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FEC Permits Anonymous SMS Spam
crm114 writes "The Washington Post is running a story about the Federal Election Commission's decision today to waive the requirement that SMS broadcast messages indicate their origin..." And it'll only cost you ten cents to read each one. For what it's worth, you can read the agenda item which describes the issue before the FEC. It's rather interesting because it includes drafts of two possible responses by the FEC, depending on which way the commissioners actually voted at today's meeting. Although the company seeking the opinion suggested alternatives like providing a toll-free phone number in the message (preserving the spirit of the campaign finance disclosure rules), the FEC doesn't appear to have taken them up on it.
How do you bill back someone sending SMS messages from, say, ICQ?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Boy, it sure would be a shame of thousands of /.'ers happened to come across the cell phone numbers of the people involved in this, and they were flooded with calls that were billed at their expense...yep, sure would be a shame...
This certainly gets around the rescrictions of campaigning not allowed within 100 feet (or whatever it is) of the polls. Just wait until the SMS messages start flooding the phone system on election day. How will the FEC react when voters are bombarded with SMS spam in the ballot booth.
....."
"Vote for
Right.
Whatever SMS provider ICQ uses will most likely charge ICQ for sending messages. They probably dont charge per message though, but amount of time connected to the SMS server. Anyone in the UK can dialup to a public SMSC with a normal modem (which supports 9.6Kbps) and send as many messages as they want and only pay for the time connected to the SMSC. The actual time connected is charged at something like 35pence/minute ($0.50 ish) and the number of 160byte messages that can be sent in one minute is much more than 3.5 (it costs 10p / SMS here in the UK for 'normal' users).
Not that any message you ever send via ICQ ever gets delivered - none that I have tried anyway, so maybe ICQ are actually having problems with their SMS charging.
"Good news! You can now use your AT&T Wireless phone to make international calls to over 220 countries. Visit [censored] for rates & info"
Sender: 9263
Sent: August 22, 2002 16:32 PT
It COMPLETELY freaked me out!!! Since I ONLY used the pager/sms as an emergency contact and I rarely get paged (unlike the sysadmin days), my first reaction was anexity and concern for my family. I had to stop being productive today due to At&t insisting on forcing their advertising through a service plan I pay for. Which, by the way, it is something I get charged for, and there is a line item on my bill. But that's not the point - we pay for it even if there is no line for it on the bill. Just because it's "included" doesn't mean I am not paying for the service. I find it deeply insulting that I should pay for a service that does not act as it should and actively seeks to dimish the quality of it's service through captive audience techniques.
I am very upset and harmed by At&t's actions and as such, I wouldn't mind hearing from civil litigation and personal injury rats^H^H^H^H^H laywers on how I may persue this matter and seek restitiution for the harm they have caused me:
- personal trauma
- loss of work
- theft of service
- telecom fruad
- bait & switch
Since government action has removed any hope of my ever being able to obtain lawyers, guns or money, I might suggest the slashdot effect be directed at the above sender. :)
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
What are you going to bill for?
Being woke up at 4am when they sent me the message, and a message disposal charge. And if they don't pay, I'll just take them to small claims court for the $30 registration fee. If nothing else, it will be hassle for them, and they'll have to pay someone to show up or they lose by default.
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If some asshole starts spamming my phone I'll sue my provider for allowing it to happen! Junk mail in my physical mailbox is bad enough.. but, at least they pay for that (and it keeps the postal service in business). But, if I'm paying for it I'm going to nip that shit in the butt real quick!
I can't believe it costs you money to receive an SMS or a mobile phone call. You guys (North Americans) have such a weird mobile phone system! It seems really unfair that the recipient has to pay when the recipient cannot control the actions of the people calling or sending SMS messages. Especially since marketers are starting to send SMS advertising messages - clearly the marketers should have to pay for that! North America is truly unique in this regard - everywhere else in the world (Europe, Australia, Asia etc) the person making the phone call is the one who pays - just like it is for fixed-line calls.
I also work for a wireless carrier, but since I am in the switch, I won't pimp the carrier. Basically, we run a linux based SMS server which is intellegent enough to stop spam messages of this kind. It looks at the recipient address, and if it sees that it is just a sequential count, it blocks that message, and any further messages from the offending sender. Occassionally, we are supposed to go through and make sure none of our subscribers are on the blocked list, and if they are, we have our customer support contact them, and find out if this was an error. There hasn't been any abuse (by our customers) so far. Not having to pay for the SMS is fine, but since I get status messages, and complaints via SMS, I have to check the damn thing every time it beeps. Getting a ping pong of negative ads would definately mess with my very limited off time. I don't know if any of the bigger carriers have this kind of filtering. Just my 2 cents, and I could be wrong.