Slashdot Mirror
Stronger Anti-Spam Law Proposed
NumberField writes "The fight against Spam is making for some strange bedfellows. A new bill sponsored by Senator
Charles Schumer (D-NY)
and the right-wing Christian Coalition
that would let individuals sue spammers for $1000 per message. What isn't clear is how they will define spam broadly enough to outlaw it, but narrowly enough to avoid making it a bonanza for lawyers. For more information, see Schumer's
fact sheet (PDF), or his
press release." Update: 06/13 14:20 GMT by M : The draft bill (pdf) is available.
You can propose all the anti-spam laws you want. But if you keep it restricted to one country, you won't go very far. Spammers will use other locations to send their spam from. So it only works if you have an international law.
That's all very well, but for a large chunk of spam, identifying the spammer if difficult, and to it in a way that would hold up in court would be even harder..
I lay awake last night wondering where the sun had gone, then it dawned on me.
I propose the following:
1. Get local spam under control.
2. Start sanctions agaist countries / ISPs from which spam originates.
Not sure this makes any sense though, but if countries like China find themselves at a disadvantage due to a handful of local spammers I would think they would be more motivated to deal with the problem.
I'm not proposing any tehnical solutions though... anyone have ideas on that?
.: Max Romantschuk
If the law is drafted in a manner which allows authorities to go after the people benefiting from spam, rather than just the people actually sending it, then they could make substantial progress. Most of the spam I receive is for US-based companies, even if it was actually sent from China.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
let individuals sue spammers for $1000 per message
I don't think many individuals would bother with this, it's easier to just the delete the spam mail than it is to risk loosing money on some lawsuit, and even if they did decide to sue them they would only have "defeated" one spammer (or his team or whatever it could be). 1 down 50000 to go.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
The ONE country affected and profiting from spam and anti-spam s/w is never known to suffer in silence when other countries cause economic harm to it. In other words, if outside spam was the real problem, this would have been solved a million times by now.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I don't see the point in having a 'do not spam' list for the US, when the majority of spam the rest of us are receiving on this planet comes from the US. Is the US govt seriously going to compile a list for all 6 billion of us?
This proposal still makes it a civil matter for the recipient, having to sue the spammer for damages. What's needed is a federal US law making mass junk emailing a criminal offense. Instead they are just pushing it back onto the people to fight in civil courts. The only winners here are the spammers and lawyers.
If they are able to legally define spam (not that easy), the spammers will immediately find an alternative which is not illegal...
It's useless for the same reason P2P can't be wiped out!
Long live the freedom of information!!
I want my karma, and I want it now!
would this bill be used to attack people you don't like rather than the real spammers??
:)
one would think that sexual harassment lawsuit is used when you're fired by your female superior, not when you're sexually harassed
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The press release is only about Porn targetted at children, shouldn't that be unwanted email targeted at everybody??
As they stand, the proposals seem to target all spam, not just porn, although it's clear that the christians are in it to stop the porn. It makes me uneasy when reasonable people ally themselves with crazy people, even if the end is good. How long before some of the christians realise that the bill does nothing to combat the exchange of pornographic materials between consenting adults?
1) Automatic loss of suit if return/reply address is faked/unreachable or there is no unsubscribe address
2) Recipient must reply requesting to be removed from list or mail unsubscribe address to become eligible.
3) If Recipient receives more mail after 28 days have passed then suit is proven.
Seems easy enough to me. Do it!
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
It is not the government's place to tackle the spam problem. If they try, they'll just fuck it up, like they've fucked up so many other things in the past. Spam has all the telltale signs of a problem that legislation won't help. It's a relatively victimless crime (or rather, its victims, with the exception of those companies who run the huge backbones, are at most marginally impacted by the problem), it can be done in a relatively anonymous fashion, and any laws banning or regulating it will be very difficult to enforce. Problems like that (drug abuse and so on) are never helped by laws, and instead just get worse with each additional crackdown.
The problem can never be fully solved by technical means, being a sociological problem, but technical solutions can do a much more effective job in curbing the problem than any legislative solution, and cause fewer additional problems in the process. Rather than try to get the government to pass ineffective feel-good laws, let's fix the problem from our end. It's time to replace SMTP with a less trusting protocol - the Internet is clearly a very different place than it was when SMTP was originally created, and we need a new mail protocol to match the times.
Keep the government's laws off my Internet, people. It is a medium that spans the entire globe and is not under the jurisdiction of any one government anyway, so laws will never do the job. They'll just cause more problems and never solve anything.
What's wrong with it being a bonanza for lawyers? And what exactly do you mean by bonanza? Surley you dont mean the television show from the 60's? why do you have to bring Mitch Vogel into this? Or Michael Landon for that matter?
Seriously though, if the judgements are only $1000 I can't see this creating a lot of work for laywers. Besides whether you like lawyers or not they do have a place in society and to craft legislation based on whether laywers will get involved is retarted.
One scary thing about a federal spam law is that our national government tends to not know when to stop when it comes to 'protecting the rights' of the innocent.
Add to this the variable of an extremist right-wing organization... this proposal could end up taking away more rights than it protects.
Remember that fiasco known as the Communications Decency Act?
and with the "Do Not Spam" registry of e-mail addresses, wouldn't it make it easier for spammers to request such do-not-spam list and spam it??
Yes, absolutely. This is the biggest problem with the idea. Even if the list is only provided in the form of one-way queries (look up a particular address to see whether it's listed, without seeing the whole list), spammers outside the US would be able to brute-force the list and get a list of confirmed e-mail addresses. They'll figure their success rates should be pretty high, since these people aren't getting other spam from the US to distract them from whatever crap they're peddling. And of course once this is done, the resulting list will be for sale for about $500 per CD, and we'll get spam offering to sell it to us.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Most of the spam that I receive comes from South Korea, Russia and China, not the United States.
If the spam is advertising goods or services sold by someone in the U.S., the spam came from the U.S., regardless of what physical server delivered it. As they say, "follow the money." I don't care that Alan Ralsky pays for his spam to be sent through Brazil. His spam still came from the United States. An effective anti-spam law will allow you to sue him for a significant sum of money ($1000 or more) and federal, state, and local law enforcement to prosecute him for a crime.
Want to deal with overseas firms sending spam to U.S. citizens? Then handle it like the "war on terror." Pressure other countries to turn over spammers for prosecution for violating U.S. laws. This can be done with multiple tools, including threats to revoke a country's "Most Favored Nation" trading status, reduction in aide to countries where we provide same, tariffs, and even federally-mandated blocking of Internet traffic to and from that country.
It should be about consent rather than content. Creating two classes of spam is a bad thing.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
From the fact sheet:
Anyone who sends spam to these addresses will be subject to stiff fines. The database will be protected by military-caliber encryption to ensure the protection of its contents.
Nonsense. How can the database be encrypted if all potential spammers are deemed to have notice of every address on it?
Such a provision would make it easy for anyone to cause harm to a company or individual by forging spam that appears to be benefitting them. It's a bad idea.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Spam is so easy to kill: add authentication to SMTP and create a new email network of authenticated email. Servers won't accept email from unauthenticated sources, and spammers will be unable to hide their tracks.
SMTP already supports authentication. My server won't send mail except from someone who has a username and password for it. How do you make everyone configure their mail servers that way? Hell, we can't even get everyone to turn off open relays.
The problem with what you propose is that it is sender-side. How will you know if the sender and/or his server are to be trusted? Will your server ask theirs if the sender is to be trusted? Will yours ask if the e-mail address is valid? It would take spammers about 20 minutes before they had something that mimmicked a legitimate e-mail server.
Or are you proposing something like the third-party system we have for secure web sites, where every person operating a mail server pay hundreds of dollars per year to Verisign (or a handful of other "trust" companies)? How would Verisign determine if a server operated by some guy in Argentina was to be trusted? Would you revoke his certificate if spam came from his server? What if it turned out to be a temporary configuration problem or a bug in his mail server that was exploited by a spammer? What if it was perpetrated by an ISP's customer -- one with legitimate access to that mail server? If I signed up for an AOL account and then started spamming from there, would AOL's mail certificate be revoked?
It's not an easy problem to solve through technology. If it was, a technological solution would have been implemented five years ago.
My suggestion is that the SUPPLIER of the advertised goods is fined, not the spammers. The supplier is, after all, paying someone to send the spam, and they're easily traceable (otherwise they'd have trouble fulfilling your orders for Viagra, septic tank cleaner and goat pr0n).
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
I'm tempted to say, "Keep your nose out of our Constitution."
We Americans do view the 1st Amendment as "Sacred Text" mainly because we don't trust today's politicians to amend anything in the Constitution. They would seriously fuck it up because of "political correctness".
I (we) don't want to live in your socialist 21st century. And I'll keep my firearms just in case you want to force me.
Our Constitution is what separates us from you and I'd just as soon go down fighting rather than give it up. In other words - it must truly suck to be you.
Spam--come on if the christian coalition (caps left off on purpose) want spam stopped so their children do not have to see t&a they should filter their email better and stop having their children sign up for the sex mailing list in the first place.
As for spam in general. laws will not help but will just serve to allow lawyers, RIAA and others loop holes to screw over the internet. When it is time to err it needs to be in favor of the freedom of speech-take care of spam yourself with a good filter, deal with it the same as you do your mail box with postal mail-->the argument about spam being free is BS it has to be written and (maybe spell checked) and then has to be sent, it is just cheaper than postal mail. The government need to stop trying to legislate everything and let us live our lives freely.
How long before some of the christians realise that the bill does nothing to combat the exchange of pornographic materials between consenting adults?
Most Christians aren't that naive. They know that kinky and perverted things go on between consenting adults every day. That doesn't mean that they want to see it. And if someone doesn't want to look at porno, why should you assault their conscience with it? Just like you wouldn't go to Egypt and start throwing sausage at every Muslim you saw.
Doesn't freedom of religion grant them the freedom to go on blocking the crud coming at them as long as they are not impinging on the rights of others?
Dont you think it's a greater violation of rights having spyware and adware on your system than just recieving unsolicited e-mail? I think spam is just a nuisance while spy/adware actually affects performance of your hardware, not to mention the fact that its broadcasting your private information to the world allowing you to recieve a large portion of spam (mmm...large portion of spam).It's like me parking my car on your lawn then setting up cameras looking into each of your windows. Unfortnately everyone that recieves spam is aware of it, unlike spy/adware. And hence, public is clamoring for spam to stop. Dont get me wrong I love charging the chumps that install i-mesh/kazaa/realplayer/etc. money for removing the crap that makes there brand new Dell run like a 486, but if your talking rights violations that takes the cake. I say that all of you not already using a spy/ad bot removal program should run one ...youd be surpised what youll find.
PS. Dont forget the growing number of spam coming through windows own messenger service.