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David Sorkin on Internet Law and Spam
KC7GR writes "Cnet has published an interview with David Sorkin, associate professor at the John Marshall Law School. He's answering questions about the current state of cyberlaw, and he also has much to say about why current federal legislation being considered could make the problem of spam worse rather than curbing it."
They can pass all the laws they want, but who's going to enforce them? It's illegal to send unsolicited faxes too, but my eFax number gets swamped by them daily.
to block spam. But I think we are going to have to "go nuclear" if we ever want to win this war. What I mean by that is we are going to have to start blacklisting *anyone* who runs a open relay and I don't just mean mail I mean everything. Cut them off from the rest of the world. Only at that point will people get off their butts and solve the problem. That at least is whay I think. No more playing around time to bring out the big guns.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Ahh, but what exactly IS spam? Is it a mass mailing? Is it unauthorized use of server resources (spam and run)? Or is it UCE?
There are legit uses for mass mailings (ie, mailing lists.) Spam and run only works with the clueless who persist in running unsecured mail relays. And UCE is a subjective measure (no matter how good your adaptive filters are), and to restrict the ability to mail based on content is a dangerous step.
The most dangerous spammers today are not the whack-a-mole spammers that keep changing dialups, who relay-rape and advertise sites in Russia and China (whose admins could care less.) The most dangerous spammers are the big commercial outfits who sideline as legit operations, and who carry advertising from the likes of Amazon and AOL and run their own ISP feeds. These guys are hard to kill because they're semi-legit (ie, they tend to carry "legitimate" traffic), even though they're clearly spammers of the worst stripe.
The only way to deal with these guys is to blackhole whole IP blocks. For the whack-a-molers, you blackhole open-relays and known dialups. For everything else, use adaptive filters on the receiving end. If you're a server admin, restrict sending to known clients only, from a restricted list of IPs. I don't think there are a lot of mods you can make to SMTP that haven't been made already to fight spam - maybe standardizing the tarpitting of dictionary attacks (where the spammer tries to ferret out working e-mails by attempting bogus mailing connection attempts.) The tools are there. The key is to make sure everyone uses them.