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Direct Marketers Association Asks To Be Regulated
alanjstr writes "Recognizing that with all the spam out there, the legitimate messages don't get through, the Direct Marketers Association (DMA) has decided that they will no longer oppose federal anti-spam legislation, but that forged headers should be illegal."
Hell has just frozen over.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
from article: But, Cerasale said, a federal requirement that consumers "opt in" instead of "opt out" of bulk e-mail is unacceptable. "We think the opt-in creates a true noneconomic model," Cerasale said. "We don't believe you get a viable economic model in opt-in."
so the Direct Marketing Association is still a bunch of scumbags after all...
What about when I have one mail address on my server with a lot of aliases pointing to it? Can I still "forge" the headers to say that it's coming from one of the aliases?
Yes, yes - this really isn't "illegal"... My question is, when does it become illegal?
The story is about the Direct Marketers Association asking to be regulated by the government, yet the topic icon doesn't have wings.
Strange...
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Please Mr. Legislator, shut off that spam (which doesn't come from us), so that we may send our spam messages in peace.
i've noticed that a great deal of the spam that has the "opt in" notice is by reference and changes on a daily basis.
1. you opt in on just one, let's say amazon
2. warner bros makes a "patnership" with amazon. warner bros starts spamming you.
3. warner bros then makes a partnership with the bestrate loan company who starts spamming you.
4. bestrate loan company makes a "paternship" with joe's porn palace and before you know it your p*nis is being enlarged!
Additionally, since a vast amount of spam is fraudulent (or so my Nigerean Finance Ministry contacts tell me), assuming ethical standards for any of these people is absurd.
Let's face it - spamming is no more a profession than being a heroin dealer. To expect professional standards out of them is equally fruitless.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
The DMA (or the gun lobby or you name it) gets involved when they see that regulation is inevitable. Their purpose? To "shape" the law according to their perogatives -- i.e., eviscerate it. Microsoft uses a similar strategy with "embrace, extend, extinguish."
The DMA's job is to promote DMA, not to tailor it to our desires or rights -- requiring opt-out is a good example. They provide a limited opt-out for junk mail and telemarketing primarily to silence their critics and head off decisive government intervention.
Many states already have anti-spam legislation on the books, but it is rarely enforced because of the difficulty in tracking these cretins down. A federal law would provide uniformity and predictability of everyone's rights and obligations. And hey, it might even work.
A recent article reported with a straight face a major spammer's contention that they HAD to forge the headers because otherwise anti-spam zealots would complain to their ISP and get them shut down -- making opt-outs impossible. Ha!
If (and it's a big if) SPAM was opt-out, but the opt-out was centralized, and as effective as the DMA's mailing and phone opt-out lists, this wouldn't be that bad. Those "physical world" lists work quite well. Difference is, of course, that, if you hate junk postal mail and telephone solicitations, the DMA _wants_ you to opt-out; why spend postage, phone charges, and staff time soliciting people who aren't going to buy? It's a waste of money. For email SPAM, though, the wasted money is so minimal as to be irrelevant...
These advertisers can then pay ISP's a 'distribution fee', which allows mail signed by that marketer's key to pass through the ISP spam filter. This ensures that spam is not free, which will drop the number of spam messages, and will also cause a corresponding increase in quality.
We are not getting rid of spam, but establishing a reasonable system for permitting its distribution seems fair.
As with all computerized information that can be modified, I strongly believe it should not be illegal to modify headers in an email message. The possibility of such modification is extremely useful for the computer professional in fields including programming, debugging and network administration.
Instead of having laws passed to dictate what can be done with a particular tool, I believe resources should instead be spent on securing and strengthening software, and on otherwise improving this field technically. To prevent the reception of email messages that appear to come from a trusted source, all email clients should automatically apply encryption. Nearly all mail sent through the postal service is enclosed in envelopes. I strongly believe the electronic realm would benefit from the electronic equivalent of an envelope.
...Like a supermodel.
...With a 6 pack of Keystone beer.
Advertisaholics Anonymous, of course.
The DMA is open to the idea of the government saying that some forms of theft of service by conversion and trespass to chattel is unaccaptable, so long as the theft of service, theft by conversion and trespass to chattel that their members want to commit is still legal.
Did I get that right?
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
- Direct Marketers Association
- Asks To Be Regulated
At least they can opt-in. .A couple of us around here have been assigned to create direct mail programs and some of these programs, while initially billed as using strictly Opt-In, degraded into Opt-Out and even eventually into a simple spamfest. I admit I sent out two groups of "spam" (though clearly marked according to California regulations, blah, blah) on behalf of a failing employer. I have to admit: it was fun to do (one was for a legitimate product the other was for a MLM, the Amway web effort) and we had fun optimizing the script to pump out more spam. But the list we were given was complete junk! Over 2 million addresses (took a while to load into MySQL from the CSV file)--including my own father's email address! It also included harvested email from die.net. Ever tried to send mail to die.net? It's a great honeypot/tarbaby for spammers. But 2 campaigns were enough for my conscience (we sent less than 500,000 total messages).
When asked to make a Flash/Windows multimedia program that could automatically extract email addresses from a users machine and send them to a central server--on behalf of serious players in the music industry no less--a couple of us around here drew the line and said "no". [The couple of us I keep refering to no longer work for the slimebucket that wanted to move spyware to a new level in exchange for listening to HipHop tracks.]
Anyway, when complaining about spam realize that someone with technical know-how enabled the peabrain spammer to do his evil.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Corporations are people to! i'm serious. They also pay taxes!
Paying taxes does not make an entity into a person. While there are lawyers who have perverted the word to refer to both corporations and human beings in the same way, we don't have to accept their twisting of the English language.
If a corporations are people, why didn't Union Carbide get life in prison for the killing 3,800 people in Bhopal, India?
Why are tobacco companies not being "executed" for killing people? They knowingly sold something that was lethal while lying to the purchasers and claiming that the product was not shown to be harmful. If you started selling arsenic-laced lemonade while claiming that it was safe, you would be in prison or the electric chair.
When corporations are jailed for criminal acts and their ability to do business is halted during that time, then I'll think about sharing the title "person" with them. As of now, corporations have the rights of people with none of the responsibilities.