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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"
IIRC, this sort of law exists in a few other states. How simple is it to actually use? Does the spammer have to be in California? Do I need to be able to locate the spammer?
No lawyer will sue for something piddly like $500. What we need is for someone to set up a service that we can forward all our spam to. It will root out the sender and lump all violations against one sender together. Then, the guy gets sued to hell and back. We all get our $300/ea ($500 less 40% legal fees) and everyone is happy.
Before we cheer legal solutions (which will have their fair share of downsides) maybe more people should take technological measures.
Also have a look here: Annoying spammers with OpenBSD's pf
Slides explaining how Bayesian email filtering is successful
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.
Good luck!
jabber: johnynek@jabber.org
Strangely enough none of the Peace movement organizations have spammed me. Perhaps even more stange, or suggestive, is that all of the peace groups are non profit, while all the pro war psam seems to come from some business hoping to sell some thing or another (offensive t-shirts, duct tape, plastic sheeting, etc).
A recent report on spam by Reuters stated that Yugoslavia, in an attempt to bring in more revenue is "harboring" spammers through its new program in which the government sells mass emailing licenses to spammers. These licenses basically exempt these spammers from any kind of criminal prosecution.
While this article is good news, it will not stop the constant migration of spamming operations to foreign countries who need the money.
There have been more and more people moving towards a newer solution which is very simple. Just ignore the spam. If more and more people ignore the unsolicited emails, eventually the Spammers will lose revenue or lose interest. By establishing all these forceful "spam attacks" we are just flaming the fire and provoking more spam. This is exactly the kind of media attention these spammers thrive on.
my two cents
However, this seems amusingly similar to the evolutions of spellings that led to 1337 5p34k. IRC would filter out some words like "hacker" and disguising these words with numbers and intentional misspellings was a way to get past the filters and avoid breaks in communications. They're using our own cleverness against us. :)
If I have 10 accounts at yahoo for example, and I get the mail at all my accounts, will it be $500x10??? What if I have 1000??? I'm going to quit my job, and start opening mail accounts... =)
LOL.
;-) a while back.
;-)
My uncle works as a personnel manager at the corporate offices in Austin; I asked him how they felt about 'spam'=='spam'
He said that a small minority of the execs there are pissed about the comparison; most don't care, but that a fair number of them find it hilarious and consider it free advertising.
*shrugs*
One thing I do have to say; Hormel doesn't,uh, use spam as a means of advertising. Not sure how true that is, but there you go....the irony is still thick.
(posting anon because uncle also reads slashdot
Curiously enough 99.9999% of spam i recieve is USA related, wether its a porn site, antivirus,pills etc etc it always seems to involve someone from the USA
maybe its a social problem more than a technological one, i dont recieve spam from other countries, and the only spam from china i get is from a USA company/individual using an open chinese relay
maybe the law needs to target the promoted product based on the owners/ceo's passport not where the business name is located
cheers
S.
Technically, this will involve very little suing of actual spammers. What this will involve is going after the spammer's customers - those businesses that are foolish enough to purchase spamming services. The thing is that spamming doesn't make you any money directly. You have to find someone willing to pay you to spam for them. And, while it's pretty easy to set up a spam box somewhere offshore, it's not so easy to set up an entire penis-enlargement firm or "herbal viagra" firm offshore, especially if you still want to do business in the US. So, if the people actually trying to sell products find themselves at legal risk, they're much less likely to avail themselves of a spammer's services, even if the spammer has minimized his own legal risks.
I'd *really* like e-mail coming from domain.com to actually come from domain.com. I.e. No fake-mail. If you have the email-address user@domain.com, you should also have to authorize with the domain.com servers in order to send mail. And mail servers should verify that mail from domain.com actually was sent by a domain.com server (they must know where the mail is to be delivered to that domain, why not if it was *sent* to that domain?).
Yes, I know that *unless* you do/can authenticate with your email server now, this will break a few setups. And it's not the end-all of spam solutions. But it'd sure be a good help.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings