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.

Comments

Get real

[Sad Loser]

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.

in ex-yugoslavia, slovenia..

[Anonymous Coward]

..spam *is* illegal.

Fingers crossed...

[26199]

...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?

Get good internet first!

[mungeh]

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...

2-way authentication solves the spam problem?

[1337_h4x0r]

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?

Re:2-way authentication solves the spam problem?

[1337_h4x0r]

Except most SMTP servers won't allow for finger queries since that's the easiest way to harvest a list of valid e-mails. What should be done, is to verify the ESMTP ID which the SMTP server could use to check if it was sent from a valid user without revealing if the user or the ID was correct. But why does harvesting valid emails matter anymore, when users/domains which spam will be forever blocked, and not just blocked by one person, but blocked by everybody ? Remember, if you have authenticated users, it's easy to set up a master list of "spam" users/domains. (Lets say it'd have to be triggered by 1000 unique people to avoid greifing). This means spammers would get to send one batch of spam per domain - thats pretty expensive after a while, if you think about it :)

Re:2-way authentication solves the spam problem?

[Sandman1971]

Something's even easier, and it already exists: Authenticated SMTP. You need to authenticate with the SMTP server when you send mail, just like you authenticate for POP/IMAIL. If this was adopted everywhere, it would solve many problems:

It would cut down on the amount of spam from 'spam newbies'.

It would allow for the creation of a blacklist on non-authenticated SMTP servers. This would encourage those not running authenticated SMTP to do so.

It would also fix the 'no roaming' SMTP problem. I could travel abroad and still send mail thru my ISP's SMTP server, since there would no longer be any need to restrict SMTP access by IP address space (though doing both would allow for extra security measures).

You could trace back the originating user. Now, user accounts could still get hacked, but it's an added measure of security.

There's also a big flaw in your suggestion. Such a system would allow for easier harvesting of email addresses. Someone could easilly write a piece of software to check for valid accounts, with the added benifit of not suffering from bounceback messages!

Only sounds good in a sound bite

[worst_name_ever]

Aside from the obvious fact that banning spam in country X does little to stop spam coming out of country Y - i.e. Australians will still be getting Turkish porno spam - the precedent set by this worries me. We've already seen the far-reaching effects of the DMCA; depending on how it's worded, I coud forsee a blanket anti-spam law having a similar "scorched earth" outcome. The last thing I want is for some sleazy corporation suing to stop me from doing some perfectly legal and peaceful activity they don't like, on the grounds that they can weasel it into fitting a too-loose description in a piece of wrong-headed legislation designed to prevent something totally else.

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.

All Legal Solutions to Tech Problems are Bad

[tmundar]

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

Re:Now if only the US Senate would take note

[jkrise]

"YOU prove ME wrong."

Your logic only applies if you're an alleged criminal and I'm a prosecutor! In a debate, when you make an assertion, you got to back it up with facts, reliable estimates, study reports (unsponsored, I might add) or relevant data.
Just throwing out some piece of statistic which is being bandied about by the big guns, to deflect attention, will not do.

Consider some facts:
1. Most spam is for products and services (if you can call them so) based in the US.
2. Spam needs bandwidth to travel, and lots of it. More than 70% of the internet bandwidth is within the US. Makes it almost impossible for 95% of the spam to come in from outside.
3. Receiving spam yields no direct revenue for the ISPs concerned. Do you believe US based ISPs passively receive and service 95% of spam traffic for nothing? Think again, and more calmly.

Evil idea

[sstidman]

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.

Re:2-way authentication ... TMDA

[bucklesl]

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! ;)