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California Anti-Spam Law Approved
Metroid72 writes "Zdnet reports that "A California anti-spam bill passed the Senate on Wednesday, a first step toward the passage of a law that would give people the right to sue spammers." I guess there's light at the end of the tunnel"
I love Mozilla, and the spam filter is great, but that doesn't really solve the problem. A lot of e-mail servers are still getting clogged with spam and the bouncebacks, flames, and problems that result.
Yes but it's waaaay over there, very tiny. Just a speck.
Until something like this gets approved at the federal level, at least.
And I know that won't do much good for overseas spammers and so on, but perhaps it will increase the cost of doing business.
In those case, we can only hope that other countries will do the same. China and Korea, especially.
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
True, but as more and more people use customized spam filters spamers will have less incentive to continue.
This is totally off the cuff but...
It seems society may be taking the wrong approach to this whole spam thing. We keep focussing on the guy actually sending us the e-mail. We seem to be overlooking the fact that there is someone out there who is trying to sell something to us (or scam us). If it weren't for this seller/scammer the spammer would have no reason to send us anything. Instead of attacking the spammer why not attack the root of the problem: the guy who is paying the spammer to spam. The way I look at it the spammer isn't doing this out of the goodness of his heart. He's doing it on someone's behalf because they are paying him. The person doing the selling is likely much more accessable than the actual spammer because one would need to actually contact them to buy the product being advertised. In contrast to suing the spammer why has suing the company/person who has hired the spammer been cosidered?
Never disturb your enemy while he is busy making a mistake.
I don't think this is going to solve spaming. (You can fake your email, etc.) It will only add to the people who sue everything
Yeah, but don't forget that spammers usually want to sell you something and in order to do that they have to include some form of contact address or phone number in their spam.
Tracking down the people behind the products or services being promoted should be pretty straight forward -- proving that it wasn't a joe-job however could be a whole lot harder.
...for California to simply enforce the ADV:-at-the-beginning-of-the-subject-line law rather than create a whole slew of new spam laws? If the state did this, then users could just create mail rules to send those ADV: messages straight to the trash. Voila! No spam in your inbox.
That doesn't do anything at all to stop spammers. Even if all that spam wound up in your inbox, you'd never give a penny to any of the people who sent it. Neither would 99% of the other recipients. Spammers know that, but it doesn't matter to them because it costs so little to send the spam. So basically, who cares if you use SpamAssassin and CRM114? The spammers sure don't.
PS: I know people might say, but what about the economic cost of spam, blah blah blah. Read the slides. If no one ever gets spam, people will stop sending it, and the economic cost goes away.
Until filters can guarantee 0 false positives, they can't be deployed at a lot of sites.
I hate having to resort to legislation to stop spam, but I really don't think filters will ever solve the problem. Maybe they'll hide most of the symtoms as far as you're concerned, but the spam still wastes bandwidth and now wastes even more CPU cycles since you have to process all your incoming mail so heavily to try and identify it. That's theft of service, and it needs to be stopped.
noah
Obviously this is not the same as product liability, which for all its evils, in many cases has made us safer in our homes, cars, and places of work.
Physicians know very well the nightmare involved in any kind of malpractice action.
While the Calif. legislature's intentions are good, the problems with this law will prevent it ever having its intended effect.
The only think it will do is make a small number of California lawyers very wealthy.
The fix for spam (lowercase letters only!) has to involve shutting down open relays, ISP and individual filtering, and carefully crafted criminal legislation. For instance, we don't sue crank phone callers, we prosecute them criminally. Likewise, the new federal law against junk phone calls and the federal do-not-call list have criminal penalties, ie, large fines. Those are the laws that have forced junk callers to change their behavior. This is the direction most likely to be successful with spam as well.
This doesn't do jack people for us people, just another open loophole law that was passed so the politicians have "busy work"
Most spam is sent out through a 3rd party, who usually hides behind all kinds of nifty little things like hijacked SMTP servers and spoofed IP addresses. My freinds dad was a spammer, so I'm quite aquainted with thier operations.
Let's say, I recieve a spam from penis enlargement corporation. I try to sue, PEC just points out that the spam wasn't sent by them, it was sent by "insert spam company here" and they're off the hook.
The law needs to include the customer of the spam house, otherwise it's going to be ineffective.
Much of the spam I receive at the moment is highly pornographic - not a problem for me, but I have a two year old daughter. In a couple of years, she'll be using the 'net (albeit from behind some kind of transparent filtering proxy); how would you feel if your child was being sent pornographic mail?
OK, so I'll be closely monitoring her email account when I set one up for her, but why should I have to do this? It's not as though I have to open every envelope sent to her through the post.
Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it...