Cornucopia of Spam

Eric Savage writes "The IETF, through IRTF, has formed an Anti-Spam Research Group. If there is any hope for a technical solution the problem, it appears the first significant step has been taken. More info here in itworld and here in ComputerWorld." Three more exciting spam related posts inside, including news from the Nevada legislature regarding spam, Arkansas dislike of the meaty email and "when students go bad" torklugnutz writes "The NV state assembly just voted 41-0 in favor of a bill which allows spam recipients to collect up to $500 per piece of spam. The new law also requires ADV to be added to the subject line so that recipients can more easilly identify unwanted ads. In addition, spoofing of sender's email address or having an invalid return address is made illegal. The old law imposed a $10 fine on spammers, but required prosecuters to collect it. This law will, more than likely, increase my chances of reading the spam I get so that I can try to cash in. So, maybe I CAN make an incredible amount of money from this "Amazing Offer""

And in Arkansas: A.G. Russell writes "With House Bill 1008, Subtitled "Unsolicited Commercial and Sexually Explicit Electronic Mail Fair Practices Act." Arkansas looks to join other states that have criminal and cival legislation in place to deal with spam. Can we help them craft this?"

And from academia: mansemat writes "Seems spammers are using a new tactic these days by paying students to send spam over univeristy networks. This particular student will be disciplined by losing his computing privileges, and being educated on the policy he violated. One can only hope the education includes being subscribed to every pr0n, male enhancement, mortage, etc. spam on the planet." Should have booted the miscreant.

Comments

Arkansas emphatic

[ratbag]

Arkansas obviously believe that if you

• underline something it MUST be obeyed

Techinical solution

[Raul654]

Think of spammers like an infection. How does your body deal with it? It attacks the infections in a bunch of different ways. Why can't we do the same with spam? Rather than working hard for the magic bullet, why not use some combination of: Bayesian filtering, artificial bandwidth scarcity, blacklisting, aggressive collection of fines, targeting of domains that are advertised, etc. If you were to do all of these together, I'd imagine spam would not be a pleasant buisness to be in...

Something Smarter Is Needed

[chayim]

Creating laws, regulations, and whatnot will come nowhere near solving the problems. Sure, if a spammer lives in the US then maybe this would work; but what about all these scams from Europe, Australia, Britain, etc. Just because laws exist in one jurisdication, it doesn't mean that others will play ball. And even having laws does nothing if they're not enforced. Why not have a group of IT police hunt down spammers? After all, they're already guilty of theft and fraud (think bandwidth people). Why not prosecute under existing laws and treat spammers like the theives they are. Even though you won't catch spammers outside your legal jurisdicition, you'll help. And every country that helps would quickly be eliminating the spam problem we live with.

Re:What's the point?

[Dan B.]

Well if the goverment made as much money out of cracking down on spammers as say, speeding fines, with 'spamming fines', how much more aggressive do you think law enforcement would be on spammers? Then how many people would still do it?

It always about the money, or the budget.

Vicious circle I'm 'fraid.

But people will always speed ;-)