need a 4-5% hit rate to make your profit. This is a huge difference. It means that the telemarketer wants to get it's calling lists as specific as possible. They have to pay somebody to make those calls, the lines, and a building for them to operate from.
But what the previous poster was trying to point out is that there is a relativly substantional cost to calling you.
This means that rather than needing than say, a
It limits them from just 'shotgunning' their ads out too indiscriminatly. They need a certain point before they break even with their advertising.
The junk-mail I got when I turned 18 must of cost the senders around 20-30 cents each. This naturally limits them. Want to mail 10,000 people? That'll be $2000 dollars. If the spammer already has a computer, the cost is maybe $20 (the cost of a ISP) for millions of emails.
Firethorn
I don't read AC A human right
Try taking one of those snail letters to the local postmaster. The post office will gladly nail the perpetrators of the fraud to the wall.
Firethorn
I don't read AC A human right
The difference between junk snail mail and junk email is that the snail mail costs the sender money, and UCE costs the recipient.
That means that the junk snail mailers constantly tend their lists, and make some attempt to send stuff only to people that might actually be interested. If you don't want to get junk snail mail, there is a place that you can write to to opt out, and your junk mail *really* will drop off in volume, although it may take a few months. See this site for more information.
Spammers, on the other hand, have no incentive to tend their lists, because it doesn't cost any more to mail to a million addresses than it does to mail to a few thousand. And you can't opt out, because that just verifies to the spammer that your address is 'live'.
If you don't like email postage, how about a 'voluntary' postage? It would work like this: If you want to send me an email, you have to enclose a 1-cent payment in e-cash -- unless you are on my 'free' list, in which case you don't have to pay anything. That way, I could sign up for newsletters, and put them on my 'free' list.
If you aren't on my free list, you have to pay a penny to make the initial contact, but then if I decide you are somebody I want on my 'free' list, you wouldn't have to pay again.
Concealed Handgun License Courses in Plano, Texas
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My company is working on a way to make people pay you for delivering spam. Our software either blocks (at the mail server itself) any unwanted email, or depedning on your settings will let some of it through for a fee. We are currently rolling a service out in the UK (a free UK ISP providing the service will be avaliable in the next month or so), and we aim to launch in the states soon. If anyone is interested check our website at http://www.stamplets.com/. We'd appreciate any comments you have.
We are developing software for this, you as a user can specify how much people have to pay you to get their email delivered. For friends/family (e.g. people in your address book) its free, but you could decide that everyone else in say *@*.com has to pay you 20 cents to get a mail though. For more details see http://www.stamplets.com
I agree with the good senator, but only on the first amendment issue. The meaning of the first amendment originally was to protect POLITICAL speach, but in the years since then, it has come to be to protect any form of communication, including telemarketing, spammers, etc. However, I do agree that spamming businesses need to become more respectable, sending from false addresses and such tactless behavior. I recieve a number of newsletters, and I enjoy them, but there are a few which I never signed up for which do not come from real email adresses. There should be limits on what spammers can do, maybe a change in thier actions will result in a change in attitude toward thier practice.
Spring is here. Don't believe me, look outside!
Every method of communication has an inherent propery indicating the amount of privacy that can be reasonably expected. This is a nice and simple concept. Yelling accross a crowded room inherently lends itself to less privacy than a whisper.
Similarly, every method of communication has a distribution topology. A phone call from you to your uncle Joe has a 1:1 distribution (unless of course Uncle Joe is in the Mafia and the feds are tapping the line). The distribution of a communication carries with it the same reasonable expectations as the privacy.
Now for Email. The most important email in your box has a 1:1 distribution. You and only you are the intended audience. The second kind of email has a 1:many distribution where the 'many' represents a finite group of individuals with a shared interest in recieving such messages.
It's very important to note that the email system was not really designed for 1:many distributions. Newsgroups are, and the web is. But email in it's most generic form only supports 1:many messages through an ill-designed hack.
The Spammers of the world are 'successful' only because email software (not an accurate placement of blame, the problem is inherent to the protocol/spec which was based on a non-commercial internet) is based upon 1:1 messages.
Joe Blow the PC Whiz is now thinking, you moron, what about CC and BCC? These are clearly intended for 1:many distribution of messages. That's right. My argument is that this is a well-intentioned misfeature.
Sending the same email to multiple recipients is a waste of bandwidth and storage which expands linearly with the number of recipients. Thats a very bad thing. We would never use a sorting algorithm with that kind of performance.
But darlin, I wanna send the same love letter to both my sweethearts! Sure you do, but since there are multiple recipients how about storing that message on your mail server and only sending the headers to your sweeties? The technology isn't hard, it's a nearly trivial project.
But we can't just change the way email works! This is the big-time stupid responce (don't you just love my straw men?). Given: the internet as a whole is growing rapidly and the larger the 'net is the more difficult it's going to be to make a basic change in the way a basic service like email is implimented. If it eventually must be changed then every minute we wait makes the inevitable more difficult, painful, and costly.
You know I'm right. You might not like it, but the less hardware is needed by an ISP the faster the connection per dollar. If massive disk space for email is so cheap, we might as well make the spammers buy it.
No need mate, you can send e-mail to gephardt@mail.house.gov.
As anybody else can send e-mail to gephardt@mail.house.gov
Actually every spambot from some sleazebag marketers can pick up the e-mail address of gephardt@mail.house.gov right here @ /.
Of course, so can every reputable company wanting to contact gephardt@mail.house.gov.
No need to thank me.
(Instead you might want to thank gephardt@mail.house.gov protecting your consitutional rights. Thank you Mr. gephardt@mail.house.gov )
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Simple including the substring "mail" into a service does not upon that service bestow all the rights, priveleges, and protections afforded to real mail.
Its illegal to send unsolicated Faxes, the same should apply to email end of story.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
The *right* to do this stems from Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company [118 U.S. 394 (1886)], Read more here
This is the wellspring of power from which most of America s ills originate. This is why you will not be able to stop Spammers (or pollutors or corrupt congresspeople or warmongers) Close this well and take back control of your country...
Simple - Anyone who values Democracy and dislikes the class-based rule (your present plutocratic government) should join with those who seek to repeal this case. This is the brass-ring with which Americans can restore their Democracy... otherwise, we wait for the next revolution.
Okay, we don't want to deal with the spam, but the spammers are covered by the First Amendment. I have heard a rumor for quite some time about wanting to charge people for e-mail. I think that spam should be charged. Keep the opt-out stuff, and they have the right to send it to us, but they have to pay $.15 per spam. Like stated before, cheaper than postage, and the government gets a chunk of money. With as much spam that goes around, that should aleviate the national debt in no time in the US.
-Dizzy
"What goes around, comes around... And around... And around."
...to come from Oregon. Please don't kill me! I didn't vote for him, I swear!
But, corporations are people according to the case Santa Clara County vs Pacific Railroads.
This issue has been mentioned on slashdot before and it angers alot fo slashdoters because they have more rights actual persons here in the US.
Basically the DMA is unconstitional until corporations lose their personhood status. This is why they always win the court cases. If me vs a 10 billion dollar corporations are both equals then I lose because I can't afford a good lawyer.
You know I have an idea. I wonder if we can give Microsoft the death penalty and break them up. After all they murdered other people like Mr. Netscape, and Mr. Wordperfect. Of course this is rather silly but if they want to play hardball and claim personhood for their right of free speech like philip Morris cough cough, then we should judge them as people and sue or break them up for competing and murding other persons.
http://saveie6.com/
% telnet mail.senate.gov 25
Trying 198.78.181.132...
Connected to mail.senate.gov.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mailsims2.senate.gov -- Server ESMTP ([Server Info Removed])
EHLO [some domain]
250-mailsims2.senate.gov
[...]
VRFY gephardt
252 2.5.0 Possible local address <gephardt@mailsims2.senate.gov>
QUIT
221 2.3.0 Bye received. Goodbye.
Connection closed by foreign host.
Oh sure, blame it all on me.
---
---
Slashdot: News For Zealots. Stuff That's Hypocritical.
and as for opt-out goes, it should at least be required by the spammers by law to include a standard tag in the mail header a la unsolicited-mail so I at least can filter the shit out of my inbox.
Considering all spam is advertising (even the "save so-and-so" chain letters, in a way), spam is NOT entirely protected by the First Amendment. Yes, IANAL, but the traditional 4 zones carved out by the Supreme Court where protection is subject to debate are 1. Advertising (see 44 Liquormart v. Rhode Island 1995 et al.), 2. potentially libellous material (US v. New York Times c. 1972 I belive), 3. indecent/obscene speech & content (now using the Miller v. CA standard from 1973) and 4. hate speech (more or less meaningless after Brandenburg v. Ohio). The First Amendment is not total, and theoretically, if it were we'd be subject to much worse from advertisers.
No, what they do know is that they bought your email address with millions of others.
They know not where your address came from nor what sites you visit.
How else do youexplain that I receive porno emails to an address which is not used on the computer from which I web browse. (There's no point in me saying I don't visit porn sites as you'll refuse to believe).
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
Has anyone ever proposed some law that would not only obligate spammers to honor opt-out requests themselves, but also honor requests that one's name/email/etc. not be passed on to any other individual? (exceptions for court orders, etc.)
Perhaps this could help the current situation in which people don't send opt-out requests, knowing that the last thing you want is to end up on some list of "verified email addresses".
~k
I am not from Oregon, therefore you probably won't bother to respond to this email. But if you actually bother to read this, I would like you to know that I am extremely disturbed by your claim at a meeting of the Computer & Communications Industry Association that "spammers" (senders of unsolicited commercial emails) have "First Amendment rights to send unsolicited communication." (http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/industry/06/20/gepha rdt.tech.agenda.idg/index.html)
While it is true that the First Amendment permits free speech (ignoring the validity of advertising as "speech"), it does not state that I am required to subsidize the speech of others. Emails from "spammers" take up valuable bandwidth, which users of independent service providers have to pay for. Unsolicited emails cost the user money, regardless of their interest in the product being advertised. Companies are free to pay for advertising in the media of their choice, but I do not believe that you are justified in claiming that they have the right to target me with advertising that I must pay for. I do not like unsolicited mail in general, but at least when it travels by more conventional methods (the Post office, phone, etc.) I am not charged for the privilege of being solicited involuntarily.
If you are interested in the opinions of a large portion of the technically inclined populace, there is currently a discussion on your opinion at http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/06/21/161420 1
One mans right ends where another mans right begins.
This means that allthough it is the spammers right to send as many emails to as many people as he likes, it is also my right not to get unwanted emails.
Sindri Traustason
"It takes two to lie, one to lie and one to listen"
Sindri Traustason.
If you dont trust somebody with your email address, DONT GIVE IT TO THEM, just use a disposable email service like Sneakemail.
Even if you're giving your address to an organization you trust not to spread your address dont trust their opt-out functionality, since it could very well be a temp using Excel to remove your address.
Since I've been using sneakemail (which lets you know without a doubt how somebody got your address) the most spam I get, BY FAR, is at g4hu5001@sneakemail.com, which is the address I only use only for slashdot.
So sure, spammers may or may not have rights, but if you have total control over their ability to spam you, the argument becomes mostly academic.
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
Since when is the right to freedom of speech the same as the right to fill my private mail box with the written speech, I didn't ask for to read ?
Isn't the right of freedom of speech already granted for each company allowing them to broadcast their website directly into my living room and advertise whatever they want on it ?
The company's "speech" is already in my house, absolutely no rights to express themselves would be taken away by making the opt-out status the default, so that the reader, who wants the info in his mailbox, has to actively give permission to the company to send it into my mailbox.
But to fill up my mail box and to force me to take action and having to choose to opt out (because the default would otherwise be the opt-in and thus they can start sending me their crap without asking for permission to do so first) to prevent them filling my mailbox, has nothing to do with their right of free expression.
Since when is there a "right to contact" a person ?
Men, if that goes through, I take my "right to contact" the Senators literally too. These days anything goes under the first amendment.
No way I would support this.
Apparantly you aren't familiar with economics. If the ISP's start pissing off their customers, they will cease to have customers, and they will cease to be ISP's.
"And like that
Ever been pissed off at the phone company? So which other phone company did you switch to, I'd like to know because I hate mine...
Well, not that it's really comparable (which ISP's have monopolies, like phone companies?), but YES, I have been pissed off at my local phone company many times. What did I do? I dropped their service and chose one of several cell phone providers in my area.
Anyway, if all the major ISPs adopted this there would be *nowhere to run to.* Frankly I am surprised that it isn't happening already.
Again, it's simple economics. Most people hate spam. Assuming for a moment the ludicrous notion is true, that all the major ISP's would take up something that is going to piss off 90% of their customers, there would ALWAYS be smaller companies coming in to service the DEMAND -- spam-free service.
"And like that
Junk sendings to actual former employees is a very small minority of the spam that I see here. We had one guy who was looking for a loan online, and his address now gets at least 2 spams a day. But that's about the extent of the truly targetted spam.
Cynical? You can never be too cynical. I'll bet this not only happens soon, but it will be presented as a cool new added service for us stoopid consumers - just like the new practice of listing paid links on search engines is billed as "increasing the relevance of your searches".
And opt-out is a joke. I've opted out of countless things, but I still get a hundred+ spams a day.
Actually, opting-out usually doesn't prevent SPAM. For the simple reason that if you send back an opt-out email, you are now a "verified email address" and I'm sure you will show up in the next edition of their "3 billion Verified Email Addresses!!!!" CD-ROM. Which you can buy for the low, low price of....
Check out Althea for a stable IMAP email client for X. Now with SSL!
The Supreme Court would beg to differ. After the case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, corporations were given the same rights as individuals under the fourteenth amendment. So, according to the Supreme Court, corporations are individuals. I think that sucks donkey balls, but until it goes to the court again (or there is an amendment -- not likely), we're stuck with it.
The emphasis on legality, while being typically American, is misplaced, as always.
In a market economy, everything is for sale, and it's offered up at the best price, or so the story goes. SPAM is the *ultimate* form of free speech in this context: it elicits a potential buy response from a consumer at a low cost to EACH party. In theory, this is why the "marketplace of ideas" works, but in reality most folks are crypto-fascists wanting their freebooting capitalism right alongside their DisneyWorldview--which rules out porn, free cellphones and any other for-sale item the marketeers wish to pitch. It's as though you want a kinder, gentler capitalism--there ain't no such thing.
What people seem to be seeking--indeed, what many people here seem to want--is a legislation of a moral stance to which they find themselves attached. This isn't the solution now, and it never has been, not the least because not everyone shares standards. Tacitus noted over 2000 years ago that the more laws a state has, the more corrupt it will be. I personally think this State is plenty enough corrupt already.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, The Histories
Bad news. It does work, and the spammers make money. Until it stops making money, spammers will continue annoying people.
Sean.
Excuse me, I thought free trade spurred capitalism? Doesn't it force domestic industries to compete with the rest of the world and lower prices for all consumers? Replace the federalincome tax with higher tariffs, even for the greatly reduced budget you're proposing, would create a trade war with the rest of the world the likes of which the nation has never seen. Libertarians tend to operate in a vacuum.
The Libertarian Party's proposal here is to strip down the budget so much that tariffs and excise taxes currently in effect can pay for everything.
For that matter why should a naval shipping company help pay for the roads that a rival trucking company uses? Or why should the trucking company help pay for the Coast Guard to protect the shipping lanes of his naval competitor?
Currenty, federal highway subsidies are paid for by the gasoline tax, so the people who use the roads are the ones who pay for them. I don't know if port fees and boat registration fees pay for the Coast Guard, but it would be nice if they did.
A legparnasom tele van angolnaval.
Oh, get real. And yes, it's really the same thing. For those of us who have been Usenet posters... without preemptive mail-filters (ones which kill the spam before it gets stored on the server), I wouldn't be able to read my email.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
...but no souls. At least according to this article.
Companies don't have first amendment rights. Companies don't have rights at all. Rights are for people. We've so much abused and diluted the word that it has become meaningless.
Screw postage, that doesn't keep the crap out of my two physical mailboxes. It's tresspassing, pure and simple and has nothing at all to do with "freedom of speech".
If I were to walk across Taco's lawn to put an advertisement on his front porch, he could bar me with a simple No-Tresspassing or No-Solicitors sign. If I disregard it he can charge me with tresspassing.
Since email is physical and takes up space somewhere, which I have paid for the use of, I should be able to post a simple No-Tresspassing or No-Solicitors sign, effectively, and they keep out. Only those I welcome into/onto my property should be allowed.
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I see absolutely no reason why I should receive advertisements that require such actions on my part. Cleaning up junk mail takes time out of my already busy life, and I don't think anyone should have a right to burden me like that. Why should you have a right to take up my time?
right on with the $.01*1k thing.
yup, that's right, I helped my ex-gf to get a hotmail account. The name she used was something like @hotmail.com. She got porno spam almost immediately after she had signed up. I don't think she even knew how to use the web then, so she couldn't have given her e-mail address out to some dodgy site or ng.
Thanks for staying on topic, Jim. The article we're discussing is titled Senator Says Spammers Have First-Amendment Rights, so it's fair to assume that the spams in question are mere advertisements. But I will deal with your question, even though it isn't a fair question.
Do you REALLY think that restricting bulk email has NO RISK of harming free speech?
Yes, I think that restricting bulk email has exactly no risk of harming free speech. Did restricting advertising (truth in advertising, zoning laws affecting signage and billboards, eliminating cigarette ads from tee vee) harm free speech? Do public nuisance laws, which restrict free speech, harm it? Do anti-fax-spam laws harm free speech? All of these practices restrict free speech without harming it.
You're forgetting that a U.S. Right to free speech DOES NOT IMPLY A RIGHT TO HAVE YOUR FREE SPEECH HEARD.
Treating email spams as what they are (simple theft of disk space, CPU cycles and network connection time) will not harm free speech. Treating advertising spams as free speech will lead to the ruin of SMTP email. Do you REALLY think that treating spams as First Amendment protected speech won't harm our current email system?
Luckily, even illustrious personages like U.S. Senators can make wrong statements. Since email spam is advertising, it is not protected speech,and therefore not covered by the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment.
In fact, the U.S. has recognized over the years that advertising must be controlled - thus we U.S. citizens are protected by "Truth in Advertising" laws.
The real question is who bought off this particular U.S. senator? The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) has its hooks into a lot of state representatives. For instance, here in Colorado, someone proposed a bill to make scumsucking telemarketers use a state "opt-out" list. Colorado citizens could register phone numbers in the opt-out list, and scumsucking telemarketers would be required to *not* call those phone numbers, under penalty of law.
The president of the Colorado State Senate is an ex-DMA-lobbyist, so he used parliamentary procedure to table the bill - it essentially wouldn't even be voted on. A mass outpouring of outrage against evil telemarketers got it back on the table, and it passed.
There can be no compromise on email spam - email spam is theft, and must be eliminated. Email spammers are theives and must be punished withing the limits of the law.
5k * 1 penny per K * 2 receivers (me and my ISP) = 10 cents
Beware typoes.
Nope. Spam's a little more like disturbing the peace.
Mod point free since 2001
First off, I'm all in favour of people standing up for their rights to speak, make their opinion known, etc.
Spamming should NOT be covered by the first amendment. PUBLISHING is covered by the first amendment, creation of work is covered by the first amendment. FORCING CRAP INTO PEOPLE'S INBOXES SHOULD NOT BE COVERED.
I believe that people have the right to put whatever they want up on a web page (within libel limits of course), express their ideas, opinions, creativity, and if Spammers want to put their stuff on a web page somewhere, more power to them! If they want to buy banner ads on sites, again, they are free to. I don't think that Spam is covered under the first amendment because it infringes upon others to "say" what is transmitted, prohibiting the sending of the message unsolicited to millions of people is irrevelant. They are allowed to create their message, their delivery method is the problem. I do not think that it is right for someone to push crap like that down my DSL line to where I host my email, for I am paying for the bandwidth, not them. If they want to send to me unsolicited, they should pay for the transmission rates more than they do, and they aren't. If spammers will pay the backbone providers so that my DSL rates can be lessened, I'll be happy to take their mail and do what I do with junk mail, trash it.
Spam is a problem, and this problem really needs to be corrected, and soon.
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
I never thought id say this but taco your insane. I hate spammers just as much as the next sane person but to start charging someone to send email ANYONE! no matter how stupid the use they put it to is opening the door for goverment regulated taxation of email use, and i do believe the goverment would love that. That is a dangerous path your treading Taco. Keep the government out of my email, Keep the dream alive man!.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise. -Fight Club
Representative Ron Wyden's number is 503-326-7525. I called his office and expressed my views.
The legislation is called the CAN SPAM Act of 2001.
If that link doesn't work, try Thomas, put "spam" in the search field and click on "Can SPAM act of 2001".
The bill suggests that "Opt-Out" is a remedy. This is extreme social ignorance of the type that is common among politicians. For support for this view, see the comment #128 above, "Opt-Out is a game like Whack-a-Mole." Or, possibly the bill was actually written by lobbyists for spam-friendly ISPs. As John McCain says, the U.S. government is quite corrupt.
However, be careful when you think about this issue. The First Amendment has pulled us out of a lot of big messes in the past. It is possible that it would be difficult to write anti-spam legislation that does not interfere with the First Amendment. If it is not possible to outlaw spam without abridging the first amendment, then it is actually better to have spam.
Bush's education improvements were
Opt-Out is like the Whack-a-Mole game, only far worse.
When you opt out, you tell the sender that they have a responsive person. That makes you more valuable to them. They take your name off the one list to which you opted out, but they sell your name to at least 1,000 other lists to which you have not opted out.
If you were to opt out of each of the 1000 lists, they would sell your name each time to 1000 others, so you would eventually be on 1,000,000 lists. These numbers are an estimate, but are not far wrong.
Opt-out is an invitation to spending your whole life as an opt-outer.
Bush's education improvements were
Well, isn't there a saying that your right to swing your fist ends at my face. If I've decided that spam causes me undo hardship (bandwidth costs, lost time, unwanted x-rated material), then I ought to be able to recognize my right not to get it. You can do this with junkmail, why can't we do it with junk email?
It'll end up being a judgement call as to whether or not the email sent was spam, but if you coordinated efforts you could probably prove that you were being spammed instead of contacted specifically for something to do with you as an individual.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Remember: Just because something is annoying, doesn't mean it's illegal. If they [spammers] find our email address, then they can send to it. This from the people that want AOL to open up thier network for free, and then want spam blocked; "well, if I like it, then it should happen". Sorry, not real life :-). On another note, I'm kinda surprised that the DEMOCRATS want this! Seems pretty conservative/federalist to me.
My other car is first.
Holy it's time to go home.
Karma: Chameleon (Mostly affected by the 1980s)
What was that about Alcohol and Catholics? I mished it...
information is immaterial
But it's still doubtful if he can think,
...because it gives companies their first ammendment right to contact you.
/. Nazi for today. Tune in next week kiddies, same bat time, same bat channel!
And opt-out is a joke. I've opted out of countless things, but I still get a hundred+ spams a day. Thank god for mail filters.
Hey Rob, try deleting them unopened if you want to really avoid spam.
Or whether he can multiply and divide properly:
I think spammers should pay a penny per k to both me and my ISP. A 5k spam would cost a dime. Still less then a stamp, but it'd make me a few hundred bucks a month for my time, bandwidth, and hardware costs.
$300 (a few = three in standard english). $300 at $0.01 per k comes out to about 30 Mb. Rob gets 30 Mb of Spam a month? Wow, those opt out emails sure helped!
Somehow I'm doubting he has $300 of bandwidth and hardware costs per month due to Spam.
And finally, we see that Kumannduhr Tawko sttil duz not kno how too speel. That's "amendment".
Anyway, I'm done being a
-Kasreyn
P.S., disclaimer. I actually think CmdrTaco's ok, I'm just being an insulting prick for the hell of it.
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Really not a bad idea, except why would it be illegal if they didn't pay a penny? It is their legal right to contact you and I don't think that should change. What is illegal and should be enforced, is the filled-in radio buttons that companies often leave in nooks and crannies which you must click off to NOT receive spam. That is illegal certainly in Canada, and I believe in the States as well. It is an absolute manipulation to make people opt-out of being targeted before they ever agreed to even BE targeted.
is this.....is this for REAL?
great comedy company.
WARNING: IANAL
That being said, my understanding of how the law is interpreted is that you have full and unadulterated freedoms until those freedoms infringe on the rights of others. For example, stealing is illegal because it infringes on someone else's right to own property.
In this specific context, SPAM should be illegal because it infringes on my bandwidth and time. Bandwidth and time are worth a calculatable amount of money and do cause damages to large companies as well as individuals. For example, if a spammer floods an email server to send his spam he is abusing the service that was provided to him and costing his host large amounts of money in bandwidth, CPU, and maintenance.
It seems like the Democratic party is at it again. My favorite quote is from Trafficant (sp?) speaking about his own party: "Is it possible, that these people are so stupid that if they were thrown at the ground they would miss?!"
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
According to a recent appeal that was upheld in federal court (previously on slashdot), we have the legal right to insist that any UCE/spam have:
valid From: and To: addresses, a non-misleading subject line, and that a working email reply address that will actually remove us from your databases, email lists, and all other files.
And, if you don't like it, we can sue you in small claims court, as can any ISPs resident in Washington State which declare that on their root web page.
I can see it now, Washington state residents taking a US Senator from Oregon to court for damages!
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
This just in: it is now legal to spam any pro-spam senator. When he opts out, just go get a new hotmail address.
Yes, but you forgot to tell them how.
First, in each spam, make sure you include a name, street address, city, state and zip code from their state. Otherwise, their spam filters will reject it.
Also, give a misleading subject: No, not Make Money Now!, but something like My neighbor said you could help with this legislation. That will get it past the subject filters and not put in a folder and then ignored.
Now for the text. Write a script for this and push it out, you need to show them you mean business.
OK, let's get creative:
Dear Senator Wyden (or other name),
Glad to meet you at when you [visited/flew in/dropped by] to talk about [guns/email/spam/cereal/mining law tort reform].
You said I should [email/write] your office about the fact that I get [spam/unsolicited email/garbage] sent to me with [opt-out that doesn't work/misleading headers].
So, I told a few [friends/neighbors] and they said they'd write you too.
[Basically/Actually], we'd like you to [sponsor legislation/write a law/pass a bill] to outlaw any commercial email that has misleading headers or subjects and doesn't include [ADV/ADV:] in the subject line and doesn't have an active working email account to remove all persons who reply to the email saying they wish to be removed.
I've enclosed a [document/petition/letter] with further info on this:
[attachment - something varying between 0K and 2 GB in size]
Sincerely,
[name]
[city]
Have fun, script kiddies!
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
when CmdrTaco agrees with Bill Gates...
Being a resident of the state of Oregon, I contacted Senator Wyden on this topic. I have challenged him to let me provide two e-mail addresses in my domain that he and his staff can monitor and use. One of these domains I want him to use every opt-out that is offered, the other I want him to ignore all spam. I am hoping to show that after a small period of time the mailbox that uses opt-out will contain significantly more e-mail than the box that spam is just ignored. A couple of questions: 1st what is the shortest way to get an e-mail address noticed so it gets onto a spam list (I was thinking two posts to USENET from each account), and how long should this experiment run. I will be calling Senator Wydens local office next week to start pursuing this topic further. Wish me luck, I am going in without a net Bill
The concept of "postage" is completely ridiculous. How much more time and bandwidth will we need to determine whether or not a mailing is unsolicited? How much time and bandwidth will we need to makee the financial transaction? Won't RSA want a kickback for the encryption? Won't ATT and Microsoft want to get in on the act as well?
Remember, US senators and representatives have the "franking privelege" which means they get to send you unsolicited (paper) mail to anyone in the country for free. Should similar restrictions apply for email?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, simulate.
Herein lies the problem. There are people who actually DO "look at their crap." Granted, it may be a staggeringly small percentage, but you said yourself the cost for sending the emails was next to nothing. If you sent out 1,000,000 emails, and only 1% percent of those emails make it as far as actually being opened, and only 1% of those that are opened actually produce an effect similar to the one you intended, thats :
.01 * .01 = 100
1000000 *
So there you have one hundred people to whom you have successfully advertised with a one time cost of not much more than a PC and an Internet connection.
Now your second time around, you already have the hardware, so your costs are even more insignificant. And why limit this to a million people? Why not make it ten million, or a hundred million?
Spammers continue to send spam because it works. If you want to effectively combat spam, don't go after the advertisers, go after that small percentage of people that still read spam and buy the advertised products.
One of the many possible futures that cloud my brain (though probably not one of the most likely) is that as negative opinion of spam continues its growing trend, actions such as buying a product or service in a spam advertisement will become such a societal feau paux that people will quit just to protect their image, at which point spamming might be reduced to ineffectiveness, and it will stop.
A more likely future is that the U.S. government somehow comes to the conclusion that it has the right to tax email, and starts charging us postage, one of the very few benefits of which would be a reduction of junk email.
I am called by roughly one telemarketer per day (usually not even that). I receive roughly 50 emails a day that I consider to be spam.
Therefore, by your math, spam is 5 times the annoyance to me that telemarketing is.
Similar concerns apply here: Bandwidth, disk space, and my time are all limited resources, and they all cost money. Others don't have the right to co-opt my resources (or those of my ISP or mail host) for their own purposes without my permission.
Interestingly, OpenSecrets.org lists Wyden as having gotten ~$100,000 from the "computer equipment and services industry". Couldn't find any particular evidence beyond that for quid pro quo, though.
OK,
- B
--
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
I paid for my physical mailbox on my house. I have to pay for my garbage service to take away the junk mail that I throw out. It cost me time to go through my junk mail. Email is just much cheaper than physical mail to send. Are you saying that It should be more expensive to send email?
Suppose someone drives around your neighborhood at 3:00 a.m. and blasts advertisements from a 10 kW PA system. Is that free speech, you free speech purists?
Of course it's not. Why not? Because it is offensive and I cannot "turn it off," like a TV station. That's just plain common sense, which Congressman Gebhart doesn't seem to have.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
- Dan I.
While it is true that telemarketers pay for their phones, they don't pay for YOUR phone. You still pay to have a phone at which to be reached. They are using a resource _you_ paid for to bother you. Not too mention they are a much greater annoyance, truly interupting whatever it is that you are doing. It takes longer to get the phone, relaize it's a marketer, and hang up as it does to delete 10 emails. The difference being that you can delete the email at your leisure.
- Dan I.
The fact is, if you get DirecTV or pay for cable, you get innundated with commercials in the comfort of your home through a medium that YOU pay for, using electricity that YOU pay for, on a TV that YOU paid for. Sure, it's regulated. But there is still a shitload of it, and you still didn't ask for it. And it wastes more of your time that SPAM ever will.
- Dan I.
The problem we run into is that when we stop Spammers from sending effectively anonymous email, we will be limiting OUR ability to do the same.
- Dan I.
What we need is accountability, to know just where this crap comes from. But how do we do that without limiting our personal freedom to use email anonymously?
- Dan I.
I'm not sure which is worse, oversimplifying a point (as I did w/respect to your Right's wrt your home)or responding in such an incredibly chldish way as you did. Perhaps you should take a few deep breaths. And don't forget to exhale.
FYI, I hate Spam. With the white hot intensity of a thousand Suns. I feel the same way about Top 40 radio. However, I won't suggest that we should outlaw it. That was the thrust of the article we are suppossed to be referring to: that they won't support outlawing it. Please do stay on topic. And don't support Spammers by giving them addresses. At least make them pay for the lists.
- Dan I.
Is that an unreasonable position?,
- Dan I.
Can you send a fax to a stranger of the flyer you made up to sell your car? Can IBM send me fax that just says "Hi. How you doin?"? Can they send unsolicited faxes that are NOT advertisements? Does the law say that Corps can't send ads, or that nobody can?
I agree that it needs to be regulated. I just don't know how. You can't trace most of it. So, for the law to have any effect, they would have to make it illegal to send email from an untracable address. They could put this limit in place just for advertisers, but enforcement would be tough and wouldn't extend to Taiwan or Japan or wherever.
I don't think we disagree about too much here. I'm just afraid of a bad law that can't be effective, and would put a dent in my own Freedom.
- Dan I.
The Right to send email unsolicited is what's at question here. No self-respecting defender of Free Speech would limit offensive or inconvenience causing speech. Hate spammers all you want (and I do) but they have a right to send you stuff you don't want to get. Deal with it, don't outlaw it.
- Dan I.
"""Spammers take away my property and happiness. Isn't that a right too?"""
It's the *pursuit* of happiness that's a right. Spammers are pursuing their happiness just as much when they fire off a million e-mails as you are when you delete those that you receive.
Now suppose you appeal to utilitarianism:
The spammer makes $1000 bucks by sending 1,000,000 e-mails (+1000 happiness points), but in the process offends 900,000 spam-ridden citizens (-900,000 happiness points). Therefore, by a utilitarian standard, the spammer is clearly in the wrong.
I can't refute such an argument, but the US Constitution is not based on utilitarian principles; if it were, the "tyranny of the majority" would be merciless. There would be the occasional positive outcome, of course: Jon Katz would be strapped to a gurney at Terre Haute.
Erlang.org: wow
I was getting around 20+ spams a day. (Oh! If only I could have found time to use all that Porn or viagra or money.) I'd had enough. Regular mail filters didn't work, and complaining through spamcop was useless. After implementing this password, I've seen 3 spams in 5 months on the same account. The rest were trashed.
I stumbled across Dr. Salvi's page here: http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts/info/proctips.html.
Basically, the way it works is that when I receive email that I haven't explicitly approved, the procmail filter sees that the password is not in the subject, and sends it back to its sender with the password stuffed into the subject. They are asked to resend the email. This time, the filter accepts the email for me to read. Since most spam comes from faked email addresses the spammers never see this. Of those that do, only 1 was stupid enough to actually modify the subject by hand and forward it on to me. funnily enough, I then had *her* email address, which I promptly submitted to any email list I could find for a day or two...*evil grin*
For people I *want* to communicate with, I add them to my email filter. I've got around 60 exemptions or so including mailing lists.
It won't work for everyone as it's fairly tricky to set up, and if you get it wrong you will annoy the hell out of any mailing list you post to, but if you can I strongly recommend you do use this approach.
Go, Springboard, Go!
The bigger issue here is how certain congressmen (and women) feel opt-out is the way to go for PRIVACY - i.e. credit card companies selling detailed info about you. Remember all those inane privacy notices that showed up all at once in teh mail from your banks and credit card companies? Well they were heavily disguised opt-out notices. Most folks (myself included since they looked like junk mail) threw them out and thus have given permission for all their info to be sold. The hell with SPAM, I can filter it and thanks to ORBS, etc, plus a decent mail filter I get maybe a handful a day, maybe - easily managed.
But the selling of my personal data like medical history, credit information, etc - screw that. I want that info PROTECTED and only released if I SAY SO!
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
But it isn't possible to put thousands and thousands of flyers on thousands and thousands of cars in an extremely short period of time. There is a significant barrier to sending large quantities of flyers or junk mail which prevents us from getting completely overwhelmed. Production cost acts a limiting factor on the amount of junk that we will receive. This doens't exist with email. Anyone can easily collect/buy a large number of emails and spam away.
Also, no self-respecting defender of Free Speech would argue that are no limits on free speech. Certain limits are necessary. Its a matter of determining which are reasonable and justified and which aren't.
A penny a k? I'm no fan of spam, as I do get a lot it, but as you admitted in your self-gratificating "couple hundred bucks a month" speil, e-mail filters almost completly solve the problem.
The next thing you'll be saying is telemarketers should pay you money for using YOUR PERSONAL PHONE, for the money it cost you on your phone bill because you were talking with them for a few seconds, some money for rent to have a place to keep the phone, money for food for you to have the energy to pick up the phone and talk, etc., etc.
I'm sorry, but if you have a reachable e-mail address, you would be paying the same amount of money having e-mail if you got spam or not. Network bandwidth is completly free for end users, and companies aren't exactly suffering over spam bandwidth with their enflated premiums and oversold pipes.
Anyone who doesn't have the two seconds to install a mail filter or press delete is butt lazy, and someone who wants to get payed for sitting on their ass and whining about paying for e-mail and hardware they would already have regardless is adding greed to their lazieness.
We're always going to have spam because we live in a capitalist economy. People will always try to sell you something. And most spammers do pay for bandwidth (having a co-hosted mail server is free!?). In many ways, stopping businesses from contacting you with all this consumer rights BS actually hurts the economy. Pretty soon people's vision will be so holy that there will be a charge for looking at advertisements in the local grocery store.
The point is there is no charge for asking "Do you want to buy this?" or "Can I have your money?" which is really all that spam is. Simply reply "No, I don't." or take the default approach and press delete. Your computer is not a forum, however much you want it to be, and people do have an unabridged right to contact you, however annoying their message may be.
Live with it. It goes both ways, and its there for a much more important reason than this. Don't destroy free speech because you are lazy.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
If you pay $20 a month for a 56K dial up, and use it only 10 minutes a day, then it's still less than a 1/10 of a cent to download most spam. And the true cost of delievery is a lot less, and falling every day. It is the time wasted reading enough of the spam to know it should be deleted that really costs.
Charging for UBE is an interesting idea, but until there's a practical suggestion of how to do so, it's just a fantasy.
http://goatse.cx
I know that if that showed up in *my* mailbox, I'd be a wee bit irked.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
Why not sign both senators up to a bunch of spam lists and let them see what it is like?
So climate's changing. So what? It has always changed. The big news would be if it wasn't changing. - Dr. Philip Stone
Nobody has a right to be happy, or to own anything. wtf? You have a philosophical right to TRY and be happy... that's about it.
Whatever happened to JonKatz?
there has been legislation restricting phone solicitation to 8-5 M-F... why isn't there legislation in the works for Spam? i agree with the penny/k deal, but paying the user won't fly... maybe if it worked like postage and it was penny/k toward the government... maybe we can get a tax break.
So does that include the right to use other peoples mail servers to send email for free? Does that include the right to send p0rn to children? Does that include the right to forge their identity? These are the questions the techno-idiots in congress need to talk about.
What is pirate software? Software for inventory of stolen treasure?
" I think spammers should pay a penny per k to both me and my ISP. A 5k spam would cost a dime."
Hey that's a good idea...Not only would it pay for the cost of bandwidth, it would also cover the cost of me adding it to Spam Control in Sendmail.
I don't know the joke about 31 Oct==25 Dec. Wanna tell the /. crowd?
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
Since I started using spamcop.net and I used to get a ton. Plus there is a certain satisfaction one gets when you have someone's spam account closed!
Corporation do pay postage. It's called bandwidth. It costs hundreds of dollars a day
I don't want American spam, or spam of any nationality for that matter.
I think it's high time people pull their heads out of their arses and realise that spam is an international problem that needs to be addressed as such.
----------------------------------------
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
It's probably been said before but just forward all your spam to congress. When congress finds out how much money it will cost them to deal with a nations SPAM they'll come around.
Wait, wait, wait - you're joking, right? Have you ever gone door-to-door? That's hard phucking work, and it's for piss-poor pay. Get real - my e-mail address is for my communication. Unless I opt-in, I don't want you e-mailing me. The poor person who gets me over the phone gets a very simple "I don't do business over the phone" and a hangup. I wish there were an easier way to do that with e-mail. However, there are a few solutions:
SpamCop, which I use regularly.
The DMA, has its E-mail Prefence Service, which you have to renew each year, but seems to work (at least for me).
You can also contact Senator Wyden and tell him exactly what you think of his statement, and, while you're at it, send a message to each of your reps, too.
I think it's obvious to us all that spam is not equivalent to regular advertising - the First Amendment is designed to protect speech that is designed to be unpopular - in a political, religious, social and economic sense. For example, I despise the KKK, but they are protected by the First Amendment, and I respect that. I don't see spam falling under any of those categories, unless you view "Sarah Michelle Gellar Caught Giving Head" as a call for opporessed workers in Third World nations to unite (and, if you do, I think there's a serious problem with one of the two of us, and it ain't me).
For Wyden to say such a stupid remark is beyond me...and, I think, beyond the vast majority of us who understand "the new economy," spam, and the First Amendment (some of us did pay attention in school, Ron). So, I say, "Enough already."
Freedom of speech is simply a ploy by companies to excuse their behavior.
So I guess we should ban it then?
You suggest that an individual has rights to free speech, but as soon as two people become organized, the government can regulate what they have to say? And what of media companies then - where do their rights of free speech end? I hasten to point out that the government is basically a large corporation; that would give the government a legal monopoly on organized speech.
Sorry, no sale.
What would keep us from /.ing a senator's
video-voicemail box at home?
That's called harrassment, or mischief in some jurusdictions.
IANAL, etc.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
That's all well and good, but what about the wasted bandwidth I spent downloading said spam, and the processor cycles stolen from me to process all the HTML and render the images in it? With USPS, both printing and delivery costs are the sender, but the recipient is responsible for at least part of those two when it comes to e-mail. It's like someone mailing you a credit card ad COD.
Alright, so it sounds like I'm being anal retentive, but it still intrudes on my right to decide how my computer and my internet connection are used. The difference between this and getting hacked is merely an order of magnitude, nothing more.
Of course, he probably never reads e-mail anyway. Wait, I've got a better idea. Everybody print out all of your spam mail. We'll bag it up and dump all of the bags on his front lawn. We'll tell him he can read all of our spam for us so that businesses don't lose their opportunity.
GreyPoopon
--
GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Improved filtering is definately needed, but I do think we need SOME laws.
The laws need to give individuals and business (especially ISPs) legal procedure to take civil action. And this should not be content based, but rather laws against Fraud as well as damages, like spammers mailbombing an ISP, intentional or not.
Most spam is fraud so it is not neccessary to get into content based censorship, and therefore this is not a violation of the first amendment. And because the government does not, at least not officially, support fraud, it is not a violation of interstate commerce.
If spammers would use consistant email addresses and domains it would be a lot easier to filter them.....
but then again, a nice feature to an email program would be to have a nice list, and only stuff in the nice list gets in the main INBOX, and just one keyboard click to add someone to the nice list when reading a message.....
But we still need to be able to fight back against fraud.
Not that I disagree with free speech but it normally doesn't force the audience to listen.
Buy a newspaper - Opt in
Turn on the radio - Opt in
Turn on the TV - Opt in
Subscribe to an E-zyne - Opt in, but only to that E-zyne
Turn off the radio - Opt out
Turn off the TV - Opt out
Unsbscribe from an E-zyne - Opt out
Sending a letter bomb to a spamming company with no return address but the address of a web site containing instructions to disarm it - Opt out Terrorism
Lurking is an art. If you can read this then I have not yet mastered it.
Just a question...how the f@©k doed the US govt think they're gonna regulate MY mailserver that I run on MY AUSTRALIAN LINUX BOX!???
Just my AUD$0.02
-==-
We are Microsoft. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Keep those addresses somewhere, and throw them into the bogus "remove" accounts that spammers list at the bottom of their spams. Another point successfully rammed home when he tries to get removed from their list, only to find himself getting double the amount each day :)
On another point: When he's talking about the value of bulk mail to internet busines, he obviously never actually tried to follow up on a spam offer. Nost of the time, the links are invalid shortly after the spam is sent, due to the webspace accounts being cancelled.
"We kill to cure, with cures that kill" - Skinny Puppy
we sign up the senator for some "product updates" and then see how he feels about spam.
-PYves
OK, I followed your cue and left the following charming message at his site:
Re: your position on unsolicited email, also called spam, I just want to point out that you are a big dumb idiot.
I notice that you do not have an email address, only this stupid web form. Good for you, so you will not have to suffer the consequences of the bribes you are receiving from direct marketing lobbyists.
Hope you choke on your spam and go to hell in a flaming handbasket.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
What we need to do is implement an extension to the mail protocol which would provide a virtual equivalent to a "No Solicitors" sign on my doorstep. I am no lawyer but I expect that if I put a "NO SOLICITORS - TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED" sign at the beginning of my long driveway out in the middle of nowhere, I could realistically get a vacuum salesman busted if he had the nerver to stroll up onto my private property.
To implement a virtual equivalent of this, incoming mail would need to merely declare what kind of mail they are: anonymous, solicitous, or normal. The mail server can be configured to accept whatever categories they prefer.
Once this protocol is in place, legislators would merely need to require that incoming mail properly represents itself as either anonymous (ie invalid/nonexistent return address including anon spam), solicitous (spam with valid return address), or normal (valid return address).
This doesn't seem to restrict speech at all. People could still send anonymous mail if they prefer, or solicit customers, or continue to use email as it was intended.
But people would be enabled in much the same way that we are already enabled in real life to control access to our property.
People would be able to ignore anonymous or unsolicited mail if they choose, and people would still be able to send/receive it if they choose also.
This seems a reasonable compromise to me.. All it is really requiring people to do is declare mail as anon, commercial, or normal mail.
If someone has a reason why requiring people to accurately declare which of the three categories their mail is any kind of restriction, I would like to hear it.
Another difference between junk snail mail and spam is that junk mailers dont hide who they are. They dont try to fool you into opening the mail with false statements on the envelope.
What the hell kind of business model is that anyway? If I want pr0n, I'll find pr0n. I dont need an email from someone that says "I think I went to school with you" or some other big fat lie. Or links that say one thing but link to another. Gee, NOW I wanna give you my money.
-J5K
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
congress is a group of people who don't understand technology. why are you asking them to make laws involving it? I get tons of SPAM too, but i let it build up for a coupla days then delete it......3 minutes....stop crying, you, babies...
well if you start charging SPAMMers, how long before they start charging regular users? the spammers are paying an ISP for internet connectivity, just like you already
it seems like everybody Has First-Amendment Rights as long as it does not interfere with the RIAA =(
The problem with spam today is with the people who forge email addresses and mail headers to send spam. On top of that, they either dont provide opt-out options, or do not honor them if offered. Some use them to confirm that your address actually exists.
The government should be (and is) focusing efforts on making those practices illegal. The obvious problem is the enforcement of those laws with header forging being so easy.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
It's this simple. You have the right to free speech. You do not have the right to be heard. I can put a sign on my lawn that says "no soliciting" and you can't stand out there shouting your wares at me. Somehow I am not able to do this with my telephone, unless I buy a box from the phone company and pay a monthly fee, or my net connection, unless I setup spam filters, which you can't expect the common person to even know what is. The simple fact of the matter is that when you show up on someone's doorstep to sell something, call them on the phone to sell something, and spam them to sell something, you are invading that persons privacy. By all means, say whatever you want. But when I want to go shopping, I'll visit your store, your website, or call you.
It might create a good reason to get an AOL account! ;)
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
We already can censor things we don't want on television.... by changing the channel.
With e-mail, we don't always know immediately what's junk and what's not unless we read them. Plus, we have to go through and delete them as well. And that takes away from our precious time. As they say, Time = Money.
With television commercials, for example, we can tell when one's coming from the fading out of the program we might be watching at the time. With junk e-mail, we have no warning and no way to avoid them until it's too late.
And there has to be an actual way to opt-out.
In one of the junk e-mails that I get, the return addy is always different. It's obviously just one of the addresses on the list. There is no way to opt-out.
As long as that's how they are going to do business (forever, no matter what the laws say), I'd rather see an opt-in model enforced.
Companies are not people and have no such thing as human or civil rights and are not covered by the bill of rights. Individuals have the right to free speech, and their speech on behalf of a company is protected. But when a company puts forth advertising, that's clearly something different...it's non-protected speech because it's not an expression coming from a person, but rather, from a corporate entity. If they can control when and where a company may advertise alcohol and cigarettes, they ought to be able to govern when and where a company may emit spam.
They have the "right" to contact me? Okay, so when they spam me does that in term give me the right to contact everyone in that company and tell them I'm not interested?
Or how about, for every spam letter I get, I call myself a "company" and then email it to all the senators that supported this piece of legislation asking them if they are interested. It is my "right" is it not?
Gotta love it when people line their pockets in the name of Freedom.
I get both stuff from companys, and made up crap.
Im persuing sueing one company how for about 4 spams ($2000), and a spammer on popsite.net for $3500. Some mortgage crap, and credit crap. I guess its because of all those banner ads while I had cookies on for a bit. Ive figured ways to block most of them via router now.
Sometimes I look at my sendmail log and get crap from some unresolvable domain. One time they emailed my name server which of course doesn't exist in the sendmail.cf therefor it was rejected. They make up names, and fecth them with their little web harvesters, so if your email address is posted anywhere visible to the net more than likley its because of a harvester.
Im about to flood a spammer with a mailbomb here in a minute. It fills up their return list where they can't get any replys from any person requesting their fake so called 'info' about what they are selling, or trying to rip people out of. Its usually somthing like bulk-list2002@yahoo.com or some crap like that. Im also about to put up a filter that filters out names like yahoo, netscape.net, and hotmail.com, in the body, or subject of the letter.
I'm no punk bitch !!!
I have to agree with you both. It partly is the user's fault for signing up for these things. Lets not kid ourselves here. Companys do send this crap, and re-sell addresses.
But there are those little 14 year olds standing out there that just send this crap to anything they see. Search engines, pages, havest addresses from pages. Whatever the hell method they use. It is all still wrong, and highly Illegal . I have already had 2-3 spammers kicked off of their ISP's this week, and am going after a company that has sent me spam only once. There was another in which they recieved a warning from their provider, and I asked the provider to tell them who turned them in for sending spam. And the provider told them. And I havn't recieved a spam from them again. I even had one moron that (after looking at my sendmail logs) tried to send a spam to customer@ns.(myserver).net. I mean... ns.(myserver).net is not in my sendmail records, and there is no user called 'customer' on my box. Even if my server does run all these services, ns.(myserver).net is not meant for mail.
The point is, It can be the user's fault, but it can also be dynamic, spammers just make up addresses and send this crap. Ive been on the net since around '95-'96, and started using UNIX/Linux around '97. And only this year I started getting bombarded with spam. Thats why I have spam filter 213 lines long. I havn't gotten any spam today, so I believe I have ridden myself of the MAIN sources.
I'm no punk bitch !!!
phunhippy says: A few major problems here... 1. If they pay for email, you should have to pay for email you send anywhere as well and then we will be back to having a regulated postal service.
If 1c per k (or less) were collected automatically, why not? The real cost of sending snail mail isn't the stamp - it's the time spent messing with stamps, envelopes, etc. 1c per k would be so trivial as to be ignorable for most people, but would have a real impact on the lowlifes who send 10 million 10k emails (and yes, that's not an unusual number of emails for a spammer to send).
Dan, that stuff is on THEIR nickel, not mine. Now, granted I am personally on an fixed-per-month cost line, but people do exist who are metered (anyone remember ISDN?). The time and cost for downloading their spam comes on MY nickel.
That's the basic argument, the same sort of argument for the anti-junkfax law.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Somebody governing someone else is what gave us Carnivore, COPA, and the DMCA.
If aspiration is a virtue, achievement cannot be a vice.
It's not leaving a note on the windshield. That is done in a public space. This is more akin to them walking in to my place of employment and stapling a note to every cubicle. The free speech issue here is not the primary one - spammers use resources that are not theirs, including but not limited to my ISP's server space. While the cost of dealing with any single item of spam may be negligible, the aggregate costs are absurd. Unless a method can be effectively developed to transfer those costs from my ISP (and indirectly me) to the people who SHOULD be paying them, free speech doesn't come into play here at all.
I read that you believe that unsolicited email is a first amendment right and that you believe that opt-out is a good alternative. It is not realistic for me to opt-out with every person that sends me unwanted email.
I would like a right to opt-out in a general way. Just like I can mark my phone number to prevent telephone solicitation, I should be able to register my email address to prevent email solicitation.
I think that anyone who takes the time to send me a personal email should be welcome, but if the message is computer generated, it should be excluded.
Thanks for listening.
Jim Hollcraft
eSoftware Professionals
10300 SW Nimbus, Suite C
Portland, OR 97223
(A volunteer on your Feed Project at the Oregon Food Bank!)
Either way, it's coming. You WILL be paying for packets. You do it with your phone, your TV and postal mail, so why does everyone continue to hold out hope that the Internet will remain free?
I've got a way to change that senators mind. Anyone know his e-mail address? If Spam is free speech, then lets use that right to send all of our unwanted spam to him. I've had my ISP for 4 years now, and I get an average of 15 spam messages a day, so I'd say if all of us help to educate him, by the end of one day he should have at least 1 million messages. Viva la resistance!
Never use the 'P' word. Once it starts.....well, you know.
i.e. if there was a central store that spammers would have to check their address list with before sending unsolicited content. perhaps downloadable with one way encryption, so they wouldn't have to use net resources to check them every time, but at the same time wouldn't be able to skim the list for addresses.
Just a thought....
I used to be all for legislation against spam until I really thought it over. Do we really want to give up more of our rights to government legislation? I know what you're thinking - a bill against spam would only affect companies & people that are sending unsolicited commercial email, not me. But consider the following: Joeblow@dickswidgets.com sends an email to his favorite mailing list, linking to a /. story.
But what he didn't realize was that slashdot.com is owned by a private, for-profit company, and actually sells merchandise from this site. So is Joe Blow sending spam? Can he be fined for this transgression? If he sent the mail from work, is Dick's Widgets now liable for his actions?
What if Joe Blow does some for-profit programming on the side, and links to his web page on every email he sends out? How is this different from the 'I'm 18 & horny!' spam we all hate so much? Should Joe Blow expect everyone to whom he want to send mail to opt him in?
Can we really expect our legislators to understand the issue well enough to craft a bill that protects Joe's right to send email, but blocks the spammers? Why am I asking so many questions? Where am I, and who are you people?
If a valid email address was *required* by the sender, then these problems would go away. And it wouldn't be that hard to do - enforce the Sender domain to resolve to one of the valid MXen in the DNS, and get roaming users to use the half-dozen ways to perform authenticated-SMTP.
Once a valid from: domain is enforced, it will become much much easier to track down the spammers, since they'll have no choice but to spam from their own domain rather than through relays - since noone will accept the email from the relays.
Of course, laziness and a "it kinda works" attitude will prevent it. *sigh*..
Ok, I don't know if anyone has ever mentioned this before, but...I don't understand how spam can be profitable for the companies that use it as advertising. I never have and never will buy anything or sign up for anything that is sent to me via spam. Someone needs to start a campaign or something, getting out the facts. Letting the general population know to NOT buy what gets spammed to them, not clicking on the links. If noone buys the stuff, or clicks on the links...then the companies are wasting money. Get ads on TV like the "The Truth" ads about cigarettes... Don't let the spam win!