Slashdot Mirror
Spam Meeting Wrap-up
wendigo2002 writes "Get used to that daily flood of e-mail come-ons, Viagra offers and lucrative enticements to invest in Nigerian pyramid schemes. Internet gurus, software designers and lawyers today ended a three-day Federal Trade Commission discussion on combating spam by concluding neither technology nor laws are yet capable of completely dealing with the plague."
they might work better if they got spammed every day? If we can persuade these guys to get hotmail addresses, they might understand better...
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
To over 40 million email addresses. If you don't wish to continue recieving these emails, you can follow the link at the bottom to unsubscribe.
Yay for meetings to determine that which you already know.
The Washington Post takes a slightly more sensationalist take on the "bare knuckle," "historic" forum.
The issue of spam is not an issue of free speech, its' an issue of theft of service and of fraud. And the answer is a total re-write of the SMTP specification and standard to allow accountability and traceability of email messages
I wish all those who convene to discuss law-enforcement and/or regulatory initiatives were so honest about their future prospects for success. Can you imagine what the DEA would be like if someone back in the 50s or 60s had actually gotten together and said "you know, guys, we'll never stop the flow of drugs into the country, and it's only going to get worse". On the other hand, that might have made the problem worse.
I still couldn't fault them for being honest, though.
Lets see more of those! I hope the reward applies irrespective of whether you bring in the spammers dead or alive :-)
``We are now importing more spam from the United States,'' he joked. ``We are actually learning what American culture is through spam.''
Hopefully you know that it's not an entirely accurate view of American culture...
Do you have ESP?
Back when the Internet was a nicer place, it made sense to allow anyone to send anyone mail through any system. Now that Internet access is much more common and the propensity of abuse on open systems, it's time to either bury RFC-821 or make it significantly more modern.
No, the deluge of unsolicited garbage will continue regardless of what is done legislatively and with technology. I'm glad to see that people are finally waking-up to the fact that more laws won't fix the spam problem. But technology can be used to make it harder for spammers to hide in their anonymous cloak.
The processing of sending email needs an overhaul that gives system administrators the ability to determine the source of incoming mail and impart a "trust" level of the message. Messages coming from systems that have a high trust are tagged in the headers while those coming from systems that seem dubious or lack any sort of real credentials are tagged accordingly.
No, it won't stop spam, but it'll allow people to simply deny access to systems and users that are a continued problem, forge credentials or email addresses.
That's one approach. Another is sender-risks-paying.
It seems to me that the problem with accountability/traceability is that it would probably require people to have a digital identity that pervades the whole internet. Well, how is this going to be implemented? The bearded-hacker community tried to implement a public key infrastructure, but it's been a huge failure, since it's never reached the critical mass where it would become useful to most people. (It's also way too hard to use.) The other well-known proposal is .NET. Do you really want a future where you have to have a .NET identity in order to send e-mail?
And what about those times when you really do need to send anonymous e-mail? What about corporate whistleblowers? Political dissidents?
I prefer the sender-risks-paying idea. There have been a lot of these proposals floating around, and yes, they've been discussed a lot on Slashdot before. No, they will not require your ISP to bill you for e-mail. No, they will not require non-spammers to pay any money at all. No, they need not involve any actual money to change hands (the currency could be based on CPU cycles, for example). There's nothing technically wrong with these proposals. The bearded-hacker community just needs to go ahead and implement one and start using it. Otherwise MS will implement it in a proprietary way (their Pennyblack project), and it will be another brick in the prison that keeps people locked into Windows/Office/Outlook.
Find free books.
I've always thought that this is a golden opportunity for La Cosa Nostra. They could sell spam protection insurance. Get spammed? Guido will pay the spammer a visit and "explain" how spamming is not conducive to a long and healthy life.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Motohiro Tsuchiya, a communications professor with the International University of Japan, said Friday that about 80 percent of spam in Japan comes from outside the country and most of it is in English.
``We are now importing more spam from the United States,'' he joked.
Yeah! Finally Japanese importation of at least one U.S. product exceeds their exportation!
"We are excited at the news to increase the amounts of this highly desirable content that we email every day," said Xing Dung Ho Chung, president of some organization in China that sends over 5 billion SPAM emails daily. "Our customers will be very pleased when download times increase proportionally with the desirable noise to undesirable signal ratio as we flood the Internet with our information, preventing undesirable signal from getting through."
Hong Dong Chong Shlong commented, "Our goal is to reduce the Internet into a medium for advertising with no possibility of gaining any other use from it. Our long term plans include government lobbying to illegalize the information that people want while simultaneously forcing people to spend a minimum quota of time reading every word of SPAM and clicking on every full screen advertisement that comes up. Strategic partnerships with computer companies and additional legislation will force the consumer to purchase a new computer each day because the hard drive of yesterday's computer will break down with the wear and tear of yesterday's immeasurable amount of SPAM."
SPAM companies also indicated plans to lobby for laws requiring the consumer to purchase every product and service advertised to them. The long term plan is to give huge multinational corporations an easy method to eternal, perpetually increasing profits with no benefit to the consumer. Humanity, except the shareholders of several enormous conglomerates, will be enslaved forever.
Spam tools are currently at the point tht detection of spam is a near-certainty and the probabilities for false-positives (e.g. good mail getting called spam) are measured in the 0.00n-0.0n% range (that is n in 100,000 to n in 10,000) which can almost always be improved on locally by the user through various means that are anti-spam-tool independant.
SpamAssassin is currently my tool of choice. It's very flexible, can be used with any UNIXish mailer and is just getting frighteningly better over time.
SA's recent addition of Razor2, a Bayesian filter and improved handling DNS blacklists (which SA weights so you can apply them withour worrying about slicing large and useful parts of the Internet out of your field of view) have reduced many concerns that folks had before about active abuse of SA's rule-base in the past. The speed with which this system applies hundreds of tests to a message is also quite stunning, and a major boost to Perl's tacit reputation as a "slow" language.
The biggest problem with SA right now is probably the inability to scale up to the mid-range ISPs and medium-sized business without SERIOUS harware allocation due to the heavyweight neature of its testing. That's my personal mission for SA over the next year or so. My goal is to make SA a reasonable option for anyone that has to process orders of magnitude more mail than your average ISP (e.g. AOL).
When the upcoming 2.54 comes out, I HIGHLY recommend checking it out. You can install SA on most UNIX-like systems, as long as they have Perl installed by typing (as root)following the configuration process if you have not done so for Perl before, and then typingAfter that it's just a matter of how you want to configure your MTA to talk to SA. I recommend using SA in "spamd" mode with sendmail and procmail. If you already use sendmail with procmail delivery, you just have to change your
Good luck!
Nothing will be done until someone answers the question that lawmakers always ask:
..." All the politician hears is "There's these people who make money" and wonders "How can I get some of it?"
What's in it for me?
No matter what you present to a politician, no matter how good the cause or important the problem, laws get introduced and passed for only one reason, and that reason is that someone was able to answer that question.
Sure, it's possible that the answer was "you'll advance your career if you save mankind with this bill", but that almost never happens. There's always a payoff somewhere, and what I can't figure out is a way to tell a Congressman what's the benefit to him for putting in the effort to fix the spam problem. And getting a bill passed is a hell of a lot of work.
I say: "There's these people who make money by sending a deluge of annoying fradulent emails
that
If every spam victim donated a dollar to support congressmen (IE, campaign funding) to do something about spam, then it'll get done. I for one am ready to help.
Just put your name at the bottom of the list, and send $5 to the person at the top of the list. Now send the list to five of your friends and soon, real soon, we'll have enough money to buy a whole session of Congress. This is completely legitimate, a lawyer looked it over, but you mustn't break the chain.
White list.
:) ) unseen. Eventually, if everybody started doing this, spammers would see zero revenue, and the tide of spam would disappear.
If the *only* way for email to arrive in my mailbox was if it came from (or at least purported to come from) somebody on my list, I'd never see spam again. No need to bounce it, just delete it from the mail server, sight (and site
Anybody know of a Linux email app that does this all, deleting spam at the server but downloading wanted email? I'm all ears.
Lemon curry?