Slashdot Mirror
Feds Cracking the Whip on Spammers
Britano writes "Fox News is reporting that the FTC has started to go after spammers and online scammers. So the governement has finally started on the side of the consumer. "The Federal Trade Commission announced Tuesday that is has created a nationwide task force that has already brought 63 law enforcement actions against Web-based scams ranging from auction frauds to bogus cancer-curing sites." Hey, this way we don't have to spend our own money on fighting this problem!"
Where do you think our tax dollars come from?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Yeah, considering how many of the spammers and such are from countries other than the US, I have to wonder about the effectiveness of this sort of measure. Of course, it certainly can't hurt us, in the long run, so I won't complain!
That it took so long for the Feds to finally realize that crimes on the Internet are no different than those off of it? Bogus charities and pyramid schemes have existed long before the net. It shouldn't be any different, should it?
If I weren't nailed to the penis, I'd be pushing up the daisies!
Um, who do you think pays for the FTC to do this in the first place?
If you can manage to track the spammers down in another country...
Anyway, this is mostly about scam spam. This wont even effect the "buy a million addresses on a CD" spam as long as they are actually selling that product.
This just cracks down on something that was already illegal--it really doesn't have anything to do with spam.
that opt a way out? You mean where you click the link so that they are sure that your email address is valid and it just encourages them even more?
This and similar previous FTC efforts are not going after spammers per se, but rather going after the worst of the worst pyramid schemers and snake oil salesman. The FTC has no interest in going after "legitimate" spam. And frankly, that's probably not in their mandate as an organization.
If you want to have a government agency help with stopping the theft of service and DoS attacks that spam is, perhaps the FBI is a better place to look.
Naw, they're too busy arresting Russian Ebook pirates. Maybe the real trick is to get Adobe complaining about spam. Then we'd see some action!
It will continue to grow, and as it grows, it will need to find more and more things to arrest people over to justify its existence.
When the feds get together with the music/movie cartels, there will be a mutual embrace, as they know their existence will be a symbiotic one.
Yes, send it to them if they want it.
One thing you shouldn't do, which sadly, too many end up doing.. is bouncing it back to the (fingerquotes) sender (end fingerquotes).
More often than not, bob@randomisp.net isn't the one spamming you. Bob is just your average Joe who thinks spam is that stuff in a can that tastes darned good friend up on toast. (No, really, try it sometime.)
Anyway, the people who think they're 'sticking it to the spammers' by sending spam back.. Are really just contributing to the problem. IMO, they're no better than the actual spammers.
*hands out clues* E-mail addresses can be forged. Servers can be used to relay things. Maybe you should talk to a system admin somewhere, but it's not going to be Bob, who's just trying to check how his shares of Hormel are doing.
Quoting the article...
So the governement has finally started on the side of the consumer.
I'd replace 'consumer' with 'online retailers who are afraid it will hurt their business' (most likely hurting business by spam/scams betraying the trust of the consumer, which in turn makes them wary of making purchases online).
Hey, this way we don't have to spend our own money on fighting this problem!
You ARE spending your own money fighting the problem. Ever heard of taxes?
I feel that I have to point out that everything after the semicolon is redundant. ;-)
Incidentally, I actually do click on the remove links (yes, I know I shouldn't, but I won't lower myself to their level, and really, how much worse could it get), but it's been at least five years since I actually saw one that worked. Serious question: has anyone here received spam (in the past three years, say) with a "remove" link that actually did anything but attract more spam?
In addition, the stock lie "This is a one off mailing. You are not on a distribution list." (insert your own typos) is also trivially disprovable, once you get the second spam.
Seems to me like the FTC could bitchslap just about any spammer they liked simply on the grounds of flat out deception - what we old folks used to call lying, before we all started speaking like weas^H^H^H^H lawyers.
I know it's a small point, but I actually detest honest spam slightly less: just pitch the product, tell me how to give you money (you delusional retard), and then shut up. Don't compound the insult by pretending to give a damn about opt-ins, opt-outs or privacy. That's just insulting. That makes it personal.
So if the only thing the FTC does is to stop the insulting lies, that will at least drop my blood pressure by about five points. Go for it, G Men.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Dude, you can't legislate against stupidity. You can't buy a commercial on national television and shake your finger sternly at the world and say "stop being stupid!" and suddenly all of the suckers disappear off the face of the earth.
You and I would walk by a game of three card monty and laugh. A rural teenage tourist would possibly be suckered in and lose $20. That's why you still see that game on the street. It works, and it always will.
"There's a sucker born every minute" as Barnum would say.
What about the elderly, who might be losing their faculties and are preyed on by these folks? Is it still the victim's fault in your eyes? Blame the victim, blame the victim. "Look at what she was wearing! She deserved to be raped." How does that sound?
The point is, if you are in a position of greater knowledge, looking at a group of people with less knowledge and saying "stop being a bunch ignorant fools!" doesn't do a dang thing for anyone, doc, except maybe for your feeling of self-righteousness, sorry to break it to you. Ironically, your attitude reveals a naivete about how the world works, similar to other forms of naivete that suckers of scam-artists possess.
"Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me."
In your book is it "fool me any time, shame on me"?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There are very few spammers who aren't involved in some level of scam or fraud.
There's the obvious scams - pyramid schemes, cancer cures, etc.
Then there's the forged headers, something that causes real problems when domain names are hijacked. This also causes real problems when the spammers have technical problems - I once got over 20 MB of spam in less than an hour because a spammer (or virus) kept hitting my address with a large unwanted message. With bogus headers, it was impossible to notify the sender and difficult to notify the originating ISP.
A related problem is the increased use of misleading, even abusive, subject lines. The issue isn't (just) that some spam has subject lines warning of past-due accounts, bounced checks, etc., but that this deceptive practice makes legitimate communications regarding such matters much more likely to be dismissed unread.
Finally, there's the common practice of the spammer interpreting an "opt out" message as address validation, not as a true opt-out message.
When you eliminate spam with forged headers or "repurposed" opt-out lists, there's very little left.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
actually, you're wrong. the cost of sending 100 e-mails is the same as sending 100,000 or 1,000,000 e-mails. i can write up some crappy scam right now, that would cost me only 5 minutes of my time, and then send it out to a million random addresses. if one person sends me anything, that is all profit. sure, if that person didn't send me anything, i didn't make any money, but there's always a sucker out there. for the low price of $10 i can make it so you don't receive any spam.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
The point is that there are enough checks and balances to slow down the legislative process so that far-reaching, encroaching legislation doesn't show up overnight. How would you like the alternative? One day a group of lawmakers decide to outlaw mouthwash. Next day, it's a law, and people are getting thrown in jail for it. Then it takes years to overthrow it, people have their lives severely impacted, etc.
The whole structure of our government is to balance power to protect the people from harmful government interference. Part of this is slowing down the legislative process, allowing time for deliberation and compromise between the branches of government.
It really is more for your protection than you think.
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
I understand the desperation that's felt by someone with cancer, but really, what kind of person is going to believe that the miracle cure for cancer is sitting on some shady website and not in the hospitals?
The kind of person who is dying of cancer. And has already been to hospitals, which told him/her that there's nothing they can do.
This is a start. But it doesn't go far enough. The real problem with SPAM isn't that alot of it is scams or cheap porno get-your-dick-sucked come ons. The real problem with SPAM is that it STEALS OUR BANDWIDTH. By being responsible for 30% of the traffic on the internet, SPAM steals the true potential of the internet from us all. OUR Internet is slowed down 30% because of SPAM.
I am a moderate Libertarian, but this is something where the market can't regulate itself. There are many such situations, where the market doesn't regulate itself on par with the ideal. M$ is one such example.
In this particular case, SPAM, it doesn't matter if everyone blocks it out using filtering that won't even d/l SPAM from the server. REGARDLESS of whether or not YOU block out SPAM, its still stealing from YOU. Because your ISP's have to devote huge amounts of their resources to sending SPAM around, they put the tab on your bill. Furthermore, its still slowing down the Net at large, and ultimately you, whether or not you download it. This is my proposal:
PREAMBLE: Any violations of these statutes can result in jail time and severe fines paid to the state, the individual harmed, and the individual's ISP. The following proposal applies, unless otherwise stated, to E-MAIL, FAX, and the TELEPHONE. SPAM in all of these areas SHIFTS almost ALL of the cost of advertising from the ADVERTISER, to US and OUR ISP.
(1) What's needed is an OPT IN ONLY system. ONLY people who OPT IN get sent stuff from organizations.
(2) Furthermore, the OPT IN should have to be exclusive; opting in to receive e-mail from IBM NEVER gives them the right to let their "partners" send you crap. If they want to let their partners send you crap, they should have to contact you, explaning which partners they want you to let send you stuff, and what those partners do. Misrepresentation of this information should be considered a violation.
(3) Unsolicited solicitations encouraging people to OPT IN are SPAM themselves. That is, if some organization (i.e., bigdicks.com) sends you an unsolicited "one time" request to "opt in" -- irrelevant whether that request is text-only or not -- its SPAM and a violation.
(4) That said, the only legal way to propose to someone that they opt-in would be if they went to your website (and you had an opt-in option on your site) or requested information from you on opting in and you sent it to them. BUT, such opt-in options MUST state how large the OPT-IN proposal is in KB or MB accurate to 99%.
(5) Any Opt-in proposals (either on the website or ones send by e-mail/fax/phone) must state the following about the commercial communication that consumers are opting into. (1) How frequently they send their communications, or on what bases [i.e., is it once every month? Or does it go by "whenver there's news"?] (2) How large is the average communication that is sent, plus or minus standard deviation? (3) Opt-in proposals must also state accurately what the communication sent is about. Intentional or unintentional misrepresentation of ANY of these pieces of information is a violation.
(6) Said information in (5) must be updated at every new communication, correcting for that communication.
(7) All such solicited communications are to include clear removal instructions. In ALL cases, the option to remove MUST be presented such that the individual need only respond with REMOVE in the subject field. The removal must be immediate, or quick enough such that the individual gets no more communications from that entity.
(8) All such communications are to include an appropriate 3 letter header: Adv, Upd, or Nws. Adv applies for any commercial entity trying to sell you something. Upd applies for an update on a situation or software (i.e., an available upgrade). Nws applies for news (i.e., the stuff slashdot sends my e-mail).
(9) This law is not intented to cover the communications of private INDIVIDUALS, but ONLY of organizations.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
"Cracking the whip" means to work harder, as in produce more spam.