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AOL, MS & Yahoo Unite On Anti-Spam Initiative
dilaudid writes "FT.com has an article about AOL, Yahoo and MS putting aside their differences to combat spam. An AOL VP is quoted as saying "Our customers are telling us it is the number one problem with the internet." Their intended response is "narrowly-defined federal legislation aimed at so-called "king-pin" spammers" who send the bulk of the mails. "
Finally! The Evil Empire has thought of something truly helpful to do with the 1 trillion dollars of cash. ;-)
;-)
I am concerned that when all of this is said and done, only users of a Microsoft OS will not receive spam.
That this puts scumshit like Ralsky out of business... I'm getting sick and tired of receiving upwards of 100 spams a day.
2 months ago less than 50% of my incoming e-mail was spam. Now it's running 65%.
Corporatism != Free Market
Wanna bet that their strategy involves DRM and only accepting/sending e-mail from approved operatin systems?
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
AOL is currently using censorship to try to solve their problem. Their customers want the ISP to stop spam, and AOL interprets this as a license to censor incoming mail for "spamness".
It never occurred to them that perhaps the customer should decide what is and is not acceptable.
This form of spam-filtering is very dangerous - when someone else decides for you who can and can not send you email.
Its obvious, but something to note, that you need to have a yahoo/aol/msn email account to see all the benefits of this anti-spam initiative.
Nope. RTFA. It clearly says the plan includes suing the hell out of the spammers. If they can't turn a profit, everyone gets less spam.
Wait, lemme guess- that "narrowly-defined" definition of "spammer" will not include internet service providers advertising their services, nor companies the ISPs have paid to spam their subscribers?
My grandmother got porno spam within 2-3 days of her MSN "internet appliance" getting set up, and it had a very unusual account name(with numbers in it, too)- no dictionary atttack hit this one. She hadn't even figured out how to surf the web yet. Wanna guess who sold out her email address? First 3 guesses don't count.
Please help metamoderate.
Perhaps if these three got together and ran some decent television commercials which cut to the core of spam it would greatly reduce, i.e.
Would you buy questionable medications from someone who solicits you from a forged email address?
Would you consider giving your personal financial information to someone incapable of proper grammar or even good spelling?
Would you visit a site alleged to contain pr0n/child pr0n knowing your visit may be tracked?
(some percentage, like 100%) of spam is unsolicited, commits an act of trespassing, is made by people who have nothing of actual value to offer and is intent on defrauding you. Visit www.cauce.org for more information.
Sadly, these companies will trumpet how spam costs billions of dollars, but a few million on public information awareness advertising is beyond them. Hell, I don't even see anti-spam public service annoucements on MSNBC or Yahoo. Smells like more ado about nothing.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Spam can be solved very, very simply. Everyone with a brain cell knows this. People need to stfu and do it right. I'll outline the basic steps of one way to do it, there's many others equally simple and valid. Actually, in this outline I'll solve not only the problem of spam, but also the problem of adult content on the web and filtering it for children. Needless to say you can combine the two to stop porn spam too. Here goes:
1) Set a technical standard for senders to classify emails in the header fields. Say, an X-header like "X-Mail-Classification: ". Give it three legal values: "UCE", "SCE", and "Personal". UCE is Spam, SCE is when you told a company explicitly that they could spam you (you really did visit their site and give them your address for future announcements or whatever), and Personal is anything else.
2) Set a similar technical standard for rating the adultness of websites. Make an HTTP header field, call it "Content-Rating", with a range of values similar to modern cable TV ratings (first a rating like PG-13, R, etc... followed by WHY (R - Violence, X - Strong Sexual Content, etc..).
3) Pass a bill in congress making it a legal requirement that all sites and emails MUST contain these headers, unless they fall in the "best" category (by that I mean, emails which actually fall in the Personal category are not required by law to state this, and websites which would have a G rating are not requried to state this). Failure to have a rating results in fines, having an obviously false rating (porn site rated PG, etc) results in even bigger fines - repeat offenses land you in a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
4) Obviously once the headers are well-defined, and prevalent because of the legal requirement, software vendors need to mod email clients and web browsers to recognize these headers, which is extremely trivial. The user can then block bad sites and trash bad emails automatically or do whatever else they wish. If something makes it through the system (unwanted porn, unwanted UCE), you've got a clear case that they failed to properly label it with headers, which violates the new law above and lands them with criminal fines.
11*43+456^2
Don't let them fool you. This is not for the customer. This is so AOL, MSN, and Yahoo can save on bandwidth costs.
Has anyone here REALLY considered not using e-mail ever again because of spam? Does anyone here REALLY believe spam is going to put an end to electronic communication?
Forbidding certain companies from sending out mass e-mails could mean your mailing list is next. I am just as annoyed by spam as the next person (well, maybe not, since I seem to get a lot less than some people here complain about), but charging for or forbidding bulk e-mails will put a cramp in more peoples' style than just the spammers.
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
Who are you trying to kid? When was the last time the government passed any restriction law that was narrow and stayed narrow? Invariably someone will find a reason to broaden the scope. It's a slippery slope to being forced to get an SMTP license.
The best way to fight spam is to enforce the existing criminal laws. Spam is almost universally fraudulent at best, if not outright criminal behavior.
It's also the easit to pursue, since the money trail *will* lead to people responsible for the spam being sent and its the easiest trail to follow. I don't believe that SPAM is necessarily trackable, especially if it involves hijacked or cracked mail systems.
As the costs for this goes up, the slippery-slope endgame will be that email addresses are registered (like DNS), and mail servers and intermediate systems will have to reject email with unknown endpoints. Actually, this could be cool in a carbomite maneuver sort of way - all 'illegal' email is directed back to the sender along with an additional message saying why it was rejected.
On a personal note, I have a problem with my ISP right now where spam actually chokes my inbound download (because of invalid headers, etc.), so I have to use POP3 Scan Mailbox to roto-rooter the queue before all my mail can download. Major pita. But, I'm hoping to make mods to Thunderbird to allow me to do this in one swell foop, as it were.
"Stop whining!" - Arnold, as Mr. Kimble
Finally! The Evil Empire has thought of something truly helpful to do with the 1 trillion dollars of cash.
Well, enough spammers seem to use IIS... Maybe they could "extend" the HTTP protocol to detect whether the referring website URL was received in a spam, and use it to disable the server... :)
Until then, my little script works well enough:
#!/bin/bashI _WILL_DO_THE_SAME_TO_YOUR_WEBLOGS
COUNT=0
while [ $COUNT -lt 2000 ]; do
lynx -dump $1?YOU_FILL_MY_MAILBOX_WITH_UNSOLICITED_CRAP_AND_
let COUNT=COUNT+1
echo $COUNT
done
Note that my website includes a warning about what happens to unsolicited e-mail. Apparently, the "Order Viagra, Diet Pills & more with NO PRESCRIPTION!" people wanted to stress-test their IIS server at Beijing Telecom.
284
Please try the following:The page cannot be displayed
There are too many people accessing the Web site at this time.
* Click the [1]Refresh button, or try again later.
* Open the home page, and then look for links to the information you want.
HTTP 403.9 - Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected
Internet Information Services
Technical Information (for support personnel)
* Background:
This error can occur if the Web server is busy and cannot process your request due to heavy traffic.
* More information:
[2]Microsoft Support
References
1. javascript:location.reload()
2. http://www.microsoft.com/ContentRedirec
Poor spammer. But then again, I'm only fulfilling his wish...
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
IMHO
ulterior motives are at work...
if AOL was serious about stopping spam, they'd catch it on the way out. I had 4 this morning that ANY decent filter would have caught (it's at work, so I am stuck with a krap filter).
if aol/msn seek legislation, better read the fine print, cause the real meat isn't in the title/stated intent.
Most spam arrives with forged return addresses
Forged return addresses harm the reputation of the person or entity whose address was forged
Forged return addresses are attempt to deceive filters based on "from" addresses, the most effective "opt-out" for most users of email (especially non-experts)
Forged return addresses harm the reputation of the forged email providers, making their services unattractive to legitimate users who don't want to have a "spam domain" address If using forged headers was a criminal and civil offense, and if penalties for those offenses were actively enforced, that would send a strong message to all spammers that they cannot hide behind a stolen email address. Here I do make a distinction between anonymous mail (return address is an anonymous remailing service, used with their knowledge and permission) and a forged one (an address used without authorization). You lose little by blocking remailers, but you lose a lot by blocking aol, msn, and yahoo!
One of the focus areas of the joint statement against spam by AOL, MS & Yahoo is the redesign of commercial email standards. It is critically important that the Open Source community rises to the challenge, and forms an alliance to ensure that the new measures for fighting spam are incorporated in open standards for mail delivery. It is the unofficial policy of Microsoft (see the "Halloween documents") to "enrich" open standards to combat open source software. The "war on spam" declared today is an important initiative, but poses the threat of ending the availability of open source email solutions. This could mean the end of free email if AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo are left in charge of email standards.