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Another Side-Effect of Spam
ghostie writes: "According to this article on news.com.au Telstra (Australias largest Telco) is having some problems with email blacklist operators. They claim that large (previously unused) portions of it's IP range have been black-listed even though they have never been used before. It seems the direct-action approach to stopping spam is having a detrimental effect as well. When will it all stop?"
A system like passport would go a long way toward stopping spam.
Apart from "selected partners" of the passport provider.
They just cant help themselves.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Where are there laws against spam? I belive there is some minor state level legislation in Oregon or Washington or something?
Here's a list. There are also laws against trademark infringement (which many spammers engage in), trespass to chattel (which many ISPs could use against certain methods of spamming), ponzi schemes (I still get a lot of those), etc. I currently have a spammer using my email address as the From address in his/her spams. So I get all the bounces, not to mention many of the angry complaints. That's clearly illegal, as it is trespass to chattel at the very least (probably many other laws). But I don't have the money to sue them in court, and you can't sue John Does in small claims court, and you can't even begin investigating who the spammer is without a subpeona. Then on top of that, they're probably using computers outside the U.S. jurisdiction anyway. I really don't think laws are going to help. But at this point I'm willing to let the government waste my tax money trying. Then maybe after a few years of that failure we can start spending our time and efforts on solutions which will actually fix the problem.
But just says there are laws and we need passport doesn't make it so.
Wait a second... We don't need passport. Passport is a bad implementation. It's a horrible implementation. But we do need a better way to sign up for things over the web. We shouldn't be using email addresses as a unique identifier for people. It's just not a good solution.
As for examples of what I am talking about, I live in Texas which resently enacted an "Opt out telemarketing" approach, basically for a couple bucks you can get on a state conrtolled "do not call list" which ALL telemarketers are required to buy, if they call you and you are on the list, they get like a 500 dollar fine, suffice to say I used to get several calls a day, now I get NONE!!!
I've explained this in another one of my posts, but I'll briefly get into it again. These laws work for telephone calls because it's easy to trace telephone calls. They won't work for email because it's very difficult and expensive (and in many cases impossible) to trace email. Most of my spam doesn't come from legitimate companies. Next time I get a chance I'll go through my mail and put up a website with statistics on exactly where my spam does come from.