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Do-Not-Email Registries?
prgrmr writes "Wired has an article about Colorodo and Missouri's latest legislative proposals to deal with spam and with spammers. There appears to be actual consumer-protective teeth in these bills which mirror the telephone 'do not call' lists. A nice example of a government perpetuating a working concept instead of trying inventing new ways to break things."
The article says that the law will allow "consumers to sue marketers who ignore their wishes [not to be spammed]" I'm curious over how the law would treat individual spammers. Would it allow people to sue Hot_Cindy9876@yahoo.com? or would it be the supplier of the product that Cindy was advertising that is held responsible. This might be especially difficult if the product (or website) is foreign, eg CrazyAsianPron.tw
It also seems a bit negative for anti-spam groups to criticise the laws before they are enacted.
I would have thought they would be all for this kind of thing, even if it doesn't work, at least it is a start and shows that some States are trying to do the right thing.
Just because they haven't done it perfectly first time is no reason to complain. Wait and see what happens, it might work out ok, and if it doesn't then start pushing for it to be reworked.
More government?
www.brainclone.com
has a cheese idea... but you need to sign a damn NDA to see deatils.
Why?
"In the losing battle against spam..."
I did not think that we were losing anything. There have been software add-ons/pluggins that limit what spam we see. Legislators have taken an active role to limit/penalize spammers. ISPs have taken spam seriously as it costs them both directly and indirectly. I dont see spam as being as much of a problem in the next 2 or 3 years.
We can conquer spam quicker by emailing our representatives our feelings toward spam.
later,
epicstruggle
"Im drowning here, and you're describing the water!"
Labeling is serving as a proxy for content. I for one am objecting to ads not because of any specific product that they're trying to sell me, but because they bear advertising content of any kind. There is a common message to buy goods or services, and that's your content. You may be thinking of the slightly different matter of viewpoint discrimination.
Since the intended effect of the labeling is to get rid of spam altogether by means of everyone filtering the spam, the true intent of labeling provisions is to silence both a wide class of speakers (commercial speakers) and content (commercial messages), such that they will no longer even be sent.
And of course, the means are so crudely tailored to the intent that I think there's even a question per a rational basis analysis, much less the no-brainer against regulation under a strict scrutiny test.
The registry is pretty similar... it might be equated to a 'no tresspassing' sign on one's door (which is allowed), but OTOH mailboxes are IIRC held to be inherently somewhat open to the public regardless of the recipient's wishes, because it's so trivial a matter to get rid of mail that is unwanted, and the burdens to speech would be so high.
As for the unsolicited nature of the communication, I would regard it as being insufficient to hang one's hat on. All discussions HAVE to begin with an unsolicited comment.
Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, commerical free speech has grown to be nearly the equal of private free speech. Labeling requirements, truth requirements, and TPM restrictions are about all that's left of note. False headers, content, or addresses might be something you could try to ban, but again it's almost entirely unenforcible.
Private filters are the way to go -- it may be a little bit more burdensome, but it's better than the relatively short trip junk mail takes from mailbox to trash can.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
It may be easy for the actual sender of the email to hide his identity, but if the spam is offerring goods or services it is not so easy to hide the identity of the privider.
The type of spam which will probably be decreased by this type of law is that from businesses which put you on their mailing list because you purchase something from them (or download software)
It may simply end up that countries that are unwilling or unable to stop SPAM find themselves banned form the internet at large. I work for a university and we find that a particular country (that I will not name) and a particuar ISP in another country are a large problem for little script kiddies. They refuse to respond to our requests for action so we are slowly banning all the IP blocks that belong to them. At some point, they will no long have any access to our network.
This is not something that will happen overnight but I do believe that some day there will be a sort of Internet law that you will have to obey and if you don't, you'll find yourself banned from most of it.
Also most of the SPAM I recieve on my various addresses is form US companies. After all, it's not real useful to SPAM someone for a product or service that they can't buy since you are from a different country. The spammers may use foriegn relays, but they are working for US companies, and those companies can be held accountable.
Much more fun is to use the counterscript. I've had a few telemarketing people sounding so worried when I did it that I almost felt sorry for them.
If there's an email address I can respond to I'll go find an open relay host and forward through that email to them consisting of a nice letter saying that I was glad to get their mail and that they may have goofed a bit. Along with it I'll usually send a large (say 2000 by 2000) tiff (or xcf) file with a picture of a can of spam and a text message "Go Away" written on it. If they've really pissed me off I'll send a dozen or so.
More often they give no usable email, but do give http urls. Since they've solicited my response, I respond to these with a couple thousand curl url fetches. I make sure that there are reasonable delays in between so it is not a DOS attack - though if they really manage to get me pissed off I'll shorten the delay and up the count. In these I always encode my feelings (my favorite is "spam spam spam..." repeated ten thousand or so times) in the UA, in the referrer and in the url itself - more or less randomly mixed up on each fetch.
Does this do anything? Probably not, but if their webmaster is responsible they'll at least see the message and with a bit of luck it will also drive their bandwidth costs up. Yah, I know, they'll probably report this back to the spam purchaser as a "hit".
They did ask me to visit their web pages after all. So I do. I don't look at the response, but so what.
Rather, I think that banning or mandating labels on spam violates the First Amendment for a trivial reason and would fail to actually accomplish anything in any event
God DAMN IT, not that same old fucking canard about free speech AGAIN!
A spammer's right to speak does not confer a license to use MY property to do so. Spamming is a property-rights issue, not a free speech issue.
A spammer can say whatever the hell he wants at his OWN expense, not at MINE.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
This all leads back to a particular favourite of mine: Targetted advertising.
Advertisers in general do not care how many people see their advert, but rather how many potential clients see their advert. Sending 50000 spams is no good if no-one buys anything from them, while sending 100 which generate 20 sales is a huge return (at the moment only about 1 spam / month gets past spamassassin, so I don't see the majority of them). While it doesn't cost much to send an email, it does cost something. I would like there to be a central registry of items individuals are interested in, so I can register and gt targetted adverts. I have no interest in penis enlargement, breast enhancement, sanitary towels, buying a new car (at the moment) so anyone who advertises these things at me irritates me, and receives no return. Any company that wastes my time prejudices me against them if I ever do want to buy a product they offer. Right now, I'm thinking of buyng a new dual-head graphics card, so anyone advertising a low cost Radeon 8500 would be providing me with information I want, outcome: I don't have to hunt for prices as much, companies can spend less on advertising but generate more sales, I can watch an hour of TV without having 15 minutes of adverts. I'm happy, commercial enterprise is happy. People who send untargeted advertising are laughed at for being so crude. The solution to spam is not to block it, not to legislate against it, simply to show that it doesn't work. Let commercial Darwinism will take care of the problem
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