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.
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....
...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.
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...
Yes. It depends on the law, but yes.
There are UK laws specifically making UK citizens who commit criminal acts abroad responsible under UK law. i.e. enjoy dodgy recreational pursuits while on holiday, come back and go to jail.
That you are actually committing the crime against another country while IN your own country certainly puts you under your local jurisdiction.
This law would protect the world from Aussie spam more than it would protect Australia from the worlds 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.
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.
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?
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.
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
But you forget that the secretaries basically run the show anyway...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Forging headers is not an exploit of a bug. Mail servers simply don't look at them. Why?
Received Headers:
1. Parsing and reversing all the domains in there is expensive. (as expensive as spam? probably not but see #3)
2. There's nothing in the RFC that says all the headers have to match up end to end. A large email provider often has separate inbound and outbound mail servers so a mail getting forward will have headers from A to B and C to D, despite being a legitimate mail.
3. Third, there is no requirement for reverse naming on mail servers. If there was then maybe #1 would be a valid tactic.
The from header:
This is what most non-technical people think of when they talk forged headers. Again, this is not an exploit, in fact its part of relaying which is a feature of the SMTP RFC. Some mail providers (like us) actually check the domain you are using when sending and stop you from sending the mail if you are faking it. However this isn't what most ISP's do because not many people actually use the Verizon or whatever address.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, this is just a tribute.
...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!