Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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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?
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Nah, at least you can prosecute Australians sending spam to other Australians and perhaps abroad. If every country banned it then spam would decrease dramatically.
Fair enough, it might not help you now but it's a step in the right direction in my opinion.
But you forget that the secretaries basically run the show anyway...
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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.
Certainly an issue, but not an issue that hasn't been dealt with before in cases of mail fraud. As long as both countries have a low tolerance for the crime being committed, then the main problem is that it's an administrative hassle.
Of course, the level of hassle required may make this highy inconvenient to actually prosecute a spammer. While annoying, spam is really only a minor inconvenience. Hardly worth the effort of tracking the guy down, getting multiple police forces, and arranging witness statements, and prosecuting.
The other problem is many countries simply have more important problem to deal with. The Nigerian scam is already illegal in all countries, but I still get roughly one email a week from these guys. Someone who is simply trying to sell me cheap printer cartridges will probably get no interest even from stricter governments.
This law would protect the world from Aussie spam more than it would protect Australia from the worlds spam!
That's basically the idea. The report states that the Australian Government should push for the creation of an international agreement on outlawing spam (i.e. similar to the current international IP agreements).
Introducing domestic anti-spam laws is obviously the first step to achieving this. It would be difficult to convince the international community to introduce similar laws if Australia didn't have them in place themself.
Despite this, until some form of international consensus is reached, these laws are basically just a symbolic gesture.
...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.
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
Just about every legal solution to a technological problems end up backfiring.
The thing is, spam isn't a techological problem, it's a social one.
If spam were purely a techological problem, there would be a technological solution. The fact that there are people out there who don't care that they're harrassing millions of innocent people means that there is no technological solution.
The way I envisage this to work is that the Governments of countries pass legislation that basically states an ISP shall not knowingly host a spammer, and failure to evict spammers from your network in a realistic timeframe will result in prosecution. You then have a government body that collects spam complaints from anywhere on the planet (like uce@ftc.gov) and goes after the ISPs hosting spammers within its jurisdiction. If the state wins the case, then they get money into their coffers (hopefully offset against taxes) until ISPs get the message and cut off the spammers.
Sure, it's not perfect and will leave an "Axis of Evil" attitude toward the nations that didn't enact such legislation, with large scale black listing by some parties for encouragement, no doubt. It would also be nice if the spammee could extract money from the spammer directly of course, but face it, that's unlikely to happen. It seems to me that removing the support infrastructure is going to be the most effective short term solution at this point.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Spam is a social problem in a technological environment. Politicians are trying to codify countermeasures without recognizing the characteristics of the medium. They're going to screw up. It's inevitable. But most of the "solutions", which the tech people have been offering so far, revolve around eye-for-an-eye, collective punishment, adding addresses to filterlists with no established and timely way to remove outdated or wrong entries ("burning" scarce IP-space) and restricting personal mail use to the verge of uselessness. I used to think that laws on this topic aren't the way, but I begin to wonder if politicians can really do a worse job.