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Minnesota Senator Says Email Tax Might Reduce Spam
indros13 writes "The Hon. Mark Dayton, Senator from Minnesota, is reportedly considering a "miniscule email tax" to counter the flood of spam. Thinking like an economist, he's obviously hoping to make mass emailing unprofitable. 'You can't say, "We want it to be totally free and unrestricted and on the other hand we want it to work smoothly and civilly," he said.' No word on how all those lobbying groups that use mass emails will respond, but I'm sure there are a few emails on the way..." Politician weasel words are part of the package, though; Dayton says a tax is "just one of the tactics that should be considered, but I don't favor it at this time."
Interesting how everyone who thinks there should be a tax on email thinks that the money should go to their organization or government.
;^)
"Leave it alone," [Norquist] said. "If the government gets involved, they will mess it up."
Agreed. The point is that if "little" things like this are allow, then it's basically saying "Look, Verisign, commercializing the internet is the solution like you said!"
I likes my SpamAssassin, thanks
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Taxing murders might stop murders.
Taxing childbirth might stop overpopulation.
Give me a fucking break.
Taxes?
World-wide or what?
Why should we all suffer just because some people are to dumb to install a SPAM filter, use Mozilla or do something else useful.
Just sitting there and crying "Argh, somebody do something against that SPAM" won't help. They just will limit your freedom as a result. Again.
This won't work. To send letters in the mail is the cost of the material, the envelope, and obviously the stamp. The US postal service has continually upped the price of sending letters, yet I seem to get MORE of those 1024 free AOL hours CD's now than ever before, and they are getting bigger and heavier and cost more to send out. I doubt a tax on sending emails will have much of an effect on spam. Spam is already SO much cheaper than snail mail, and snail mail spam still happens. I would argue that even if we levied a 37 cent tax on every email that we still would have a large amount of spam. Besides, how the hell do you enforce such a policy? Especially when emails can be sent within a particular ISP from the spammer to users with no real way for the goverment to get in there and inforce such a payment plan. This just won't work.
Will Stokes Album Shaper http://albumshaper.sf.net
Taxing email makes baby Jesus cry. You don't want to do that, now do you Senator?
People talk too much and too loud, they oughta be taxed. Geez, you can't go around taxing communication like this!
So, assuming that at some stage, we all have to pay to send email to (wherever). That creates a market pressure to set up email servers in (!wherever) that other people use webmail to get to...
:-)
I guess once you get a critical mass of people used to paying for email, and it's accepted as "what happens", then it won't be an issue, but getting to that happy stage is another ball-game.
Not sure if ISP's would be in favour or not. The market pressure applies to them the most directly of all. On the other hand, if it works, it'll reduce their bandwidth (I saw a statistic that 50% of email is now spam), and the more-confident of them can probably apply a mark-up for email...
Corporations are stuck, unless they're *really* big, I think. But who cares about corporations
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
as long as you send the tax money to me.
Clearly the guy is pretty clueless about email or only ever receives it from his mother down the road. How does he expect to tax email from ... wait...
outside the USA? Hold the emails in some large mail spooler at the border and send a bill to the people in the foreign countries? Christ , how do people
this dumb ever get elected? Oh
I can't even imagine how this tax would fit into the internet, let alone be inforcable, the cost of the charging system and the extra effort required to police the fraud of the system, lets face it any system where money changes hands I'm sure somone will work out a way to defraud :)
Ok, so another politician has brain stormed up this new idea, that...ummm...1,000,000 others have. Seems like everyweek another politician is talking about taxing email. The government has no right taxing this and can make no valid arguments for it.
If you must!
Yeah, that'll make a big difference in the Spam I see (most of which is getting bounced off of open realys somewhere in Asia). Can't wait to see how he plans on taxing them...
Internet Explorer was unable to link to the Web page you requested. The page might use standard HTML or CSS.
Spammers tailor the stream of bytes to get into other people's computers, bypassing various measures the owners have taken to keep them out. Does this sound like "computer cracking". That's because it is. Did you think that computer cracking is illegal? All together now: That's because it is.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Two points:
If you want to make it unprofitable, sue the corporations that always wind up the object of the advertisement (Norton WhateverWorks always show up in my box 2-200 times per week). If they don't fund the spammers, some of their incentive dries up.
Anyone caught co-opting another CPU to turn it into a proxy should be prosecuted and sent to prison. The ROI on that taxpayer money would be much better than putting some teenage file-sharer in prison!
I think many on Slashdot will agree with me that this proposal is, essentially, unimplementable. The SMTP protocol simply isn't designed to interface into some kind of online micropayment transaction system to make everybody pay their tax. That said, I'm very pleased to see a member of Congress acting proactively on the issue of spam (i.e., unsolicited email, not the delicious lunch meat).
.NET enabled heavy iron monsters, guarded by severe-looking men with machine guns, and laser-wielding robots. Every email account in the United States will be routed through these machines, and sophisticated genetic algorithms will filter out any messages containing the words "penis enlargement," "exciting timeshare opportunities," and "URGENTLY SEEKING YOUR AID IN AN EMERGENCY BUSINESS TRANSACTION." Keep in mind, privacy advocates, as an added bonus, this system could spell the end for hated systems like Carnivore (or whatever they're calling it these days) because, with every email server consolidated in a secret underground lab in New Mexico, there's no need to monitor your local ISPs traffic. It's a win-win. As an added bonus, this system could very well stop terrorists in their tracks. Just imagine the look on poor Ahmed's face when DIS (Department of Internet Security) stormtroopers burst through the door of his flat, guns blazing, after intercepting his "Dear Osama, the attacks begin at dawn" email.
/.'ers to write their congressmen immediately, and say, with one clear voice, "URGENTLY SEEKING YOUR LEGISLATIVE ACTION: Please stop Osama from acquiring penis enlargement, such that he may steal our nubile young coeds willing to bare it all at the luxurious timeshare condominium financed with a low, low interest rate!" Think of the children, people.
I guess the problem with Mr. Dayton's approach is, it doesn't go far enough. You can't very well force everyone to change their mail servers over to a system with the transaction processing software in it. On the other hand, the government has got to DO SOMETHING, as no one is interested in lower mortgage or nubile young coeds willing to "bare it all!" for you. Therefore, the only logical option to stop spam (i.e., unsolicited email) is to consolidate the email facilities of the United States. Perhaps we need the creation of a Department of Internet Security.
Imagine, if you will, an underground labyrinth of servers, all secure
Truly, there is no downside to this plan. I urge all
OK, first the obvious: You can't tax e-mail sent from out the country.
Whenever this issue comes up on TV, it's obvious that the people talking about it have no clue. Last weekend there was a show in which the pundits were either "for" or "against" -- "taxing the Internet", and of course they weren't specific. I don't know about you, but when I pay for my ISP at home, it's taxed. These days, things I've bought (from say, Amazon.com) are taxed. I had the distinct impression that not only didn't the people realize this, but that some of them have never even used anything connected to the Internet.
If it's not that, what the hell do these people want to tax?
Besides that, it's all just data. You can't tax some packets and not others - people will just develop new protocols to avoid the taxes. Unfortunately you have to understand the technology to make sensible rules governing its use.
Later in the article the guy mentions the creation of a Do-Not-Email registry. This doesn't strike me as a very good idea. What's he propose doing about every other country in the world? Total blacklists? An international spam police squad? How would one enforce the email tax idea, too?
I meta-mod all positive moderation Unfair, because it's abuse of the system.
and if the rest of humanity is too stupid to do a 10 minute google search then I'm not paying for it. You want to stop spammers? Use a decent filtering scheme.
Same thing as with drug, gun, and sex ed. If the vast majority of people weren't so damn irresponsable and stupid then they'd be able to handle either not using drugs or using them responsabily (not only does this apply to marajuana, but also the likes of prozak), certain guns wouldn't need to be outlawed because some dumbfuck would press the trigger by accident and off his entire family. And finally, our kids would not only know where and when sex is ok, but why it is ok and how to make love responsabily.
Either way, if he passes a e-mail tax law, I'll just setup something else that isn't spammable like a VPN between my house and my family members that transmits txt documents into a local folder. Mabye that way the idiots who use the system won't open up sobig viruses and help to make virus problems worse.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
What, excatly speaking, is e-mail ? If it's defined as "messages delivered by the SMTP protocol", all one needs to do to avoid the tax is to invent a new protocol (or use instant messaging, for example). If it's defined as "messages delivered by computers", then it would kill Slashdot, for starters...
In any case, it would be the end of free email lists. Probably newsgroups too, since they would be the next logical step.
Of course, all this is assuming such a tax can actually be enforced, which is unlikely. Nevertheless, if e-mail becomes non-free, it's one more reason to hate spammers - thank you, parasites, for ruining a good thing for everyone.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
on a more serious note, is there a legal definition of what is spam? i consider anything about M$ Windows based products to be spam because i use a Mac, but i am sure to somebody it may be useful information.
I don't see this as feasible in any way. Is my ISP going to add the tax to my bill when I report SPAM. If so goodbye SPAM reports I'll just live with it. Or does the person sending the SPAM get the bill. And if so what if I start reporting my friend's email as SPAM just to get them to pay money. And then we have the lovely out of country spammers in China, India, etc. Somehow I think they won't care and will just send it anyways.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
Spammers are already using viruses and hacked accounts to send the email. They won't be paying the tax the victim will.
I know,it was only a matter of time before the internet was to see taxes. But why e-mail? How in the world can anyone monitor this to tax it? My e-mail is all based in Canada, and my residence is in the US.
Pretty Pictures!
This keeps coming up... and getting killed. For good reason.
The only people having trouble spam these days are those not smart enough to install SpamBayes :)
Let's say that an e-mail tax is indeed made law. There are some considerations that make this a terrible idea:
1. Who collects the taxes? Are collecting the fees going to fall on the backs of ISP's, on consumers or on anyone who operates a mail server?
2. Will other countries co-operate? Say someone in Germany wants to send e-mails to America. Problem! The e-mail tax must be paid! If it is waived for foreign senders, then all you'd get is a tax and massive offshore spamming operations. Think of the internet gambling phenomenom. Most of those sites are operated offshore because they run contrary to American law. Even if most countries agree and implement, you'd see several that saw an oppurtunity and go along.
3. Will legitimate companies agree to have their cost of doing business raised so drastically? Think of the price a 3M or other large multinational would be exposed to. They certainly wouldn't like that.
There are far more than that, but time to get back to work.
NOT!!!
Geez... Even if his plan works, how does he propose to tax email originating outside US borders?
What's next? A Internet Stamp issued by uspo.gov? I'll bet the post office just loves that idea!
Schmuck.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
I don't pay for music, porn, movies, or software, and they think they can get me to pay for email?
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
What if spammer breaks into someone machine and uses it to send spam?
Here's the three step solution for spammer to get profit
1. Break into computer and send spam
2. Let the innocent victim pay the tax...???
3. Profit!!!
Some miniscule tax (pennies/email) is not going to kill spam and does not even funnel the money to those most affected by it. I say make the sender pay money to the recipient and let the recipient set the payment level. And if the email is from a friend or proves to be worthwhile, let the recipient refund the money back to the sender.
If the recipient values their time, they can demand $3/email. If the recipient values doesn't value their time or wants to maximize payments from spammers, they can demand $0.10/email. In either case, it is the recipient that is in control and it is the recipinet that gets paid for the labor of dealing with spam.
The current e-mail system is broken. The unrestricted low-cost of sending email provides too much incentive to send emails that are worth nothing.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
unless they're providing something for an email tax such as email service, it's completely insaine.
/. but, what the hell. when your income is declining due to lack of sources, then cut down on your freaking spending. cut down on it tremendously. we're at the point where it's time for a massive reengineering of this "government". business have been doing it since the 80's and even well before. cut costs and improve productivity by 100's of % ages, not 5-10% increases. the government currently has the largest but laziest bunch of stock holders around. man, to these people piss me off with their new ideas to raise money instead of increasing productivity.
i'm sure there's no politicians reading
It's difficult to prevent the use of spam when there's no cost associated with sending thousands, tens of thousands or even millions of e-mails,"
It's also difficult to promote the free interchange of ideas when there is a fee associated with it. Email is one of the true great equalizers of the Internet. Anyone, anywhere with access to a computer can send an email. At the library, school, a kiosk in the mall.
You can't say, `We want it to be totally free and unrestricted and on the other hand we want it to work smoothly and civilly,' "
And if you get your fingers into it, you'll totally dick it up, and not actually solve the problem.
As it says in the article, follow the money. Almost all spam is directed to splitting you from some of your money. Where does that money go? Go get that guy. Don't place a burden on me and hope to screw him over.
- Require a "miniscule tax on email"
- ???
- Profit!!! (through the taxation)
The snag is that "???" is actually a known entity - "Implement a robust micro-payment system". That's a concept that seems about as nebulous as SCO's claims about Linux and I doubt it's going to happen anytime soon.On the other tinfoil hat, if you require ISPs to monitor the amount of email being sent and bill accordingly, then the obvious way to go would be to force all email through a central server farm at the ISP. Wouldn't that be convenient for all the agencies that might want to monitor communications to "prevent terrorism".
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I've never understood why this isn't something that the OSS community hasn't tried to tackle.
For business purposes, I want an email system that:
1) Is Spam free.
2) Is secure.
3) Is failsafe - i.e. if the recipient doesn't receive the message, I want to know about it.
Surely from a technical perspective, this isn't that difficult?
Why can't the OSS mail clients agree on a standard for doing this. I don't see why it shouldn't be possible, for instance, to have two mail boxes (or whatever you want to call them) for a single email address - one for "secure emails", and the other for the rest. The secure email box would only recieve emails that were from an approved address.
This could be a great way for OSS software to creep into organisations - I could tell my clients, for instance, hey, if you use Thunderbird, we can email each other more securely/without spam/in a failsafe manner. The network effects of this kind of promotion for OSS could be fantastic.
This looks like an opportunity that's going to waste for the OSS community. Come on guys, or people will start saying we don't innovate!
(Checks computer specs) Nope, nothing about it being government property or a marketing channel. However, if someone said that skipping commercials is theft, someone will say this. (But I really had to go to the washroom, honest!)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Ok, there are already some wingnut posts on this story, so I feel the need to set the record straight:
This is not just a case of RTFA, it's a case of RTFP (post). Fortunately the post quotes Dayton as saying Dayton says a tax is "just one of the tactics that should be considered, but I don't favor it at this time.".
It's just an idea folks. Obviously we all know it isn't workable, but at least these guys are thinking about the issue in general.
There probably isn't a legislative solution, and I think Mark Dayton is open minded enough to reach that conclusion and then say it publicly. Of course, I don't think it would get as much coverage as this story, because here's a Democrat trying to raise taxes! For shame!
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
In order to facilitate our accounting records, please fill out the attached Form 80179 per email you send out. You have several means of submitting these forms:
- Fax them to us,
- Send via postal mail, or
- Email them to us
Note that if you choose the third option, you will need to submit a Form 80180 declaring that email as being Form 80179 exempt.Yours truly,
Uncle Sam
Then, promptly three hours later:
Dear Taxpayer,
Due to the infinite number of emails we have been receiving, we have decided that this whole email taxation thing is a huge waste of time and resources and has only caused all internet innovation to move off-shore. We apologize for the inconvenience and the resulting demolished economy. On the bright side, all displaced workers can apply for a job to help us dispose of Form 80179 submissions.
Yours truly,
Uncle Sam
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
This is a bad idea if we want to keep the US competitive in the global spam market.
Taxing spammers will just move all the good US spamming jobs overseas.
Taxing doesn't address the real problem, which is that spammers are breaking the law. We already pay for the infrastructure and the ISP, not the spammers. If the spammers had to pay for their own infrastructure instead of hijacking ours, their return on investment would drop.
Taxing would be a big wakeup call to idiots with open relays, but it's unlikely to catch the thieves who originated the spam.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
...immediately to be tested for substance abuse. You've just exhibited a very clear behavior, indicative of classic symptoms of narcotics abuse.
(thankfully not in Minnesota). The governement would have to install some sort of hardware/software somewhere on my network to collect a tax. The government can install such equipment on my network over my dead body.
That is all.
The Anti-Blog
The best idea to stop spam for end-users is still server-side whitelists. If you can't have something like that, you need bayesian filters. They work REALLY well.
1. where will the money go?
2. hello i'm a student do i need to pay?
2.1 well wouldn't that turn students into spammers
3. do i need to pay if i'm only sending mail within my domain. i.e. me to my teacher
4. business replies, tech support etc. if businesses only will communicate through email for ordering stuff online and tech support for their products souldn't they have to pay for the email since they don't offer me a free alternative to contact them? would this law require them to have a free alternative to contact them? i.e. a phone number, or something similiar.
How can this system possibly work? Firstly it can only be enforced inside the US. This means that any measures taken can only be taken on US SMTP servers. The idea is surely that SMTP servers will only trust other SMTP servers that are signed up to the tax program and are taxing users, but what about connections from overseas? If US citizens want to receive e-mail from anyone abroad, then US servers will need to trust all servers outside the US.
Therefore an overseas spammer will be in precisely the position that they were in before - i.e. they're free to send as much bulk e-mail as they want - except now everybody inside the US has to pay a cent per e-mail.
An alternative might be to tax after the e-mail has arrived at the recipient, and yes, I'm sure Microsoft will tell you this could be an ideal application of certain DRM technologies. But that won't work either. Since most of the e-mail spam sent comes from overseas, aside from trying to send tax bills to people out of the country in areas with no extradition treaties, I don't see what can really be done.
Spam is, and always will be an international problem, and must be tackled as such. I don't really want the UN charging me taxes, but if this is what it takes to stop spam then sobeit. Of course, since most American politicians over the last 50 years have been disgusted at the idea of the UN's power being enhanced to cover this sort of thing I can't see any change any time soon.
By far the easiest cheapest way to combat spam is through user education. By explaining to users that there are free and effective spam filters available and by persuading them to use them, there'll simply be no point sending the stuff any more because no-one will be able to read it.
I think the industry as a whole would be *MUCH* better off looking for a technical solution rather than hoping for government intervention. Plus, the internet is multinational, so it's a hopeless task for the government to do anything about it. "The Road to Hell is paved with good intentions" pretty much sums up this article.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Regular mail "costs" 37 cents, but every day I get a stack of flyers in my mailbox that are metered or something, and they come from multiple sources. Charging for email will generate a lot of revenue, but just like raising the postage stamp rate, it will have 0 effect on spam.
stuff |
How will the taxes be determined and collected? What about some Windows user who's computer gets comprimised and becomes a spam relay or sends out thousands of emails when hit by the next email virus?
I think that the spammers will find some way around this tax to continue annoying all of us.
Tom
This will force the implementation of what is needed to solve the email problem -- digital signatures identifying SMTP servers outside of your network.
In order to pay the tax or tariff (for foreign email), you'd have to have a virtual "tax stamp" that identifies the server to the taxing authority. Email spam would disappear overnight.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Washington, DC Office
SR-346, Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, District of Columbia 20510
Phone: 202-224-3244
Fax: 202-228-2186
remind him that most spammer send spam illegally and never pay for it in the first place.
take a moment to flood him with calls.
let him no he should not even MENTION such an idea in public. The roots will take hold otherwise!
again:
Phone: 202-224-3244
Fax: 202-228-2186
it just takes a moment.
Do Nigerians pay Taxes in the US?
If not? Will George W. Bush invade Nigeria because of eMail-Terrorism?
NoSuchGuy
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
Technology moved to fast for laws and lawmakers.
As soon as something like this is inacted, some geek somewhere will design a new (no-email, but email like) communication system. First Internet users will start using it, and within a year it can easily replace the current email infrastructure.
If you must!
taxes won't stop criminals and scum. we already know spammers are evasive, they will just wheedle a way around the taxes the same way they wheedle into open relays and use foreign hosting.
if the government want's to do something, let them prosecute. most spammers live in the us and canada. in almost all the spamm i've ever seen their is enough fraud and misrepresentation in each email to at least bring charges in civil court with current laws.
If it did come to an email tax--worldwide--then why not funnel the revenue into maintaining/creating more backbone servers, or perhaps throw the money at Open Source?
Just a thought.
C17H21NO4
A better way would be to actually charge spammers with a reasonable sentence other than a fine and a slap on the hand.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
Next, the blog post tax. Hey, it would make trolling far more expensive, right?
Between this story and the story of third world countries wanting the UN to "control" the Internet because IANA is too US-centric, I really get the idea that government-control types really have no clue what the Internet is. If you "regulate" the Internet with taxes, restrictions, etc, another network will rise to take it's place. The main feature of the Internet is relative anarchy (also called freedom). Are there rules on the net? Of course! It's called "consensus"! Deal with it.
Mark Dayton is the heir to a fortune, but he spent years as a teacher at an inner-city school before entering politics. He also does not draw a full salary as a senator, donating part of it back to the treasury in the name of deficit reduction. He's not a traditional politician and he's not a weasel. What he is suggesting is embraced by a lot of mainstream observers, and Timothy should be ashamed of himself for taking a cheap shot at an honorable man. Perhaps if Timothy left his parents' basement and his desk next to the water heater he'd see that people like Dayton are committed to public discussion of important issues. Taxing email is probably not a good idea, but snarky comments like those posted by little boy Tim do nothing to forward public discussions of how to deal with the issue. At least Mark Dayton tries.
Spam is mostly about business - about keeping an ad in your face when you dont want it. Just because you impose a tax on it doesnt mean it will deter a person who wants to sell something - For Example, if someone wanted to sell used cars which go for $10000 a pop, what is a $500 email-spam tax for him ? Basic point is that there will always be something which will ultimately be profitable by spamming. Sure, it might stop the average sunday spammer, but i thought my yahoo spam guard already did that.
All those people who forward those damn chain letters would go bankrupt and have to sell their PC's...hmmmm, might not be a bad idea after all!
Why would they pay the e-mail tax when they're already conducting fraud?
Because of tax evasion. Its what got Al Capone put away, when nothing else would.
I don't agree with email tax, I think it is the camel's nose under the tent flap, so to speak, once it starts, precident is set.
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
No, he's thinking like a socialist. An economist would have thought how wonderful it is profits are being generated through such an inexpensive media as the internet. Spam is an opportunity, not a problem.
Dawn of the Dead
To charge people for email, you need to actually be able to verify where the email comes from. That means that email can no longer be anonymous. However, it is exactly this anonymity which allows for spam in the first place. If we had an email system with authentication, spam would no longer be an issue. So I think this is a moot point. The system that would have to be set up to charge people for email would be sufficient to stop spam without actually charging them money.
Like /.! If there were only a miniscule tax on Slashdot posts... (then this one wouldn't be here).
Seriously, how could this ever be implemented? Who's going to track who sends how many emails, and to where? Furthermore, the logical spaces of the Internet don't correspond very well (at this time) to physical spaces in the world. Do you have to pay export taxes if you're emailing someone overseas? Do you have to pay import taxes to receive an overseas email? Will it cost more to email someone "further away" from you?
How would this tax apply to *my* email server?
How do we even define "email"? Would this apply to messages sent to a different port, or a different protocol? If we do, then where do we draw the line?
In the end, taxing one type of Internet communication differently from any other type doesn't make sense. If all that's moving are logical bits, then distinguishing between the types of bits for taxation purposes seems silly. Either tax bandwidth usage, or don't, but don't tax only some.
Now, if there is $$ changing hands, taxation at least makes sense, even if you don't like it. If something other than bits is being moved (whether it's money or some other type of property), then taxation starts to make a lot more sense.
How long will it take before everyone simply drops email, and creates a better IM network to handle both delayed communication and real time chat (ICQ? but they're owned by AOL)
Will they move one to put taxes on IM's too?
Basically every services they throw a tax on will be abandoned by sane people, and the government will end up putting taxes on everything.
Beyond this, as stated above, how do you even implment such a thing?
Mod Parent down. This guy is posting crap and plagarzing slashdot posts.
Check out his journal.
Go ahead and tax it all you want. A new and free protocol will just pop up in its place. Is it even really feasible to tax email? The nature of the internet really does not allow for socket services to be tax- I do not see how it is possible. The only way to really tax such a thing would be if you controlled the service and then you still have the problem of new free services/protocols popping up. Of course, if they controlled the who network- which there is no way for the us gov to control the internet- then taxing such things would be possible and they could squash alien protocols.
I have trouble believing that it would be that difficult to restructure US networks to block all outside originated email that doesn't have a "postage paid" bit flipped.
Does requiring drivers to be licensed keep those not off the road? No. Will taxing email be enough of a deterrent to keep people from sending SPAM? I am certain that it won't, because much of the SPAM is sent from overseas where US taxes and laws has no baring.
-Slashdot Junky
.
Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
The problem of spam is already a problem of laws going unenforced against an entrenched criminal element. While spamming itself may not be explicitly illegal, the act of spamming is not separable from acts which are illegal, such as fraud, conversion, and theft of services. Many (including some spammers) are under the misapprehension that because these laws go unenforced, spam is thereby legal. Indeed, the problem of enforcement is so bad that blatantly destructive acts such as denial-of-service attacks against anti-spam services have gone utterly uninvestigated by law enforcement. (This may be changing.)
It is utterly unnecessary to create further laws which penalize ordinary Net users, in an effort to stop spammers. Indeed, such laws simply aggravate the problem already posed by spam: increasing the bother, inconvenience, and expense of using and operating the mail system. In effect, such laws would help the spammers destroy email.
Reading every day about how some (many?) spammers use hijacked computers, who would really be paying this tax?
A politician never met a problem he didn't think could be fixed with a tax of some sort.
And this guy's in the "Democrat-Farmer-Labour" party (whatever the hell THAT is-sounds like one of the eighty million British political parties to me) so he's probably a bit of a luddite and don't understand squat about how things REALLY work here.
Minnesotans: Send this jerk packing.
An "tiny" email tax might work well to slow down spam a little. The problem is that new taxes never go away, instead they tend to get bigger.
So it's small today, but tomorrow when some politician wants to pay for his or her pet project, it will be that much easier to just raise it a "little bit" to bring in more cash.
It's rediculous that governments think that they can tax any kind of activity. What's next, a per-page tax on the web?
This isn't any ordinary darkness. It's advanced darkness.
If you could track spammers down and collect a tax, then you could just as easily track them down and prosecute them for fraud, which the majority of spammers commit in one way or another. All this would do is tax law-abiding citizens, and encourage more credit card fraud, viruses, trojans and ID theft on the part of Spammers so they could stay anonymous (or pay the tax with someone else's credit card). We need a new branch of government - the IT branch - because no other branch has a clue when it comes to this crap.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
California could explore this option too.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I'd stop using e-mail. So would every else.
We would instead start using IM, which by then would have an enhancment so you can send messages back and forth without being online at the same time It would be sort of like voice mail but for instant messages. An electronic version of voice mail: call it e-mail!
Oops. We have come full circle. Just shows how pointless it is to "tax e-mail".
why send money to the government? Create your own tax on email, and have people pay you!
www.paidstamp.com
has a free solution to make it happen.
Anthony Loera
Do we really need to play this game?
Don't accuse someone of something until you can at least spell it correctly.
Think about it. They put a tax on all email. What will the geeks of the world do? They'll want to find a way around the tax. So, if the law is written just right, specifying RFCs and such (I know, it's a long shot), then this might be the kick in the rear needed to write a secure SMTP replacement that isn't succeptible to all the problems the current system is, and since the new system wouldn't fall under jurisdiction of that law it would be free. There's your reason for people to switch to it, which is always a response to the "write a new protocol" statement (that nobody would switch, since there's little reason to do so).
:>
Not saying I want to pay a tax for my email, I'm a sysadmin and get lots of it (though a salary increase to cover the tax would be nice..) But, if the lawmakers and the code writers collaborate a little, it could knock out the spammers in a different way.
And the revenues from the taxes could pay the salaries of the coders working on an SMTP replacement
Three dits, four dits, two dits, dah!
Radio, radio, rah rah rah!
A Minnesotan here, and I like Dayton and all, but he isn't exactly the most compelling public speaker you'll find. I get the feeling when he qualified himself that he isn't dissembling, he just has a nervous habit of qualifying *everything*. ...which is a politician trick, I know...
Anyway, the point is that this is more "Hey, this might be an idea, or whatever, I really don't know," than it is "I have this secret plot I want to enact, but I'll throw you off the trail by claiming I'm unsure about it."
why the heck dont we make it illegal to have an open relay? .. And while you're at it .. require ISPs to block port 25 beyond thier main router. This seems to me like a decent couple of ideas.
I think spam is on its way out-- we recently integrated spamassassin into our email server and spam is a thing of the past. With programs like these being integrated on the ISP level now and in the future combined with individual email packages getting smarter about spam I think we can kill spam dead.
:P Its becoming a problem. But now you can fight it!
Atleast in email form. Instant message spam, cellphone text spam and of course..
uhm uhm uhm... visit this hot pr0n site!
comment spam
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
As soon as we make email taxable, it becomes a potential source of revenue for the government. Eventually, to help make yet another pork filled budget meet, they would raise the tax on the email; entire bureaurcracies would form around the taxation of email, which would also need their own chunk of the budget.. The entire thing would become yet another yoke around our necks.
What a brilliant solution for stopping spammers. Now pull the other leg, please.
Weapons of Mass Analysis
Obviously, it would be shitty to pay more for something we already know and love (or you might have email for free, in which case paying anything would stink). But here's what I like about it. They could set it up in some kind of tiered system, kinda like cell phone usage plans, where it's pretty cheap if you stay within your expected usage, but totally unreasonably expensive if you go over. So maybe you pay one penny per email sent during the month, with a cap of 500 emails sent (I'm just throwing that number out there, because it seems like a huge number for an individual). If you go over 500 emails, you pay $1 per email. You could then regulate email traffic and collect taxes at the ISP level, since they're the ones who own and control the smtp servers.
Yes, there would be implementation issues and privacy concerns, problems, etc., but if this were in place I can't help but think it would make a positive difference. And before I get slammed by everyone, I realize there are all kinds of problems with legislating spam behavior in this country. The most obvious of which is the spammer's ability to simply relocate their operation outside the U.S. border where U.S. laws will have a much more difficult time taking effect.
Keep in mind that I'm not trying to invent the solution in this post, so don't take it like I'm defending the silver bullet to the problem of spamming, or go on a crusade to prove why I'm wrong. I just think this is an interesting idea. There are problems with every other spam prevention idea, evidenced by the continued (and growing) presence of spam for the majority of people (ie, not just computer geeks; spam reduction has to work for people like our grandparents and non-nerdy friends, and it will have to be transparent for it to work).
I think the email tax seems like one of the least shitty solutions out there. Anyone else have other, not-so-shitty solutions to spam?
Cos you guys know that if this had been a Republican suggesting this, the tin foil would have been crinkling faster than you can say "Look, an OMCL autographed by GWB!"
Btw, I hear you can get those on ebay. It truly *does* have everything!
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
This proposal doesn't necessarily incent spammers to stop spamming - instead it incents spammers to hijack other machines (a la SoBig) so that innocent bystanders get the tax.
The Democrats only want to take YOUR money and fritter it away. It is funny how multi-millionaires like Ted Kennedy are so willing to take your money for his programs. Wonder why Kennedy doesn't divest himself of all that "burden" of wealth by funding programs out of HIS OWN own pocket.
Oh, and it is Kennedy who is a major supprter of flooding the tech sector with cheap foreigners. What jobs are left he is advocating to be shipped to tele-centers in India.
Democrats - fr^hiend of the working man
An E-mail tax just can't be implemented, and the infrastructure for collecting it would be horrendous.
A much better initiative would be some kind of electronic cash micropayment system, perhaps run by the US Postal Service. Then, the recipients themselves could require a micropayment stamp for any mail they are going to read (a few cents, maybe).
What about some Windows user who's computer gets comprimised and becomes a spam relay or sends out thousands of emails when hit by the next email virus?
:-) ).
Then we will call that user 'enlightened'. You bet they will research their tech then, and not run cruddy software. I say this would be a good thing. -- me in Linux land.
Realistically tho, e-mail payments would be the worst thing ever. Think of it this way. $0.02 or so per e-mail is cheap to anyone living in the first world, but what about countries that are trying to get their economies up to par, and wages are not as high? Isn't Disney paying something close to that per HOUR of sweatshop work in Malasyia? (This info is something I heard long time ago, so don't quote me on that). How would they be able to afford such a payment?
Just my $0.02(Which I can afford
.... grant Email Tax Exemptions to the richest corporations, while claiming that the vast majority of the exemptions are being granted to the bottom 50% of email senders.
I have misplaced my pants.
Damn politicians. Last thing I want is them idiots messing with my email.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
That's just a pretext for yet another massive money-grab from John Q. Public's pocket.
Add another layer of bureaucrats to administer it all and in the end we'll be right back where we started from.
When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and when you're a politician, everything looks like a revenue-stream.
Of course it's easier to mod this as a troll than to write an intelligent rebuttal.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
i dont know about this idea, but it doesnt seem too terrible. if it's small enough i could deal with it. and maybe places like universities and such would be immune.... we shall see.
What if the government did put a small tax on email? Ok, pretty simple plan here. Normal people, send what? about 10 15 emails a week maybe more or less? Well, it is simple fix.
Normal people, no tax for sending less than 15 emails a week.
Business, no tax for sending 100 emails a week per employee.
Spammers, well, for your abuse to email servers around the world, you will be charged 1 cent for every email over 200 per day.
I didn't run any numbers, but it would be interesting to see what someone would come up with.
Oh yeah, if I am off with some of my numbers, sorry, I am going from my own personal experience.
eh, this sucks, I am going back to bed....
Just think, you subscribe to 5 high-volume mailing lists and participate heavily. You send out 300+ messages daily. Suddenly your fee gets substantial!
And if you work as user support for a small company, replying by email? Suddenly costs of operating rapidly rise. You operate a free web forum, where people subscribe and an automated reply sends them their password, and optionally get email notifications on changes in threads they watch. Your forum can't be free anymore.
I can think of a dozen other legitimate uses for sending bulk amounts of emails. Even with $0.01/email, with one email a day for some 500 users, that makes $150/month. Can easily kill any free service.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
An e-mail tax? Quickly, forward this message to everybody you know and urge them to vote against Bill 602P!
>>The Democrats only want to take YOUR money
>>and fritter it away. It is funny how
>>multi-millionaires like Ted Kennedy are so
>>willing to take your money for his programs.
While the republicans simply want to take my money and fritter it away, while not taking away the money of millionaires like ted Kennedy.
I have misplaced my pants.
...is to make it very illegal, and then actively pursue the guilty.
Hoping to stop it at the users' end is folly - no spambusting software is (can be!) fool-proof.
Taxing email is a very bad idea - nobody owns the web - I'd like to keep it that way. (This senator probably thinks America owns it nd is therefore deserving of the would-be revenue... but wait a minute - wasn't the WWW invented @ CERN?)
Tar and feathering Minnesota Senator may reduce fear-mongering tax and power grabs by the government.
There are a number of issues, not the least of which is enforcement, that must be addressed and resovled for this idea to work. However, I think that the idea was formed under a poor assumption: Spammers will transmit their ilk as legitimate businesses do, by using systems they own. I don't believe that to be the case. Judging from the spam that I receive the messages are usually sent through a hijacked account. The spammers won't be paying for the proposed tax, the legitimate owners of the hijacked accounts will. The economic cost is not applied to the source of the problem and therefore will have no affect.
However, a tax on email transmissions might provide enough economic incentive for organizations to make sure their mail servers are not configured as open realys and that they are properly hardened against other forms of attack that could allow them to transmit spam. It is feasible that relayed spam could cost a significant sum, depending on the amount of the tax. That fiscal incentive would be enough to grab the attention of the suits.
While I think any type of tax on network traffic is a Historically Bad Idea (tm), it could have some unexpected positive benefits. I don't think any of the positive benefits would outweight the general crappiness of the original idea though.
For the purposes of this tax what exactly constitutes an email? Is it any communication on port 25? What if I use some other port? Would I get still taxed if I ftp'd a text file? What if the file were compressed. What about message board traffic? What about IRC? What about Instant Messenger? What if I mail someone a floppy with messages on it?
What happens with email from outside of the taxing jurisdiction? Does the receiver pay? (That would be cool. I could just 'drive' across the border and mail bomb people I don't like. POW! right in the checkbook!)
For the future, I predict the following thing:
1) a future version of MS Outlook will offer all of these features in an easy to use way.
2) The OSS community will scream "They're evil! They're just trying to force a proprietry solution on everyone!"
3) The OSS community will then copy what they MS done, or try to catch up with their own solution.
Don't get me wrong. I'm really pro-OSS. I just despair at the short sightedness of the community sometimes, and its lack of understanding of end-user requirements.
...and then I realised it would kill mailing lists, too.
Then again, it might be made to work if, instead of the government taxing every outgoing mail spool, ISPs charged other ISPs for the privilege of sending mail to their users. That is, when fred@aol.com sends a mail to jim@hotmail.com, AOL has to pay Hotmail 1/10 cent, or however much the "tax" is set at. These charges would be aggregated, so there would be one monthly bill instead of trillions of nano-payments. Your ISP subscription could include, say, 1000 free emails per month, or 12,000 per year.
I would expect that for normal email traffic, the amount flowing in each direction would be about equal. When someone starts spamming, though, their ISP is slapped with large invoices. If the ISP has any sense, they pass those invoices on to the spammer. If the invoices aren't paid, the ISP that sent them refuses any traffic from those IP blocks.
For spam that comes through open relays or proxies, invoice whoever runs the open machine, and let them worry about where it really came from. If they can find the spammer and recover the cost from him, great. If not, they'll have learned a valuable lesson about not leaving an unsecured box on the open Internet.
A scheme that requires all (or many) ISPs to change their behaviour would be difficult to get working, but easier than one that requires all (or many) email users to change. The biggest problem I foresee is that it's notoriously hard to extract money from a spammer. Still, if ISPs who are currently spam-friendly know that selling connectivity to a spammer will cost them a large amount of money, they might be more careful about whom they sign up.
Just another wannabe fantasy novelist...
Recently I got sent a message to someone and got a repsonse that sent me to knowspam.net. It is just an example of a whitelist that non-technical worker might be able to use.
I use TMDA and my inbox is close to spam free, but it has a UI that is tricky and configuration is time consuming.
http://knowspam.net/
http://tmda.net/
TMDA asks you to to reply. Knowspam asks you to enter numbers from a GIF into an HTML form, just like some registration forms. Once you do this, your address is good for all Knowspam users.
Is a whitelist a solution or will spammers eventually figure out how to get around them?
What would they tax?
what email?
Locally generated and delivered messages?
Private email that only ever exists on my home network?
When it bounces throught a server (ISP mailbox -Home server- email client)
Instant messaging?
By size?
Weblog messages?
Then the biggest problem, how to tax these people who we don't know, can't find, and can't prove did it in the first place.
fun
Unworkable. Unworkable. Unworkable.
Do I get taxed for all my cron jobs that send me mail?
Do I get taxed for sending email to users who are on the same Unix box that I'm sending mail from?
Do I get taxed for sending email between computers that are all mine, but dispersed around the world and connected together with VPNs?
Do I get taxed when I set up VPNs to the systems of all my friends whom I email on a regular basis to avoid governments snooping to tax my email?
It will never work and even if the government attempted it, thousands of people will move their email accounts onto machines residing in countries without stupid laws attempting to tax email.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
This moron intends to collect taxes from offshore spams, how exactly?
This moron intends to collect taxes from ad-hoc, DHCP zombied home-machines, how exactly?
Or perhaps this moron intends to collect taxes based on the spoofed FROM: addresses, how exactly?
This moron intends to audit the messages sent, in order to calculate the amount due, how... exactly? Carnivore III?
Mook.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
taxing emails - yeah, right... as we all know Mark Dayton is a very dubious figure and he should better clean up his own affairs and corruption instead of coming up with such ridiculous ideas like taxing emails. we already have much better ways to deal with spam and don't need stupid politicians try to mess around with our internet. all i can say is: keep your hands off, buddy!
I have a baysian filter and it works fine. That doesn't change the fact that 95% of mail that reaches my mail server is spam. Which isn't that bad as it only handles 200 messages a day. Now translate that into the internet at large and clearly the picture changes.
I am in favour of a network providers providing spam _detection_ by simply intercepting any port 25 connection from a connection and running it through their own mail servers, which do baysian and traffic analysis and contact/cut-off the client if it is spam.
That is how you kill it, at the source.
How exactly do you expect people to pay for something that's used several million times a day and at the moment doesn't cost a cent?
To tell you the truth, there is no way anything like this can be pulled off, think about all the free services MS, Yahoo, and many others provide... What happens when someone writes up another virus that mass mails everyone in a contact list... And now for the icing on the cake.
If they do decide to implement something this ludacris, who is to say we can't get our email sevices from another country THAT DOESN'T CHARGE TAXES? I thought so...
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
Here's the URL:
.jp and .il domains listed as relay servers. Japan and Italy? How are you going to tax that?
http://dayton.senate.gov/webform.html
And my letter to Mr. Dayton:
Mr. Dayton,
It has come to my attention (via today's Star Tribune) that you are proposing an e-mail tax as a possible solution to curbing unsolicited e-mail (SPAM). As an e-mail administrator, I'd like to explain to you why this is a fruitless effort and, in general, a really bad idea.
Let's start with how e-mail works. E-mail is transmitted from one e-mail server to another e-mail server. On server A, the e-mail server software opens a connection to server B. There's some handshaking between the two servers, the mail is sent, error checked, and then the connection is closed. My question is of a technical nature. HOW can you tax that? There's no magical central server. In order to impose a tax, you'd have to impliment code in every e-mail server package to report to a central server. Sounds good in theory, but do you know how many THOUSANDS of e-mail server software packages are out there? Way too many to impliment.
Now, let's look at spammers. Spam is already sent with forged information, usually bounced off servers overseas. Look at the headers of some of the spam you've received lately. You'll porbably see
Ok, now let's out the two together. My mom who uses e-mail legitimately would be taxed for each message sent. Spammers who send millions of messages a day could use a server package that doesn't report to your magical metering server, bounces messages off servers in Japan, and is then received by my mom. That's right, my mom gets taxed for no reason and the spammer goes about his business untaxed. E-mail tax is unenforceable and easily avoided. Please don't punish innocent netizens with a rediculous measure that won't work.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Under your view income tax would be unworkable. Would I get taxed for mowing my neighbor's lawn? Would I get taxed for collecting deposit bottles on the side of the road? Would I get taxed for the money I get selling crack?
Under you view sales tax would be unworkable. Would I have to pay it if I only shopped at garage sales? Would I have to pay it if I bought everything out of state? Would I have to pay it if I only bartered and traded?
You're argument is that because there are some circumstances where tax could not be collected, the entire tax system would be impossible. You're clearly wrong. There could easily be a system in place where ISPs track email usage and send that information to the state. Sure, there would be exceptions, there are ALWAYS exceptions in real life, but over all the system would work.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
With spammer creating accounts and using hacked accounts it would make it impossible to find the person to tax.
How would you like to receive a tax bill form the government for millions of dollars for sending spam only to find out that spammer had spoofed your email account?
The only way a taxed based email system would work is if the 99% revenue generated went back into the building and maintaining of a new email backbone. A system that would give 100% security, 100% reliably, and most importantly 100% authenticity of sender (the person they would tax).
So you could have the basic email system we have now or a new email system that is taxed. I think both could run concurrently until you phase out the old service. Only email from the new system to the new system or old system. The old system would not be able to email the new system. I am sure that business would gladly use the new closed email system just to cut the billions of dollars they are claiming they are spending on blocking spam.
The initial cost of such a new email system would have to be funded by the government. I doubt few would trust Micro$oft creating it. Since the government created it then they have the right to tax it. They need to pay for the development and maintaining it. The tax would be collected by the Service Provider of the email message and then passed to the government. No I am not saying it should be the US government. Rather it has to be more of a United Nations type of department.
I gather that a lot of spam comes from nets of hijacked random users, mostly Windows on DSL accounts, whose owners don't know they have been hijacked and are sending out boatloads of spam.
...
Imagine these people getting the rude surprise of a huge email tax bill, thousands of dollars
Other than the govt gettig lots of irate calls, it is fun to think of the outrage directed at Microsoft for making the PCs so easily hijacked.
Infuriate left and right
Why not make a very small change to the system. This way people can still write eachother for free, but spammers get screwed.
We can all acknowledge that spammers cost us for each e-mail they send. So why not adjust the system so that if someone e-mails you, you have the right to charge them some miniscule amount for each e-mail you receive. Thus, if a friend e-mails you, they won't get charged, but if a spammer e-mails you, you can charge him 1-3 cents per e-mail you receive. Basically adjust the system somehow so that when an e-mail is sent, it is possible to charge the sender of that e-mail.
It's not perfect, but it sure as hell is better than charging everyone, or even worse letting spammers have free reign.
~ kjrose
Nerds are a special interest group. We are the aristocrats of computerdom and geekery. We see no more wisdom in a Congressman from Minnesota making laws than we do in a PHB issuing clueless work orders on how and when to code. They simply don't know what they're talking about.
So, it's pretty clear that whatever solution for spam a lawmaker from Minnesota, or anyone else in Congress, makes, it won't get the nod of the geek would-be aristocrats.. including myself.
But he's right.. you can't have it free and unrestricted on the one hand and have KOL (!) on the other. The only thing we differ over is which side to favor. Too bad he gets to decide.
In a rush to avoid the tragedy of the commons we'll throw the baby out with the bath water. There, I've said it. That's positively the lamest little meme I could think up to describe what's going on.
Either we keep the internet, socially, as a p2p network that requires lots of care, thinking and personal responsibility, or it becomes hub-and-spoke network that, through a variety of enclosure laws - like e-mail taxation - turns into the next medium for mass-stupidity and mass-vegitation. TV will, by comparison, seem like yesterday's radio. The Matrix will be seen by most as a wrong-headed, pessimistic critique of the real benefits of zombification.
Ah, who am I kidding. Who's going to go spend the holidays with their family and explain the virtues of open and free, a promising cultural renaissance, and DIY to families full of folks happy to just get up-to-the-second sports scores, infinite celebrity gossip, free music and endless naked women (or men) so long as nobody asks too many questions? Thought so.
They're the voters, mind you. Mmmm... democracy.
The G-men are coming, and the Internet will be owned by their favorite caretakers. Back to work, peons.
Ah right, that's me too.
As usual, the legislation will punish to good in a failed attempt to thwart the bad. We'll pay the taxes, spammers will find a way around it. Music companies will limit our usage rights on digital media, crackers will simply hack the rights. Fun fun fun...
-----
Web Hosting @ HostForADollar.com
Just what is email? They might decide that taxable email has occured whenever a message has been forwarded to a recipient over the internet. Wouldn't each and every packet sent then qualify as email?
Eat at Joe's.
so many people, including people in congress, do not realize the utter impossibilibity of taxing email. Hopefully at some point they will have this realization so that they can stop wasting our time and their time.
"Dayton said legislators will keep looking for the right balance between a low-cost service free from government control and a system without annoyances like spam."
/., but at least he is understands that it is a problem costing us time and productivity, and is looking for ways to assist us in stemming the flow.
First of all, the Do-Not-Call registry is a wildly popular government intervention. Legisaltors, seeing a win, are looking at ways of solving their constitants problems with the tool they have available: the law. That is their job. They are responding to calls by citizens to do something about spam.
Maybe they are not the right people to do something about spam. If you read the article, or the above statement, they seem to be aware that they are not the right people to do something about spam. Did you read the article?
This is an unthinking, knee-jerk reaction. Senator Dayton is responding to a problem, by talking about it and thinking about it. The gist of what he says is true: Spam is huge because the costs are miniscule. There needs to be a change in the economics of Spam.
He might not have the requisite genius to post on
Read critically, why don't you? Yes, taxing e-mail is barking mad, which is why Sen Dayton "stressed that he is not advocating it", which is alo why the reporter brought it to the for in her article. New taxes from a Minnisota Senator, that's good copy.
Our ISP is killing an email domain because it is getting too clogged. It isn't our domain, but that's a different topic.
Filters help out the end user, but do absolutely nothing for the ISP. The problems you personally have with spam are the same as the ISP, except their problems are yours combined with everyone else who's email is on their systems. Same for bandwidth.
Changing SMTP (the best solution, in my opinion) to only allow valid IP address is possible, but needs to be implemented across all email servers. Lots of whining about why it won't work without trying to figure out how it could work.
That leaves micropayments or legislation. I don't think this can work without changing SMTP (see above). Either way is $ that will force some decent people off email in order to remove spammers.
As many other comments have pointed out, the tax approach is shortsighted and irrelevant.
However, it has long been proposed that micropayment directly between sender and receipient would solve the problem.
In a nutshell, here's how it works:
Every time you send me a mail, you also transfer a token with it that is worth, say, 1 cent.
In a normal communication, when we both send mails back and forth, this will more or less level out. Maybe at the end of the year you owe me 20 cent or the other way around, no big deal. In fact, I can just send you a 20-cent token and we're even.
Mail without tokens would be bounced with an appropriate error. Or you can decide to accept them anyways and filter them however you like (e.g. in a special "cheap crap" folder).
Mailing lists and other legit mass-mailings can be solved in one of two ways:
a) When you subscribe, you send a token for x cents, and you'll receive the next x mails. This is cool for newsletters and other periodic things where the number of mailings per time-frame can be reasonably safely guessed. So in effect, you're subscribing to the next x newsletters, say 3 weeks.
Same for web-based sign-ups. When you sign up to my online game, I send you the initial password by mail. I'd simply add another text field to the page where you paste your 1-cent token. Very much like a "please include a self-addressed envelope with postage paid".
b) Whitelists. My mailing list would send out token-less mails and if they bounce as "insufficient payment", I'd handle that just like any other bounce, e.g. after 3 bounces you get automatically unsubscribed.
There are many fine points to sort out, but they are, essentially, all trivial.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
When was the last time taxes went down?
I totally agree. [highly stretched analogy follows...] Like trying to reduce amount of hard drugs on our streets, it's more effective in the long term to try to reduce demand by education than to try go after the suppliers. There will always be someone out there to fill the place of a convicted dealer (or spammer). There will always be someone out there who'll figure out a new way to smuggle drugs or send spam.
We can start educating by telling our friends and families not to buy anything that advertised in unsolicited email. Unfortunately, we all know that there's another sucker born every minute, and educating them about spam is going to be difficult (if not impossible). Maybe as well as educating people not to respond, we could make it illegal to purchase a product from an unsolicited email? Pretty draconian, I know, but... Most suckers are law-abiding citizens. They might be dumb or desperate enough to buy an enlargement cream from a spammer, but would they risk a fine or (worse) being asked to explain their purchase to a judge?
The government doesn't understand technology. They can't even stop spam in normal snail mail. How can they tax a protocol?
http://threetechguys.info Come, discuss Technology. Got a technology question? Come ask!
We in Minnesota are used to our polticians purposing grand plans without a clue as to the underlying problem or how to implement the plan. Sen. Dayton is following in this tradition. How would such a tax be determined and collected? Who would get the money? The government. What would they do with the money? Heaven only knows. Who ends up paying for this? Lawabiding users of the internet. There is no place for the government in the spam fight. They6 have already passed laws that do not get enforced or are enforced loosely. Let the internet find a tech solution.
that should do the do the job nicely.
includes a funky orange ear tag for mass mailers, attached without anesthetic.
A tax on private email? argg...
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
however minuscule
these things are important :-)
Escuse me, but how is he thinking to control this? I whish I could control every single email that leaves my network. But I can't do this without bloking important services (like HTTP).
What about the rest of the world? This tax would be valid only in US, and then what?
IMO politicians and executives should consult some kind of technical advisor before send to public perls like this.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Well, it seems we need to come up with a technological solution before the government regulates and taxes it to death.
I don't think this is as daft as it sounds:
There are two uses of email:
1. Communicating securely and reliably with people you know and trust (And people have just got to learn not to use SMTP for this!).
2. Communicating almost anonymously with the entire online community (i.e. Free speech).
The first point can be solved with any of the existing technical solutions (e.g. PGP), but I can't see a technical solution to the second point that doesn't impinge on privacy or free speech.
Therefore, as in any effective community, the second use will have to be policed to reduce abuse without killing free speech. As this policing will cost money it is likely their will need to be a tax to pay for it.
The are obviously no organisations available to provide this service but this does not mean that an email tax should be ruled out of all future considerations.
I've been using Bogofilter with great success.
http://bogofilter.sourceforge.net/
As a Bayesian filter, it doesn't so much learn what spam looks like, rather it learns what my normal mail looks like.
I've currently got it trained on 6283 spam messages, and 25434 non-spam messages.
NOTE: I have _never_ had a false positive!
Open season on spammers or the idiots (you know who you are) who respond to or click on links in spam. Freedom of speech only goes so far. Spam is not freedom of speech. The original intent for our first admendment freedoms were to not allow the government to censor a person's ideas. I don't care if I get political e-mails that I may not agree with. At least I know who it is from and who to contact to get removed from their list. When I get Viagra and breast enlargement emails, well, that's where I draw the line!!!!
How 'bout taxing or suing the *source* of spam: the folks that the spam is trying to *sell*? Well over half of them are in the US, and have physical locations. They are, therefore, engaged in interstate commerce, and subject to *those* laws.
Or one of these days, I may just decide to read a spam, preferably one that I've had more than one spam about, and sue *them*, if I can find the junk fax law for it.
Let's be real: spam is 90% advertising (leaving out 419s). Therefore, the company being advertised is the liable party. They *pay* the spammers for all sales. Let's go after *them*.
mark
Hashcash is essentially a cost, not in form of real money but in form of burnt CPU cycles.
Pros:
Attached to e-mail message.
No complex system necessary.
No jurisdiction problems.
No trouble with non-payment.
Cons:
CPU time is wasted - it's proof of work, nothing else.
Spammers may use viruses to make others do the calculations.
Legitimate mass mailers, such as mailing lists will probably not have CPU time.
Capacity to send e-mail now linked to CPU power.
CPU load needs to be offloaded to client, server's can't mint hashcash for all "normal" clients.
Optional improvements:
Whitelists of good domains, with no or less requirements
Blacklists of "spammy" domains.
Tokens:
Users (through server) can provide a token to a message list. This token will allow messages to bypass the standard hashcash check. Token would be issued to a specific "task", and can be revoked. That is necessary both if it a) is stolen or b) becomes spammy.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Shouldn't you be at work, Senator?
Nice try, Senator Putz.
Nice try, Timothy. How's life next to the water heater? Give your mom a kiss for us.
That is why he is a senator, and not an IT guy. He obviously doesn't understand the technology.
"If you have done 6 impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways" -- hhgg
Considering that they don't use their own names, their own email accounts, SMTP servers or much of anything else that's tracable (there would be acts of violence if we could get our rightously indignated hands on 'em,) just who is this bozo proposing pay this tax?
Somebody buy 'm a clue.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I guess this is the moment where I should start to look for alternatives to email because that tax would bother me more than just that little bit junk mail (Mozilla works still great).
And how should a stupid tax prevent foreign spam? Are you so happy to give your goverment your money?
What next? Re-elect GWB?
Ah, something not yet taxed that should be, eh? I'm sure it will solve everything. Just like tolling highways to reduce traffic (ala Reston/Tyson's Corner VA area). Yeah, that'll work.
NOT.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I would rather see something like taxing upstream bandwidth usage. This would help eliminate illegal file sharing and spamming.
The obvious solution is, of course, to lobby ICANN to create a new .spam top level domain for all spammers. Of course, with subdomains like .v1agra.spam, .loans.spam etc.
The company operating the .spam registry would be profitable in nanoseconds, as all spammers rush to register their brand new spam domain.
OT: Let's tax all customers of the dot-spam registry. Simple. Unadorned.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Its just a matter of time before we get hit with a transactional fee of some sort ( perhaps lumped into a 'average' for a years worth. )
From the governments point of view, the internet is nothing new, its just something to be regulated and taxed.
The only reason its not now, is that they understand taxation stifles growth, and they postponed it until it became 'integral part' of society.. ( much as they did with cars and phones.. wait until it would be hard to not function with out it, then tax it )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
They would already know that most of the spam I get comes from Asia.
Coderz 4 Life
"just one of the tactics that should be considered, but I don't favor it at this time." Basically, "I'm testing the waters so if I get an onslaught of negative pub I will, of course, assert that *I* didn't like the idea." Politicians are looking for ANYTHING to tax. We've let ourselves be taxed to such extremes that we no longer seek to repeal most of the taxes that were supposed to be temporary in the first place.
Although he probably got it from someone else.
There should be a fee for sending an email - but that fee should go to the person who recieved it. Then, for example, if they responded, it would even out.
He also points out that if sending an email isn't worth five cents to you, then it's probably not worth sending.
Keep in mind, also, that corporate mail servers wouldn't care about it, so if you sent your email to someone in your office, there wouldn't be a charge, only external stuff.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Sure, implement an email tax. But as long as you're going through the trouble to
build the infrastructure, construct it so the tax collected goes to the recipient
of the email instead of the government. Every citizen would have a mechanism,
like a PayPal account, to recieve taxes they wish to levy. The government
enjoys this system of collecting money for everyday life activities, why shouldn't
average citizens benefit from this wonderful revenue stream as well?
Set an email tax of $.05 a message, but by law, it goes to the recipient of the email.
This would still have the desired effect of making email uneconomical for spammers,
but directly puts the reward into the hands of those that carry the burden and overhead
of the undesired email traffic.
Implementing this new direct reverse-taxation system would give as a clear indication
that the intent of these sorts of levies are truly made with good intent and not just
another disingenuous grab to extract money from the citizenry.
Such a system might also be used to rectify problems we're seeing with voter fraud
and apathy. Every time you vote, you receive a payment. The money for this would
come from the same account as the Federal matching funds that candidates get.
Vote in the presidential election, get $150 into your account.
The IRS has this huge bureaucracy to suck money from the assignee of a given
SSN, we need a comparable agency, the External Revenue Service, that enforces
money flow going the other way. Long live the ERS!
This, of course, will never be done. And that makes it clear what the true intent of
taxation truly is.
I've not RTFA, but obviously taxing email is going to work because the internet is only in America.
Dayton spent over $30 million of his parents money to get elected (if you don't recognize the name... think Dayton Hudson (aka Marshall Fields aka Target)
Another example of undereducated politicians spouting out impossible ideas.
There is no good intention here. Let's say the tax passes. Spam is reduced because they don't want to pay the tax. The tax, however, is in place. Who is paying it? WE ARE! Are they going to repeal the tax now that only the innocent are paying it? NO! See, a new teat was spawned and their are "social programs" that depend on that new tax. When someone tries to repeal that tax, they will be dubbed "uncaring" and "anti-children." Furthermore, we'll hear the usual "Who is going to pay for the e-mail tax cut!?"
I`ve been thinking about a way to introduce monetary disincentives for spam, and came up with the following scheme:
1. Individuals or corporations voluntarily register their `account` with some neutral registry (which we create).
2. Registrants then filter to only accept mail from others in that registry.
3a. Each you send an email to someone in this registry, you owe them $.01, which is recorded by the receiver when filtered or by the sender via bcc:registry.
3b. If you are not in the registry, you get an autoreply to register. Spammers would be loathe to join.
4. Your friend simply sends you replies to each of your email messages in order to "zero" your account with her (because you have both sent the same number of emails). The same would apply between two companies or domains, etc. At worst, you owe your friend $.10 or some small amount if you are sending more email than she is replying. (If things get way out of control one-way, then the reciever can place that sender on the `spammer` list at the registry.)
5.Bulk mail orgs, such as political groups, advertizers, etc, would be willing to pay the $.01 per email.
6. This would be completely voluntary and have nothing to do with the govt.
davejenkins.com |
If I just set up a private server for me and my friends to use, I can dodge this stupid scheme, and the government would be none the wiser.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
If I thought that it was remotely feasible to tax e-mail, I might support it. However, I'd be more in favour of the more radical solution, which would be banning advertising on the Internet altogether, which I think would make many people very happy {except the advertising industry; but hey, remember the slave trade? Or the fur farming industry? Exactly} and in all probability won't affect anyone's sales one iota; people eat because they are hungry, not because some billboard tells them to eat. I set my proxy up to block all known advertisement servers as a matter of routine.
/var/spool/maillog if you don't believe me; this may not work with free accounts}. And there would have to be laws giving ISPs certain obligations {otherwise they could block you from running proftpd, apache, irc or game servers, for example; and there should be a reasonable attempt made to contact you before disconnection, and reconnection should be within a reasonable time frame}.
But if there was a pie-in-the-sky pipedream I'd really like to see made reality, it would be a Networthiness Test. Most countries have a roadworthiness test for cars, and nobody minds it for the benefits it brings. In this country, the police have the authority to order any vehicle to be moved off the road if they believe it is not in a roadworthy condition. By analogy, ISPs should have the power to disconnect computers being used for antisocial activities - specifically, spamming and virus propagation.
If you run a mailing list, you might have to tell your ISP about it, in order to avoid a nasty surprise, but you can't hide the fact anyway {ssh into your ISP's server and tail -f
It opens up a whole swathe of questions, of course, and the answers will not be easy. But the longer we keep avoiding them, the worse it will get; till we end up with a tub of minging rancid bathwater and a dead baby.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
He's an apalling public speaker. He's on MPR all the time and both his semi-prepared comments and his answers to interview questions and callers verge on the unintelligable.
He's also a limousine socialist who would have never gotten elected if it wasn't for the backing of Paul Wellstone and the huge amount of money inherited from his family (his family were the owners of the Dayton's department store in Minneapolis and the Target discount chain, which eventually owned Hudson's and Marshall Fields. The parent company is now called Target corporation).
With Wellstone dead and his political machine in shambles, Dayton's aimless rambling and his limousine socialist policies will likely cost him the next election.
Thinking like an economist? No... Dayton is thinking like a democrat. Taxes. Big government.
I read the article in the StarTribune.com. Dayton, like most politicians, doesn't have a clue. They listen to whoever gives them the most money to get re-elected.
We all want the gov't out of the internet. Stay away. Taxes? How would you enforce it? How would you bill? It's a ridiculous idea, but a perfect example of what runs through most of these pea-brained heads.
Where's Feinstein and the rest of the California politicians? Raising taxes is second nature to them.
I read the article in the StarTribune.com, and I see they included the obligatory "analysis", saying that email will become "unuseable" by 2005 or so.
Dayton doesn't have a clue. This will get him in more hot water. He's already back pedalling in the article... Paraphrasing starts here: "I was just considering it... you have to consider it as a possible solution."
-- No sig for you!
The day you're forced to pay taxes for email I'll start to write a spam bot.
Then I'll spam you from a foreign country and there is nothing your stupid tax can do about it, if at all.
I'll do this just for the fun of it and because I believe the average american still deserves some education.
So does Apple Mail, but it doesn't cost the citizens of this country money. Mozilla Mail does the same thing. Hopefully once 90% of e-mail users are using tools that block spam, spam will be more expensive to produce than its worth.
mbbac
I know that this is not a popular idea here but I think a whitelist is a good idea.
Basically, I want to get rid of anonymous email services like hotmail and yahoo. Have the government set some kind of organization that basically just keeps track of all the "verified" domains. If you or your company/organization want to host an email server on your domain, you fill out some knid of form that says "we have verified the users of our email (via credit card or whatever) and will take action against those who abuse our services.
Then ISPs will provide an OPTION that you can emable to check all incoming mail against the government's list of valid providers and your address book / safe list then delete the message or move the message to a junk folder.
If spam gets though, forward the mail to a government address where a message is sent to the email provider and or investigaded. If the problem persists, remove the provide from the list of verified email services.
I'm sure this wouldn't work exactly as I suggest and I know loopholes are there. I think it would be a nearly transparent solution for most people and shift the responsibility of controling spam to the email providers.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
Modified subject... You're absolutely right...
I guess all those chain letters and usenet messages flying around in the mid 90's about an email tax were actually correct? Damn, maybe I should have got in on some of those pyramid plans or even the questionable trapaziodal ones of the time.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
This is where anti-spam legislation will lead us.
First we'll have the $0.00001 per email tax. It will fail, but we're told its failing because enforcement doesn't work when you don't know where the SMTP servers are. Which means that we'll have a law requiring SMTP server registration, enforced by the IRS and your ISP.
Forget to pay your SMTP tax when setting up your new box? Good news! The IRS can now search your hard disk (gotta know how much untaxed mail you sent) and then file tax liens against your bank account and your home.
When these don't work, we'll be told that the tax rate isn't high enough. So they'll raise it. And keep raising it. And then someone will figure out that it's a great way to put PCs in poor neighborhoods or some other "worthy" project.
Have I mentioned Ashcroft's take on SMTP registration?
Enforce the fraud laws. Arrest the people behind SPAM products. Ensnare the spammers as part of the conspiracy. That will solve the problem. Everything else just takes away our rights AND or money.
http://www.tmda.net It's here, it works great, and if you want a plug and play solution, I can hook ya up at a great price :)
No seriously, though, I use it, and check my pending mail about once a week. I haven't missed one important email, or gotten more than 2 spams a month.
Contact Me (got tired of viruses emailing me).
I think we need to speed up process of finding new email solution or Microsoft will do it for you.
I believe they are about to use the public outcry about spam to push switching to proprietary, Exchange based email format. They are perfectly positioned to do so.
My favorite anti-spam compaign would be simply to agree to reject all the messages that are not signed with PGP/GPG. Friend to a friend, coworker to coworker, this CAN take off.
In this new world it would be simple to compile database of known spammers, take legal action (esig is legally bonding in many states) and filter incoming email.
Email is a P2P activity, with spam a design flaw carried over from its smaller scale origins in a community of trust. The solution to the problem is to use the larger scale P2P community, with its graded degrees of trust, and the tools that are already deployed, like the address book. Inserting a fee at the recipient's discretion is a manageable incremental change. While throwing the P2P architecture away, in favor of a government client/server architecture inserted in the middle to administer an ineffective, unmanageable tax, won't work, will cost a lot more, and will deprive email of its valuable scalability and relative confidentiality.
Taxes are a bad approach for many reasons. 1> Governments are completely unsuited to collecting micropayments in every way. 2> International email, especially international recipients of a single message, provide a jurisdiction nightmare that can only increase complexity and cost. 3> Taxes do not compensate the recipients directly for their costs in the delivery, so only a tiny fraction (if any) of their costs will be defrayed. 4> Governments have no business in the loop between the sender and recipient of any email, unless that message is breaking a law, to be determined by due process, with the presumption of innocence until evidence and witnesses prove guilt.
The tax is like a stamp, where postal mail goes through a central "server farm" (the government postal service), which charges to defray the costs of their service. Clients of the government send mail, and clients receive the mail. Remember that the government *likes* junk mail, because bulk mail fees are high enough to subsidize the relatively low postage on first class mail between private citizens. But junk mail fees are obviously too low to prevent junk mail from accumulating in your mailbox. The client/server model of postal mail isn't as scalable as the distributed email system of the Internet, and is more prone to abuse in favor of the spammers. And there's no reason to compromise the confidentiality of email bodies/headers, by government processing, when there's a much better alternative in recipient fees.
Architecturally, the fee is much more consistent with email than is a tax. By the recipient charging the sender, at the endpoints, the charges are administered by a distributed system. Acceptable delivieries will increase the workload of the email system by a trivial amount, as incoming senders are authenticated against the recipient's address book, and fees are waived for members. This work is spread across the hundreds of millions of email recipients, who outnumber the spammers by thousands to one. Any fees actually charged, are directly received by the recipient who is maintaining their ISP feed, email server, email client, and time to filter the messages. Since each received message has only two endpoints, sender and recipient, managing the transaction, even internationally, is simple. And the details of the transaction, like the sender/recipient, subject, and message body, remain known only to the recipient and sender, *no one else*.
Developers, we can improve email starting right away. We have identified the flaw in the model that allows spam, and a fix, in the form of recipient fees, is before us. If we act soon, we have a chance to preempt governments from inserting themselves into the email model, and keep it simpler, and safer.
--
make install -not war
Hello? Did I not suggest this a few months ago right here on Slashdot? I will be suing Senator Dayton for infringing on my prior art. All the e-mail taxes belong to me!
"We're from the goverment" and "We're here to help you".
Why not? After all, look how well taxing has reduced our usage of tobacco and gasoline.
Taxing e-mail creates an incentive for government to allow spam to continue to exist.
And then come the crackdowns on any new technologies that would try to create a new path for e-mail-like messaging apart from the existing, taxed one, with tax-evasion charges attached.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
...if say, under 100 emails a day was exempt. But it can could go to hell real quick in the Congress. Yeah, it is just better if we do not go there!
BullShit!
is there a legal definition of what is spam? i consider anything about M$ Windows based products to be spam because i use a Mac, but i am sure to somebody it may be useful information.
To me, it's anything I didn't ask for.
If you're not a friend or relative of mine, it's spam, unless I've specifically signed up for YOUR advertising. Which in my life amounts to exactly zero things in the 9 years I've been online.
I don't give a damn if everyone on the planet except me finds something useful. I'm perfectly capable of finding information on my own, thank you very much.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Howabout identifying party affiliations of politicians in parent articles from now on? Mark Dayton is (D-MN).
Its that once there is a system in place to track and bill per email, its only a matter of time before the email tax slowly gets increased for revenue purposes.
then only outlaws will send bulk email*.
*by hijacking the credentials/identity of unsuspecting citizens.
From my cold dead hands!
From my cold dead hands!
You damned dirty apes.
Ok, each nation has it's own system. Users could whitelist contacts in other countries to allow email from outside.
In the US we could setup a branch of the USPS to handle email. This could be a public works project, minimal funds to start with, but build it up with the tax revenue gained from it's use.
Each citizen who wants to use the system signs up (maybe a $5 fee to help with startup cost) and installs the gov't client. Make sure it's secure and NOT anonymous. Tax the email sent via this system, including attachments (you pay more to send heavy packages in regular mail, same thing with attachments).
All revenue generated from using the system should go back into improving it. Users could whitelist contacts not using the system, but must pay a tax for receiving (so, if you have family that likes to send forwarded emails you might not want to add them to your whitelist).
I can already see problems with it, but I think they could be solved. For instance, if you have a virus that sends out many many emails you would have to pay for that. Well, maybe take users to a web page with one of those non-machine readable codes that must be entered before you can send anything.
Most important would be no bulk rates like with real mail. That would kill the whole system.
If people used this system it would grow. If not, it would die off due to lack of funds (which just means this is not something most people care about). This doesn't mean you couldn't still use your current email, it would just be another option. Kinda like having a mailbox at your home which is controlled by the USPS and having a PO box at Mail Boxes etc.
Now, I'm just playing around with an idea so go easy. But hey, if spam is a big enough problem for enough people maybe something like this would work. I'm ok with it as long as there are still free and anonymous options.
you're all figments of my deranged imagination
Although sending between private/corporate addresses would be very difficult to tax, government-run email addresses could potentially be taxed. They could hold the email for a certain period while awaiting payment. If the tax is paid, the email passes through. If the period expires, it is deleted.
The inbound taxes could probably pay for the service, though people would probably mostly stick to their regular, free email due to its convenience.
..and in other news, today a man was fined half a million dollars and jailed for five years for evading email taxes. IRS agents say that Joseph Smith of One Horse, Nebraska filed fraudulent SMTP logs and is suspected of having had encrypted tunnels to email servers in tax havens abroad. Reportedly, the prosecutor is also looking to charge him with evading the new web-page-hit tax, after his legal defense fund page was posted to the popular news site "Microsoft Slashdot".
Attorney general for life John Ashcroft commented "too late, assholes. In twenty oh three you let the camel get his nose in the tent, and now he's screwing your wife."
I could not afford an extra $500/mo or $6000 per year just for the right to send out email notices to users.
Would the law apply overseas? I could see lots of people abandoning MSN, Hotmail, & Yahoo mail to use overseas mail services. Would they be able to tax you if you went to the off shore mail server and sent from your account there? What's to keep a spammer from doing the same thing?
I got my first e-mail account while overseas. It's still my primary account. The ISP is a small one so it isn't the target of dictionary attacks like the US nationwide ISP's. After 8 years of use, it seldom gets more than 3 SPAM's per week. It's the main reason I keep it.
I think one of the things that is overlooked in reducing the success of dictionary attacks is what mega ISP's can do. They need to divide up their mail servers so each would have no more than say about 5000 mailboxes. It would make the addresses a little longer maybe. Instead of having an address such as technician126@msn.com, I would have an address like technician@mail3275.msn.com. A Mega ISP is a sitting duck for a dictionary attack. A dictionary attack on a small domain could easly be detected and rejected. As an example, more than 5 invalid emails from one TCP address in a day would block the sender for like a week. Attacks like bob@ bob1@ bob2@ bob3@... would quickly blacklist the sender for all of the ISP's inboxes, not just the server being attacked (@mail3275.msn.com would also block @mail****.msn.com). The inboxes would be protected by a virtual minefield. The spam failure rate would be high and the valid mail would not be impeded as a valid address is already known to the sender.
(disclaimer not my real addresses. I'm a member of a small ISP, not a national)
The truth shall set you free!
I run an email server. For the family. Total of four email addresses. My server directly delivers to other servers. How is this to be taxed?
Obviously, the computer SENDING the email pays the tax. But this means that some form of compliance checking will have to be put into place. Which means a change to the email protocols. But, other countries may not comply. Of course, running an email service for sending may simply be declared illegal, forcing all emails through a centralized point. This solution also has its problems. I guess the tax revenue collected could be used to run the central email servers.
Ratboy
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Drill baby drill - on Mars
On behalf of the State of Minnesota I apologize for the complete and utter breakdown in the brain of my Senator. At one time the email tax myth was such a widespread urban legend that the US Post Office had a link on their front page debunking it. Said link is no longer there and this idiot decided to try to make an urban legend into reality. Again, I apologize, and you have my promise to try and get this guy out of office next election.
Dayton's aimless rambling and his limousine socialist policies will likely cost him the next election.
Mark Dayton spent six years teaching in the inner city and still lives in rather modest circumstances in south Minneapolis -- he is a liberal, but he's certainly not a limosine liberal. How many years did you spend teaching poor and disadvantaged kids in north Minneapolis, swb? I'm guessing zero.
Want a politician who actually hears what people are saying to him and tries to problem-solve about it with a certain amount of candor? Here's your guy. ("Weasel words" are not usually how you'd describe a politician who says he'd consider a new tax but the approach doesn't seem practical.) The article's slant is obvious, but underneath that you see a range of possible approaches to the SPAM problem -- and various members of congress saying they're skeptical about how any of them would work, just like you seem to be.
Except, of course, you haven't heard all the testimony on the subject they have. You haven't even read the article.
I guess you'd like someone who'll cover his butt so that he's never misrepresented, instead. Maybe you'd be interested in someone who "talks tough" about taxes but shows the fiscal responsibility of my ten-year-olds with a Discover card? Maybe (s)he'll even mention this in campaign ads: "Mark Dayton wants to tax everything. Death. E-mail... He wants to tax the whole world..." (I know, that last bit's the sort of peurile hyperbole you see in campaign ads all the time... but you just made it, didn't you?)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Hypothermia Helps Brain Heal
"Hey, spam is undermining the usefulness of email as a communications tool. What can we possibly do about this problem?"
"Uhhh, start charging money for it."
Yeah, brilliant.
1) If the cost-profit ratio is still economically feasible, legal mailers will continue to mail in vast quantities, and they might also increase their mailings, having been "blessed" by the government in the form of a tax payment.
2) This puts the mass e-mailers in the government's pocket, increasing their lobbying power and their power among society. It adds government to the list of benefactors of the mass e-mail problem, significantly reducing the likelihood that they will ever take any other action. This solution could be described as "It's a problem until we get a piece of the action", much like gambling (which is now blessed and depended upon as the lottery), and cigarettes (which are now blessed and depended upon in the form of high taxes and settlements to state governments from tobacco companies).
3) The technical implementation of this is amazingly difficult. If all e-mail went through ISPs who were already charging their customers for metered units, such as minutes online, it would be less of a nightmare, but still very difficult. In that case, their software would have to be modified to integrate their mail server into some sort of tracking and billing system that would keep track of how many e-mails a user sends out in a period. Additionally, their overhead would increase to report and pay the taxes on the consumer's behalf (much like a sales tax), not to mention the cost of upgrading the software to track something that has never before been tracked. This additional overhead will lead to higher prices to consumers.
4) Aside from problems within ISPs, you don't even need to send mail through an ISP mail server. If you know enough about how the protocol works (you don't need to know much), you can send mail directly to the recipient's mail server, and there's no way their ISP is going to bill you, since they don't even know who you are. The point is that the entire electronic mail infrastructure will have to be replaced and old pieces of that infrastructure (such as old versions of sendmail) will have to be outlawed. Try enforcing that.
5) Don't forget workarounds. Want to see an even bigger boom in instant messaging? Tax e-mail. If they decide to tax instant messaging, watch something else show up that works around it. The only solution will be an extremely broad definition of "electronic mail", that would have to encompass any way that a message from one user can get to another user, which will never get passed. Even if all US e-mail was centralized, say, with the Postal Service (not a chance of that), that would just make it even more clear what forms of communication to avoid and which new technologies to embrace.
The solution to the problem of spam is not government intervention. It's a self-regulation issue that will require users to grow up technically if they want to get rid of their unwanted e-mail. I sign every one of my e-mails with a PGP signature. Hardly ANYBODY else does that. If everybody started doing that, which is easy and free, it would be A START in the right direction. Eventually, you could be able to only accept e-mail from anybody who has a verifiable signature. If they're e-mailing you for the first time, there could be a challenge-response system in place to force them to provide a public key, even one that has been certified by a certifying authority. Most of this exists today. But the users don't want to have to get smarter. And they certainly don't have to work harder. They want the government to just make the problem go away, but they don't realize that the internet they have today is as good as it is precisely because the government hasn't regulated every step along the way.
RP
If everyone running an SMTP daemon for outgoing mail had to pay a tax on each e-mail, think of the record-keeping and reporting requirements. Now, what could keep those reports honest unless the receiving systems also kept records of e-mails received, and the outgoing and incoming records of every SMTP daemon in the country were reconciled in some government-supervised database? Still, if my company is exchanging a high volume of e-mails with yours, and I'm in the IT department and ordered to hold down costs, there's a good incentive for us to agree to keep most of our incoming and outgoing e-mails between our two firms off the record - and send them all through IPsec tunnels between us so no intermediate party can spot the deception.
... especially not to avoid a tax!
Oh, but wait, we have such a strong sense of ethics in our business culture that we'd never seriously consider such methods
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
How would the law define email?
What about web mail?
What about web message boards?
What about news groups?
What about IM?
What about Cell phone chat?
What about P2P?
etc. etc. etc.
He'd have better luck putting a tax on each bit that goes through my ISP than taxing email specifcally.
What's that famous quote from the lawmaker that tried to outlaw porn?
"I cant define it, but I know it when I see it."
-Steve
$7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
The same way taxing bread will reduce roaches.
The way taxing food wrappers will reduce litter.
I urge you to look around and see how government has used this logic in the past. How easy it is to pass new taxes to a majority of luddites who support "shoot from the hip" politicians who's aim is re-election via "feel-good" but empty or damaging policies. Now, just remember who they are when you vote.
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
The problem with spam is that it turns the traditional "bulk mail" model around.
We all understand junk mail. We get crap in our mail boxes all the time: free offers, ads, etc. But you don't see us complaining too much. Why? Because the SENDER is paying out their pocket for the privilege of "spamming" you via the postal service. Even at bulk mail rates, sending a million flyers out isn't a cheap option except for corporations.
When fax machines became the next great thing in communications, junk fax appeared almost immediately. It took an act of legislation to stop that. How was junk fax different from junk mail? Simple: the RECEIVER paid to receive it! Not in terms of a direct payment, but in terms of consumables. It cost the RECEIVER money in terms of paper and ink to reproduce the received junk fax into paper form. In countries that metered fax/data lines, they was also the possible cost of phone charges. Because a junk faxer is essentially stealing from the receiver of the junk, the receiver either needs to be compensated or you do it under penalty of law. It is theft otherwise. As long as the onus is on the sender to incur all costs of advertising, that is acceptable and right to the average person. The general public should NOT be forced to pay to receive advertising. The junk fax laws are harsh enough that you hardly hear about people receiving tons of junk fax nowadays.
When you get right down to it, that is all spam is: junk fax. Instead of stealing paper and ink, the spammers are stealing bandwidth (not theirs but that of the ISP sending the mail) and storage (both on the ISP's mail server and in your personal mailbox). Although its tough to touch the bits flowing across a network, it is still a limited, consumable resource and the person using it should be compensating the person who owns it or they should be barred from using it.
I don't know how to solve the overall problem but I have ideas about where it should go.
what I already paid for.
Email isn't a government service, nor a centraliized one.
Spam is an issue, and it will be dealt with technically at some point, and legally at others.
It is easy enough to regulate under advertising laws.
Email will never be taxed, I"m sorry. you want to tax it, you go build and maintain your OWN email system and regulate it, then charge people to use it, and pay for it out of the profits.. otherwise, piss off.
shrug. the AC response to this says it pretty well. Dayton might be rich, but he's done plenty to help folks out and to know what joe schmo lives like.
And as for the "limousine socialist" stuff - a few "real" socialists might help the US realize that most of the world practices politics a little differently than we do - Dayton is most certainly not one.
And this could be done entirely in the email client.
To send an email I have to have money in my stamp box. I get that money by paying the post office for e-postage. They give me a code which I enter into my email program.
When I send email each item takes a few cents from the stamp box, calls the post office computer to get a "stamp", they agree on the ammount and the stamp is put in the header of my mail.
I fire up my email client, it gets my mail, extracts the "stamps" verifies them with the computer at the post office which "cancels" them. Any mail with no stamp goes in a bucket for a few days (User preference) and is then either trashed or sent back to the sender with "NO STAMP -Not Read by recipient", The email would explain how to get a client for the new system. If the email is sent back it may be reflected by the recieving system- this is detected and the returned email is just trashed to avoid loops
Mail sent with a fake stamp would be fraud, counterfieting but would be treated as mail with no stamp by the mail client
If an email does have a stamp - half the value goes into my stamp box, the other half goes to the post office for the use of their computer. (yes the post office makes a bit to sell the stamp and makes a bit when I read the mail)
I could also have a whitelist - when email is recieved from someone on my whitelist it is placed in my inbox and the post office is not bothered. The whole value of the stamp is (A- returned to sender or B- retained in my stamp box which do you think would be safer for fraud?)
For the tinfoil chapeu crowd - if the sender is on my white list the Post office is not notified at all and the email is as
secure as email is today. If not well I suppose the post office could figgure out from canceled stamps who is sending email to whom.
In order to determine the solution to the SPAM problem you have to get into some pretty hairy mathematics. Fortunately, I am presently unemployed and willing to spend some time working on this.
When you talk about email, you are really talking about sending bytes of information, but a perfectly clear email can be sent in relatively few bytes, perhaps a Kilobyte. So let m be a kilobyte's worth of email. m is a good descripter because it stands for mail.
Now sending mail through the internet requires processor effort. Lets choose E for this to stand for the effort. E would then be the effort required to push m through an email processor on the internet in a second.
There is only so much that the internet can do sending emails, eventually with enough spammers, the internet will get bogged down, certainly there will be bottlenecks here and there. Of course the theoretical limitation is the speed of electrons somewhat approaching a maximum of kilobytes of mail per second per second that we can call c.
It can be shown that mail messages can be related to m through the quantity c using the following formula.
E=mc^2
Aha!!!
The solution is obvious... NUKE THE SPAMMERS.
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
... can be made easy by mimicing other taxes -
-VAT
-Gas Tax
-Road Tax
The simplest way to collect the tax is to pass it on to the ISP and then to customers. Every user would have to pay $X more per month. Universities could be tax exempt or collect the tax in the form of an increased technology fee.
Naturally, this logical method of taxation would do nothing to stop spam, as a suggested per-email tax would be insane. Spam is already illegal in most states AFAIK, so tax evasion wouldn't be a huge leap for people already commiting a crime.
However, if the government is out for more revenue, this taxation would be easier to implement and enforce within the US.
Micropayments for email is an idea whose time has come. I should be able to charge U$0.01 per received message, to compensate for my work in delivering it. I should be able to waive or refund that fee for people in my address book, either before or after receipt. Individual messages would arrive with impunity, while bulk messages would cost the sender enough to require their actual value to the sender to reflect their actual value to the recipients, according to the recipients.
A fee applied directly by recipients to senders is very well suited to the problem of spam. UCE is "unsolicited", and "commercial" email. The recipient of unsolicited messages could require a micropayment, of an amount that they determine, to complete delivery. Solicited messages (replies) and selected senders in the recipients address book could waive the fee. That would force senders to consider the risk that a costly percentage of recipients would never refund the receipt fee, stopping spammers. The commercial nature of UCE would force the consideration on economic grounds.
Let's add authentication and micropayments to email. I'll illistrate a revised POP protocol session. When my MUA (like Outlook, Evolution, or Eudora) connects to my POP server (like Exchange or qpopper), my MUA sends the "SNDR" command. The POP server sends a list of all the senders of messages in its queue, with a count of messages from them. The MUA compares each sender to the members of its address list. It then sends the list of senders back to the POP server, with either just a "+", or a "-" and a number representing any charge, appended to the address. In America, the charge would be in cents, the lowest denomination. For example:
[MUA sends]:
SNDR
[POP server sends]:
SNDR 4 29
friend@isp.com 2
spammer@spam.com 20
uce@junkmail.com 1
stalker@weirdo.org 6
[MUA server sends]:
FEES 4
friend@isp.com +
spammer@spam.com -20
uce@junkmail.com -1
stalker@weirdo.org -999999999
[POP server sends]:
FEES 4 OK
The POP server periodically charges the senders. It might accumulate hourly, daily, monthly, etc, or when charges exceed an overhead value, whichever comes first. That way, the transactional cost is spread over as large a transaction as possible, but ensures that the sender is charged, even if the received amount is negligible. Because the amount charged by all recipients, even if small, combines to bankrupt spammers. By accumulating the amounts at the POP server, usually serving many MUAs (at an ISP), the POP server can combine the microtransactions into a larger transaction with a spammer, and split the payment into micropayment to the user of the MUA. The ISP could merely credit the amount to the user's account, defraying the cost of their service (which is being used to process all this email).
There might be an opportunity for a commercial service which aggregates small transactions from small POP server ISPs. There's also an opportunity for banks to process the signed and logged-in transactions, aggregating them and collecting fees. The small scale startup of the additional protocol commands requires no 3rd parties, but the scaling up to Internetwide use offers a monetized opportunity. It might even coax some spammers into "going legit", offering authentication, aggregation, and transactional services, properly supervised by local governments, and properly underwritten by banks and insurers, if they pass muster.
This transaction requires authentication of the sender, which integrates well with the use of the MUA address book. Anyone not authenticated, because they're fake, or not in the address book, is filtered out. Authentic senders are charged or not, at the discretion of the recipient, while inauthentic senders are charged. The address book contains authentic signatures, and any amounts to be charged, as well as a default amount for inauthentic senders. If a sender doesn't pay, they can be filtered out, even if authentic, for higher fees, other notificati
--
make install -not war
As usual, Slashdot is pissing and moaning to the WRONG PLACE. If you want the government off the back of the Internet, TELL A SENATOR. You can contact Dayton here:
Webform
An email is a message in a well known format composed a sequence of TCP/IP packets, usually but not always sent via a port 25 socket on an SMTP server, and usually but not always retrieved from a POP3 or IMAP server.
As the expressed intent is not to to punish recipients, the notion of taxing retrieval of emails is dismissed out of hand. Only the sending and relaying will be considered.
An SMTP server can be configured to handle email from anybody (an open relay) either deliberately or through incompetence or malice. Some SMTP server can be configured to require authorisation before handling email. Some SMTP servers are configured to only accept or send email to certain domains. Some SMTP servers are hidden (successfully or otherwise) on non-standard ports, behind firewalls, or are only accessible via (e.g.) SSH encrpyted connections. Some SMTP servers handle email only for a specific organisation, or for a specific machine.
SMTP servers are freely available for most computer platforms. Most linux distributions, for example, come with one or more SMTP servers as standard, there are several free SMTP servers avaiable for Windows, many email viruses contain their own SMTP servers to propagate themselves, or a simple SMTP server can be written in a few dozen lines of code or script.
Anyone connected to the internet anywhere in the world can set up an SMTP server and provide services to anyone they like. This may be against the acceptable use policy of their internet service provider (ISP), and their ISP may try to prevent it by technical means such as blocking the well known SMTP port 25, but there are ways to disguise the traffic or bypass these restrictions, including relaying to open SMTP servers on non standard ports and/or using SSH tunnels. Spammers can set up their own SMTP servers rather than using their ISP's servers, or can find and use open SMTP relays based anywhere in the world.
There is no practical way to oblige or enforce taxation on the administrator of an email server. Large US based ISPs could conceivably be taxed, but spammers commonly use open relays or their own SMTP servers. These can be based anywhere in the world. How will US legislation enforce taxation in Russia, for example? As a futher issue, at what level does email attract taxation? When it is being sent anywhere in the world? When it is being sent within the US? When it is sent from outside the US to servers inside the US? When it is sent within a subset of the internet, like a corporate or academic network, which can comprise tens of thousands of users? At the individual machine level?
Email is relayed across SMTP servers. In theory, it would be possible to tax the receiving SMTP servers of US based, large corporate ISPs and have them bill the sender. In practice, ISPs would be unable to collect this, and would in any case have to have accounts for every possible sender. This would lead to them either: rejecting email from the vast majority of non-US ISPs and being rejected in turn, effectively cutting the US off from the email network; or more likely, passing the costs on to the US based individual recipient either directly or indirectly.
In summary, Senator Dayton, the only practical way to keep the internet safe for Americans is to wall off part of it and declare a Fortress USA.
Any ISP who wanted to do that could do it right now. AOL could do it tomorrow. They have, for example, repeatedly experimented with rejecting email that appears to come from SMTP servers that don't appear to match the registered SMTP servers (well, their IP addresses) for the apparent sender's domain name. The reason why I repeat "apparent" is that these factors can be faked by malicious spammers, but that they catch out many legitimate senders, to the point where this policy has been unenforcable.
Thank you, Senator Dayton, for your interest in these matters, and for taking the time to suggest a superficial knee jerk solution that would wreck the internet as we know it beyond repair. I suggest that you sack whatever idiot nephew you employ as a researcher and take some actual advice on this issue before you do some real damage.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Given the choice between spam and taxes I will take spam. Any time the government gets involved things get screwed up. Let private industry handle this puppy. If the load of spam becomes too great it will start impacting bottom lines and that's when the problem will be solved. Ella seems to be serving my needs quite well now for Outlook. It is troublesome to me that the minute a problem becomes large scale the cries of government intervention start coming. It's a bad train of thought to be riding.
TT
Huzzah!
I'm a Kennedy, and poor. I'm doubly offended, you insensitive clod(s).
We want it to be totally free and unrestricted and on the other hand we want it to work smoothly and civilly.
Try and collect taxes off that!
....all those emails I've been getting from my naive relatives warning me about the impending email-tax bill in congress really weren't a hoax.
-Steve
$7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
No worries. This guy is so dumb he needs a roadmap to pull up his socks. He inherited his money from his hardworking ancestors and now feels guilty about it. In response, he wants to tax anything and anyone who does work for a living and give our money to anyone with a hand out.
Typical Minnesota urban white Democrat.
And yes, I do know what I'm talking about. I'm a native Minnesotan. Heck, I'm a 4th generation Iron Ranger whose family has pretty much voted Republican or independent (a major sin on Da Raynch) since my great-grandfather got his citizenship papers.
Make it per server, per month. Anyone who pays the tax gets added to a published whitelist. Mailserver admins are then free to use current blacklists, use this whitelist, or some other whitelist (for local delivery only - no relaying), and are free to determine if and how they recover the cost of the tax.
The nice thing about a tax is that there are agencies who are very good about knowing where the taxpayers live. So when spam starts coming from a whitelisted server, they know exactly where to go to collect the fine of one cojone per infringing email.
--
E_NOSIG
It's clear that if the sender of an email suffered a cost above just paying for the computer and bandwidth, the problem of spam would be mostly eliminated. A fee of even just $0.00005 would cancel out the profits from the typical spam business plan.
But, also clear is that a government mandated tax would be absolutely the wrong way to impose this cost.
If a citizen wants to setup his email client so that all messages from strangers are deleted unless accompanied by a $5.00 paypal donation, that's his business! "Pay for email" can be implemented without government help. If we ever get a functioning micropayment system so that transactions of less than $0.05 can be cheaply exchanged, then it's quite probable that big ISPs (starting with AOL) will let their users elect to block all non-whitelisted emails unless the sender paid a minor fee to compensate for time wasted reading.
If the question is: "Should email require a stamp-like payment?", the answer is maybe.
But "Should the government tax email?", no.
If consumers decide that per-email fees are a fair price for eliminating spam, then private enterprise can provide it without state meddling. Pay-email poses technical and administrative challenges, so it might not ever really work- but sticking the IRS in there would just strengthen the obstacles.
I think the industry as a whole would be *MUCH* better off looking for a technical solution rather than hoping for government intervention.
I've been hearing that for over five years. Entire businesses have been built up around seeking a technical solution to spam. Fighting spam with these various half-assed "solutions" is costing every online business and Internet user money. Every person in the computer industry realizes that a practical technical solution could make the inventor rich.
Yet no universally appealing technical solution has been developed. But every time that legislation is proposed, someone goes into the anti-government rant mode.
I've got a better idea: Pass legislation now and if any of you "technical solution" gurus has a brainstorm that really solves the problem, repeal the legislation.
That said, I am strongly against an e-mail tax. I support criminalizing the sending of spam or causing the sending of spam. If Alan Ralsky wants to pay some ISP in Brazil to send spam, fine. Put Alan Ralsky in federal "pound me in the ass" prison.
Here is the link: http://dayton.senate.gov/webform.html to Mark Dayton's public comment page. I left a lengthy 4 point comment about his suggestion for an internet tax. I'm hoping he seeks further assistance on understanding the nature of how the internet works before trying to push such a law through as I think educating him would probably make him realise the error of his ways. Please leave a comment to him under the "Technology" category so that it doesn't get lost with the inevitable piles of "Taxes are too high!" comments he surely gets under the "Taxes" section. I suspect if he sees quite a few comments telling him what a horrible idea it is that he'll drop the idea.
A great idea, I've never heard of this before.
Read "Earthweb" by Marc Steigler... I like the ideas for SPAM reduction he presents there. Here's my brief impression of how it works:
A user has one or more "brands" which are forgery-proof digital identities. This could be approximated with public key crypto until quantum computing comes along, I'm sure there are many other technical methods for doing it. A "brand" may be anonymous or linked to the user's real-world identity, but anyone can attach a (digitally signed) endorsement or flame to a brand on one of several public sites.
If someone sends you an email, your email client can, of course, filter based on brands. Nothing new here. What is interesting is that it can refuse email unless a fee is paid... and there are various levels possible (obviously.) A typical user setup would be:
Don't charge people I specifically add to my "A" list.
Charge people on my "S" list, whom I don't wish to speak to, $100 if they want me to read the mail.
Charge brands linked to a verified real-world identity 10 cents. (Obviously doesn't include people on other lists.)
Charge anonymous brands 50 cents to accept their mail.
Of course all this is user-configurable, I'm sure that if a system like this were in place that there would be all sorts of additions, like a version of the RBL for brands... check with the RBL and if the brand is listed there, tell the mailsender it'll be $50.
Obvious problems with this scheme compared to current email:
Little compatibility with current mailreaders.
Sender must be able to determine recipient's charge when mail is sent so they can agree when they send. -- This could be handled at the ISP, but still presents problems compared to current mail-handling, where you only need to be able to reach one hop to start an email on its way.
Interesting idea, maybe there should be a tax for responding to spam, or it should be illegal to respond at all. That way, the target audience for spams might just go away by evolution.
Rumor has it that in order to spread the word for this movement the minnesota politician is going to be using a 'Large Mail Merge' to inform the public of the idea.... uh wait um..
I think they're just fishing for ways to boost revenue. Right on its face, this idea suffers the same problem that plagues many other legislative "solutions" - the only people that are really penalized are going to be the ones that have nothing to do with the problem itself. True to form, it's no different than Bashcroft talking about how the U.S. is going to fight Al-Qaeda and terrorism by spying on every American Citizen and trampling all over the Constitution. In other words, the problem, and the proposed "solution" have nothing in common.
unsolicited commercial e-mail
Doesn't matter if you find it useful or not. If it's commericial and you didn't ask for it, and it's in your inbox, it's spam and you have a right (in some places) to sue.
Laws have two parts, the law and the punishment. Just because you choose not to seek punishment when someone breaks the law doesn't mean they didn't break the law.
If you find a piece of spam useful and choose not to sue if you could, that doesn't mean a crime wasn't committed by the company sending you unsolicited commercial e-mail. Just because you don't care doesn't mean the law doesn't care and that no one else can care.
Most people didn't sue telemarketers either when they broke the law but that didn't mean they didn't break the law.
"useful" and "I don't mind" have absolutly nothing to do with defining what is spam.
Spam: Unsolicited Commerical E-mail
Now you know.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
First of all, you can't tax e-mail. As mentioned before, what exactly is an e-mail? It just packets with plain text formatting and some headers. That's all. Taxing packets implies that the sender will keep track of the packets being sent. It also implies that the machine sending the packets in the first place is doing what its owners intend it to do. So to effectively tax spammers, they need to be using their own machine (yeah, right) and install new software that taxes itself. Non-techies tend to think that things like e-mail are centralized like the Postal Service. It's not.
People need e-mail, right? But they don't need SMTP or POP3 or IMAP or any other old e-mail based protocols. What about Jabber as a replacement? SSL, double ended authentication, server to server challenges, open XML protocol, open source clients and servers... It's basically IM, but some jabber servers support saving messages while you are away like an inbox. Doesn't that cover what we need e-mail to do?
My point here is that IM and e-mail are essential to internet communication, but we (techies) tend to think of them as seperate entities. They can easily be combined, though, and that's what jabber does. A poll here points out that many people feel that e-mail will always be important to the internet, along with IM, but not go away in favor of IM. This leads me to believe that people don't see how similar they really are.
E-mail taxation is not possible and if it were it would only hurt those who couldn't bypass it. Spammers would get around the same way they get around blacklists and spam filters. They would also heavily invest in IM spamming. Jabber can help with both at the same time. Why? Because jabber server administrators can whitelist the "trusted" servers or just blacklist the bad servers. "But that's what we're doing now," you say. True, but the difference here is that jabber servers can insist that they accept messages only from other servers whose DNS forwards and backwords lookups (ip name) match completely. Then, you know who (server, not user) sent the message and if they are a spam offender you can contact their administrator or blacklist them altogether.
Here are the facts that are going through my mind when I put this together:
1. E-mail spam is getting bad.
2. IM spam is growing as well.
3. You can't tax packets.
4. You can't insist that people upgrade their software if it already "works." In other words, servers with open relays are going to stay that way if they still "work."
5. People don't care how it works, they just want an inbox and a contact list.
6. People will not go through the trouble of making their own digital signatures. So, don't think that OpenPGP will be the next big thing in e-mail. It won't, it's hard for people.
7. Jabber IM takes care of authentication and encryption, anyway.
8. People are already familiar with IM and wont care which protocol they use.
9. Jabber IM with message storing can be the "new e-mail."
10. People flock to "new" if it works and is easy. Kazaa is a great example.
So, when you write your senators, or whoever, make sure you let them know that there are alternatives to cutting spam down. But, because spam is a technical problem, you need a technical solution. Making unenforcable policies won't help anyone and can probably do quite a bit of legal damage. They don't want to hear that, of course, but it's the truth.
Oh, and support jabber!
If email was controllable enough that you could tax it, we wouldn't have a spam problem in the first place. But a fee for registered, digitally stamped mail... along with a legal framework to prosecute fraudulent signatures? That's something that could help.
Here's more or less what I wrote:
Everything that makes it hard to technically fight spam makes it completely impossible to track it well enough to tax it.
What you can do, though, is have a small fee for *registered* email. This would take the following steps:
1. A lightweight extension to the email message format, similar to the current signature and encryption mechanisms (and probably piggybacking off them) whereby you could pay the post office or other organization for a "digital stamp"... you would send the mail to them, they would sign it and deliver it.
2. Modifications to existing filtering tools to allow "digital stamped" mail to bypass any filters. This could be done in any number of ways, and shouldn't be specified in any great detail.
3. Some kind of legal tool to prosecute people who forge "digital stamps". This is where the government could come in.
The third point would discourage people from forging digital stamped mail, so that mail *servers* could accept it as it arrives and then check it later, rather than having to slow down mail handling to verify the signature as it comes in.
Of course if you're sending mail to someone you know, they can accept your mail stamped or not. Similarly, when you sign up to a mailing list you can tell your filters to accept the mail from that list.So there wouldn't be any great impact on individuals or *real* subscription mailing lists... just bulk mail to strangers.
This would raise the cost of spam as much as a tax, without stepping into the quagmire of trying to tax or regulate what's already there.
All email should be Public Key encrypted for the recipient!
Wikileaks, no DNS
No, under the Bush tax plan, the rich pay a much higher percentage of income, much higher percentage of overall tax revenues, and a much higher amount of actual dollars than the poor and the lowest-income taxpayers. This is after the Bush tax cuts. Check into the actual amounts paid in taxes.
It certainly does not "Favor the Rich", unless you think that kicking a dog 76 times a day instead of 80 times a day "favors the dog".
This is yet another testiment as to how people who don't understand technology shouldn't be allowed to make policy for it. Now, granted, he doesn't seem serious about the idea. However, the very suggestion marks serious ignorance as to how the 'Net works.
Now, if the government ran all the email servers in the world, they could implement this tomorrow, but we are talking about millions of privately owned servers.
Is the plan to turn ISPs into tax cops? Are you going to charge x amount of money whenever you detect an outbound connection on port 25? What if the email doesn't go though? Spammers have dozens of people in the Bcc: field, but only one outbound SMTP connection is made from their computer to send it. If they don't send that mail to their local ISP's server, they'll have no idea how many people that mail went out to. Sure you could set up a system to read the headers of any email that floats by, but we all know how people fell in love with Carnivore.
And if people don't want to pay the tax, what's to stop them from sending the data on another port to an offshore server where it will be routed to its destination via SMTP? Or better yet, tronjanizing a clueless users system to do the same, then what happens when the bill comes?
The gubermint seriously needs to keep their hands off of tech until they get a clue.
-R
Lets see.. another big problem is junk mail, is it free to send mail through the USPS? Nope, so this little tax just turned into something over $.15 per email. No way. If it comes to that, make the internet free and I will gladly pay to send emails.
"Actually the republicans want to take my money and my kids' and grandkids' money. Hell, if they keep borrowing and spending like they have been they'll have my great grandkids money too"
No, they do not. The Republicans are the ones who want to pass the balanced budget amendment. Just give President Bush a line item veto, and there would be no defecit.
Besides, your children do not have to pay for the debt: it can be paid for by government cutting waste spending.
"Don't buy into the republican lies"
I don't, but thankfully they rarely lie. With Howard Dean, Kerry, etc lying just about every time they make a statement about anything, it is hard for Republicans to get a word in edgewise.
Taxing is a form of censorship. If you censor e-mail, people will move alternative communication mediums (IRC/IM/Blog/etc.) or start using e-mail accounts in jurisdictions that aren't censored. When people move to other communication mediums, the spammers will be there to greet them (IM spam, pager spam, chat room spam, etc.).
Then again, maybe this bill is yet just another hoax.
-ez
That's the most insightful thing I've seen on Slashdot in a long time.
No comment.
The same sort of thing you described has happened with guns. Most people don't realize it, but it is totally legal for a law-abiding citizen to own a fully-automatic weapon. The 1934 "National Firearms Act," however, gives the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) --then under the Treasury dept.-- the authority to collect a $200 tax everytime a machinegun is transferred to a new owner.
/new/ machineguns could be registered for civilians (gradually expanding powers...)
But.... in 1986 somehow congress was able to declare that no
Now most recently, John Ashcroft has moved the BATF to the Justice dept, which, as we know, is more concerned with police-style enforcement than tax collection, the original purpose of the BATF. And indeed, this fits with the role of the BATF in the last 20 years.
Now, I'm not looking for a discussion on whether guns are good or bad (I'd love to own an automatic weapon, personally), I'm merely pointing out that if you give Congress an inch, they'll take the proverbial mile. It may happen slower, or it may happen faster, but it's better not to let them have the first taste.
James
Right! Let's DDoS these IRS bastards! That'll teach them!
The moon is not fully subjugated. I demand a second assault wave preceded by a massive nuclear bombardment.
And the recipient gets the money. You pay $.05 to send an email and I receive a $.05 credit to my ISP account. I could live with that. It would probably put an end to those stupid chain letters I get, and jokes from 1983 that my aunt just got and thinks is teh funny shiz.
'Same speed C but faster'
I've posted it once and I'll keep posting it until people actually listen.
The right way to make email "cost" something to mass mailers but not cost end-users anything is HashCash.
See http://www.cypherspace.org/~adam/hashcash/ for more info.
[ home ]
A spammer sending out 60,000,000 spam messages is likely to make more than $3,000. Articles and interviews with spammers often quote incomes in the $50,000-$100,000 range PER MONTH.
The answer is no. First of all, businesses would NEVER impliment a system charging potential customers to send them mail. (Support customers... maybe.) A complete change in the way e-mail is done (globally) would be required. If we're going to do that, why not put some other means of verifying senders in place?
and take government control out of the picture. I agree wholeheartedly that email should never become a revenue source for any government or organization.
If you want to make micropayments the vehicle to stem the tide of spam, go ahead, but let the recipient receive the payment.
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
warning: USA readers may not understand this because of the mobile phone differences.
If you need an example of what is already working, take a look at SMS. There the recipient can get messages for free, but the person sending it foots the bill. And they had to come up with a billing system for that, right?
and I can bet you it doesn't cost the phone company 25 cents to send a damn text message.
Yes. Yes. Exactly. If people don't want email spam, why don't they move to a new system that requires some type of registration to enter into. I beleive there are companies already offering this system. Imagine that--a market solution without the interference of gov't!
I think when you sign up you have to set aside a certain amount of money in escrow, and if the receiver of your emails reports your email message as spam $.05 is deducted from your account, otherwise you are charged nothing.
Ok, first of all ... my opinion is that this is a really bad idea for many reasions ... I despise government intervention in matters such as this, I despise taxes, and taxing the source of email won't even put a dent in spam. In fact, I think it'll boost spam because US based spammers will simply outsource their operations to China and boost China's spam economy, which is already booming.
...
... how would one define email? "messages sent via SMTP" is a likely definition. Great, so lets say that somebody writes an email system that functions via HTTP POST in order to circumvent the tax. How then would the government define "email"? Would they then have to modify the law to include a tax on HTTP POSTing?
Besides the fact that it's a bad idea, if such a tax went into effect, it wouldn't be hard to circumvent it with an alternate "email" system
When the government taxes "email", it'll have to define email
Though it seems like a simple, well intentioned idea, the reality is, email tax it is neither of these.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Its pretty sad that he has absolutely no idea about what hes talking about. Email isnt a thing that can be taxed, its just a standard way of doing something, its just another packet on the internet, so what are you going to do? say that i cant run a mail server on my computer unless it does things your way? Otherwise how can you possibly tax the current protocal of email? The only way to do it is to come up with an entirely new system, for example lets call it fmail. fmail would have some way of taxing its use maybe by passing every message through one big hackable Microsoft based server, so aslong as you got everyone using it instead of email it would be taxable. lets keep the internet free, and free from idiot politicians who dont understand it.
You wouldnt try and perform brain surgery if you had no idea about medicine so dont try and making legal decisions about the internet unless you know what your talking about.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
How many years did you spend teaching poor and disadvantaged kids in north Minneapolis, swb?
Bite me, troll, I grew up disadvantaged in Minneapolis.
If The Hon. Mark Dayton, Senator from Minnesota, thinks it's even possible to tax the millions - yes, millions of privately owned mail servers out there, then The Hon. Mark Dayton, Senator from Minnesota is a retard.
Not to mention, most spam comes from outside the US. How is The Hon. Mark Dayton, Senator from Minnesota going to tax mail servers in China? Declare war?
Bite me, troll, I grew up disadvantaged in Minneapolis.
Nice try. I'm betting you grew up within two blocks of Lake of the Isles or Linden Hills if you did indeed grow up in Minneapolis, but judging by your politics, I'm guessing Edina or Wayzata. Disadvantaged kids from the inner city just don't call a moderate like Mark Dayton a "limosine socialist."
No trolling here. Just pointing out that Dayton lives his convictions. Then again, if you're wacky enough to call Dayton a socialist and lying about your background, you're probably living your convictions too, sad to say.
I'm experiencing a problem at the moment, some spammers are using my email address in the 'from' and 'reply to' fields of their spam, so I get all the mail daemon messages for their invalid addresses. I'm contacting the abuse addresses at the senders' ISPs, but an automated system, unless it was intelligently put together would block my email to the ISPs which recieved the spam.
If the automated system were to perform a whois lookup on the 'recieved' portion of the header and kick an email to the abuse address of that domain, it would probably be a bit more effective, and would result in fewer false positives.
IMHO, what's really needed is a micropayment system, you can say 'if you pay me x, I'll let you place your email in my inbox, if it's interesting, I'll refund the fee.' as for implementation, either the end-user would need to run their own mail server, or the ISPs would need to get on board and offer the service.
Also, another good way to check for unsolicited email is to run a whois lookup on the mail server IP, if it doesn't match the 'from' OR 'reply to' domain, then reject it.
Politician weasel words...
How is it "weasel words" to say that you're "considering" something, and then later say that other options are being considered and that the tax one isn't his favorite? You need to get a grip.
Don't become a regular here, you will become retarded. -- Yoda the Retard
All the spammers will be outside the state, or going through email servers located outside the state.
"Thinking like an economist, he's obviously hoping to make mass emailing unprofitable"
That's exactly wrong. He's obviously hoping to increase state income with email tax revenue. It would actually be quite profitable, because since nobody could do anything to stop the spam anyway, they wouldn't spend any of the collected tax on trying. It would just be free money from the legit email users.
I think I'd be happy to accept any amount of SPAM provided my bank account gets a boost every time I push DELETE. But then again, most SPAMMERS would never get past the "...leave a deposit..." step. Heck, I might even READ the SPAM coming from the ones that do.
The downside, of course, is that you'll have to install a special version of sendmail which authenticates (cryptographically) the sending server. That, and mailing lists will now likely need to charge a small subscriber fee.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
First of all, businesses would NEVER impliment a system charging potential customers to send them mail.
"NEVER"? Sorry, it's already happened. More than 300 years ago. Have you sent "mail" to a business lately? It won't arrive without a "stamp", which costs money. Telephoning a business also costs money.
Of course, a company can decide to take care of these charges for their customers- by providing 800 numbers, postage-paid mailers, or other ways to cover the cost. Many do that today. If sender-pays email takes off in the future, companies could whitelist all their customers so they don't have to pay. And first-time customers could have the mail fee deducted from the first order (how validated parking works in US metropoli).
Or, the company could even decide to do a accept absolutely all emails for no charge, like a 1-800 phone number works today. Spammers have little incentive to send to a corporation anyhow; after all, we rarely hear of telemarkers preying on toll-free support line operators.
If we're going to do that, why not put some other means of verifying senders in place?
What's that supposed to mean? If money is being exchanged with email, it implies that a very strong way of identifying the sender has been implemented- strong enough to reach her bank account!
Maybe you're suggesting that strong sender-ID would enable whitelist/blacklist systems to work more reliably. But in reality, the "sender pays" concept has white/blacklisting at its core. It's expected that the majority of emails sent would be accepted via whitelist. The option for the sender to pay is a fallback for the occasional time a non-whitelisted person needs to send a you a message (such as when your grandma has just changed to a new ISP)
Here's an easy way to get rid of spam, based on some other recent ideas: set up a system where sending someone an e-mail costs you a penny, unless you're on an "approved senders list" that that person has set up. Instead of going to an ISP or some other entity, though, that penny goes to the receiver's account, and then can be used by them to pay more of these penny charges. Accounts are maintained at a website (or possibly several with an interlinked network), which charges some sort of small percentage fee whenever new funds are added to cover server costs, administrative overhead, credit card processing fees, etc. The only messages not subject to the fee would be message delivery errors, which can easily be checked against recent sent messages and made to follow a standard format.
The great thing about this scheme is that since the receiver gets to keep the penny, consumers effectively end up paying nothing for this, since typically we'll receive a lot more of these messages than we send out (as there are plenty of copmanies that are quite happy to pay a penny per message to talk to us, since it's a lot less than postage or telephone charges). ISP's can even provide their customers with a few dollars in credit to get started, or perhaps 20 or 30 cents of it monthly, so that most people will likely never even need to put up any money at all. And yet, by charging a penny per spam this can easily put the spammers right out of business.
I've been fighting SPAM for over ten years. Any kind of "tax" will not work, because a majority of SPAM is outside any jurisdiction to which said tax can apply.
Of our own server's SPAM, 80 percent comes from overseas. Contacting the ISPs proved pointless, so how could you possibly tax them, as any "tax" could only be applied at the source?
[Rogue] companies send SPAM because it is ZERO COST. After trying to also hunt down the origin companies (where the link gets you), I also found that EVERY ONE I went after was bogus. Hosted off-shore, with bogus contact information. I went so far as to go after Network Solutions; because many of the DNS entries I found hosted by them had bogus contacts. It turns out they do not verify contact information so long as a valid credit card is used to pay for the name. Pressed on the issue, a manager there said "It is not our policy to police the internet," even though I pointed out that my point was entering bogus contact information was against their policy, and the fact that the rogue site was defrauding individuals meant that they were assisting in a criminal act (because one couldn't get to their site without name resolution through netsol...) The forwarded me to a "procedure" they had for reporting rogue sites, where the onus is on the one making the complaint to prove the site is rogue before they start an investigation. More barking from me (I.E. Santa Clause at the North Pole?) that the misinformation was too obvious to warrant me wasting my time, and the DNS was finally removed. A few days later, we were getting mail re the fraud from a different name resolving to the same host. I gave up.
The point is, you cannot tax the recipient. You cannot bottleneck and tax the line spam goes over without enormous cost and grey area personal liberties arguements. So you can only tax the source, and present protocols and transmission media makes this practically impossible.
So, the only way to regulate SPAM is to strictly control DNS... and the US Dept. of Commerce wisely privatized internic to Network Solutions such that this will never again be possible.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
You fucking idiot!!!
~Knautilus
I am in total agreement with Mark Dayton, incidentally, my senator.
Any child could see that taxing email would reduce spam. What spammer would be willing to pay a a couple pennies on each of a 5 million emails in a bulk mailing? Perhaps on a particularily profitable one, sure. If it's legally profitable and people buy into it, then it is likely for a good non-evil reason. If they make money illegally or through fraud, then the tax itself would help track the assholes down and punish them.
That said, I think our freedom should be retained and cherished. While it may certainly help decrease the amount of spam, spam isn't that big of a problem for me personally, and definately not worth the money spent on the email tax or the cost of freedom lost.
huh. sounds like I said what he did- "just one of the tactics that should be considered, but I don't favor it at this time." Which is to say: "yes it could work, but I don't think we should do it."
Likewise, destroying all email servers would put a stop to email-based spam in a heartbeat, but I sure as hell don't endorse that etiher.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Why not just tax people who send say 1000+ e-mails a month, or something like that? Some number any normal person wouldn't send during a monthtime.
Only a capitalist would try to impose a tax to curb something. This is just as idiotic as trying to curb pollution by introducing a pollution credit system that the top capitalistic economists come up with.
Yes, I realize that left-leaning people usually support these things but that's only because it is better than not having anything at all. In other words, people who support such schemes are short-term oriented and are not idealists (of course, I am not that person). You cut pollution by eliminating it (or trying to elminate it). Similarly, you cut spam by trying to eliminate it. Go to the root cause and eliminate that (if it is worth doing that--I am not saying it is worth it in this case). Introducing a tax will not really do anything because the wealthy can afford it (just like how a country like China that tries to curb population growth by fines discriminates against the poor and lower classes). Large wealthy corporations will pay the taxes while the smaller ones are driven out of business (yes, these spammers ARE in a business--not a business you and I like but it's still a business).
You want to cut spam? Get people to avoid clicking on the spam messages and not to respond. The reason SPAM is popular is because it works! Yep, people actually click on those penis enlargement ads, free sex, Nigerian scams, etc. Yes, what I am saying is hard but it is the only solution that will lead to utopia. All other solutions will violate/penalize liberties or certain parties.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
You realize there's no way in hell lawyers will let this happen, right?
How come Democrat senators like Mark Dayton always get a pass when they try to reduce our freedoms by converting someting free to something that is taxed.
I forgot the advertisement,
"...more taxes, bigger government, less personal liberity...vote democrat 2004!"
Except that, as an amateur/hobbiest/non-profit site, I should not have to split my email server up from my regular server. I should have full control over running my own email server in my own country from the expensive machine I already build and pay to have hosted in my own city...
Like the "miniscule" 1% "income" tax passed in 1913?
I think we'd all be happier paying it if it were *still* 1%...
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
.. but the fact remains that people do try to use their resources wisely, no matter who they are. If sending an email weren't free and it cost some little bit of money to send (say 1 cent USD or whatever is reasonable in the local currency), then it automatically becomes infeasible to spam indiscriminately. Legitimate bulk email will still happen, just not for free. I can foresee that charities and religious organizations would be able to use a bulk discounted rate, just like they can today.
In the meantime, the rest of us will happily continue going on our merry way, hardly even noticing the change, except for one thing: we'll stop getting so much spam.
As for your view on how to achieve utopia, I agree with you. If everyone just stopped clicking on those stupid things, then spam would go away. Likewise, if everyone were honest, there would be no stealing. If everyone treated their fellow human beings properly, there would be no war, hunger, or oppression. If only....
The only thing perfect about this world is that we all stand on equal ground when it comes to finding our ultimate reality. None of us have an advantage at that and all the material goods in the world won't get you ahead there either. You may as well take comfort in that because, until "utopia" exists, we'll just have to get by with systems of economics instead.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Topics like "Idiot X proposes Y" or "X from SCO says..." should appear together in a stupidity/asshole ranking poll, that is all they deserve.
Nice try. I'm betting you grew up within two blocks of Lake of the Isles or Linden Hills if you did indeed grow up in Minneapolis
No, I actually was a couple of miles from Lake Harriet, in Minneapolis proper, and not in Kenwood, Linden Hills, or any other limousine liberal neighborhood. But what's proximity to either of those two lakes have to do with hardship, anyway? There's plenty of low-income rental housing within walking distance of both lakes.
Disadvantaged kids from the inner city just don't call a moderate like Mark Dayton a "limosine socialist."
Sure they do. If they use hard work and their own smarts to get ahead and then see some wealthy asshole decide to buy a Senate seat and turn around and propose new, regressive taxes, they call 'em like they see 'em, limousine socialists. Or is it just that you think that people who start out behind aren't smart enough to see through the failed trappings of welfare society?
Just pointing out that Dayton lives his convictions.
If Dayton lived his convictions, he'd be working a real job like the rest of us, giving away all his money (and I mean all, and I mean now, not in some tax-sheltered foundation giveway over time) and working full time to convince the rest of his artistocratic heirs to do the same.
Instead, he's looking for ways to take from those of us that have worked all our lives to earn what we have to give to those who refuse to work. If you're so myopic that you think that makes me an Edinite, so be it, but at least be comforted in knowing at I hate the rich just as much.
And the thing is is that HR and others hiring use scanners looking for keywords they require in resumes.
Should there be a Law?
Spammers crack a server to make it send their emails (do spammers ever do so?) and the server owner gets a tax bill?
the power to destroy.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Instead of SMTP, I'll use OFMIP to send 'messages' instead of emails...
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Here's an idea that has been mentioned before, but merits a mention here. It's not clear how we would "get there from here," but it's food for thought.
Imagine an e-mail system in which the sender of an e-mail would have to pay the recipient a fee specified by the recipient. The e-mail simply would not show up in the recipient's inbox unless the fee is paid.
You would be able to provide "keys" to regular correspondents, legitimate mailing lists, etc., that would allow them to reach your inbox without paying a fee. The keys would be revokable, in case they are abused or fall into the wrong hands.
It would be an expected courtesy, but not enforced, that legitimate e-mail that pays a fee would have the fee refunded once the recipient recognizes the mail as legitimate.
Now, if you're actively seeking e-mails from unknown senders -- for example, if you advertise a product or service and tell people to e-mail you for more information -- then you probably wouldn't charge a fee to reach your inbox. If you're a more typical user, you would set a small fee, probably just a few cents, so as not to deter legitimate mail.
A spammer, assuming he doesn't have keys to millions of inboxes, would need to pay tens of thousands of dollars in order to reach them all, assuming they each require a payment of a few cents.
This would not only deter spam but also compensate its victims. However, it would have little effect on legitimate e-mail.
I think one of the things that is overlooked in reducing the success of dictionary attacks is what mega ISP's can do. They need to divide up their mail servers so each would have no more than say about 5000 mailboxes. It would make the addresses a little longer maybe. Instead of having an address such as technician126@msn.com, I would have an address like technician@mail3275.msn.com
It doesn't matter which side of the @ site you put the number on. technician@mail3275.msn.com is no harder to hit than technician3275@msn.com. The important part is that the real users need to scattered randomly among a sparce name space rather than assigned sequentially among a dense one.
technician@mail3275.msn.com is actualy more vulnerable than technician3275@msn.com. In the former, the size of the name space can be found with DNS lookups and need only be done once for all usernames. For the later, the spammer has to actually send mail.
All you need to detect a dictionary attack is a sparcely populated name space and the ability to detect attempts to send to the missing addreseses. If a single host, in a short time, racks up a high percentage of failures with a large number of email addresses, then you just found a dictionary attack. .
Small domains are less vulnerable to dictionary attacks becuase their name space is already more sparce than megaISP's can practically be.
If most people used these technologies, then spam wouldnt be a problem, the problem is that many clueless isps and users don't like spam, but they haven't bothered to fight it much either.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
if there was a tax of $1000 per email to tax-my-ass-off@anti-spam-agency.gov If you find an open proxy, you send the email...
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Have all email compared against a white list of email addresses in your personal email program.
If they match your white list, no tax.
If they do not match your whitelist, they get taxed.
Friends, some family members, newsletter groups, business groups and the like will just ask that the address they send from get added to your whitelist so they don't get taxed.
Your first email to a new address can be a freebee if it is added to the recipients whitelist. This allows new customers of businesses to avoid the tax, but still taxes one time spammers.
Make violation of forging the "from" address 10 to 100 times the tax rate.
Tax is charged to the ISP who collects it from your account. ISPs who do not pay it get blocked. Free email hosts can set whatever limit on daily/weekly outgoing email they want before making you sign up for a pay account, or have you show that your outgoing email is not getting taxed. Everyone I have ever come across who uses free email accounts do not put out large volumes of daily emails to people they don't know, unless they are spamming.
Open source is targeting the problem and spamers are attacking them with a few laws to help with will destory the spammers. Where in hell will a tax help. It might help the spammers fight the open source filters and stop them from being used.
Now a law forcing spam filters on email servers will be far more effective linked to one of the many updating spam lists.
Why is it that political affilation only matters when its a Republican doing something wrong? Every time I see a Republican name here at slashdot it is always followed by a "(R)". Yet here we have the Democrats doing something silly, and like many times before no mention of their party. Republicans get the shit end of the stick here at slashdot.
People are saying pay a penny to someone and a penny to this other person. How could you possibly police that? Everyone has to have a paypal account to sent email? You would have to rewrite every mail client ever written.
Instead here's an idea that might work. Don't spammers want you to contact them? Isn't there always some contact info for the product they are trying to shove, why not go after these people, they are the one paying the spammer TO spam.
Or better yet since that might not work either for what ever reason, how about we use more education so people don't reply or don't purchase said product? If there is no sales to be made from spam why would they spam in the first place.
... if it will get broadband to my neighborhood sometime before the freakin' heat-death of the universe!
Now that is a freaky coincidence because I was saying just this morning how I think it would be a good idea for a Minnesota senator to come by my house and smooch all over my ass.
While it is great that you have confidence in this lawmaker, the fact is that taxing email is a solution that can never work. Period. It isn't worth studying beyond this simple test:
In my spam bucket a large portion are from Asia and India. What possible help could an email tax be? Does this really require more sophisticated study than the above?
-- Jack
If most people used these technologies, then spam wouldnt be a problem, the problem is that many clueless isps and users don't like spam, but they haven't bothered to fight it much either.
ISPs don't want to be in court because their spam filters blocked e-mail saying "Mom's dying and this is your last chance to see her..." So they choose spam filtering that is weak, at best. Individual users are not going to install spam filters. Hell, over half of them don't even know that Windows has an update feature for patches, so how do you expect them to find, install, configure, and use spam filters?
But, on a philosophical note, why should I have to pay protection money to some company selling a spam filtering solution? Why should my ISP?
This whole anti-government crap is like saying that there should be no laws against theft and that we should rely on technology (burglar alarms, CCTV, etc.) to solve it. If something is unethical and costs innocent people money, then it should be illegal. You have people that say "but you can't catch and prosecute every spammer, so there should be no law against spam passed." Bullshit. You can't catch and prosecute every person who steals a radio out of a car, runs a stopsign, or shoplifts -- but no one wants to repeal laws against those things, do they?
Don't we already pay to have regular mail sent? We get tones of spam in regular mail even though it costs money to send it. I don't think it will make any difference at all for electronic spam.
I don't think introducing a tax willslow them down at all. Jail time probably would though. Make spam illegal. It's not like we don't already get bombarded by advertizing everywhere else.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Fair and equal taxation,
don't worry your privacy is assured...
I'm guessing the assumption is that taxing e-mail would make it too costly for spammers. But there's several critical flaws with that assumption:
Not to mention the little fact that most spam is delivered through various proxies (open relays, open proxies, compromised systems, distributed spammer clients, etc). "Go ahead and tax it!" says Mr. Evil Spammer, "I'll just make sure Mrs. Jone's Flower Shop ends up with the bill! MOOO HAHAAHAHA"
Ok, let's review the options available once more:
Well no one wants the US government to regulate e-mail. I don't want ANY government to regulate it. We've been fighting spam with technological controls for, what, a decade now? Since the spammers use technology as well, it's an endless arms race.
That leaves law enforcement and sociological controls. And by law enforcement I do not mean new laws outlawing spam. I mean standard, existing laws about fraud, theft, and other criminal acts.
Law enforcement has been hampered by lack of co-operation from those ripped off by spam (i.e. end-victims as well as ISPs, companies with hijacked systems, etc), insufficient technology and knowledge resources, and conflicting idea of jurisdiction. Yes, I spelled jurisdiction wrong damn it, I don't care.
This is where sociological controls can help. We, the victims of spammers, need to work with law enforcement! There needs to be a revolution in the mind-set that we don't share knowledge with the law. How many systems administrators have discovered clearly illegal activity in their ISP network and just quietly disconnected the offenders rather than reporting it? There's so much concern about civil litigation, violating customers privacy, etc. that even the most blatantly obvious scumbags can get away with not only ripping off a provider but never even being reported to the police.
That. Must. Stop.
Similarly, those that actually reply to spams need to be exposed. Not just the perverts wanting porno and the losers wanting a bigger penis, but all the desperate folks who want cheaper mortgate rates, low-interest credit cards, etc. If you know someone (friend, relative, co-worker) who has for whatever reason responded to spam, humiliate them. And I don't mean be an asshole and give out personal data. Just tell them they're an idiot, let their friends/co-workers/relatives know they are an idiot. Make it clearly how socially unacceptable that is.
Will that work? Ultimately there's no way to know without trying. With any change in human society (i.e. the industrial revolution, the rennaisance, man on the moon, the ATM, etc) our social behavior has altered to adopt to new problems as well as new opportunities. That change can be encouraged and consciously controlled.
In the darkness of future past, The magician longs to see. One chants between two worlds, "Fire, walk with me!"
The backend needed to tax is more than what's needed to knock out 95% of spam. Registered E-mail Servers.
1. Introduce email tax 2. "someone" writes email worm exploiting oopsie in outlook express 3. ??? 4. PROFIT!
Yeah, it comes on a phone bill, and even if you have dsl, using a phone line is required. Back when I was on dialup, I was running two lines, and the phone company actually had to charge a "FCC inter-state network connection" (assumingly for long distance) on both lines. The irony of this is, that the dedicated comm line never used long distance, but they charged an $6 for the first line, and $7 for the second... and that's per month!
I really think at this point the government has taxed absolutly everything, and from here on out, they're just deciding what to tax twice (or 3 or 4...) take for example an SUV. You buy your new SUV, pay sales tax, say $2500. Then you get hit with a gass guzzler tax, then, you are taxed for the gas you use in your SUV. then you sell the SUV, and the next owner pays sales tax again. Also don't forget about the recycling requirements for many things that a vehicle uses... I know in my state it's illegal to put empty oil quarts in the trash, and I don't get free recycle pick-up.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
As long as your making laws, why not make open mail-servers illegal and get rid of spam for good and for real?
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I should have full control over running my own email server
No problem. Most non-profit/amatuer/hobbiest servers I see have less than 5000 users. I have no problem with small ISP's providing e-mail. They provide poor yeild to a dictionary attack.
The truth shall set you free!
Dumbass!
Next thing you know the government will want to tax me for living. OH WAIT, THEY DO!
Slashdot = -1 Redundant, Asperger, kdawson FUD, Libertarian, and Linux
I don't understand how this is supposed to work. Since most SPAM is spread through open or hijacked mail servers on SOMEONE ELSES MACHINE they will end up paying the tax, not the spammers.
the Americans are thinking they are the center of the universe.... How exactally would such a tax work? Would the US Gov be taxing canadians for sending email to the US? or Europeans? What about a Canadian sending an email to an Austrailian? would that be taxed as well? and who would receive the tax? What would the revenues from these taxes be put towards? Americans can play the legal game with American spammers, and American companys that deal with spammers, but the internet does not have borders. The solution to spam needs to be technological. This is not a job for governments. It's up to the users to decide they have had enough with the SPAM and demand that their ISPs start filtering the SPAM. All it took was one request and I started using a couple of the better black hole lists, and now I have several customers telling my that the like my service because they don't receive much SPAM. I added virus filtering and the customers were happy again. If people find that SPAM is a problem, either deal with it yourself, or complain to the people who can actually implement a solution (your ISP) if your ISP doesn't care enough to help it's customers, then find an ISP that does.