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Michigan's Proposed Spam Law Called Toughest In U.S.
goats_in_boats writes "A new bill (PDF
or HTML)
was presented to the Governor
of Michigan that would require spam sent to residents of the State to be identified
as such. Highlights include the requirement that unsolicited email 'Include in
the e-mail subject line "ADV:" as the first 4 characters' and that 'a person who
violates this act is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment for not
more than 1 year or a fine of not more than $10,000.00, or both.' An article
in the Detroit Free Press calls the bill 'the most stringent anti-spam law in
the nation.'"
Funny I see this now -- all day today I have been receiving SPAM with "ADV:" in the subject line. I was wondering what this was about! I guess it is safe to set up my filter now.....
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
Doesn't California have the same requirement, albeit with a lower fine, and the requirement of ADV:ADLT for XXXspam?
How does this apply to out-of-state offenders Vs in-state recipients, or in-state offenders Vs out-of-state recipients. I've never really figured out how US law works... too many different states with local discrepencies :-)
Would sure be nice if you could nail any spammer from anywhere in the US if you're a Michigan system... I bet it'd be a good place to set up an email server too.
Now we just need a few more laws in different states, mandating a different set of initial 4 characters. SPM:, AVT:, etc... That would make it reasonably difficult to send nationwide SPAM with any guarantee of legality.
1. Enforcement: How will they actually prosecute (or even find) spammers that violate the law? I'd say there's a pretty good chance that there will be quite a few complaints. Assuming they're even able to backtrack and find the spammers who violate the law, a large number of violations could render this law unenforceable. It takes a good amount of time to review the violation, try to track down where the e-mail came from, etc. If they can't effectivly track down violators, the law won't do much.
2. Interstate/International commerce: While this should affect spammers in all states (as explained in another post), how will this hold up with international companies? Does this stop a company in the US from sending it's spam through a Canadian e-mail advertising agency? Does it apply to non-US companies at all? I'm far from a legal expert, so if you have any ideas please share them.
The spammers move out of Michigan, and the law is useless?
Yeah, Jefferson wasn't barraged daily with details on how to grow his penis.
..Jeff Keegan
seven syllables explain TiVo: kee gan dot org slash ti vo
As much as I dislike spam I find it disconcerting that so much focus has been put on it by politicians. Our current government has major structural problems which have been getting little press as of late (such as the bush mandated discrimination against pro-homosexual bureaucratic policies). The fight against spam is trivial, yet has a powerful hold. I think its largely the result of common support from all consumers + it makes politicians look technologically adept and forward thinking. In short, it's low hanging fruit, an easy win. This question has been asked a million times, but, why can't we focus on what's really going on.
Photos.
(a) "Commercial e-mail" means an electronic message, file, data, or other information promoting the sale, lease, or exchange of goods, services, real property, or any other thing of value that is transmitted between 2 or more computers, computer networks, or electronic terminals or within a computer network.
I can't quite decide if this covers donations and political messages, the usual exemptions you see in these bills.
I'm guessing the word "commercial" was inserted in there to make the exemption implicit. A shame.
What if a Michigan citizen is checking his e-mail from a server in London, from a hotel room in Tokyo?
Michigan never enters the scope. Who and what has to be in Michigan for this to work?
but I don't see these laws really doing much about Spam, especially since people can just spam from other states or countries. I think that we will need to change the way Internet email works before we see some real relief.
Wow, just imagine, "Spam Prison."
With offshore spammers and the like, who the f#(* is going to be able to enforce that?
.gov and .edu domains. It would help keep the spam from clogging up the government machines/networks (it's likely clogged enough already with them folks doing "work"), and would help keep the porn spam from getting to kids. (Plus I work at a univ. and it would help me!)
If they can/do, I think a law should be passed that bans spam for
is to simply round them up and summarly execute them by beheading on tv, preferably pay per view.
That would get the message across.
Mental note to self: 'Put ADV: in front of anything just in case'
Well, I have to say I finally got a Bayesian Spam filter when the Outlook plug in came out so, for now, it's like back in the days when no one knew my email. Only 1 in 20 spams scores less then 98%, and only one in a hundred regular messages score more then 3%. It's fantastic!
That said, I'd still be for this law, as long as it was fair. That is to say, if the sender had a 'reasonable' expectation that the person expected to receive mail from them (i.e. opt-in, or if you signed up for a service from them and never opted out). Similar to the 'business relationship' in the Telemarketing laws.
One important thing is to make it clear that you can't sell "lists". I've been sent spams that said "Cd of Opt-in emails" or whatever. It's like, come on. I don't know if I would want to send people to jail for screwing up like that. Jail and very harsh Spam fines should be reserved, IMO for habitual offenders, you know the lowest of the low types like Ralsky, etc, who relay and proxy scan, forge headers, etc.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Isn't Alan Ralsky from Michigan? If so, then maybe he's the reason this law was passed in MI.
15 and 19 year sentences for first time drug offenders, and you can now go to jail for spamming ?
This bill is akin to using a shotgun to swat a fly that is sitting on somebody's arm. Sure, you kill the fly, but your going to hit a lot of things that you aren't aiming at.
My questions:
1) how are they going to enforce this.
2) What happens to those that fall prey to spam auto mailer viruses or similar underhanded spamming techniques?
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
The question now is whether Hotmail etc will start automatically filtering out ADV: spam. If they do not, or if (more likely) they market ADV: filtering as a pay service, then most technically illiterate folks will still be drowned in spam. The spam will just have a slightly different subject line.
(NB: The scientifically standard 'average punter' is kept in a tube of inert gas in Geneva).
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
is worried about the anti-spam bill
grass green
sky blue
hoes dirty
Way to go MI, hope that NY passes something similar. I used to get online some days and find FIFTY FUCKING SPAMS in my mailbox steve@dosius.zzn.com. (I check it more often now that I have dialup at home) That's over a weekend. Now just imagine if I can't get on on Friday or Monday...ouch. (110 spams over that time is nothing unusual.)
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
If I was thrown in prison for such an offense I'd be sure not to let any of the other prisoners know. I can see it now: "Wha' chu in for?" "Well...nothing bad...really." "Yeah?" "I was a spammer." "YOU SICK BASTARD! GET HIM BOYS!" The picture just is not very pleasant.
That wouldn't actually be a structural problem to go by definitions, but still, the NewSpeak(ish) way in which bush accomplishes this is still wrong, especially as it simply increases the dificulty and decreases the effectiveness of said bureacracies.
Photos.
Now, do I need to change my email address or will this automatically work when I cross the border?
as harassment? Then it's a federal thing and I can nab all those jerks!
On another note, I haven't gotten a single spam since I firewalled off the nation of China from incoming smtp connections.
From what I've heard, AOL's policy of denying access from everyone with less than a T3 line isn't nearly as successful. This jerks don't remember whitelist requests by their victims^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsubscribers, and they don't honor whitelist or rewhitelist requests by syadmins. They don't offer any explanation for an entry disappearing from their whitelist other than "maybe you're running an open relay." I'm not, and I'm sick of getting user complaints spawned by the death throws of that evil leviathon.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I'm all for wiping out Spam, but this law is a giant piece of junk. I run a small business. I solicit business by email. Lots of people do. Now you're telling me that if I try and solicit any work from a client that happens to reside in Michigan that I'm going to get hit with a $250,000 fine? Nope.
....
For those who didn't RTFA:
(a) "Commercial e-mail" means an electronic message, file, data, or other information promoting the sale, lease, or exchange of goods, services, real property, or any other thing of value that is transmitted between 2 or more computers, computer networks, or electronic terminals or within a computer network.
No exceptions for small business guys like me means an unlawful restriction of business speech.
And this is the real penalty, not $10,000
(b) In lieu of actual damages, recover the lesser of the following:
(i) $500.00 per unsolicited commercial e-mail received by the recipient or transmitted through the e-mail service provider.
(ii) $250,000.00 for each day that the violation occurs.
No this isn't.
It is a simple law, which if followed would reduce SPAM to those who don't want it, and allow those who do to keep it.
Those who break this new law would break any other law. They try to evade any technical solution too.
In the internal memo from Microsoft, dated June 24, Bill Gates proposed this.... coincidence?
:-)
In his other proposal (reverse MX records), he doesn't address the possibility of a faked mail header...
And the idiot who rated my previous message as offtopic at leased should have followed the above URL (and now utterly apoligize to this Anonymous Coward
The ADV: header isn't really useful, since the spam will be deleted only after the delivery, at the target machine. And let me cite after CAUCE:
Some junk emailers say, "Just hit the Delete key!" Unfortunately, the problem is much bigger than the time and effort of one person deleting a couple of emails. There are many different places along the process of transmitting and delivering email where costs are incurred. In the Internet world, "time" equals many different things besides the hourly rate that many people are still charged.
For example, for an Internet Service Provider, "time" includes the load on the processor in their mail servers; "CPU time" is a precious commodity and processor performance is a critical issue for ISPs. When their CPUs are tied up processing spam, it creates a drag on all of the mail in that queue -- wanted and unwanted alike. This is also a problem with "filtering" schemes; filtering email consumes vast amounts of CPU time and is the primary reason most ISPs cannot implement it as a strategy for eliminating junk email.
The problem is also compounded by the fact that ISPs purchase bandwidth -- their connection to the rest of the Internet -- based on their projected usage by their prospective user base. For most small to mid-sized ISPs, bandwidth costs are among one of the greatest portions of their budget and contributes to the reason why many ISPs have a tiny profit margin. Without junk email, greater consumption of bandwidth would normally track with increased numbers of customers. However, when an outside entity (e.g., the junk emailer) begins to consume an ISP's bandwidth, the ISP has few choices: 1) let the paying customers cope with slower internet access, 2) eat the costs of increasing bandwidth, or 3) raise rates. In short, the recipients are still forced to bear costs that the advertiser has avoided.
"Time" also makes for some other interesting problems, especially coupled with volume. Recent public comments by AOL are a useful point of reference: of the estimated 30 million email messages each day, about 30% on average was unsolicited commercial email. With volumes such as that, it's a tremendous burden shifted to the ISP to process and store that amount of data. Volumes like that may undoubtedly contribute to many of the access, speed, and reliability problems we've seen with lots of ISPs. Indeed, many large ISPs have suffered major system outages as the result of massive junk email campaigns. If huge outfits like Netcom and AOL can barely cope with the flood, it is no wonder that smaller ISPs are dying under the crush of spam.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
yes yes, I understand this, but seriuosly, this legislation is being pushed LIGHTNING FAST, not PATRIOT act fast, but fast. The way I view it your analogy doesn't work. Why? Because all these little chickenshit problems get more public mindshare than the important ones. Spam articles abound, articles on say, congolese massacres never make the headlines. Hell, liberia's pres resigned today and it only got to the bottom of the front page in the LA Times. I dont' know if this reflects something bad about the public or the publishers, but its still fscked up.
Photos.
From the article's paraphrasal of the spam bill, I would say that it misses the mark. The problem is not advertising per se, but email designed to trick you. The leading trick is a fake sender address.
Almost all spam uses a fake sender address. Usually the sender address is bogus. Pernicious spam uses a real, forged sender's address. Not only is this difficult to detect, it causes the victim of the identity theft to receive rejection messages and hate mail. I have been the victim of such identity theft and it isn't pleasant.
I support legislation making it a criminal offense to forge the sender's address, and a lesser offense to send email (especially in quantity) with a bogus sender address.
I believe that legitimate advertisers and freedom-of-expression devotes can agree that forgery has no legitimate purpose.
If emails were signed, it would be much easier to bring pressure to bear on the senders of undesirable email to cease and desist.
This is like, seriously fucking my routine. Slashdot has some decent news updates, and on a few select topics has some good discussion (not PATRIOT/spam/YRO), and of course the obligatory SCO story for kicks, but I always gotta check my k5 comments for replies/ratings, comments on a story or two, /modsub, and the all-important diaries of the 8 hours I was asleep. I've said my piece in a debate started yesterday on this site and now I'm trying to continue reading, rating, and replying to the [new] comments in the trans-fat story in dynamic threading mode and THEY WON'T FUCKING LOAD GODDAMMIT THIS IS BUGGING ME THE FUCK OUT AHHH RUSTY SAVE ME.
I feel sorry for ADV Films.
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
When the extridition kicks in Michigan will be PACKED with pencil thin, big (thick and long (and hard due to herbal V.I.A.G.A.R.I.A)) dicked, instant millionaire Asians . . . all posing as Nigerians.
Glad I don't live in Michigan.
-Peter
Don't believe the hype - it's just another opt-out proposal. Opt-out is a flawed scheme only ever pushed by people who are naive to both the technical and practical issues. It's an enormous waste of resources (bandwidth, energy, people's time), and at the end of the day it's only partially solved just one of the issues at the expense of ensuring that we'll never solve any of the others. This really is a case of "the slippery slope exists and it will happen".
Like all the other opt-out schemes, all you have to do is opt-out of those 50 million emails you're about to receive. Legitimately. Enjoy your day.
But the law hasn't been passed yet. It's only been proposed. I think this should have been modded "funny"
All of this spam is advertising some product that a business is selling. Why not hold these businesses responsible for the spam? I don't think the claim "oh, we didn't know that SpamMasters was going to use spam when we hired them" should be a valid defense. The businesses hiring these scumbags are just as responsible.
Then let's work on a solid replacement for SMTP that makes the assumption that people are going to attempt to abuse it.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
One mother told me that when she found pornographic messages in the family's e-mail, she immediately suspected that the teenagers in her house had been up to no good. The broken trust took weeks to repair.
and that's the basic tone of the whole piece: spam is a trojan horse rolling sexual material into the living rooms of godfearing, wholesome americans.
of course, it's not worse than the detroit free press who provides for the solicitation of prositution....
2 1337 4 u!
I was really rallying against the press in my reply. Obviously bi-partisan supported initiatives will go through faster. My real beef is with the constant press on the topic, its not necessary. I simply feel that it could be better spent. Of course I do realize that my position has been said over and over, that the people never hear the 'real issues'. So its not like I expect anything.
Photos.
From Sec 3 of the Act:
"an e-mail service provider that the sender knew or should have known is located in this state or to an e-mail address that the sender knew or should have known is held by a resident of this state"
Requiring willful conduct or intent as this law does (in Sec 3, not Sec 4) puts a huge burden on the prosecution/plaintiff. With email addresses that have no physical correspondence to the receipt's real address, how is the spammer supposed to "know or should know" if the resident is in Michigan? Once this, nearly unprovable, element is part of the crime, the crime becomes nearly unenforceable. And, all the draconian requirements that got this law the press coverage may be ignored.
I guess the real battle is "can you assume that if a Domain Name is registered to a MI address that the email server is physically in MI?" After all, the Domain Name's mailing address may be a corporate headquarters and the server may be located in Florida.
Sec. 4 of the Act is a good old strict liability requirement (no intent or negligence needed to prove the crime). But, the requirements imposed by Sec. 4 aren't that odd, just standard "truth in advertising" applied to email.
IE, canadian liberals often put women between the psycho's and themselves. What's out my front door isn't what is being sold on cbc.
I'd call it quite a failure.
You remember, the major spammer:
Alan M. Ralsky
5016 Patrick Rd
West Bloomfield, MI 48322-1543
(248) 661-3355
(248) 661-5166
I'm sure he appreciates all the cards, letters, catalogs and magazine subscriptions he's been getting!
such as the bush mandated discrimination against pro-homosexual bureaucratic policies
What makes you think it has to do with bush? The majorty of americans hate faggots. Secular and Fundies alike. What moron would want their kid to come home with a man or a woman as their "lover" and have to worry about them catching AIDS or other diseases from the infection caste of society?
As far as I can tell this is just a silly PR campaign for politicians.
When I start hearing about the prison systems being overwhelmed with spammers, then I will believe that the law is stringent.
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
Will a consultant have to use this header to solicit business? That might mean most of his emails will never get read. What about a contractor trying to hire himself out to employers? What about someone notifying a mailing list about a special-interest web site he just set up, which incidentally sells merchandise on the side? We all might know spam when we see it, but once you start down this path you can get entangled in the law.
Believe or not the congress is just as adept in simplified language when the mood strikes.
to control spam. As it is now, email is still somewhat unregulated and protected by first amendment rights.
Spam can be controlled with properly configured mailers, good filters, and good habits about who you give your address out to. (plus blacklists, whitelists, etc)
Legislation being applied to this area could potentially open the door to more regulation in this area, and I'd rather not take the chance.
I get almost no spam at all at GMX. the site may be in German, which I cannot read, but they have a very effective, multi-layered, and reliable anti-spam implementation. Thier service supports pop and imap for retrieving your mail, and smpt (with auth) for sending.
I'm sure that most (smaller) ISPs would implement good anti-spam measures and policies if enough of thier users (politely) requested them.
If you are using Hotmail, MSN, AOL or similar, my guess is that you're sh*t out of luck, and it's time to change providers.
Read, L
Do not click on the link! He just wans to foul you!
This has already happened. In 1994 a (married) pair of California BBS owner/operators were tried and convicted on Tennessee porn charges.
CUDigest report
It's a particularly bad idea when an official in some other state decides to set you up for the fall.
Email: slashdot3@FreeMars.org (Address will be abandoned when it gets spam.)
With the internet being worldwide, how will anyone know who is a Michigan resident. This may be able to be struck down, since it almost equates to a state making laws outside its jurisdiction. If a spammer spams from outside the state, who is going to prosecute? What happens when mail is sent to a hotmail account? The servers are not in MI. It will be impossible to enforce fairly, if at all.
This proposed law is not constitutional. I suppose, the constitution may be thrown out if a spammer sends spam to a socialist, or fascist, or dictator of some kind, where Michigan's spam law is favored.
Slashdot editors, why not ask constitutionalists what they do to cope with outrageous freedom of speach in the form of spam?
Now we can sort out the legitimate Spam from the illegitimate ones.
Those trying to claim the high road of "we are just marketers" will have to comply and get filtered, or risk jail. Those that don't are branded as law breakers. This law could put every American based spammer out of buisness eventually.
Great News.
Pretty lame trick used these days... piss all over slashdot with your graffiti, then reply with "MOD PARENT UP". Guess some people need attention.
I wonder how the state can enforce this. There are already multiple obstacles that have been mentioned, but the enforcement of Internet-specific laws has proven to be unreliable in the past. I'm all of us remember that media piracy is already illegal not only in this state, but the whole of America. However, that hasn't stopped millions from committing this crime on a regular basis.
It would be nice to see someone enforce these laws. Every one of these spams leads to someone making money from them - that's why spam exists. Every one of those websites selling viagra knock-offs, or porn, or selling mailing lists can be traced to someone who profits from these sales. Those are the people paying for the spam; make them accountable - cut off the money - and the spammers go away.
California has had "antispam" laws for quite some time - can anyone point to a single prosecution of these laws?
Well, at least "something" in this case isn't worse than nothing... yet... but the way Michigan has been heading, that end seems inevitable.
Any law that says you must label spam (e.g., put ADV: in the subject) has two major flaws:
1) It only addresses half the problem, and it's not the important half. It does nothing to ease the burden on the mail servers that must transport the spammer's trash.
2) It sanctions what would otherwise be an illicit act.
As it is today, the act of spamming may or may not be illegal, but once a law is enacted that says "label it", the spam becomes sanctioned by law. Without that law, a hosting company can dump a user for spamming. With the law, it becomes more difficult because the spammer can say "I followed the law!"
IMHO: We're better off without laws like this.
--Bill
home
gimme back my
If I don't recall, one of the world's biggest Spam Kings lives in West Bloomfield, Michigan (about 1.5 miles from my house in fact) And no, I'm not planning an asassination. ;-);-)
Karma: Bad. Mostly because the only moderators that notice me are conservatives.
I'd just like to point folks to this in hopes that we can collectively steer this topic where it ought to be with our elected officials. Alternately, we could take Lessig up on his bet.
hold on a second, i just received an email that demands my immediate attention.
hmm, it seems that there are 'horny lesbians' that need my 'hard cock'. apparently these teens are 'hot and wet', and just waiting for me to 'give it to them hard and fast'. these poor girls seem to be pretty desparate 'for a good fucking' and i suppose i should help them out. i'll get to 'making them cum all night long' as soon as i get off of work (per their recommendation, i will try to 'get off' as soon as possible).
hey, waitaminute...
---
__joe_b
I understand all the arguments coming through syaing that there is no way we could enforce a law like this, that all the spammers would just post through a server in Nigeria, or something like that. All that does is leave people frustrated, like there is no solution to this epidemic.
s -spamhow_x.htm
We are the technical community, we should be making our voice heard when nontechnical people - with the best of intentions - try and understand an inherently technical problem.
My preferred solution has been around in theory for quite some time, using computation time as the "cost" to send an email. For those who are not familiar with the concept, it goes something like this:
I want to send an email to my friend Bob. My mail client connects to Bob's mail server and says "Hey, I want to leave a mail for Bob, okay?" The server then says to the client "Sure, but you have to solve this computationally intensive problem first." My mail client then says "No probs, hand it over. It'll only take a few seconds anyway." Here's the key. My mail client must now spend a few seconds solving this problem if it want's to send the mail. This isn't a problem if I'm only sending one, or ten, or even a few dozen emails, but spammers sell their services in the millions of units.
Ten million emails x a few seconds per mail = far too long to bother about. Yes, they could buy incredibly expensive hardware that could solve these problems quicker, but then the whole concept of spam as cheap advertising becoming a moot point.
Bill Gates gave a good summary in that interview a few days ago on USA Today, although he did not invent them, as he would have you believe. And no, I am not an MS lackey, as somebody suggested last week. here's the url:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-06-29-gate
As a side note, people often argue that mail servers should be locked down anyway, etc. But this doesn't solve the problem that email itself is inherently insecure. Given how much effort has gone into developing TCP/IP into what it is today, I'm surprised that the email spec has survived this far, virtually unaltered. These security problems are going to keep rearing their ugly heads until we fix them all, but that is all part of the wonderful evolution of software...
Don't knock HTML email. It makes my life easier, since I
The Evil Bit returns in it's new form, it's now the "Evil Subject Line"
Since when is any unsolicited email legitimate? This is what I find most disgusting about the proposal - it diverts away from the real issue. Spam is just plain wrong.
Those trying to claim the high road of "we are just marketers" will have to comply and get filtered, or risk jail. Those that don't are branded as law breakers. This law could put every American based spammer out of buisness eventually.
How about this - they all comply and tag everything with "ADV:". And because it's all "legitimate" now, they'll send more spam, to more people, and all the other businesses who previously considered spam wrong will also join in. We'll soon have the vast majority of email traffic as spam, as opposed to the slight majority we currently have at some ISPs. Everyone who knows how to filter will still be receiving all that bandwidth, and all the fibres and routers in the world will still be passing them on. I currently receive up to 50 megabytes of spam a month - and that's a single IP on a 512kbit DSL account. So I'm supposed to just put up with the bulk of spam and filter stuff out at my end?
Quite frankly either the anti-spam people behind this proposal don't understand the issues, or the spam people behind this proposal know them very well. Perhaps both.
Ya but a spin off from judeo-christian ideology is marriage. It's influence is throughout state and federal laws and is a cultural fixture within our society.
With the state having the ability to provide the same cultural experience; and it's acknowledged discrimination=bad to distinguish between gender and/or sexual preference (between consenting adults anyways) the contradiction does become evident.
From a christian point of view, I believe everyone by intent does something daily something worthy of hell, your either forgive or your not. It's not my place to judge the souls of others and I do my best not to.
goatse.cz still gets me sometimes though
I live in Michigan, I hate spam. However politicians need to stay out of this, once they start playing internet cop where will it end? They cannot govern something on a global scale.
Isn't most of it (directly or indirectly) sent from Florida, where Michigan (or even foreign) laws have no meaning?
No, I think the only good law about spammers is to give a world-wide grant to "kill on sight". No, I'm serious. I honestly believe these "people" (in the most forgiving sense possible I call this vermin "people") can't really be "re-educated" to fit a working society. There are but two ways to stop them - either do what Kevin has faced, but extend it to not even *talking* to people, or in any other way disclose how to spam, or just do what probably >75% of the ones having been spammed by them wants to do with'em - termination.
Send them to Texas.
I like the ID thing
Addressing fraud
Bounce
etc, etc, etc...
A criminal statute allows for jail, true. However, only one class of people can actually file criminal complaints: law enforcement. Peace officers and prosecutors.
You can call your local police department to make a complaint. However, except for certain types of crimes (Domestic violence and protective order violations in my state-most are similar) there is no law prohibiting us from sending the complaint straight to the shredder. As a point of Federal law (Federal district court ruling for WA DC, sustained on appeal) the police and prosecutors do not have a duty to any one particular person.
In other words, not much will change. A few cases may be filed. Most, however, will end up sitting in some detective's inbox until the statute of limitations expires. My department doesn't even have enough detectives to cover all of the stuff that needs detective followup: if a burglary/auto theft/just about any nonviolent property crime isn't thoroughly handled by the patrol officer taking the initial complaint, it'll languish marked "inactive-open pending leads" forever. The info-hogs can only follow up on the leads in the bluesuits' reports.
Now, take a wild guess how many patrol officers are qualified to handle these. I may be the only one here. And I spent today (a relatively quiet Monday dayshift) taking cold crime reports, three neighborhood disturbances (two of which weren't even criminal and one was petty enough not to charge anyone with anything) one unwanted subject (started screaming in a McDonalds and didn't leave when the manager invited him to eat elsewhere) and a drunk driver.
When I work swing shift, my normal shift, I'm running from call to call to call. It'll be close to midnight before I have time to follow up on a funny email. I think my time from 11 PM to end-of-shift is better spent on drunk drivers.
In other words, most cops will consider this to be a waste of time that could be better spent on areas where someone might actually get hurt.
That's why it's CIVIL spam laws that actually matter. The clown who wrote this law knows we won't be able to really do much, living in the real world and all. A civil law, OTOH, with a private right of action, would make the spammers shit themselves with fear and consider career changes. That's because a victim with the legal power to act may actually do something, when the police don't have the resources.
Some will complain that it's not their responsibility to do anything, even when the whiner is also the original victim. Who has the moral responsibility to act is an open question. However, the real question IMHO is 'if you don't give a shit, and you're the victim, then why should I care?' And if someone can't be bothered to take an interest in his own life, then I've got better things to do than fix his minor annoyances for him.
To open up a PO Box!
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
I'm the Mayor of Hardassville.
In my town we have the death penalty for spammers and telemarketeers.
We don't play no steenking games in my town!
I'm a resident of MI, and I can honestly say our state gov really sucks. First we make firewalls and VPNs illegal with a super-DMCA-like bill, now we get some tough but unenforceable spam bill?
Of course it could be much worse; like our roads, bridges and public transportation system (ha!) have been for years.
Disclaimer: I live in Wayne and travel extensively in the tri county area, so if you live someplace in MI where the roads are nice raise your hand and point to it. For those of you who don't live in MI go look at a map of it to see the best thing about MI, ie how easy it is to show people where you live.
Jonah Hex
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
That's an interesting analogy. I agree that the best that can be done (from a technical perspective) is to provide the tools and make them easy to use. However, I live in a country where it is mandated by law that people wear seatbelts, and as a result evryone does. Not from fear of punishment, but because it's the done thing (like putting litter in a bin). Interestingly, the penalty for a passenger not wearing a seatbelt is levied against the driver here -- if someone wants to bypass a safety device you are not supposed to transport them.
It sounds very draconian in writing but it feels casual and traditional in practice. It just a thing you do when you get into a car, on par with closing your door.
Now that I think about it, I think that the law actually supports individual freedoms, in that it prevents people becoming projectiles in the event of a car accident. The freedom to not be speared by some halfit emerging from a windscreen is rated higher than the freedom to place oneself in needless danger of emerging from said windscreen.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
I've had the same email account for 20+ years. Two years ago, spam was a minor annoyance. One year ago it was annoying enough that I started using spamassassin. This year it is annoying enough that I can cope only by using spamassassin with a bayes filter. Next year?
Let me quantify my statements. In June 2002 I received 732 legitimate email messages and 375 spams. In June 2003 I received 683 legitimate email messages, and 1872 spams. in June 2004, I expect to receive 700 legitimate messages; how many spams? Let's start a pool!
Technology is cool but not a panacea. I ran a personal version of Spamassassin 2.60 on my last 15 months' email. Every decision was fed back into the automatic learning process, and every incorrect decision was corrected manually. Here are the numbers:
total legit: 13726
total spam: 11441
false positives: 11
false negatives: 272
These numbers look good (2.3% of spams slip through under the radar and 0.08% of legit mail gets trapped). But they aren't that good. The numbers mean that one or two spams a day get through right now, and who-knows-how-many next year. Hardly an adequate approach to keeping offensive material from my eyes. The numbers also mean that I would have missed 11 legitimate messages in the last year or so had I not sifted through the crap.
While I'm not holding my breath for a legislative panacea, I believe that something has to be done to check the uncontrolled growth in the volume of spam being sent. Receiver-end controls won't cope.
As I have mentioned in a previous comment, I believe that the volume can be abated by prohibiting deceptive email, as opposed to trying to adjudicate the consensuality of the relationship between sender and receiver.
Oh yeah. I like jacking off so therefore I must be a spammer, that makes sense.
No, I don't like Spam, and I'd like to see Ralski et. al. shot. But what I don't want to see is people thrown in jail for making mistakes. There are some spammers who know what they are doing is irritating millions of people and don't care. But I'm sure there are a few people who don't really understand what they are doing is wrong. They should be fined, yes, but not thrown in jail. I would prefer to see jail time only applied to people who use open proxies and relays (at this point).
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The Governor of Michigan was born in Canada.
I would not be suprised if this law is pre-empted by a up and coming watered-down federal "anti-spam" law with no teeth which will not help the spam problem in any way.
The elite run this country, not the commoners (i.e. you and me).
This looks great for politicians and I'm sure it'll play well in elections in Michigan, but I seriously doubt we'll see any real gains from this legislation. When will people understand that spam is a social and technological problem, NOT a legal one?
Spam is already illegal to send, if not outright then certainly without the ADV: tag which is the case here. But since (a) people still respond to spam a high enough percentage of the time to warrant more spam; and (b) these laws are not enforcable without some way to track emails from relay to relay, a purely legislative solution will not have any effect whatsoever.
What's really needed is a comprehensive program to educate people about the consequences of responding to spam in the first place, in terms of violations of privacy and amount of hassle caused from spammers selling each other address lists. I'm sure AOL/Earthlink/whoever would be willing to help with educating people in one form or another, since any reduction in the volume of spam sent through their networks directly translates into lower bandwidth costs.
This social and educational device would be accompanied by a server-side mechanism replacing SMTP, which ensure a piece of email comes from a known host (and is really the host the email claims to be from). Together this would stop most spam from reaching inboxes, and those that do would be safely ignored, which would go a very long way towards making spam unprofitable.
the coolest club on
I'm not a lawyer but maybe this kind of tack would work...
Population of Michigan ~ 10,000,000 (Estimate from here)
Population of the World ~ 6,250,000,000 (Estimate from here)
Now provided that spam has a regular distribution, that means that one in every 625 spam emails will be sent to a Michigan resident. Given that spam is sent to thousands of addresses each day, there is a reasonable expectation that at least one of the recipients is from Michigan.
Due to the very nature of spam, it would be easier for the spammers to comply overall rather than to make efforts to determine the real destination of each message.
Fun. Let's see how they screw this up. Our roads suck ass, our schools are bankrupt, with the state close behind, but at least I won't get junk e-mail.
Honestly, when intellegent sounding ideas come out of the michigan legislature, it usually means a lawmaker has shoved his/her head so far up their own ass they've begun to see daylight.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
That means there will be a very good reason for ISPs to host their email servers in Michigan.
Amazing magic tricks
When this law requires "ADV:" in the Subject and another law requires "Adv:", another "AD:", another "Anu:", another "Rek:", another "Pub: ", another "", another "", and another "Pro: ", what happens? Does it become impossible to lawfully spam? Or will they be able to invalidate all the laws because they are contradictory? Remember that it's impossible to determine the geographic location of the recipient of an email, and these sort of laws always require that the header be at the -beginning- of the subject.
Spam is not, and has never been a free-speech issue. It's a property rights issue. Spammers may say whatever they like, but they may NOT use MY property to do so.
The libertarian principle here is perfectly clear.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Aside from the significant limitation imposed by this being a state law (who can tell if a particular E-mail address belongs to a Michigan resident or not?), this law will likely fail because as soon as users (or providers) start to filter ADV:, the spammers will stop putting it in the Subject line, and there are too many of them out there for law enforcement to go after.
Japan enacted a law similar to this in July of last year, requiring that all UCE have a subject beginning with the Japanese equivalent of "ADV:". Spammers started following the law pretty quickly; so far so good. Then, last October, cell phone provider NTT DoCoMo started up a service that would let users reject such mail at the server. Having been subjected to lots of cellphone spam until then, I was very delighted at this, and as soon as I switched it on my spam level dropped to roughly zero.
Until this past May, when spam once again found its way to my phone. The spammers seem to have realized that adding the mandated text makes their mail not reach its destination, so they've decided to just ignore the law completely. I spoke with someone at the agency that handles spam complaints, and was told that "we're doing what we can, but there are so many of them it's hard to keep up."
C'est la vie, I guess--or should I say, shikata nai desu ne...
Yes, more money is saved by the rich because, surprise surprise, they are already paying the lion's share of taxes. If someone is essentially not paying taxes, how can you cut them even more? GIVE them money? Yeah, that's fair to the rest of us... NOT.
I don't have the link handy, but soon after the tax cut some op-ed piece on Newsweek or MSNBC or somewhere complained about the same think you are. That it was a giveaway to the rich. it then went on to give specific numbers. Again, I don't have them handy but it was along the lines of family earning $30k used to pay $1000, now will pay $50. A family that earns $500,000 used to pay $130,000 will now pay $110,000. Or something like that.
The exact numbers are not important. What is important is that low-income people that used to pay around a thousand dollars will now have virtually NO income tax, but the rich are still paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Short of GIVING the low-income family cash money there's not much else you can do. But if you're going to give the poor a free ride tax-wise (which I'm not opposed to), don't complain if the people that are ACTUALLY PAYING THE BILL get some money back, too. It's not like they stopped paying taxes.
i don't see how this law is in any way a bad one, as long as it is implemented correctly.
Email users are more easily able to block spam. Win for them.
Spammers only miss out on competent Emailers who knew to block the spam--and i'm guessing they get no purchases from these types of users anyway. Granted they dont gain anything by this law, they dont particularly lose out either.
this whole spam fiasco is a fairly simple one. as long as there is demand in the market, that is, as long as people are buying spam advertised goods, spammers will continue to send unsolicited bulk email. its near free advertising. i think its safe to say most of us hate receiving spam, but you have to admit, its a good business model.
people stop buying spam goods completely and spam dissappears. simple.
...the companies that are the ultimate beneficiary of the spam are not targeted. Don't just get the guy sending the emails, dig up the individuals and company owners selling the fake viagra, copied virus software, stay at home work scams, 250 free hours in the first month isps, and everything else under the sun.
I hate spam as much if not more than the next person, but I don't think jail time for the first offense should be written into the law.
If I want to endanger myself I should have that right.
Sure. But I'm not sure that endangering others on a whim should be enshrined as a right.
Seatbelt laws and helmet laws for motorcycles/bikes are just two prime examples of laws that work against natural selection and cause the devolution of our species.
You could say the same thing about the bulk of modern medicine, or disinfectants, or education, or even fire. Are we supposed to live like apes so that you can rationalise your support for 'social darwinism'?
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
Stupid Polititians. They just want to force Mr. Ralsky get out of the state and sell his house cheap for the brother-in-law to move in a nice new house with a T1 line.
Like it or not, there really is no way that state law can govern email that is carried over the Internet originally built by the Department of Defense - this is going to be a Federal law or it will be shot down.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Why, you set up some fall-guy-scapegoat-to-be, in some foriegn country to flood the net with crazy quantities of spam. (Easy to do. After all, the U.S. military already owns most of the name-server companies which connect your www.address to an actual I.P. number. And the CIA is renowned for setting up and turning into manipulable assets people, companies, countries and even twerps like Bin Laden.)
Then you wait for the pot to come to a boil, (which it hasn't quite yet), and then with the help of Big Brother Bill and his earth-flattening software company, introduce some seriously insane control measures. Serialized computer chips. Carnivore-style information traffic monitoring. Bottomless jail cells. You know the drill. (The net has been around for ages, but the whole spam deluge is happening now? --Right when the whole erosion of rights parade just happens to be going into high gear? The reality of this situation is staring us in the face, my friends! Cripes! If you take notes while living during these times, you'll end up with a book you can entitle, "How to take over the world in 10 easy steps. --And get away with it!".
But all of that isn't quite good enough. Nope. You want to really make sure the message hits home. Better slowly release documentaries and news stories about the evil hackers and their viruses, and how Bad Things Can Get. --Heck, you really need to drive the wedge in there but good! Damn. Better announce July 6th as, "Hack Lots Of Web Pages Day", and time it with the release of a popular film with a popular actor loaded to the gills with mind-control shmuck-stuff. (SkyNet was the result of a hacker-deployed virus? Sheesh.) Luckily, government spooks are no better at writing movie scripts than are script writers. That's probably why the whole 911 thing felt oddly reminiscent of a cheese-ball Bruce Willis flick.)
But anyway, that's how you do it. Simple. Easier even than flying jets into skyscrapers!
-FL --This is not a troll. This is just meant to provoke thought. If those thoughts anger you, try asking "Why?"
Bayesian filters, as presently applied to spam, can be used to filter any text based content (HTML pages, for instance). Mozilla Mail (I have migrated from Eudora some weeks ago) recognises HTML spam without any problem.
The way this kind of text analysis works, implementing your idea is only a matter of developing the browser plugin (or proxy server, for better control and security) and trainning the filter to deny access to certain kinds of HTML pattern. For efficiency, you will probably want to have a cache mechanism in place (one more reason for it to be a proxy). And you get a nice free side-effect: the filter may be school specific and even grade specific. It is only a matter of trainning.
This is a very bad idea. The law is draconian in its punishment (1 year in jail) for so minor an infraction (1 spam!?!) that it is guaranteed to be misused. This will be a political tool and nothing else. Whenever the government wants to stick some guy in jail, they'll discover some ancient SPAM message and stick the guy in jail.
This law is overeaching and overbroad, and the slashdot community should be ashamed for cheering it. Karma be damned,
It's not really a black-and-white topic. There are actions endanger yourself without endangering others (jumping off a cliff into the sea) and there are actions that endanger both (jumping off a skyscraper into traffic). Not wearing a seatbelt is somewhere between the two. If there's a crash, you might just hurt yourself. Or you could hurt others in the same car by flying into them. Or in an extreme case, you could be projected from the car and hurt a third party. It depends on the circumstances, so, in my opinion it's probably best to err on the side of safety for the innocent.
On the subject of Darwinism:
Natural selection does not make moral judgements. Either you survive long enough to reproduce (and do so), or you do not. I don't see why you would be in favour of removing poor judgment from the gene pool, but against removing something medically treatable like diabetes.
Further, some forms of poor judgement may be genetically inherited, but others may be environmental (e.g. Dad lets you ride your bike without a helmet). Again, shades of grey, so better to err on the less draconian side IMO.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
Step back and look at the people who post on k5.
Why would you care what they say ?
How long does it take to get me moved in?
Little Brother, watching the watchers
Wouldn't having ADV: as the first 4 characters of the subject like make it no longer a Subject: line, because you can't have it start with both Subject: and ADV:? It seems to me that this proposal actually makes any form of spam illegal, since it's impossible to meet this requirement. Wheee!
refer explicitly or implicitly to a "reasonable person." IANAL, but IAGTBAL (I am going to be a lawyer) and with the business law courses I've had in my undergraduate work, I've found that the courts apply this "reasonable person" standard to most laws like this.
Some crimes require "malicious intent" to be proven, but most of the time the court views malice as proven if the crime was in fact committed. How do you prove malice? Well, if you walk up to someone and shoot them in the head, that act, to a reasonable person, would be malicious.
Same logic here, I would suppose.
I'm on my way!
Does "unsolicited e-mail" mean any e-mail the recipient didn't specifically request? I guess my co-workers in Michigan will stop sending me e-mails now or face the consequences.
Seriously, do they even make any distinctions between an advertisement for breast enlargement vs a political message from a new candidate that doesn't yet have enough money to advertise on TV?
On the flip side, will I be in deep shit in Michigan if I send unsolited political opinion/suggestion to an elected official via e-mail because they don't make the distinction?
What if they decide to fix laws that aren't specific enough by tacking on quick-fixes such as "require all political messages to begin with 'POL:' in the subject." in the name of protecting political e-mail from being treated as spam? Wouldn't it be ironic that this would actually make e-mail political censorship/monitoring MUCH easier and more practical? (Please don't retort with comments about Boyer-Moore-Horspool or irregular expressimifications because I'm not a techie and don't even know what they are)
Frankly, I don't know which would be worse because it is easier to filter/monitor all political messages on the net if they had "POL:" as the first 4 letters of the subject.
Which do you prefer?
And is there new technology on the horizon (not mere spam-blocking) going to help us solve this issue? It would be interesting to have optional and required categorization of e-mail in some future protocol.
And yea, I didn't read the story but chose the "talk amongst yourselves" bit instead.
Not long at all.
To move in though you have to bring us the head of Billy Mays on a plater, but only after giving him an Oxyclean enema and pulling the dents out of his head with the Ding King..
Florida. That's where they all live. Florida. Home of Disneyland and spammers!
Stop the spam from leaving and you won't receive it.
This is the first US anti-spam law that calls for jail time. All the Michigan Attorney General's Office has to do to make this the most effective anti-spam weapon yet is use it to prosecute only once or twice and actually lock the spammers up in jail.
I will repeat that just because I really want to type it again: lock the spammers up in jail. Oh, baby. Yeah.
Having to pay an occasional fine as a result of a couple hundred hours of work by some Attorney General's office (as if any AGO would actually enforce their $500 penny-ante anti-spam laws) doesn't do anything to deter spammers, but haul a couple of spammer asses from other states to spend six months in a Michigan jail, and I believe that you will see a change in spammer behaviour as a result.
This is a fantastic law, and if wielded properly only once or twice, could have an actual effect on spam. I'm not holding my breath that it'll be passed, nor that the Michigan AGO will have the balls to carry through with it if it does, but it is a glorious ray of light in the center of a murky spammy swamp.
I live in a small country in Europe, where SPAM is illegal, so I don't get anything from local companies, instead I get more than 20 a day from the US. :-(
Is this law going to help non US citizens getting US SPAM, or is that part of your export quota?
-H
This is even better than an "X-Spam-I-Am: " header!
How do you enforce laws outside of your jurisdiction?
This is fine and dandy (or overkill, whatever) for spammers in Michigan, but spammers in Ontario seem harder to prosecute across the border.
To me, it sounds like yet another over-reaching, poorly-thought-out law by the friendly folks in legislation.
No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness. --Aristotle
- Spertus v Kozmo
- Ferguson v Friendfinder
- California v PW Marketing LLC
Next question?I really need to learn to proof read better.
The law also includes a private cause of action that allows enterprising individuals to sue spammers in small claims court. An early draft of the legislation set the amount you could collect at only $10 per spam, but since I work in the Michigan Legislature for a senator who sits on the Tech Committee, I made sure they cranked it up to $500 per spam. So let's get busy, y'all! (Yeah, yeah, it's tough to track them down, but not always. Plenty of spam comes from morons who don't know how to cover their tracks.) Oh, and for those of you who use this tool to stick it to a spammer and manage to collect some cheese... you're welcome. :)
That would be whether you understand the difference between civil and criminal law. Only one of these cases involves enforcing criminal action, and that only against an apparent "spam delivery service" California prosecutors managed to track down within their own borders. The other two are simply lawsuits, one of which ended in a whopping $72.50 judgement against a company that had already gone under (and, no doubt, sprang right back up on the other side of town). Requiring private citizens to either hire lawyers or file lawsuits in small claims court is hardly a practical enforcement mechanism - which pretty much explains why there seems to be just so damn many of these cases being mentioned in the press...
This will never work. There area few problems that I see with it. We've seen a number of articles here recently about the weasely (is that a word?) things people are doing to spread spam, such as abusing open mail relays, installing trojans, etc. Who would be held responsible in this case, the owner of the system? If that's the case then there is going to be a severe public backlash when they start hauling grandmothers in for spamming. Second, what percentage of spam originates in Michigan? Will they be able to press charges against people from other states? Other countries? I don't really see this as being something that could be enforced. Third, if I were a spammer in Michigan, I'd just set up a computer on the other side of the border, change "corporate headquarters" to that new location, and carry on as before. I like the idea, but this legislation is never going to work.
Time to see if mailx has a filter...
Time for yet another round of junk mail for this asshole. Fire up roboform and nail this fucker again. He MUST learn.
The government is so quick to squash SPAM but ignores unsolicited snail-mail? Why? Could it be that snail-mail puts money in the government's pockets via postage? Quite the double standard if you ask me.
Adult-onset diabetes is often the result of being overweight and poor diet. Such people (grossly overweight) should be remove from the human gene pool.
Just say it! You're not 'pro-choice' -- you're pro-abortion. Say it. People suck, there's too many of them, and they are easier to kill when they're small.
Solutions are easily accessible. Find a yoga studio, start a dedicated practice, and stop whining about missing chocolate Ding-Dongs at lunchtime.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
I have an alumni account at a school in Michigan, but I don't live there. What kinds of rights will I have against people who send me unsolicited email?
This is a pretty simple question, but there isn't a simple answer. It's going to be a long time before this works itself out. We might get rid of all US spammers, but what about an email that originates in Asia? I'll stick to my spam filter instead of waiting for my government to stop spam.
Well... good on one condition: If the law will cover mass-email that is sent to an e-mail address in which the sender does not know the recipients geographical location. For instance, someone sends me SPAM, I sue, but their defense is, "Well how was I supposed to know they lived in Michigan?" If they still get slammed fine, but if not then this law doesn't do much good.
::sigh:: ...relief...
If the prior, then this will greatly cut down on the number of SPAM-mails anyone gets per day since the sender must take this precaution if they don't know where joeblow@some.domain lives. (Assuming one will use a filter against it!) Some people may complain that the article sucks, or some even because they don't like the law... but just wail till your average inbox size goes from 250 to about 50.
Freedom goes hand in hand with responsibility. The Internet, and the SMTP protocol specifically, provides a channel of communication which should not, must not be restricted or regulated (freedom). On the other hand, everyone must refrain from consuming my resources by sending me unsolicited messages (responsibility). Breaches should be treated in the same way as other lapses of responsibility resulting in unfair property disadvantage, so no separate law is needed. One possible solution is to prosecute under trespass to chattels:
A chattel is just personal property, like my computer. Spammers intentionally meddle with my computer, resulting in its impaired usefulness. It's as if they broke into my house, coming in thru the cable modem, and took a hammer to my hard drive. Each spammer has violated the public trust, and should be fined. No need for additional legislation.This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
"Governor" of Michigan? More like the Attorney Governor of Michigan. She wasn't even born in the US.
Have you read my journal today?
"Send him to Detroit!"
This sig no verb.
I imagine that since $10,000 and one year in jail is the maximum penalty that it would be reserved for the worst offenders. First timers would probably get off with a slap on the wrist (community service). I agree that this should only be used if you don't have a prior relationship with the sender.
Next it should be illegal with larger penalties (up to $100,000 and 10 years in jail) to use fraudulent headers. Some spam emails I get put places before their in the "Received" headers and use bogus domain names or email addresses. Also messages many times don't really describe what they contain. For example, I get a lot of spam that have the subject lines "Hi" or "Re: your order" that don't come from people just wanting to say "Hi" or in response to an order I actually placed. This should be considered fraud in my book.
Also I just got an html email (the "Re: your order" one) that had html comments with random letters and numbers inserted in the middle of each word. Granted they don't hurt your ability to view the message in HTML, but their only purpose could be to obfuscate the text of the message, trying to keep someone from filtering by message content.
I also think it should be illegal to sell or give your email address away to another party. There should be an exception for individuals of course, but that's all you really need. Make it illegal to harvest email addresses by crawling the web and using VRFY on mail servers. It would be pretty easy to setup a "sting" by planing bogus email addresses and tracking down the people that send them emails, then putting them away for a very long time.
IANAL, but I've got a good grounding in legalese. So let me try and translate it into clear English. As far as legalese goes, BTW, this stuff is pretty clear.
"Commercial e-mail" means an electronic communication between two or more computers which tries to get you to buy, lease or exchange things (goods, services, property, or basically anything else of value).
It's pretty clear to me that donations are exempted; there's no sale, no lease, and no exchange of goods/services. Likewise, political messages are exempt; no sale, no lease, no exchange of goods/services.
Based on their definition of commercial email, those annoying windows messenger pop-ups are illegal. But if you look closely, based on this clause alone, all internet advertising that promotes the sales, lease or exchange of goods, services, real property, or any other thing of value is in violation of the law. That's all advertising!
Now.... if there's another clause that requires these messages to be unsolicited... would this law perhaps include those annoying pop-up generators?
I don't want the government regulating the internet. I think we're capable of regulating ourselves.
Am I the only one who sees the dangerous slippery-slide these laws are starting? Where are we with self-regulating? Wouldn't a trusted delivery system work?
Am I "not cool" for not being reactionary geek?
Improving the gene pool is a tough one. Say, for example, that we wanted to wipe out diabetes (this is assuming that diabetes is entirely genetic -- maybe haemophilia is a better example). Anyway, the only real way to get it out of the gene pool is to prevent people with diabetes (or whatever) from having kids. Alternately, perhaps some sort of selective breeding program could be set up so that diabetes would become more and more recessive and have less and less chance of being expressed (I don't know about this, IANA biologist). Although good for humanity in the long run I think these idea would have trouble getting enshrined in law, and more trouble getting enforced to the point that the gene pool was totally diabetes-free.
So, on to the stupidity! If stupidity is solely genetic, and we are serious about removing it from the gene pool, then we can't rely on car accidents, we'd have to set it up as per diabetes, above. Why? Because stupid folks love to breed : ) Anyway, a gene pool adjusting program is highly unlikely, not only because of the PR problems, but becuase 'stupidity' is difficult to define and probably partially environmental in origin.
Back to the seatbelts-related points:
- A stupid person not wearing a seatbelt may kill someone other than themselves (maybe not outside the vechile, as you say, but perhaps in the same vehicle)
- Attrition of the stupid (from car accidents etc) is unlikely to counteract growth of the stupid (from back-seat-of-the-car accidents etc... ha)
- Plans to eradicate the stupid are morally / politically / PRwise unlikely to gain support. I think this where the accusations of racism will come in as well (not that I think you are a racist, far from it). If someone has had a bad education or no education at all, it's usually because they are poor, and could not afford access to a decent level of schooling. And as minorities are disproportionately poor, accusations of racism will be made, even if the idea is not intentionally discriminatory.
Hence, seatbelts, education, and contraception for all, and remember not to sleep with your relatives : )Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling