Slashdot Mirror
XS4ALL Wins Anti-Spam Suit
johnpc writes: "In a court case started by Dutch ISP XS4ALL, a judge ruled yesterday that spam outfit AbFab is forbidden to send spam to all subscribers of said ISP. The judge writes: 'The essential point is that XS4ALL has no legal conveyance obligation. (...) XS4ALL does not wish to convey messages which its customers have not asked to receive and therefore does not wish these messages to be delivered through its systems, in this case from Abfab. The question of whether the unsolicited sending of large volumes of advertising messages by e-mail should be referred to as 'spam' or 'electronic direct marketing' is not relevant to this dispute.' This is obviously not a solution to the spam problem within the Netherlands, but it is a step in the right direction. You can read an english abstract of the ruling. Unfortunately, most of the actual case documents are in dutch, some of which are still being translated."
If the US congress tomorrow passes a law that clearly and completely illegalizes spam, the amount of pr0n and online diploma spam I get will drop ZERO PERCENT.
How do you sue? Like I'm going to sue a korean mail relay. Stop. You are wasting my time. This problem can't and won't be solved by Trent Lott and Tom Daschle. Stop pretending it will.
Expect to see more of this on Slashdot, which will post basically anything spam-related in the news. Companies sue other companies for spam. Your ISP fights for you. Things work out...
Gotta win one of these in the US to make it a reality though.
Synergy is your friend
The sentence translates to:
The sentencing judge:
everyone who holds an e-mail address ending in a domainname containing the word XS4ALL, explicitely inluding domainnames: XS4ALL.NL, XS4ALL.com, XS4ALL.net, XS4ALL.org, XS4ALL.co.uk, XS4ALL.be, and the domainnname hacktic.nl.
StarTrek.org Free Webmail
Similar rulings in the United States would start detailing the landscape of rights of website owners to keep SPAMMERS from scraping.
Fight Spammers!
Unfortunately, most of the actual case documents are in dutch, some of which are still being translated.
Well, I read the 8 page verdict, and there's not a whole lot there that's not in the English abstract. So don't worry, I don't think you're missing a lot.
(Sorry, I'm not going to translate 8 pages of Dutch legalese into English).
MSN 8: Now Microsoft even has bugs in their ad campaigns.
One thing I am really confused about is what makes congress fellows hesitate about passing a law to ban spam? Does that conflict their personal interests, or is that (possibly?) unconstitutional, or is it just technicalities? Doesn't banning spam benifit everybody except spammers?
disclamer: I only ask that you READ all the way through this mess before modding it as troll. thx.
/. address my "main"? Not even close!! I have a personal address which I give out to coworkers, close friends, etc., which they have instant access to. The access list blocks any emails orginating from unfamiliar territory. I check my other, public list as I need to, and filter out the crap that builds up in there.
Get ready for a long one. YES, spam sucks. We all know it, we agree with it, no one likes it. Guess what? DEAL with it!
In order to legislate the Internet, parallels must be drawn between it and regular society. Why? Because the Internet IS regular society, en masse. You've read all the shite about it being a global community, well, it IS!
We've all seen the posts before comparing spam to junk mail and why that makes it legitimate. No one has bothered to fully explain that so I'm going to, because IT'S TRUE.
You move into/purchase/rent/lease a house. Your address is thereby registered in various marketing pools. By participating in surveys, signing up for credit cards, buying various things, your Home Address gets propagated around the Real World net. Advertisers troll these networks and eventually pick up that you, Person A, live at Address B. And so they begin to send you mass mailings. The ones you receive may be personalized to your community. Depending on how much information you've volunteered to the Network, they may be personalized to your age/sex/religion/choice of pets/favorite video game console/etc. These people pay money to the (very much legitimate) US Postal Service to see that their advertisements/coupons/etc. are mailed to you.
Now we move to the Internet parallel. You have signed up for an Internet Address. The Internet is public. I will repeat this. The Internet is PUBLIC. Therefore people on the Internet can determine your address, just as much as I can browse the white pages looking for Real World home addresses. Depending on how much information you have submitted through various channels to the Internet, people may have put together certain profiles about you. Just as in real life, they will determine which advertisements are best suited to you, and make sure to send them to your PUBLIC address.
Being that this is Slashdot and no space to write novels, I would hope that we have all seen the obvious parallels between Home Addresses and Internet Addresses. If not, reread the above paragraphs until it makes sense.
Now, onto the problem (and indeed, I will propose the Solution)...
The US Postal Service requires MONEY in order to send out bulk mailings. The cost IS proportionate to the amount of mail that one wishes to send out. If I wish to print one million full color ten page Pennysavers and send them out to my "most likely to buy stuff" list of targets, I must pay a requisite sum to the Postal Service in order to see that these ads are delivered. This is where the Internet FAILS MISERABLY. ISP's do not care about bulk mail. Open relays allow far too many people to send far too many identical messages without caring about how many poor souls are copied on the same duplicated message. The ISP level is where it MUST CEASE. The current system is retarded and asinine. Those that maintain SMTP servers MUST begin to charge appropriate rates for bulk mail. There is no reason not to do this. Yes, I hear you whiners coming with "I'm a busy business professional, mail rates will hamper me!" BULLSHIT. *I* am an extremely busy business professional. I send AT MOST fifty emails a day. DAMN sure that they are all NOT identical ads merely being copied to various other people. At the ISP level, this is not in any way difficult to filter out and charge for.
I propose a simple and effective email charge system, where bulk mailers are FORCED to pay an appropriate amount in order to mail to a few thousand, tens of thousand, etc people.
The problem now is that our "open" network allows spammers to do their business virtually for free. If we can force them to conform to a business model that mimics the Real World and no longer lives in Fantasy Land, I will guarantee you that our goal of receiving less spam will be accomplished. However, I can't say this enough: Attempting to legislate against this practice is not only ineffective, it is UNCONSTITUTIONAL and completely worthless. Restricting people from advertising their products to PUBLIC networks and PUBLIC addresses on those networks goes against everything our country was founded on.
There also exists a second solution, which I'm sure many people will bitch about as well. But it's simple: Maintain TWO email addresses. Keep one public, open to any senders. Go through it as your business needs demand, and filter out any important emails. Keep the second address PRIVATE, that is, only accept emails from people on your "accept" list. I submit that this is really not that horrible a thing, and many of us are doing it already. Is my
In short summary, legislating against spam is yet another of the giant wastes of time that government spends its time doing. It needs to be addressed from the economical model (reasonable ISP charges) or from the personal level (maintain public/private email addresses). Anything else does nothing but waste clock cycles.
--t
Currently spam is frictionless; that is, there is almost zero marginal cost associated with spamming, hence the constant increase in junk email.
Something like this in the US would undoubtedly increase the cost of doing business for spammers aned their clients.
Some spamming companies would get caught, have judegements filed against them, and have to pay up. Korean mail relays notwithstanding.
No, I don't agree with your assertion that a judegement like this in the US would cause spam to "drop ZERO PERCENT".
I'm willing to listen to your arguement, but as you've presented it its baseless.
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I'm sorry if I rant, or come off as an 'astro-turfer' (whatever that means), but I prefer to think of myself as an evangelist. Simply put, HoTMaiL.NET is the finest e-mail system currently in use, and I would have no problems whatsoever in recommending it to anybody who would rather receive less unwanted mail. I'm sure that when the Netherlands receives access to the civilised Internet, the judge's decision will be overturned as their population migrates to a powerful, easy-to-use system such as MicroSoft's spam filter.
Greetings, for free software!
Mayhaps I misunderstood this?
A judge ruled that an ISP doesn't have to use its own resources to deliver advertisements (for free) for someone else to whom they have no obligation of any kind?
US companies have no such problem that I am aware of, and it greatly disturbs me that a judge in any country should have to state this explicitly.
XS4ALL have said that they have no legal obligation to deliver all mail that their customers are sent. While true, using this as a reason to ban certain e-mail from their system is a little worrying.
Why? Because it means that screening e-mail will become commonplace and ethically acceptable in future.
Take a less essential system such as IRC. Large channels often have ridiculous bans in place.. for example, kick/ban all those with French hosts, AOL users, people from Asia, people with nicknames they don't like.. and so on and so forth. E-mail could become a similarly uncontrolled system.
Do you really want to use a provider who, yes, blocks spam.. but, if the administrator doesn't like the French.. oh well, that means no-one using that ISP will receive any e-mail sent from French ISPs? Or, say, mail from Middle Eastern countries?
So, yeah, blocking spam is good.. but making this screening behavior morally acceptable simply means that a lot more mail is going to be screened in the future.. and you might not be getting all of the e-mails you are due.
mogorific carpentry experiments
I really think it's great that you have reduced the amount of spam you get, but by your ruleset, you wouldn't be able to read this if it were an email message. And rest assured I'm not running an open mail relay.
BTW, just how long does it take your mailserver to check each and every email coming in for these criteria? Beowulf cluster of Linux boxes does this work? Really?
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
Now, XS4ALL is not an U.S. based ISP, so certain concepts like that of common carrier status may not apply. But such things used to apply in the U.S., even if they don't apply today.
The reason this isn't a victory is that it essentially declares that the ISP may transport ("convey") whatever data it pleases.
Well, it is a privately owned company, and I can see some merit to the argument that what it does with its resources is its own business.
But now apply the same logic to all ISPs, particularly the large ones, in light of the behavior of the media. That's right, folks: this ruling means that ISPs have the right to refuse to transmit any data they see fit. In short, they have the right to censor. After all, there's nothing that prevents them from selectively filtering.
How would you like it if an ISP decided that it didn't want to bother transiting any Slashdot traffic? Or Kuro5hin? Or any non-mainstream web source? What if they start dropping data based on the content of the data itself? Think it can't happen?
You say you could go to another ISP? Tell us that when the only ISPs left are AOL/TW and AT&T (the former, at least, has a very large interest in being selective about what you, the audience, see).
This may be a "victory" in the fight against spam, but it has ramifications that are so bad that I'll take the spam, thank you.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
The reason it went to court was that XS4ALL did not wish to censor any of the incoming traffic, as it had committment to deliver everything that was sent to its customers to its customers.
It could have filtered out all their mail, but chose rather to try and get Abfab to stop sending the mail, therefore meaning that it has not had to do any censorship at all.
first of all a disclaimer, I've been a proud xs4all user for many years now so I'm a little biased ;)
:) ) ISP's I know... trust me on this, applying censorship is the last thing they want to do...
anyway in can understand that some people may see this as an ISP trying getting censorship power this way... but if you now enough about what XS4ALL stands for, you will know that is absolutely NOT their intention... XS4ALL is by far one of the most cyberrights-aware (if that's a word
Ricardo.
The point is that XS4ALL doesn't want to block e-mail themselves. They don't want to filter or censor anything. Instead they want the originating company to stop sending the e-mail through their networks in the first place. That is what the case was about, and the judge ruled in their favour.
Rather than repeating yourself, it would have been better to clarify which sense of "public" you meant. Open to all the people, like a public meeting? Maintained at the public expense, like a public library? Open to the view or knowledge of all, like when a fact goes public? I have a couple of servers permanently connected to the Internet, and only parts of them can be considered "public" in any of these senses (and not at all in the "funding" sense, alas). Perhaps you simply meant that you can't control what people do with information that you've disclosed (made public). I can agree with that, but I think "the Internet is public" is a poor way of expressing it.
I propose a simple and effective email charge system, where bulk mailers are FORCED to pay an appropriate amount in order to mail to a few thousand, tens of thousand, etc people.
Which bulk mailers will be forced how and by whom to comply with this?
If we can force them to conform to a business model that mimics the Real World and no longer lives in Fantasy Land...
Hate to burst your bubble, but at this moment in time the Internet exists in the real world, and your proposal exists in fantasy land. How were you intending to transpose them?
However, I can't say this enough: Attempting to legislate against this practice is not only ineffective, it is UNCONSTITUTIONAL and completely worthless.
To which constitution were you referring? The Internet does not have a "constitution" of which I'm aware. I take it that you're not proposing to legislate that ISPs should have to charge for bulk mail, then? Or would that be both constitutional and worthwhile? You mentioned forcing people to comply, so I assumed you meant law, but now I'm not so sure.
In short summary, legislating against spam is yet another of the giant wastes of time that government spends its time doing. It needs to be addressed from the economical model (reasonable ISP charges) or from the personal level (maintain public/private email addresses).
Oh, so you are against legislation in this case. You expect every ISP under the sun to spontaneously start charging for bulk mail. Well, if that's our only solution, then my guess is that spam is here to stay.
My bet is that an improved set of mail protocols will be the answer. That's why I'm working on them full time right now. Ask me about them in another four months or so.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
(XS4all is my ISP since 1994 and I also do know a person working for the spamming company in this case, AbFab. I receive 15 spammails or so a day on that xs4all account)
.tw, .kr and .cn at least, but they don't do that for individual customers. Now the ISP can tell the smapping company to quit or they have to pay a fine, but this is not workable with oversees spammingfactories like the taiwanese and korean (which make up the fast majority of the spam IMHO).
There is a problem: The EU. They accepted a law that made spam 'opt-out' or in other words: the user should tell the smapping company to remove the emailaddress of the user from their list. XS4all was and still is fighting this stupid law, but with no luck so far. I've asked them several times to block anything coming from
AbFab is just a company sending email on behalf of mostly dutch companies. When you look at it that way, it's quite the same as the unsollicited mail you get in your snailmailbox: sometimes it's not totally useless, but most of the time it is: you get advertising shit about products you don't need or even CAN use. If advertising-mail is more targeted at people who will possibly be interested, it would be less annoying.
This verdict will probably the end of AbFab, since other ISP's will now also come with a block request and AbFab can't refuse that now. People will be out of a job.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
These guys have been on the forefront of allmost any ethical debate concerning the Internet and digital freedoms in general. XS4ALL was formed in 1993 by the infamous hackergroup Hacktic(RIP) and was the first dutch ISP to allow access to private persons. Since then they haven't like so many others sold out to profitmaking instincts but kept to their goal of providing high quality, afforable internet access to the masses. Over the years they've suceeded without giving in on netpolitical views like the right to privacy, freedom of speech and freedom of choice.
- On numerous other occasions they've been in court defending the privacy of their costumers and other basic rights.
- Threre's no single ad on any of their pages. They're an internet provider, not a advertising agency! Me and many others will gladly pay some more 's for that.
- They offer analog, isdn(128k), gsm, gprs and adsl access and their service includes free licences for mcafee virusscan and pgp software (all platforms). Do you know any other ISP that does that?
- There's a whole lot of other goodies you don't find at your average ISP: a telnet/ssh shell, static ip with bSMTP (if you want it), adfree secure webmail, and good public irc, gaming and hosting servers.
- Their bussiness services are also quite exelent.
- And they're definitly the only isp in the world that grows marijuana in the workplace!!! (in dutch).
[DISCL: No, I don't own stock or work there, I'm just a ver loyal costumer that has been with them since 1996 both privatly and professionaly.]
SqyD
Why not make a new POP or alias adress?
Xs4all allows you 5 unique POP boxes with 10 aliases each!
And you can allways abandon one for another.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
No they can't block the spam but they can go after the spammers.
As AbFab was a national company with mainly national clients this was relatively easy.
It's still just as hard to fight against spammers from far away.
Xs4all is running a trial with a few hundred subscribers on a DNS-based anti-spam system, looks good so far and might be available to all in the future.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
And now it seems some centralised effort is spoiling the fun for the spammers!
Look at the example I copied to my website!
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
As a small ISP (just over 10 customers, over 40 domains) I have just printed a letter to Ab.Fab which asks them not to send any mail to my clients.
Given the ruling, I think they will have to comply with that.
I hope that lots of others do the same. Especially if you can legally claim to control more than a couple of domains.
I used the address that I found on their site as "how to find us":
ab.fab Interactive Media Group
Postbus 9088
1180 MB Amstelveen
[the netherlands]
I hope that this will at least stop the "spamfactories".
Roger.
Filtering of customer traffic is already widespread. It isn't called censorship because it hasn't been based on content. But filtering is done by port (to stop inbound connections to customers), by protocol and direction (egress filtering to block email to non-ISP mail servers, or to block any spoofed packets, especially outgoing broadcast requests), etc. What you should be afraid of is a world where there is only one ISP to choose, because then you'll give what they get you and like it.
I am attempting to deal with spammers. Unfortunately, justice is thwarted by the law, so I cannot deal with spammers the way George Bush is dealing with al-Qaeda, but I get as close to that idea as I can.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.