Slashdot Mirror
Australia To Fast-Track Anti-Spam Bill
Crypto Gnome writes "News Interactive is reporting that anti-spam legislation is being fast-forwarded by the Australian Federal Government. The proposed law will ban sending commercial emails without the recipient's prior consent and ban the use of email harvesting or list-generating software. Naturally, this will only directly impact local Australian spammers, but they're also hoping this will set a precedent for the International community." Banning list-generation software seems a bit heavy-handed, doesn't it?
This could lead to the same kind of subnet-blocking that Something Awful was the victim of... all of their email being blocked by anyone using really nasty spam filters that had worse manners than the spammers in the first place.
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According to the NOIE media release, they aim to ban 'the distribution and use of e-mail 'harvesting' or list-generating software'. I read this as any software which trawls web sites etc. for addresses. While this in itself will make little difference to the educated few, it should curtail their ability to sell 'harvesting' as a service, and is thus a GoodThing[tm].
This must be the first useful thing which that stupid goat, Dick Alston, has ever done. It must have been drafted by someone else and simply rubber stamped by him.
For those with short memories, Alston is the one who banned internet gambling and porn, thereby sending any Australian companies involved in the above overseas. Of course Australians have no trouble engaging in internet gambling or downloading porn - just not from Australian servers now. Well done Alston!
I'm curious though, this bill bucks the liberal government's current trend of screwing the individual. Maybe they're just trying to distract us from ever-increasing public transport & medical costs.
For a fraternity that had limited membership rules according to major. Get them a list of all students in that subset of majors to compare people who signed up with interest against. It's counter productive when you are trying to get someone to join your organization to be over-intrusive when first meeting.
For my boss, a list of all houses for sale in a 30 mile radius from all 22 local realtors. The houses had to fit certain specs and be in a certain price range. This included contact info of the realtor.
For the company I work for. I wrote a robot that scans specific job postings for projects available to bid on. It compiles them from many sites and updates them daily to an inter database, which then generates webpages for our Sales Staff to llok at and figure which ones are best for us to bid on. Once again, contact info is grabbed
Again, for my company. A bot to scour resume sites based on inputable criteria so that HR can find potential new hires more easily.
For my company yet again. contact info for the owners, engineers, contacts, managers, etc ... of every (available) mall, shop, radio/TV/Emergancy radio tower, telephone company, utility, etc. We are contracted out to provide PEMA (Pennsylvania Emergency Management Association) a database for use in case of emergancy. The list generation software helped populate the data, and helps scrub the database and keep it up to date.
For my company again. Phase I/II 911 geodatabases. I write software that scours local tax records for changes when people move, as well as phone carrier's records so that when you dial 911, they already have directions to where you are and emergancy crews automatically dispatched. These databases can shave anywhere from 45 seconds to 3 minutes off of response time ... which can mean life or death.
For a man in Palm Springs, CA. He wanted to track down people he graduated with for their 25th class reunion. His school had since closed and I wrote software to scrape classmates.com (after he paid for a membership) for the contacts he wanted so they could be put in a spreadsheet that was more easily readable and printable than the website.
;). I told him 'no' because I didn't feel right about contributing to spam anyways.
These are just some of the very legitamate uses for list generating software.
I don't have much of a problem with targetted lists, either, but I don't generate them myself. The man from Palm Springs offered me $2000 to get him the contact info from every Real Estate Agent in Cali. He was teh top seller for 6 years straight ('91-'96) for a real estate firm in CA and retired young a very rich man. He wanted to offer his consulting services to agents there now. I find this a gray area for spamming, but refused the job on principle. He *WAS* targetting his email towards people that could actually use his services (unlike me getting mortgage offers when I don't own a house or my girlfriend getting penis enlargement spam, regardless of how much I may or may not need it
-Ab
Nothing fails quite like prayer.
This could lead to the same kind of subnet-blocking that Something Awful [somethingawful.com] was the victim of... all of their email being blocked by anyone using really nasty spam filters that had worse manners than the spammers in the first place.
No, you just felt like bringing up the somethingawful problem, it has nothing to do with this story at all. Banning the sending of spam and banning the harvesting of emails could in no way lead to the same kind of subnet-blocking that Something Awful was the victim of... all of their email being blocked by anyone using really nasty spam filters that had worse manners than the spammers in the first place.
Nice try at being insightful though.
I made a script as a proof-of-concept that will download Slashdot pages and finds e-mail addresses, un-obfuscating where appropriate, and displays them on the screen (doesn't even bother storing them).
;) ), but could its very existence be illegal in Australia ?
This just to show that it can be done in the scripting language of choice, and that the Slashdot obfuscation techniques commonly used are hardly a deterrent.
I have no intention to release the script ( heck, I only just got my internet restored - I can do without a Slashdot mob pounding at my sites
The proposed law will ban sending commercial emails without the recipient's prior consent and ban the use of email harvesting or list-generating software.
Well, I'm not sure exactly what "list generation software" includes, but I generated a list of OUTGOING email addresses from my mbox files so I knew who to WHITELIST.
I also have had to extract email addresses out of my mbox files for various technical reasons, such as when I set my "default" mailbox to bounce mails. I had to build a list of all email addresses previously sent to my domain so I could decide which addresses I wanted to keep.
No - that is indeed spam. It is unsolicited. It is also sent to a group.
...
Spammers use exactly the same justification - that every person who receives their email is a "genuine potential customer".
The amount of paper junk mail I get at home is ridiculous. There are idiots who drive along the street *every day* in a van and put more in. Worse - they get their *kids* to put it in the mailbox, teaching the next generation how to spam.
Well, here's a tip for spammers and spammees. *Anything* may be attached to a reply-paid envelope in Australia, and the person who paid is liable for the entire amount. That's why I keep a good heap of bricks and rocks around at home. I take all the reply-paid cards, tape them to a brick and put it in the post
http://home.earthlink.net/~tm120176050/fec.html
;)
This list generator is a fake email creator to generate huge lists of non-existent emails, which it turns into a HTML file. You then put this HTML file online among your other pages, so that spam harvesters pick them up and pollute their own database with thousands of useless emails. If everyone had one page with a thousand bogus email links then spammers would find their job much harder.
Oh, and of course you can add the real emails of company individuals you hate, of course, or spammers themselves etc, or Darl McBride
Under the proposed legislation this program would be illegal in Australia....
Quizo69
Visceral Psyche Films
Kinda like free speech?
No seriously, your problem here is that the holes will be opened in the same heavy handed and ill-informed fashion as the inital screen was created.
Making the whole idea more worthless than not having it, given the false confidence argument.
The real problem we have here is this: People have false expectations from the idea of email. What I mean is, email is by it's nature, open and unlimited. Anyone can send emails to anyone else. It's a bit like walking down a busy road in London, and expecting people not to offer you leaflets. Sure you cannot refuse them, and in some cases make them less likely to give it to you (i find an evil stare helps!), this is like deleting or blocking spam.
To prevent spam at all, the only way is not to walk down that street. Given that your office is at the end, that doesn't work. So instead, don't expect every email to be useful, or relevant, or requested. Sure, you can stay off the main streets (keep your email off Usenet), keep your head down (Use Thunderbird instead of outlook, maybe get a filter like SpamAssassin or whatever), and refuse those leaflets (hit the delete button for 'Work From Home Now! afkasf').
That's just my take on the issue - it's an overblown problem. No-one ever died from too much spam, it's just a modern day hassle, so taking a philosophical approach will help you deal with it, like it does with traffic jams, house prices and fitness club leaflets.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
Yes, but when you consider that "all I'm doing" when I send spam (Wait, Wait! I don't! Hypothetical Situation!) is sending signals across the wire to my ISP, who then has to (knowingly?) forward it to your ISP which then has to accept the spam, and then it gets sent to you, who again has to accept the spam, consider there are many places it could have been blocked, and wasn't. Unfourtanetly, I don't see anything wrong with that.
Sidenote, I'm not sure, but I'm beginnning to wonder if the (US Only, Maybe Canada) regulation (FCC) requirement of "This device must accept any interference recieved, including interference that may cause undesired operation" (Part 15 (2) FCC Rules) would allow this of it's own right.
I tell you what, though - if so many people were handing out leaflets on Oxford Street that it was physically impossible for pedestrians or traffic to move, then the police would come and move them along. Just like the way that there's too many spammers, so the cops are being called in to get rid of them. Sure, it impedes their "free speech" rights, but no-one really cares about people's "free speech" right to jam up my mailbox with unsolicited commercial email.
I accept that sending UCE is "almost essential" for promoting your services.
Given that, I hope that you go out of business and burn in hell, not necessarily in that order.
Unsolicited. Commercial. Email.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
What I mean is, email is by it's nature, open and unlimited
;-)
What is needed is a gauranteed way to determine who sent the email. This is indeed possible...if a bit of a fundamental change. A method to 'classify' email would be a nice 'feature' too, but that's a different holy war
It's a bit like walking down a busy road in London, and expecting people not to offer you leaflets.
Really? it's generally about the frequency, once or twice people can deal with. Every day, 40 or 50 times, i.e. every few steps, and there wouldn't be room to walk on the sidewalk.
Refusing the leaflets isn't a good analogy...since the equivalent is they put them in your pocket before you can give them that 'evil stare'.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
You do realise that spam is termed 'U.C.E.' as in Unsolicited commercial email?
The phrase "but I'm just contacting genuine potential customers" is the mainstay of every spammers excuse list.
Ok, I'm not a complete idiot and do realise that in the strictest definition of UCC (Unsoliciteds Commercial Correspondence), this would be considered UCC.
However, I do not liken UCC to spam. Spam is sent to random people or organisations with no particular bias or particular knowledge of them. It targets anybody and everybody in the hope that somewhere in that supergroup there is a tiny subgroup who will respond - usually out of ignorance.
It's a slightly different kettle of fish.
We are providing a service that keeps an economy afloat and is vital to a large number of companies, even some that don't know it. Our UCC is targetted at specific entities and never sent to those who it would not apply to. On the other hand, most spam mail is trivial crap and unexclusive in it's targetting. There is a market and reason for our UCC, whereas spam is just annoying and only takes advantage of the ignorant.
Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary
You're missing the point. I've seen this "Free Speech" argument on BBSes, in Usenet, and I've lost track of god knows where.
Free speech means you have the right to say whatever you want. Period. You have the right to utter any words you like, using your vocal chords.
Free speech does NOT, repeat NOT, mean you have the right to demand of someone else to relay or amplify your own speech. To illustrate this point, imagine somebody going in to the local TV station and demanding that they broadcast his opinion, and accusing them adamantly of denying him the right to free speech when they politely escort him out of the building.
Relaying messages cost money, whether if it's on television or on electronic mail systems.
Spammers know this and knowingly try to get the cost of their huge volume messaging on somebody else's tab.
That is not free speech, that is fraud.