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Virginia Anti-Spam Law; FTC Forum on Spam
kiwimate writes "According to this press release, the state of Virginia has just passed a statute making 'the worst, most egregious and fraudulent kinds of spam' legally actionable. And yes, this includes header forging. The article reads like a big AOL PR piece in some places -- the VA governor led the signing at the AOL HQ in Dulles. The story also states this comes on the eve of the first-ever FTC forum on spam in Washington D.C." The FTC also made the insightful discovery that most spam is fraudulent in some fashion.
This is the one that's always gotten me. It's obviously one of the worst possible things in spam. But how do you then track down who happens to be sending it and punish them for it?
And in further news, a minimum of two-thirds of all types of intrusive advertising contain false claims--telephone cold-calls, loud tv commercials, the crap that hides the funnies in the sunday newspaper, the daily pound of paper cluttering your mailbox, you name it. The more intrusive the advertising, the more fraudulent the content.
Remain calm! All is well!
I don't mind legitimate advertising. Spam that clearly shows itself as such isn't a problem; I can just delete it without a second thought, like tossing out the fliers in my mailbox.
It's the bullshit that these scumbags pull that bothers me. Header forging is fraud. Making invalid claims is fraud. Sending spam and making it look like legitimate mail is fraud. Spammers should be prosecuted under existing anti-fraud laws.
(And by the way, at least the VA representatives have the balls to address the problem, unlike most states.)
o/~ All God's children shall be free in Pirates of the Caribbean, when we reach that Magic Kingdom in the sky... o/~
I hate to say it, but if AOL can throw their weight around to rid me of spam then I'll stop bitching every time I get an AOL cd in the mail :)
:)
I wonder though- is there a place that we could report spam to the virginia prosecutors? Perhaps our state attorney general could setup a spam email and state residents could forward their spam there for the prosecutors to go after
I think Ralsky would get that many bounces in an hour, if he did not forge headers, and hijack mail servers.
Penalty is only $10.00 per email or $25K, whichever is less.
Not enough financial damage to spammers, but it is a start. If the statutory damages were higher, it might have a legitimate claim to being the toughest in the country.
Wind under Thy Wings
Amber
Suppose you did.
Suppose you did not.
You don't need to find who is behind the scene. Here are the steps to punish spammers without knowing them:
1. Write a small program that every user can run at home, on the seti model. Let's call it spammerSucker.
2. Identify an email as spam (this part is easy)
3. Find the website of the spammer (The email is generally full of http links)
4. Add the URL in the centralized DB of spammerSucker.
5. In minutes, millons of DSL/Cable users running spammerSucker are downloading every byte out of their server, initiating millions of sockets per second.
6. Their server is "slashdotted", and no one can access it.
Such a campaign would just result in destroying your website when you send a spam and so would make it a lot more dangerous for a company to send spam.
The danger is actually in step 2, because you don't want to blinbly suck any website...
Write boring code, not shiny code!
I forgot that AOL has a huge datacenter up North from here. Hmm.....
Unfortunately you're probably closer to the truth than they would have us believe. While the manufacturers, at least a chunk of them, could claim these do no harm (unless taken in absurd quantities, which nobody really knows how much as they aren't regulated or adequately tested), it's hard to disprove whether or not they do no good. So, it's like selling sugar pills, which can be very profitable, hence so much spam regarding all these great meds and supplements.
Spammers, of course, have used far from ethical tactics so they don't go to capitals very well armed to defend themselves, even if they could tote in some 'campaign contributions.'
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If any spammers are reading this, let me tell you about the Virginia correctional system. If you are lucky you will go to the big house. If they put you on the farm you are fucked. Most penal farms in Va grow their own food and cut their own fire wood, etc. You will come out tan and fit, my friend. I taught literacy in Wise County at the facility there. No slack for misdemeanors and light felonies. They also operate road gangs (no chains. Work is time off from your sentence with good behavior) with the Boss standing over you with a 12-gauge full of rocksalt if you decide to make like Cool Hand Luke. Also, the Virginia State Police are ruthlessly efficient and will get you. This was the best state to implement anti-spam legislation if we want spammers to hurt.
PS. It is "The Commonwealth of Virginia" not the "State of Virginia." I didn't get my hands whacked with a ruler by Mrs. Underwood to have y'all malign my beloved home with the lowly name of "state."
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
An interesting debate arose from a story I wrote earlier this week in which I published screenshots from a spammer's mailboxes.
One reader complained that this was "hacking" and that it was an unjustifiable action.
In response to that complaint I asked my readers (part-way down the page) whether there was any difference between a spammer trespassing on someone's mailbox with their crap and someone trespassing on the spammer's mailbox to expose their mis-deeds.
Gathering by the responses it appears that the rule of "do unto others" can reasonably applied to spammers and their mailboxes.
If nobody ever replied to spam, there'd be no point to it, so maybe it would dry up eventually. People who react to spam are providing the feedback that encourages the spammers to spam on.
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For great justice!