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.
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..
And hence it would have to be a spammer very confident in his/her anonymity to risk it.
It might be difficult in court, but it sounds to me like this law would act majorly as a deterrent too.
How about the spammer gets 1 minute in jail per recipient for any unsolicited commercial email they send?
(from the pdf linked in article):
Prohibit Harvesting of E-mail Addresses and Dictionary Attacks:
The bill will also prevent spammers from assembling e-mail lists through the practice of address "harvesting" carried out by software known as spam "bots" that mine web sites, chat rooms,
I really wonder how one can prevent harvesting, and how that could be enforced without making non-spammers pay.
main(char O){O++&&(((O-291)*O+27788)*O-868020?1:putchar(O++
Recently there was an article posted here about taxes on cable modems here, but it occurs to me that spam, like postal junk mail, could help pay for infrastructure just as easily.
Not an original idea, but like a state sales tax (or one of several European VATs), the onus would be on the merchants, or in this case those relaying spam, to collect and pay up.
Now, since American companies are being required to collect and disperse VAT for sales made in Europe, surely there will be some sort of reciprocity there, and in general America (or the states therein) would impose sanctions on countries that did not abide by these new spam tax laws.
With spam in the news as much as it has been lately, surely some government types will take notice, that there is cash sitting in their inbox (or in their filtered spam folder if they're smart). And SpamAssassin catches a huge percentage of the spam I get lately, so if my mail machine has to do a little bit of filtering so that middle America can get cable modems and dsl, and so that maybe the last mile can be fiber someday, well, I'll bite the bullet, as long as I don't have to pay cable modem taxes or any other such things and get this spam.
" I propose the following:
1. Get local spam under control.
Er.. how do you define 'local spam'. I got a Nigerian-type mail from a Hong-Kong based system on my Hotmail (More Useless Everyday). The Niegerian account is hosted by an American entity and the beneficiary seems to be an American as well.
2. Start sanctions agaist countries / ISPs from which spam originates."
How does one detet the origin of the spam? It could have been added as payload during a virus infection on a Windows PC. Since ALL countries in the world have Winows PCs, and even Microsoft's systems have suffered from spam and virus attacks, whom do you start sanctions against?
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
"right-wing Christian Coalition"
You know, I've never liked right-wing religious groups before. They are, after all, the people who thought up things like the 'sin' tax. Alcohol, smoking, gambling.. Sins? According to whom?
They're the ones who would have games like Grand Theft Auto removed from the shelves of stores. Good movies censored to the point where they become comedies, because no one can say the word 'sex'.
More seriously, they're the types that would make second class citizens out of women once again by denying them the right to do as they see fit with their bodies.
But you know, today, I look at the right-wing religious lobbyists and say, "Hey, good job."
$1000 per spammer. Who gives a flying fsck if the lawyers get richer off of it. If I, and everyone else, can easily sue every damned spammer that attempts to fill our inboxes, the lawyers deserve a few more Mercedes for doing it.
I was hoping for legislation that would allow the bounty hunting and subsequent execution of spammers. (And no, that wasn't a 'joke'.) While I seriously doubt such legislation will ever see the light of day, I'd settle for $1k a pop in the meantime.
I don't even give a damn about the money; the lawyers can go buy barrels of new car scent to go with their Mercedes if they want. I simply want to make life as difficult as possible for spammers.
You know, backbone providers used to take sanctions against their customers if they allowed spam to flourish, and they in turn took sanctions against their customer's, etc. down to the individual spammers.
A case could be made for requiring networks to take measures against spam, and to tax networks that do not, or that are connected to networks that do not (and so, become tainted). So if you receive 10% of your traffic from customers in, say, Korea, who rarely enforce anti-spam provisions, you pay spam-tax over 10% of the traffic you shift (the 'tainted' traffic) regardless of whether it is spam or not. Of course, where-ever you shift it to will have to count 10% of the traffic they receive from you as tainted as well.
Independent third parties could certify networks as 'spam-resistant', paying particular notice to enforcement, ingress- and egress filtering of spoofed traffic, etc. Over time, statutory limits could be shifted to require that networks operating in the US be at least 10% spam-resistant (i.e. no more than 10% tainted traffic), then 20% then 30,50, up to 100 (at which point the tax can be lifted).
Note that this won't happen.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
heres an article on what Australia along with other countries are doing to fight spam.
1 09 20208.html
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/09/10550
I think you're safe. I am pretty sure agreeing with them on children not getting spammed with pr0n doesn't make you a bad person.
One thing spammers always get correct in spam, is the details of how to buy whatever they are advertising
Why don't we ignore the spammers and punish the companies who's products are being advertised?
Spam wouldn't exist if people weren't paying the spammers to spam.
Target the advertisers contact details, like how BT disconnects numbers advertised on tart cards in London phone boxes.
"Sure you can advertise by spam it'll cost you $10000 for 2^8 mails unfortunatly within 12 minutes of the 1st mail going out your contact email and website will be deleted."
Alex
How many of my email addresses will I be allowed to register? Let me see, assuming a maximum of 64 characters per username (it's probably more), and 36 different characters (actually there's more there, too), that would be potentially 40119919145476304800650533877024438126904024877418 12225955731622655455723258857248542161222254985216 addresses. Of course no one would have that many and no database could store them all. But spammers could dynamically generate random ones. As more and more mail services support tagged addresses, spammers will likely start adding random tags to make sure they have a defense of "no match in the do-not-spam database".
I use a different email address for every mailing list I subscribe to. Should I register every one of them with the database? Most of them have already been spammed (probably harvested from online archives of those mailing lists).
One possibility is requiring that tagged format address be matched with respect to the base address (tag characters usually being "-" and "+"). Another is registering a whole vanity domain making it applicable to every username possibility. I'm sure aol.com will get registered like that, as will just about every domain out there. Mine will be.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This article in the UK "Guardian" claims that the recent blitz of viruses was done by spammers trying to generate open relays.
We have a law to deal with this kind of organized criminal activity, it's called RICO. I fail to see any legal reason that the federal government can not apply RICO laws to spam. It's an organized illegal activity, and the people who pay spammers to send it are just as guilty and in my view just and culpable as the spammer who sends it.
...Tell him most spam is pronographic in nature, he spent most of his career in Missouri hassling libraries and adult film/book stores.
RICO is not intended to be used this way. It was created to allow vertical destruction of a criminal organization, where the people at top insulated themselves from the crimes committed by the rank-and-file. This isn't quite the same. It's also rather hard to compare spammers to the Mafia- Alan Ralsky and Ronnie Scelson are shitbags, but until we find the RBL creators dismembered in the trunk of a Cadillac, spammers are still just petty crooks.
Just draft a basis antispam law at the federal level -- make Ashcroft earn his money enforcing it. Tip
We have this troubling little thing called "The Constitution", which makes it difficult to pass a sweeping federal law like that. Ashcroft is currently busy trying to destroy the Constitution, but I see no reason to assist him.
Get it through your head - the government can not help you here. Besides, do you really want our Congress micromanaging the way the Internet or technology in general is uses? That sort of mentality is what led to obscenities like the DMCA and the library filtering act. I'd rather keep bombing the spammers with catalogs.
1) this is doable but when a lot of these places are fly by night it might work when they send the mail but not 2 days later and what about an address that suddenly works when you got to court. You would need some impartial third party to verify this.
2) this just gives them a validated list of addresses for the next round.
3) A lot of spam companies play shell games with companies making a new company for every ISP they try abuse. 28 Days is a LONG time to legitimatly spam from a front.
How about this:
1) Automatic loss of suit if anything forged.
2) Require an ADV tag like CA is doing this makes filtering spam just way to easy and as this is a company requirement for the actualy product seller it becomes more usefull.
3) Make opt out lists be virial, require them to percolate up the the seller and all other companies the address has ever been sold transfered etc. This stops the shell company game.
4) Require that Opt outs function quickly like a few hours from the direct sender. Anything that takes days will just allow them to get a verified address and abuse it as much as possible.
5) You need some sort of verification system at to the insure seller actualy being associated with the spammer otherwise the dirty tricks squad is going to fire up spam houses against there competition and hope people litigate them to death.
In the long run I can see the use of having a whole US led tax on spam. This would make them have to register file paperwork and generaly be easier to track and patrol. If spammers had to pay some tax like a cent an email sent to the gov thats a tax on something people dont want to see aka a good tax for most of the people.
No sir I dont like it.
..or derivatives thereof.
Back in 1999, I posted this message to NANAE, about getting spammed by a Jerry Falwell-backed ISP. Well, it has been a long time since 1999, and now I get a lot of messages from various CC-related organisations, most of whom are telling me to vote for various RNC initiatives.
Curious.
The problem I have is with the effectiveness of the technical solutions to date and the likelihood that they'll become much more effective in the medium-term future unless they're accompanied by legislation.
It seems to me that the ongoing technology race between spam-blockers and spammers has been instrumental in accelerating the adoption by spammers of increasingly objectionable subterfuges for delivering of their unwanted material and obscuring its origins. The result has been that users of the Internet are incurring measurable additional costs for dealing with the sh*t and that despite this many people find that enough gets through to make the going through their email an activity, as the Economist observed in a recent article on the topic, about as alluring and attractive as sorting through raw garbage.
To put it simply, the technological solutions deployed so far have not worked. Sorry, but I think it's high time for the 'Net community to get its collective head around this unpalatable fact.
OK, laws currently on the statute books have not been noticably effective, either, despite their obvious applicability to much of the spam that's swilling around. Admittedly, the nature of many of the 'products' and 'services' being peddled in this way undoubtedly discourages dissatisfied customers from seeking redress by way of formal law enforcement. And unwilling recipients of the nastier types of material may also be understandably wary of requesting law enforcement involvement. That's a sociological problem in itself, of course, and while technical measures like providing means for forwarding anonymous tip-offs will help, what's really needed is for people to be able to feel confident they can report such stuff to the local police without coming under automatic suspicion themselves of being part of the problem. Intelligently-drafted legislation does have a role in promoting such a consensus.
So I guess I have to put up and then shut up. Here are a few guidelines for legislation which I think could help shift the balance between profit and risk for spamming. Al Capone, remember, was eventually nabbed for tax violations.