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Australian Considers Outlawing Spam
An anonymous reader writes "The Sydney Morning Herald has an article on spam down under. I guess it goes to show that if something that bothers us also bothers enough politicians then something may be done. Interestingly, the article discusses international co-operation wrt spam. Good thing too. With only 2% of the global economy, it'll take more than Australia to beat the spam problem. Perhaps someone should send a 'group letter' to all relevant politicians in various countries to start co-operating? :)" Update: 04/16 11:56 GMT by H : There's another article on the subject as well, running in The Australian.
This is a typical Australian head-in-the-sand position (IAAA): 'ban' it and it will go away.
Unfortunately Senator Alston does not seem to appreciate that we are connected to the rest of the world by this internet thing, and it may just be that courts in Russia and China will not recognise Australian juristiction in this matter.
It would be better if they saved their breath and did something useful like investigate some sort of token-based email, and maybe funded its development.
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
Most spam I get is of the 'down, under' category :-). Incidentally, is hotmail banned Down Under? How else can they outlaw spam?
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Just one single citizen is going to outlaw SPAM? Perhaps tomorrow we'll see a story about a Cameroonian deciding to jaywalk?
..spam *is* illegal.
Do people in country B complain to the police in country A? Can country A prosecute their spammer for spamming people covered by different local laws?
More bizarrely, would there be extradition of spammers between countries, as if they'd committed a murder or buglary?
...but I'm not holding my breath.
Still, it sounds like a step in the right direction...
I guess the important question is... will America cooperate?
The proposal in the Australian report is to ban unsolicited commercial e-mail (opt-in). Now if only the US Senate would pay attention to that instead of introducing idiotic opt-out bills like the one recently introduced, that would actually increase spam.
there should be a UN resolution against spammers. How about resolution 1337?
This P.I.G. will walk on the water, This P.I.G. will walk on the sea, This P.I.G. will walk whereever he wants.
As an Australian I think that we should setup a decent internet infrastructure before we outlaw spam!
Judging from the level of incompetance shown by the vast majority of Australian politicians I've seen, I doubt they have a hope in hell of outlawing spam!
Besides, what's spam to one person could be golden information to another. Right?
OK maybe not...
So we should spam politicians in several countries to have them get rid of spam... you know, that just might work. Perhaps someone should register the various @house.gov addresses at a few online casinos and watch the fireworks...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Most of mine comes from servers listed in the APNIC. What needs to be done is for countries like china to crack down, but from what I've been hearing, they are trying to.
2% global economy with 0.3% of the world's population? Not bad I suppose... maybe it would be higher if government & schools used Linux :-)
w
:-)
0.3% = (18,000,000/6,000,000,000) * 100
Estimate of world's population may be found here:
http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/ipc/popclock
Go Aussie go!
We will outlaw speeding! that'll surely get people to drive safely and stuff.
That said, I guess it's better than having legalized spam. Though, otoh junk fax law applies to spam already anyway, methinks?
I am reminded of a quote from War and Peace - "Everybody can write regulations, but it's finding ways to enforce them that's the difficult / tricky part."
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Sure, things like this will weed out the non-technical spammers, but anyone that has any knowledge whatsoever will just move on to another smtp server.
With this technique of outlawing, maybe nstead of 5 people a day trying to increase my bust size, maybe I'll only get 4 a day.
The only real way to get rid of spam is to make every user have some unique identification number (SS#, etc) tied to their email addresses. However, no one will want to get rid of spam enough to have to attach such personal information to an email account.
Lets say you get an email from bob@yahoo.com .. and your mail server then contacts yahoo's mail server (looked up by the official DNS record) to make sure that bob@yahoo.com is really the one who sent the email. If he's not, trash it. If he is, keep it.
What does this do for spam? Allows you to block it! Since all email addresses would then be verifiable, and tracked to a specific domain/user, spam-abusers could either be silenced at the source (their ISP) or silenced at the destination (your spam filter killing that whole domain). Sure there's lots of domains out there to use, but a simple master-list of "spam domains/users" maintained online would quickly whittle the spam down. What do you guys think?
It seems like a better idea would be to apply technology instead of legislation to the problem -clamp down on Hotmail users who send a zillion emails a day, and lock down open mail relays - but IANAL.
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
There was an article a while back about a political group for geeks, right? something similar to the labor party or the populist party?
perhaps we should have them mailing stuff out. I'd actually like to see slashdot get behind them a little more, keep it to ONLY geek related issues(no war protest/mongering).
Wouldn't it be great if they mailed a message to your congressman saying "yeah, we have the slashdot population of 300,000 behind us. do something about _______ or you'll force us to vote, and you really don't want that."
hell, if the farmers of the 1900's can do that with the populist party, why can't we? We count as a special interest group too.
(please, if you have anything thoughts about it, reply. don't be rude or cynical.)
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
Forged headers are only possible because of bad code. This has been a recognised problem for years now, I read an article 5 years ago about the flawed code, and that it should be fixed (sendmail2 from memory).
Why can't bad code be be fixed or updated in order to fix problems with legal implications, in prefence to "widespread usage"? Widespread usage is one reason Microsoft can't be bothered fixing more than just a couple of giant holes in the security of their OS, so doesn't that invalidate the argument by default?
"I love deadlines. I love the "whooshing" sound they make as they pass by." - Douglas Adams.
Bruno: [looking at spam] Ooh! Ah, that's it. I'm going to report this to me member of parliament.
[yells out window] Hey, Gus! I got something to report to you. [Gus tends his swine]
Gus: That's a bloody outrage, it is! I want to take this all the way to the Prime Minister.
[they go down to a lake] Hey! Mr. Prime Minister! Andy!
Andy: [floating naked on an inner tube with a beer] Eh, mates! What's the good word?
Just one Australian is considering it... imagine if all of Australia wanted to outlaw spam... Up next... An American considers switching to Linux!
You're a bastard. Your mother should have aborted you with a coat hanger and then hit you and your stinky fetus with a sledgehammer.
I suggest we cruise missile spam servers and their owners into kingdom come. Someone just convince US congress of the fact that spammers are terrorists (the truth is relative, people) who violate the DMCA in their spare time and then we'll just have to sit back and watch the US military solve the spam problem for us. Ralsky won't be able to spam once all of his servers have become a delightful mix of burned plastic, twisted metal and shattered eletronics, now can he?
Hate me!
.......Sounds like a hygiene problem....
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
Some other interesting points:
The only thing I'd say that was wrong with this bill is that it places the onus on a government body to initiate proceedings. I think that there should be a way, indeed an incentive, for individuals to chase spammers through the courts as well.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Considering that Russia and China have adopted both the "ban it" methodology and rely on kangaroo courts, they might get along with the Australians just fine.
Laws are for people with no friends.
Some people seem to fret that this legislation is only local.. the only way to make it global is to appeal to the World Trade Organisation. The WTO is responsible for the global application of Copyright Laws and also the DMCA and its European equivalent. Any country that wants to be a member of the WTO must produce legislation that conforms to the WTO's standards... so go lobby the WTO.
I miss my rubber keyboard.(Homepage)
Just about every legal solution to a technological problems end up backfiring. The problem is that most laws are so broadly written that they usually end up making something legitimate illegal as well.
Usually these laws end up fining someone who sends 'spam' described in legalese. Then, you forward a joke to someone who gets offended by it, calls it an unsolicited e-mail message, and then uses the law to extract money from your wallet. Meanwhile, since the spammers never send anything using their own return address, they just continue doing what they always have done.
I think of laws as the social equivalent of bug fixes in code. You fix one problem and unintentionally create 5 new problems.
Tom
only outlaws will have sp...
Uh. Ok.
-------
Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
This is a typical Australian "do something about it" position. Granted, it may not always be the best thing straight up, but we are willing to modify as required.
If you don't like it there is always Europe and the UN...........go hide there.
With Respect To. Welcome to the internet, n00b.
So if you did want to encourage law makers to pass anti-spam laws, I think it may be fairly easy to make it happen. Borrowing from the recent campaign to harass a spammer, what if people started putting the e-mail addresses of various lawmakers on the lists of spammers? I would imagine that if the lawmakers started getting tons of spam, they might be encouraged to do something about it. And I'm not just talking about US lawmakers, I'm talking about lawmakers everywhere. If Chinese or Russian lawmakers are overwhelmed with spam, they might just do something about it.
Send/track messages to 100K people: www.xPressAlert.com
I disagree... After installing TMDA I have been getting more spam. Actually it is quite funny, since I don't see any of them normally. I just checked all my spams with tmda-pending (I was bored), and I got the Nigerian email a couple weeks ago...
So what does TMDA do? It sends a reply asking to confirm that address. I receive a follow up from the Nigerian people. TMDA sends another reply. I get the Nigerian peeps again (they have a ton of gold just for me). TMDA sends a reply... this happened eight times.
So you can see that this will only increase spam! ;)
help fill in hidden movie endings @ End of the Credits
A previous thread covered this on this story mentioned it, please check this out.
I'm curious, with our politician's email addresses easially available on literally hundreds of web sites, how much spam do they already receive? Does anyone work for a politician and can tell us how much trash they get on a regular basis?
Perhaps someone should send a 'group letter' to all relevant politicians in various countries to start co-operating?
:-)
Better yet, find the email address of your favourite MPs and sign them up for all the spam mail sites you cna find... that will get them active pretty quick
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
...then only Outlaws will spam?
As mentioned previously, the myopia of thought in believing that if you "ban" something it will stop is, well, myopic.
Yes, and French considers outlawing English while German consider outlawing Budweiser and Chinan consider outlawing money.
Actually I highly doubt that any of the high ranking politicians read their email.
Most likely their email is filtered manually by an intern or assistant and only the legitmiate is passed on.
But as the internet transcends geographical borders, Australian laws would not be sufficient to bring spam under control.
Even if this law passes, it won't be of that much help. Australians will continue to receive spam originated from all other countries. As for the rest of us, we just won't be receiving any spam from Australian sources. The law is only good if the problem is contained. So spam will continue to linger around for years to come.
On an interesting note, if this law passes, it may be a good precedent case to outlaw pop-ups, pop-unders, net send messages, etc. that are equally annoying.
Yeah.. ban stick.. use it on like, like! Porn and Ogrish.com and stuff! The .au rules!
And therein lies the problem. A political group will be run by the politically-minded, who will eventually use any clout created by the group they represent to advance their own personal agendas. It may be a cynical statement, but it is borne out by precedent.
In an ideal world, there really wouldn't be such a thing as major political parties (in the US case, Democrats and Republicans). Instead, candidates would need to line up the endorsements of individual interest groups that would reflect the candidate's positions. To a certain extent that is done now, but the party labels seem to carry many of these automatically, regardless of a candidate's actual ideology.
The fact is, party labels are so broad that they don't really tell much. Who is more representative of a "Democrat" -- John Breaux or Maxine Waters? Who is the more typical "Republican" -- Rick Santorum or Olympia Snowe? Even distinctions of "conservative", "liberal", and "moderate" aren't very helpful.
Knowing that a candidate is "pro-geek", on the other hand, does tell me something useful about what to expect from him or her.
That gives me an idea: if you receive a message in a weird character set that's only useful for a language you can't read (e.g. Korean in euckr) or that isn't supported on your mail reader, the message is probably spam. Maybe we should add filtering based on character set to our spam filters?
Yes, I did.
Why do you ask?
It sounds good on the surface, and everyone likes the idea of spammers spending some quality time in a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
But...it won't work. It's just too easy to move (if its not already moved) these operations offshore to countries where pissed off AOL users aren't a concern. And that's if you can trace the messages and the trail doesn't go cold at some open relay or owned box.
Furthermore, it only invites a lot of unwanted government regulation of email. If DMCA, the Patriot Act and others aren't enough for you, can you imagine having to license an SMTP server?
What we need (and I've started to see this gain more prominance in comments to these stories) is better enforcement of fraud and racketeering laws. Most SPAM is criminal, and the best way to find the crooks is to FOLLOW THE MONEY TRAIL! The one way the crooks behind spam allow themselves to be tracked is through the mechanism that allows them to collect money from their victims.
If you can eliminate the crooks who are behind most spam, you should see a big reduction in spam. Not everything will go away, but enough should to make a big impact on the people who make a living doing the spamming. If they can't make a buck selling spam services, they might move on to something else.
If the government won't enforce the criminal laws spammers are already breaking, why should we expect them do a very good job enforcing anti-spam laws, except of course where it benefits Ashcroft et al.
Which Australian exactly? - I know a guy from Adelaide who doesn't like spam much, maybe it's him.
Does anybody know if Australia already has something similar to uce@ftc.gov? I know they used to have sweep.day@accc.gov.au, but that address bounces nowadays. I ask because lately I've been getting a lot of that $25 MLM scheme with Australians at the top of the list. You know the one, where you pay 5 people five dollars each for the reports, blah blah blah. I know that the FTC (or FCC?) finally started cracking down on U.S. citizens participating in that scheme, and it seems that it's illegal in Australia too, according to this site[google.com, using the cache because the actual site is not responding well today].
While I agree completely that spam is a pain and costs mail providers money, do we really want laws passed? After all, these are the people who crafted Patriot I & II, DMCA, and COPA/CIPA that most of us are opposed to. What will we give up to in anti-spam legislation?
At the bottom of the endless pile of paper work which characterizes all regulation lies a gun.
Alan Greenspan
Because your post came very quickly after the story had been posted here on /. and your post touched on generalizations that we all know and hate about SPAM. But then again, you could be a speed-reader or read the article somewhere else.
Basically I think you are whoring for karma by making some quick remarks which would invoke certain emotions in the general crowd here.
I may be wrong and if that's the case, I will offer my apology in advance.
My point is, in other words, that if someone doesn't know how to behave as a "netizen" then there is already an informal means of removing him from the community. All it takes is an email or even a phone call.
I don't know if anyone has ever had/written about this idea before, but it came to me as I read this article: Someone should begin a huge campaign to get every politician on every spam list imaginable. Most (all?) politicians have public email addresses, and it wouldn't be too hard to sign them up for more spam then they could ever imagine. If they're personal email is available too, it would be even better. When personal convenience is at risk for those who run the United States, change happens very quickly.
Gramm a r.
when you outlaw spam, only the criminals will get spam...
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
Or maybe not. I don't really the relevance of Linux on that issue.
Australia is just a smaller canada with hot chicks and beaches. Bla.
It might be a little over the top, but if you outlawed open relays, you could cut down on spam some. Imagine the fun when some incompetent ISP has their mail server (as well as any other computer that looks like it might be a mail server) confiscated as evidence because they were couldn't be bothered to read the instructions. :-)
While we're at it, also outlaw the act of hiring someone to send spam. This is easier to track down because presumably these people who are advertising through spam have to identify themselves in some way, otherwise the advertisement is pretty useless. Spammers spam because people are willing to pay them to do it. People pay them because they think the advertising will help their business. If they think they might have to pay a large fine, they won't view hiring a spammer as a good business decision.
If anything, the Aussies should outlaw VEGGIMITE, not Spam!
Without Spam, what should we substitute in that Monty Python song? I propose the new PC phrase, "Potted Meat Product".
Is this just a bad week for spammers? What happened to hating the spyware?
only outlaws will have spam
between the greater and lesser infinities sleep the dreams undreamt
Quick, everyone smap your senators and ask them to make spam illegal!
Who cares if one guy is thinking about outlawing SPAM!?
I've been thinking about outlawing Spam too, can I have my own
T
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
...to Australia for laws about the internet?
Given their track-record in legislating the internet. Are we really sure we want to look to them for guidelines on this?
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Does this mean we can export all our lawyers to Austrailia?
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Because now the spammers INSIDE the country have to check their entire database of email addresses to make sure none are in their country. So this would (hopefully) eliminate spam FROM Australia....
Fellowship 9/11
Post as many government email addresses to spamsites, newgroups/usenet, etc. Even if they don't read the emails themselves, the large ratio of junk emails will trigger some action. The staff who read it will voice their frustrations, the IT dept of each organization will get annoyed also. They will have the stats to show their reps.
Imagine an MP/Senators 's secretary getting 200+ spam emails a day? That's gotta persuade somebody look into this. If it's filtered by IT dept, then the IT dept will start to take notice.
Say, why don't they consider outlawing lying, cheating, and backstabbing, too. Think how much more efficient the corporate and political worlds would become. Hey, if we did that here, we could have an Honesty Czar as a sub dept. of Homeland Security!
--rgb
It seems odd to me to recommend an increase of torte action in any nation. If anything, the individual should only have to pursue 'justice' through the courts when his/her government has failed to sufficiently protect his/her financial or personal safety. Alternately, such actions could be used to goad a government to action through the continuing decisions of the Judicial branch in cases where the Federal or State/Provincial laws lag behind what society deems as just and fair (a situation that is developing here in Canada with 'soft' drug use)
Additionally, at what point would an individual be able to reasonably claim financial recompense for intense spamming by a particular company? Let's not clog the courts in any country with spurious claims for the sake of defending a principle... it's our responsibility to instead inform and educate our elected officials to implement change.
Cloudmark.com has a good solution for those who use Outlook for email.
It's a plugin that catches spam as it enters your inbox. How does it identify spam? By using the community as a resource. From your Outlook toolbar, you can report a message as spam. If enough people report it, then the plugin automatically filters it out of your inbox.
The early versions didn't work too well, but the latest one is catching about 95% of the 50-60 spam messages I get per day. I recommend checking it out.
Additionally, as a general rule legislation should be as narrowly targetted as possible. Therefore, as commercial spam is the only sort of spam causing real issues at the moment, go after it and nothing else.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I think the idea of a continent of criminals being aimed at spammers sounds delightful.
will they outlaw this too?
My ISP ArachNet, Western Australia provides spam filtering and virus scanning of e-mail automatically as part of their entire account range.
I can't say the span filtering works perfectly, but I don't recall receiving any since switching over, I've also received NO viruses since.
If all the ISP's did something responsible like this, it might not stop the spam/virus problem but it would sure reduce the numbers.
-----------------------
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
The only way to make sure that bob@yahoo.com is bob@yahoo.com is to use e-signature. You keep the list of public keys of your friends (free for them, but you have to know and trust them personally) as well as the list of certificates of CA-servers you trust. Well-trusted CA-servers keep lists of public keys for very well-know and well-trusted citizens and corps (not free and perhaps not very cheap, depends on the level of trust). Once your mail server gets email it checks the signature. if it it verifies - you can read it right the way. If not - bounce answer + save the copy in a bulk folder, just for a case (like monthly based digests sent to you - if you configure so).
See? the authentication must be applied only to ecryption software (the one provides e-signature in particular). In that case it's free for you and your friends (you exchange keys directly without CA). Perhaps it's still free for ISPs (they may or even should host their own CA, which you are going to trust, aren't you?). The goverment agencies should be also registered in their (or ISPs) CAs, but you can decide to trust govt or not (it's a free country, isn't it?). Every one else are not welcomed.
So, instead of waiting when someone can solve the problem you can start solving it right the way: install GPG or other compatible e-signature supporting software, generate your key pair and exchange public keys with your friends. Then tune your mail-filtering to reject all non-signed email messages. Then...
Here we go. Then you have to force all B2Cs (e-shopping, e-banking) where you have accounts to sign their email messages. Well, they should have done it long time ago, but they didn't. Is it b/c they are the part of spam infrastructure? Anyway, you can tune your mail filtering program to accept email from those monsters anyway (but it is a good idea each time to send them back the warning that they forgot to sign the message).
P.S. Internet (at least email) is here for about 3 decades. It's 21st centure, but we still don't know that personal higiene is not only to protect our health at sexual relationships, but within other relationships as well, including email messaging and file sharing.
Less is more !
Well, I read quickly...
I tend to comment when I have an opinion, even if it's of little use to anyone... after all, what else is a public forum for? :-)