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Protect Your Cell Phone From Spam
Dejected @Work writes "If wireless technology ever kicks off you may be getting spam phone calls - "hot deals 10 feet away". If so you will have to use techniques like RMI, BrightMail, and latest e-mail filters to keep phone spam free. This article examines some of these tools and programming concepts."
Uh, oh. I get lots of spam on my computer, and it sucks. And now I'm going to get lots of spam on my phone.
The difference?
I can throw my phone...
Bulk email is (relatively) free.
Spam phone calls would not be. Not only would companies have to pay for the phone calls, but they would also have to pay someone to make them.
Also...what's new about this? Haven't you ever been called by a telemarketer?
-kwishot
Hi, my name is Jenny im 18 and me and my girlfriend were wondering if you wanted to see us live ...
;)
Hmm.. except, this is the kind of thing I'd purchase "in real life"
I understand that spam by SMS is already becoming a problem, in the UK some of my friends have responded to competitions (SMS your answer to...), not realising that in the VERY fine print they were selling their soul (and mobile phone number) to the SMS spam merchants.
Spam by email is bad enough - but spam by mobile phone when you could be interrupted any time, any where without knowing if it's a critical SMS from work, or meaningless spam is an invasion of privacy.
I'd like to see this new form of spam stamped on hard, and stamped on fast, before it gains even more of a foothold as "acceptable practice". Anyone receiving spam by SMS should do everything possible to report it, and ensure that the companies making use of this form of advertising are made aware that it is totaly unacceptable.
We may have lost the fight againast mail spam - but if we fight now, and fight hard, we may just be able to keep our mobile phones free from this junk...maybe...
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
Most of the major Cell providers have a web->SMS gateway, so that you can send a cell messaage via your browser.
This is nice, and I use them.
But what's to stop some low-live scum sucker from using these to send "Enlarge your penis!" messages? I've wondered since there's no authentication at all. It would be (was) trivial to write a script that auto-submits information to a cell number.
(SPAMMERS - YOU HAVE BEEN INFECTED WITH A MIND RAY. YOU DO NOT REMEMBER ANYTHING YOU'VE READ FOR THE PAST 24 HOURS)
-Ben
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I say don't buy a new phone. Both of mine work fine. 'Course I'm the sort that hates to be on the phone anyway, so having a phone around isn't a priority. After all, there are only a very small number of people who must be contacted any time, any place. I'm certainly not in that set. And I'm definitely not in that set when I'm at the movies. Maybe nobody else should be too...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
I would imagine that spam text messages would be hard to report because many of the headers are removed because of space/storage restrictions. I think that the burden would lie pretty heavily on the providers. How far is too far, though? If you're asking your provider to log and/or prosecute spammers, they inherently *have* to sort through your personal messages. As I understand it now, most services just send the information directly to your phone without having to actually store it on their servers at all.
-kwishot
The majority of spam messages are from anonymous or overseas accounts where it is extremely hard to track down the physical location for the seller.
If someone sends me a message telling me that "HOT DEALS ARE 10 FEET AWAY!" then unless the deals are really hot, there is going to be a lot of yelling, screaming and physical activity going on.
Of course, if the message is along the lines of "MY GIRLFRIENDS WANT YOU NOW!!!", the yelling, screaming and 'physical activity' may be of a more pleasant nature.
I'd consider carrying mace if that "Deal 10 ft away" scenario came into being.
-Peter
== Just my opinion(s)
We look at someting differently when we call it spam. If spam is an unsolicited advertisment that I receive on my cell phone or computer, then I also get about 3 spams per day on my land-line phone.
tcd004
We've redesigned. But we're still idiots.
hehe I can see the headlines now! US district court has declared that cell phones are a transmission device that carry morally offensive advertising and will be banned in all areas to protect children..
:|
hehe that would be amusing... first hold the backbones liable for the content.. then the cell phone providers.. well it would stop possible cell ads in the futre
This poem expresses my feelings about spam perfectly.
Geek Girl Chronicles
SPAM via SMS would be a problem for spammers compared to email. Why you ask? In most parts of the worl, SMS is not free. In in those areas wherein SMS is not free, most of time, they charge you per message instead of a fixed monthly rate for unlimited SMS sending. So in other words, SMS costs would be a burden on part of the spammer. In this part of the world where I live, an SMS costs almost 2 cents (USD), while the other neighboring countries costs at least 4 cents per message you send. (I live somewhere in SE Asia.)
Take-off every
Last year I was called by a someone from one of these financial expert firms. So he asks me if I'm interested in one of their products, and I say "NO". Then he asks me if he may pay us a visit to explain their products. "No" is my reply. Then he goes on to say that their products are the best and can't be beaten etc. Tired of the conversation I tell him that I want to hang up.
"If I give you 50 bucks, will you listen to me for half an hour?"
At first I thought he was joking, but apparently he was so desperate that he even offered to money to hear him out. 50 bucks for half an hour seemed like a good deal, and even if he didn't pay us it would make a good story to tell my grandchildren so I accepted.
The guy came to our house, asked for the number of my bank account, explained his products during half an hour (for which I obviously had no interest) and left. A few days later the 50 bucks had been deposited in my account.
What's the world coming to?
no sig error.
would be a typical SMS message to expect.. :L
So, I decided to help the guy advertise. I went to Google, typed in 'XXX "free for all" link' and placed ads on about 30 sex related free-for-all pages reading "FREE PHONE SEX! - Try us out! 520-xxx-yyyy".
Interestingly, I haven't received any more spam from that place.
(Posting anonymously in case anybody who knows the spammer reads /.)
sex lines have found the strenght of marketing directly to your mobile phone. not in the convential way though, they've been quite creative.
Method 1 (SMS). well there's been some amount of SPAM SMSs telling something like "hi, I'm Katja, I'm from Russia and I need a friend, I'm waiting for you, call me at *********"...
method 2 (call). Second method is quite simple, they call you, but won't let the phone ring long enough for you to answer it. Afterwards you see the number on the screen and call back.
The thing here is that the number they use is not the usual 0700-number, but a regular cellphone number. They either redirect their calls or use cellphones and bill later. This, of cource, is illegal and there's been some kind on police investigations. Luckily it ins't a big problem, I've had 1 SMS and few calls in 4 years. but just think of the worst scenario
-Jaakko
It seems we have forgotten all about fax machines and the law that they prompted.
Let's see. There is a law against sending unsolicited ads to your fax machine. This came about because it cost the recipient to recieve this unwanted crap - in paper, toner, etc.
Our legislators, in their wisdom, determined that we shouldn't have to be subject to crap we don't want, especially when we had to pay for it.
Ok, now to cut to the chase. Even if my Internet service is billed on a flat fee instead of by bandwith or connect time (in the US), it still costs me a cash outlay (some divided portion of my monthly ISP fee), to recieve spam. Not to mention the value of my time dealing with it. I know this has been mentioned many times before, but the message doesn't seem to be getting through to the lawmakers.
-- Rant On --
If this starts happening on my cell phone where I do pay by the minute or the message, I'm gonna become hell on wheels. Anyone up for a class action suit? Not against the spammers, but against our so-called representatives for not protecting our interests. Ok, well maybe against the spammers too. Considering the intent of the fax law, doesn't this cover this eventuality already?
If I have to go to law school myself, that's fine. My needs are minimal and I'm not averse to living like a pauper to give all my time to pro bono work.
If I recieve ads for some business 50 feet away. They're gonna hear from me. I'm gonna collect the cost of that spam message recieved on my phone. It might be only be a penny or a dime, but I'll tell them I want it in a check not cash. If they won't pay me, I'll whip out my sandwich board and picket the damn place, or make myself as annoying as possible. Or maybe I should do all of the above...
This crap has to stop. If it takes law or civil disobedience, I don't care. It has to stop.
-- Rant Off --
Of course the upside to this is that my old analog Motorola TAC II phones and my Audiovox bag phone will become very valuable.
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. - George Orwell or George Bush?
The email address for the Docomo cell phone that my company issued me was apparently in use before, and got in the hands of spammers and was included in an email database. I have gotten 46 (!!) spam emails to that phone in the past 5 hours and 20 minutes, all for i-Mode sex sites and such.
:-P
At least in my case my company is picking up the bill-- i-Mode users in Japan pay for all received packets, so you are billed for all of the spam that you receive.
Docomo has tried to stop the flow by allowing you to block email from specified domains, but of course that doesn't help things at all. I know several people who end up having to change their cell phone email address every few months because the email features of their phone become unusable due to the amount of spam they start to get. (The spammers get their email address when they register on i-Mode capable web sites, or if they have an easy-to-guess email address like tanaka@docomo.ne.jp)
Up until last year or so you could usually send email to [cell phone #]@[cell phone provider].ne.jp, but the cell phone companies all had to discontinue that service because of the amount of spam that would be sent to all of their customers.
Compared to what I'm getting to my work phone, the amount of spam I get to my email accounts is nothing...
CC-licensed translations of Japanese fiction: http://tonygonz.blogspot.com/
much like spam faxes, unsolicited calls to cell phones will cost the end user a *lot* of money. Its something that the consumers will never stand for.
Currently i know that if you recieve a spam fax you can send a copy to:
Consumer Information Bureau
Federal Communications Commision
445 Twelfth St. SW
Washington DC 20554
if you ask that appropriate legal action be taken, it works! Not only that, you can sue the people who send the faxes (not for a ton, but the maximum amt is well over the cost of printer cartridges and paper)
Since this seems like a fairly equivalent situation, i.e the cost of the spam will definitely have a fair sized impact on your own bill (unlike standard telephone telemarkating and junk mail)... i would be surprised if things didn't work out the same way once complaints start flowing
This would work with the new phones that have the enhanced location system for the 911 service. When shopping for a phone, be sure to ask if the GPS location feature can be turned off by the user. Explain you do not wish to by spammed by SMS messages when approaching a shopping center. If enough people ask, they may rethink selling location specific advertisement space. Explain you want to be able to turn it off for everything except 911 calls.
The truth shall set you free!
In fact its such a big thing that even respected global players such as Logica (their software runs over 50% of the SMS gateways in the world) are getting involved according to this article in the Financial Times.
In short getting people responding to SMS spam is unreliable because due to difficiencies in the GSM protocol you can only catch about one SMS reply to an advert every 5 seconds.
Because of this, take up of bulk SMS advertisements (where people respond) is slow. But thanks to the boffins at Logica, they now have software which can harvest 1,000 replies a second.
Which suddenly makes pumping out SMS spam look a lot more worthwhile.
Coming soon to a phone near you ...?
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
This problem seems analogous to the one posed by Jack Valenti's plan to build copy protection into home entertainment systems. The next generation of various devices will be fatally compromised by 1) content restriction protocoals and 2) back doors for corporate and government watchdogs, and spammers.
/. about building your own PVRs, wireless networks, customized computers, etc. Maybe some enterprising geek will someday soon post about building your own cell phone. (One that runs Linux, perhaps?) :)
I will stick with my non-wireless-web cell phone until I see a good reason to upgrade (or until I'm forced to, b/c it breaks or b/c they change the protocol and force me to do so).
I wonder...we've seen a lot on
I'm currently stationed in Okinawa and all my Japanese friends are currently frustrated by the ammount of spam they receive.
Also, not sure if you have seen the new Sprint PCS phone from Sanyo, but it is getting close to the tech out here and I beleive will allow emails of any size to come through.
I know I've sent some sizeable ones (500 - 700 characters to provide directions) to my friends and they received them just fine. The also can receive pics in emails.
The flip side of this is the unbeleivable convenience it is to get written driving directions sent to you. Not to mention when the US finally catches up to Japan and releases $200 phones that also have a digital camera in them.
my two cents...
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
Big difference: My home phone is a fixed rate for incomming calls. No matter where I get a call from in the world, it costs me nothing at all to accept it, unless it is collect in which case I have the option of refusing. Unlimited incomming calls are a part of the $15/month I shell out for the line. However with a cell hpone, I have to pay for airtime, even on incomming calls. You can be calling me from the same network, and it doesn't matter, the airtime used still comes out of my minutes. Therefore, unsolicited cellphone calls cost ME money, which makes me mad and shouldn't be legal.
Unlike email, sending an SMS costs money, so how do the spammers do it?
Well, there are a bunch of networks across Europe which all allow SMS to travel between them for free - they have mutual exchange agreements. There are a lot of these networks: all the operators and a lot of small players which provide email2sms and commercial SMS type services. The spammers pay once-off to use these commercial services and then pump out millions of SMSs.
So what happens is that Vodaphone for example then cancels its contract with that little commercial SMS company and the company changes it's services/rates/business. Meanwhile the spammer moves on to another small commercial SMS provider.
It's just the same cycle as regularly switching ISPs, spamming successfully before getting blocked.
You don't pay to recieve calls per se, you pay for airtime. There are some unlimitd minute cellphone services, but most have a fixed number. For example my plan gives me 400 minutes of airtime at any time I want and another 1000 minutes for use on the nights and weekends only (since their network is used less then). Now any time I have an active call, I use those minutes, doesn't matter if it is incomming or outgoing. Thr reason is of course because there is a finite amount of bandwidth available in the frequency liscences my carrier has.
This is just the way most cellphones work. Like I said, there are a couple of companies that offer unlimited plans but they generally have other restricions (no long distance, no romaing).
Plus I'd also get pissed about unsolicited cellhpone calls because it is basically a bussiness line. I do use it for personal calls, but the reason I have it is for important things.
Odd, my father has to pay for incomming calls with his European cell phone (he travels there often). Remember when I say pay I DON'T mean there is a surcharge, I mean it comes out of your minute bank, just like outgoing calls. At any rate I don't travel to Europe so I don't know how it is there for most people, but my father does and he has a European cellphone and, just like his American one, minutes are deducted for incomming and outgoing calls.
I can see a whole new charging mechanism which will solve this. Different sorts of data demand different prices (for example):
1. Stuff the user wants - $30 per megabyte.
2. Stuff the mobile operator wants you to have - free
3. Stuff 3rd party advertisers people want you to have - $5 per megabyte to the advertiser.
4. Stuff 3rd party advertisers are desperate for you to have - $5 given to the user?
(don't forget that SMS is of the order $1000 per megabyte!)
The operators are going to want to use the new capabilities of the phones to advertise and pay to use the real estate on your screen. They want to advertise their services...because they can and it'll make them money! So they will be happy to spend unused network capacity on this at no charge to the user.
I just realized that I spend more time reading about spam on /. then I do deleting it from my inbox.
I live in Europe, and it actually depends on the country you are in. Here in Italy, most cell phones have pre-paid cards: you buy 25 Euros worth's of minutes, and use that to make calls, until they run out.
For incoming calls, there's absolutely NO charge. Even more, some cell phone providers will "recharge" your account for every received call (which is a way to reduce the average bill with a more "sexy" slogan).
The only occasion where I pay for incoming calls is when I am outside my country.
I get the spam as text messages on my phone. So far every message that comes in is from @yahoo.com. I've contacted yahoo and they say they have nothing to do with the problem. Luckily I don't have to pay for each text message but if I did I bet I could easily win a lawsuit against them.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
...travelling in Europe, once or twice as my phone logged onto the local network when I get off the plane, the telco has spammed me with an SMS. Ho hum.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
On the other hand, billing them for the service of evaluating their spam at the top of my lungs sounds like a nice idea.
It probablty will fit under telemarkeing laws, and may fit into the trend developing for people to be opted out of such a service as a default choice as a matter of law.
[ianal, etc]
I can even see going into the store, insisting to find out who is providing them this "service", and then suing the spamming service provider along with the spammer.
Or a retake on the old satire with the mob based spam prevention service.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
At least none of the European carriers I am familiar with charge for incoming calls or SMSs. If anyone tried that, the company would go tits up in a month, its premises would probably end up trashed by a riotous mob of angry clients and the owners would have to spend years in class-action court battles
Yes, but the arrangement has always been like that with European carriers (when not roaming), just as US carriers have always charged differently (AFAIK).
I think it's all down to what people are used to.
On a similar theme, I think it's significant that email spam has been a daily reality since most ordinary people got hold of email accounts. Where I live, SMS/text spam is still really quite rare. When people start being inconvenienced when using a service that was previously useful, I think they will make a big fuss.
I think it's largely to do with consumer expectation, and mobile phones are now a huge part of popular culture at least here in the UK.
Having said that, the younger end of the market might become desensitised to it because of stuff like this...
Information wants to be beer.
"...you may be getting spam phone calls"
"...you will have to use...e-mail filters to keep phone spam free..."
How is an email filter going to keep a phone call from coming in?
I get the point, but it would really help credibility if the text made sense logically.
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
I could just see it. My cell phone recieving the message.
"Computer Consultant 4 Hire -- Call 773-yyy-zzzz 4 more info."
I'll know right away to tell the cellular service to discontinue service to Bernard Shifman. If he threatens legal action. I'll just respond with my legal team at Yourassis, Grass & I.M. DeLawnmower.
In North America cell phone plans are per minute, all calls. In Eurpoe all calls are caller pays. (simplification on both sides of the pond, but close enough)
This is different. It is not better it is not worse, it is different. There are advantages to each system. Just because your system is different doesn't mean that it is better. Do not pick on the downsides to our system that you don't have because your system has downsides too. In fact, the downsides are mutially exclusive, that is you can't have the best of both worlds! You pick one system or the other (there are more than two possibal systems), and live with the down sides as well as the good.
The scary thing would be if they moved to this model without any kind of opt-in.
There was a fuss here in the UK where what was essentially a change in the agreement appeared as a footnote on the monthly bill.
Information wants to be beer.
Cell phone spam has one big advantage over regular spam - it will piss off people who can do something about it (in the US at least). Every Congressman/women/senator I've seen at the airport has a cell phone - and therefore is a potential target for the latest Viagra/MAKE*MONEY*FAST/Surefire stock tip spam. While they probably don't even see the spam in their email, phone spam will be hard to ignore, especially if it starts to interfere with normal business. While I am generally not a big fan of government soultions to commercial problems, this one may call for one.
A sender pays format might also drive phone servcie providers to develop verification of sender technologies so they can be assured of getting their pennies per message,as well as install spam detection technology and phone filtering capabilities similar to those used for email today.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
This may turn out to be quite advantageous to us all - unless your a SPAMming scumbag !
Why? While it is true that - in some cases -one must pay additional money for bandwidth when downloading SPAM over the net, it is rare and the total cost is at most a few pennies a month, making it hard to convince the well to do politicians that it's even a valid issue to explore. Things change drastically however when cell phones are involved.
Calling someone on a pre-pay cell phone, or during peak hours when peak minutes aren't bundled in a package, can cost about $0.30/call. 10 calls a day, 300 days per year (for ease of math, and owing to the idea that weekends and holidays will be less active), is $900.00 per year of burden pushed on the consumer! Even a fat cat in Washington has to recognize that this is unacceptable. This should pave the way for discussion, at which point it will be hard to argue that their is a fundamental difference between the two other than scale. End result
OK
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Why not? Because the receiver doesn't pay the cost of SPAM, the sender does. If you want to send me a SMS you must pay the cost (about 5 cents or a little less in volume in my country). So it won't be the same threat level as email spam.
In the same vein, you don't really have telephone/cellphone SPAM at the same level you have email SPAM, since it costs the sender, not the receiver, to make a call in most "sane" countries.
The real threat is the "SPAMadvertiser" that thinks it can make money and not bear the risks/costs. If s/he must bear the costs, I don't believe the same "genious" will be doing much of it...
"Oh really?... So you mean it dosn't use wires huh? Kinda like my TV remote huh? Wow!
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
Thanks again for lunch it was great!
Best regards,
Steve
Anyone know what this SPAM means? I seem to get it everyday now
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
What about those Pocket CE phones? They have them in europe.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
Ummm... This can't happen in the United States of America. The junk fax law prohibits sending unsolicited advertisements to mobile phones: "It shall be unlawful for any person within the United States ... to make any call [other than emergency or opt-in] using any automatic telephone dialing system ... to any telephone number assigned to a paging service, cellular telephone service, specialized mobile radio service, or other radio common carrier service, or any service for which the called party is charged for the call" (47 USC 227).
The same section of law prohibits sending spam to a fax machine, which is defined so as to include any computer that has a modem.
Will I retire or break 10K?
There is no prescedent for banning speech simply because it is annoying or offensive.
The ban should not be on the content, but on the method of delivery. Thus, you're not banning the "speech", you're banning the act of spamming -- deliberately sending unsolicited mass messages at the recipients'expense.
Naturally the penalty for violating such a ban should be death.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
I thought telemarketing to cell phones was already illegal. Would anyone care to enlighten us on the details? I searched on google and found a number of references to this ban, but no actual spec of the law.
I rather doubt you'd have any problem convincing a judge that SMS spam to a cell phone is legally the same as calling it to try to sell you stuff.
Have you ever wondered why you don't get calls from telephone solicitors on your cell phone? People in Europe certainly do. Why are Americans exempt?
The answer is a simple but important legal decision: it's illegal for solicitors to bother you if YOU must pay for the call. In Europe, incoming cell calls are free, but in the U.S. you pay a per-minute charge for the privilege of answering calls.
Text messaging spam will be illegal only if it costs the victim money. Unfortunately, providers are moving to flat monthly rates for text messaging services. I expect this will become a burgeoning spam market.
Sincerely,
Brock Arnason
The problem with email is that the end user doesn't actually pay for it. If you are charged $0.05 for each incomming message, then not only will you have legal grounds to sue, (e.g. $1.00+legal fees!) but people spending $5.00/day for spam will REALLY be motivated to start suing. It's the perceved lack of value of e-mail which has allowed spam to prosper.
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