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US House, Senate Agree on Anti-Spam Bill
Folic_Acid writes "Rep. Billy Tauzin, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce committee, has announced that the House and the Senate have reached a deal to both pass an anti-spam bill, the first ever federal anti-spam law in the United States. Specifically, the law contains: opt-out, authority for the FTC to set up a "Do-Not-SPAM" registry, criminal charges for fraudulent spam, including five years in prison, statutory damages of $2 million for violations, tripled to $6 million for intentional violations, unlimited damages for fraud and abuse." News.com has a copy of the bill and a story.
Unbelievable.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
This has been a long time coming, I hope we're actually able to enforce it. Although, its going to be tough with all the world wide spam.
Is this really just fluff to impress voters? Or do you think it will actually carry any weight?
"Enforces statutory damages of $2 million for violations, tripled to $6 million for intentional violations, and unlimited damages for fraud and abuse."
Does this mean that if you are a spammer in the USA, and you spam addresses outside of the US, you will be fined $6 million dollars? Or does it mean that if you are a spammer from outside the USA, and you spam inside the USA, you will be fined by the USA for doing so? Or does it cover both as international violations?
How is the average SPAMming scumbag supposed to know where his 1.6 million email addresses are going? Do you look at every AOL email addy and assume it's linked to a user in the states? Okay, now what about Hotmail? Does this mean a new database of SPAMworthy email addys will be created so that SPAMmmers will have to use it against their lists, to prevent fines? Might be a good way to lower the bounce-count, at the bare min... not to mention, a way to perhaps add a SPAM-surcharge, so that SPAMmers will have to pay to SPAM.
The meaning of this could get mixed into a quagmire. I wouldn't care, because they are spammers (so who cares anyway), but I wouldn't want to see some of the more savvy ones wiggle off the hook because of some point of law that was overlooked. I mean, at least the law is here, but let's really have at it and make it solid.
IANAL, but American law only applies to America, right? How are they going to stop the spam coming into the states? Many of the offenders exist outside the States. Is if the next US lead war is going to be against countries who SPAM, and rip off Americans with Nigerian scams? That'd be funny as hell!
But as for unlimited damages for fraud and abuse, I think it's a good idea that the US Gov't has the power to bankrupt SPAM companies that lie, cheat and steal. How can I convince my own govrenment (Canada) to do something like this?
How can any of them possibly believe that this would do any good?
Technoli
... unlimited damages for fraud and abuse.
...?!
What the -- unlimited damages
Holy crap, get ready for the undead legion of attorneys to rise from the grave!
-kgj
-kgj
Peace
How will this be enforced? The global nature of the Internet seems to be unmanagable by a single government.
C:\>
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Aren't those old dudes in the Senate the ones that are buying all that Viagra?
I thought so.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
While I applaud the intent, unfortunately this is another totally ineffective anti-spam legislation. There are plenty of laws already on the books making 99.9% of spam illegal, but the problem is the government and related law enforcement agencies do not enforce the existing laws so why would anyone think this is any different? People need to realize that passing a law, and enforcing a law are entirely different. This is like going into a book store and buying a book, but not reading it! I hear next week Tauzin is going to solve the world hunger problem by passing a law making it illegal to throw out leftovers. Hurrah!
At this point, the only way you can realistically take action against a spammer based on these laws is by printing them out, finding the spammer and then hitting him over the head with the actual laws. Law enforcement agencies and district attorneys have repeatedly demonstrated an apathy towards pursuing and prosecuting spammers. The FBI has a monetary threshold of damages on any case of this nature it even elects to investigate. There are virtually no resources dedicated to enforcing this bill and there are no competent agencies available to even investigate! Please send a message to your political leaders that enforcement and not more laws are key to dealing with this problem.
The law looks good, but without dedicated provisions and a change in policy which will actually insure that these issues will be enforced, this is just a joke.
"including five years in [Federal Pound-Me-In-The-Ass] prison"
Bet someone's going to regret pushing all those penis patches (of grow 3 inches! fame).
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
some state court says that's unconstitutional and lets spammers spam?
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
If anyone wants to hear that in English, it sounds like they're saying that the MPAA- and RIAA- bots don't count as SPAM.
Too bad.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
A few things that the bill missed
1. No requirement for opt-in
2. No jail time only monetary damages
3. No public stonings
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
is this measure to be enforced, given that most spammers are not operating from the States? How do I, Joe Consumer, expect to be compensated for the oodles of spam that I am sure to continue receiving after this bill is passed?
learn to read, you moron!
Oh yay, another "do not..." registry. As if that'll work. What happened with the "do not call" registry? We got hammered with spam. If there's a new "do not spam" registry, what happens next? Flyers dumped out of airplanes? Something tells me cleaning out the pool is gonna become a bitch.
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
The very idea of don't email list is stupid. the only way to fight spam is by attacking their business model. You get spam because some idiot thinks he is getting a good deal for the product that the spammer sells. don't the law makers know that there is a diff between phones and emails? it costs real money to call someone to sell something but it costs almost nothing to send out emails. Also what about security for these Don't-emails-lists(if they are created)? what are they going to do give the spammer a list of email address he shouldn't email? yeah right. I bet the spammers would support this bill.
Finally, we get an antispam bill. Only this time, it won't be delayed like the nocall list was. What spammer would object to it publicly? If he/she did, they'd be lynched (I'll be the one holding the 10 yr old motherboard; can't use the comp for anything else, so might as well go to a good cause).
First thing, I'm going and registering all the domains I own, and my comcast account. Then, for good measure, I'm going to see if I can pipe all emails through servers in California.
One question: does this federal law overrule the Calif law, and if so, is it for better or worse? What's CAUCE's opinion on this?
"Brains . . . brains . . . "
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
...reminds me of an NDA from Sony I signed in a previous life. Buried deep in the middle of it was the phrase (from memory)
"Should PARTNER at any time divulge material covered by this agreement, then financial reparation may not be sufficient"...
(No, the NDA wasn't under the NDA - do you think I'd be telling you this, if it was ???)
I never did get clarification on what non-financial reparations would be demanded (first-born son?, ritual dismemberment ?)
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
If I read that right, it appears to say that an electronic mail message sent by or on behalf of one or more lawful owners of copyright, patent, publicity, or trademark rights to an innocent person is SPAM. Fascinating. What is the RIAA's error rate, and what is the fine for repeated violations?
The brilliant idea of taxing emails didn't pass?
but at least it's a start...hopefully the bill will be improved upon & enforced...
This is a BAD bill... it preempts all state spam laws -- some of which are actually decent, and let US the CONSUMERS go after the spammers instead of depending on fat, lazy, guberment morons to do it.
Don't preempt the SPAM state laws!!!
whose computers are hacked by spammers, who proceed to use that person's e-mail address as a source of spam? Are they gonna make those people pay the $2 million?
Crushing dreams at the speed of sarcasm
...enforcement.
Make all the laws you want. How can you enforce it, when the spammers are in S.Korea, or in an Eastern Bloc country?
or:
"The intarweb worm diddit!!"
do() || do_not();
Putting your address will give foreign spammers a list of lots of active US email addresses. There will be no way for the US government to do anything aobut this.
There will me no way that my main address gets on there. I will put my secondary address on there to see if it makes any difference.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
Does anyone even know how many US spammers are out there? If there are only a few hundred this might help some but what if there are thousands or hundreds of thousands. Tracking them all down would be like trying to arrest all the people that speed or download mp3s, like stopping a tidal wave with your middle finger. They're not going to stop unless the risk outweighs the benefits and if all they get is a puny fine, if anyone can even catch them, then they are not going to even blink at this.
Thats a tough one. Generally its not considered unsolicited advertising if you have prior business with the entity. See the Do-Not-Call list. If I have a credit card with a bank, and the banks calls me out of the blue to try to sell me anti-fraud protection, that is legal, and should be. If one is using the material of the copyright, patent, publicity, or trademark rights holder, you have prior business with the entity (business that was initiated by the end user, specifically). Therefore, like Do-Not-Call, that entity is allowed to contact you to offer such wonderful opportunities as settling out of court to avoid a massive infringement lawsuit.
I fail to see the problem, or even while this special exemption was necessary. Also note this would protect rights holders whose works are published under the GPL as well as the **AA.
So hate on haters.
From keytlaw
- Digital Millennium Copyright Act Safe Harbor
I think they just wanted to make it consitent with DMCA.The simplest, cheapest and best way a web site owner may protect against liability for copyright infringement resulting from users' uploaded content is to comply with the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Web site owners who comply with the requirements of the DMCA and who take appropriate action after receiving notice of copyright infringement from a copyright owner, will not be liable for money damages for users' uploaded content.
The closest distance between two points is a tunnel
- Lyndon Johnson.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
In spite of the Do Not Call Registry, my phone still rings with sales weasels trying to get me to buy something. For some telemarkets, nothing has changed and the FTC is unable/unwilling to do anything about it. Other telemarketers have changed tactics, their calls are now veiled in the guise of surveys and "charities" but, by the end of the call you are being asked to buy something.
So what does this new upcoming law offer? I doubt very much that it will change anything. If anything does change, more than likely it will only be that more spammers will likely move offshore. A great deal of the spam I receive already originates in China or Russia, somewhat beyond the reach of US law.
An experiment.
I'm going to create a new email account, and register it on the "do not spam" registry. It will have a random account name on my own domain.
I will not use this account for anything else.
As a control, I will create another random account under the same domain, and not use it anywhere, even on the "do not spam" registry.
I will measure how long it takes before the first address receives spam, how long before the second receives spam, and the amount of spam each receives.
Hypothesis: The first account will start receiving spam almost immediately. Due to the nature of the spam, the second should never receive spam unless someone is sending email to random 8-character accounts at my domain (brute force attack).
I should opt out from each of them?
If it takes 5 seconds to scan a single message, identify it as unwanted, searching for the opt-out link and clicking on it, this would take me 833333 hours, or 190 years (assuming I sit 12 hours a day in front of my pc).
Are they insane? A spammer will just take the do-not-spam list to another country where they will spam you from, eliminating the need to populate their own email addresses.
I'm surprised that no slashdotters are screaming "foul". What with the freedom to trade music, etc, doesn't this put a damper on some freedom, rather?
t :Hey yo!
From:evilDarthFredd@theworldisround.com
Subjec
Message content:
Hey brian, remember me? Hey, drop me a line, willya?
~EOF
Brian: I don't remember meeting this SOB..oh yes, it was HIM!!...SUE!!!! [calls lawyer]
And the rest is history.
"The most looniest, zaniest, spontaneous, sporadic Impulsive thinker, compulsive drinker, addict"
According to statistics from last year, there are more than 27 million registered .com/net/org domain names. If each domain holder paid an additional $2/year for renewal, this would generate more than $50 million for cybercrime enforcement activities. If each domain holder paid $5/year, that would generate more than $1.3 BILLION DOLLARS that could be dedicated towards creating and funding an agency dedicated to actually enforcing all these laws that are currently un-enforced.
I don't know about anyone else, but the prospect of paying a few more dollars per year on my domain registrations would be worth eradicating spam, and it could generate enough money to easily fund whatever efforts were needed to finally enforce these laws, crack down on worm/virus developers and the plethora of other Internet-based crime that's going on.
As usual, Katie will be left dissapointed by your efforts.
I direct you to Spamhaus.org rokso list
Have a quick scan down the list of countries...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
are we going to invade nigeria/china/indonesia for sending spam?
Probably not. Instead, we'll invade them for the oil.
-kgj
-kgj
Yay, they are finally doing something to curb at least some of the spam. Hopefully this will work well. Another implementation idea is to make a user of an email account pay $.05 per email for every email over a set limit (on a per month basis). For example if a spammer sends out a spam to 20,000 people he would have to pay nearly $1000 just to do that which would make the spam model not worth it. This might cause some issues with businesses doing legitimate mail but I'm sure somebody has some thoughts on how to fix this idea.
It seems very weak. Under the heading, "Illicit harvesting of electronic mail addresses", it says that "uses an automated means to obtain electronic mail addresses from an Internet website or proprietary online service operated by another person, without the authorization of that person and uses those addresses in another violation of this chapter, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both." Nowhere does it state anything about using someone elses list that MAY have been illegally generated. And what about overseas spammers? What prevents me from going to Tobago and setting up shop? And what prevents Tobago, or some other 3rd world country, from becomming the haven for spammers? After all, if it generates tax revent for them, it's doing some good for them.
Aside from the well-known difficulties of enforcing legal measures against spammers, this bill has a number of problems. It trumps existing state laws, such as the stonger California law. Consent is determined on an opt-out basis, not opt-in (as in the California law). In the best of cases, then, every spammer can legally send you at least one email. You can then opt-out, which will work if you are lucky and confirm your email address as valid if you are not. As in the no-call list, exemptions are granted for charities and political action groups.
I get more viruses than spam.
Except, what if the viruses are also spam?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
As much as I hate spam, it shouldn't be a criminal offense, and especially should not have a prison sentence. Prisons are for those who are dangerous to society, and spam is just annoying, not dangerous. The unlimited damages part is scary enough, but I don't want my tax money paying for some spammer to get raped bi-weekly.
Th
I suppose this means that Doubleclick can put a clear pixel data sniffer on the registry, just like AT&T did with the Do-Not-CALL registry? :-)
Either the article or the summary:
Makes it a crime, subject to five years in prison, to send fraudulent SPAM
While of course, fraud is already fraud... this covers in particular spam fraud - which does account for a goodly percentage of total spam.
I personally don't think that somebody needs to go to jail for spamming, there are cases where spamming is accidental or at very least due to extreme ignorance (see those who hire spammers). Not to mention the spambots hijacking computers... wouldn't want to face jailtime for that either.
No, I think I'll stick with large monentary damages to spammers and jail-time for fraud. Public stonings aren't a bad idea though.
Oh, and opt-in would have to be very well worded or otherwise useless. The first time you sign up for a service on the network with spamming "partners" you'd have opted in...
This is going to be abused real soon. While I hate spam, Once this law gets passed the Feds (Read the DOJ) will say that they do not have the ability to monitor what is being passed. At that point, they will push to have unlimited capabilities to monitor anything on the wire to detect spam, not just a "terrorist".
While I personally think that Ashcroft is abusing his power very badly, I can safely assume that will follow will make Ashcroft look like an angel. Absolute Power Corrupts absolutly.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The right to Opt-out of SPAM, doesn't stop the SPAM. We shouldn't have to opt-out of something we shouldn't be getting/don't want in the first place. This will look great in their re-election campaigns, but has no bite at all.
because the 'Do Not Call List' worked !
And now it will work again for SPAM !
No one is taking powers away from the states from suing. Double whammey .
From: MAILER-DAEMON
To: U.S. Congress
Subject: undeliverable: user unknown
The following mail could not be delivered:
user unknown <joespammer@spammer.com>
> From: U.S. Congress
> To: <joespammer@spammer.com>
> Subject: You are under arrest
>
> Attention Joe Spammer,
> Please be notified that you are hereby under arrest for violating the new US Anti-Spam law.
> You will be subject to up to 5 years in jail
> and two million dollars in damage.
>
> Seriously yours,
> The U.S. Congress
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
"This isn't going to single-handedly rid the world of spam overnight all by itself, ergo there's no point in even trying this."
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Unbelievable.
You mean that a message from a wounded party asking the (possibly inadvertant) offender to stop the tort is unbelievable?
Bah.
The darn law doesn't mean that an e-mail is now legal service; it means that the RIAA won't have a "we'd get sued" excuse to not try and tell people "please stop that, we see what you're doing" before starting a lawsuit.
Some will argue that it won't help because all the spam comes from China and South Korea. Wrong. A lot comes from those two countries, but the number one source of spam in the world is the U.S.
Then they'll argue that the spammers will move their mail servers to another country. So what? If the company doing business is still located in the U.S., the anti-spam laws will apply. I already block China and South Korea. I'm damn close to blocking Brazil. If the spammers move, it will be easier to block them.
Then they'll say the spammers will move their entire business to another country. Hell, that works for me. Maybe they'll move to the next country on the anti-terrorism hit list.
As for the idiots saying spam is protected by the Constutition. Bzzt! Wrong! Your right to free speech does not extend to breaking into my home to set up your soap box. Your right to free speech does not give you the right to make me pay to listen. Your right to free speech does not continue when I tell you to shut up and get the hell out of my house, nor does it mean you can sneak back in the next day to make me listen yet again.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Related Links
announced
More Spam stories
Also by michael
Your Rights Online
Your Headline Reader Has Been Banned
You May Only Load Headlines Every 30 Minutes
In 72 Hours, Your Ban Will Be Lifted
Do Not Bother Contacting Us For 72 Hours
Keep up the good work, guys!
Then we will adapt by cutting that country off, no access to U.S. internet network.
Should the Teamsters be allowed to support Howard Dean but General Electric not be allowed to support GWB? Why? Why should we stop the Sierra Club from giving money to Nader or the NRA from supporting Arnold?
IMO the problem isn't too much money in politics, it's too much opacity. Give as much as you want, but every campaign contribution must be public
This has been a long time coming
Judging by the text of the bill, not long enough.
Properly implemented, a law would be a good thing, but this misses on several counts..
First - it defines spam incorrectly.
Spam is unsolicited bulk email. This uses the term 'unsolicited commercial electronic mail message' - whether an email is commercial or not is irrelevant as to whether it is spam. Although the majority of spam is commercial in nature, not all of it is, just as not all unsolicited commercial email is spam (as evidenced by their need to include an exemption for copyright infringement notices.)
Second, the fact that it's opt-out, means that it legalizes spam - it's a pro-spam bill, not an anti-spam bill.
I haven't finished reading it, but if it overrides state legislation, then it's the worst possible outcome.
The term ''commercial electronic mail message'' means any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service (including content on an Internet website operated for a commercial purpose).
Capitalism will solve problems like this if left alone. When a business practice stops generating revenue because it pisses people off, then the businesses will find new practices. Obviously the practice is working, so it will continue being used. Until everybody, that's EVERYBODY, stops buying from spammers, we _WILL_ still have spam. As was pointed out before, this is not an international law. People in France, bless their smelly hearts, can still spam our asses off.
END OF LINE.
So, if I want to kill your company, I just send the spam, eh?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Perhaps the sucking is you. It seems that he has people calling him and he wants it stopped. Nobody wants to call you.
I not Fat! I'm big boned!
I went to see the Looney Toons movie today! When Buggs Bunny dressed as Marilyn Monroe I got a hard on.
Now they've got the house AND the senate lined up against them! If SCO ran their company, they'd be suing everyone and their brother for trademark infringement.
We don't need and shouldn't want a Do-Not-Spam registry. It should be a Do-Spam list. Spammers will only be able to spam people who put their name on the list. This way I don't have to publish my e-mail address to spammers who don't yet have it telling them not to spam me. Punishment for spamming people not on the list will be the death penalty.
I have no doubt spam will increase to any account that signs on to the list. All we'll do is provide a list of active accounts that aren't receiving domestic spam - what could be better from a spammer's perspective?
If the gov't simply provides a list, then it'll take about 5 minutes for it to get into the hands of foreign spammers. If they have lists submitted to them, then send back a list stripped of addresses on the list, it will take 6 minutes for spammers to get addresses. The only option is to require the spams go through a gov't server which filters out addresses. This is only a step away from having all email in the US required to go through government computers, which is of course the worst possible situation. No only would privacy become nonexistant in emails, but the speed and efficiency would decrease dramatically (bottleneck). I'm sure you can all think of a hundred other reasons this would be bad, of course.
I don't see any way that list can't make things far worse than they are now.
GL
Because some idiot got a spam that looks like it came from you, and now you have to spend $$$ to defend yourself and show that no, you didn't send the message, someone else did, using your address as the forged FROM address, will you like the law so well?
Simple. Election Year is comming up. They can mention this and get results. It will probably not have taken effect yet, so they can tout it to the general public.
Remember, the average computer user has no idea of how spam works - just like the average person does not know the difference between a telemarker and a market research caller. People (a good many of them) think that spam is sent out by the corporations that are advertised in the spam - not some person from Argentina that doesn't give a crap about U.S. Law.
Anyhow - that is what gets this bill passed. Do you really believe that some Senator checks his own email and reads spam - heck no. That is what secretaries are for. The same is with this bill. I really doubt that anyone of these people has actually tried to track down spam before. Oh well... legislation usually reflects what the public wants - and to your average AOL user... this is perfect.
There is always a frontier where there is an open and willing mind
In lawyer-speak, what they really want in this legislation would involve terms like the email being sent on the "good faith" assumption that a violation was occurred. "Good faith" for lawyers is a claim that they're trying to do the right thing, whether or not they are succeeding.
Let's hope the RIAA lobbyists don't follow SlashDot and this passes as is.
Aside from charities still calling my home number, the number of tele-marketers calling me at work has greatly increased. MCI has been calling me there every day this week. Today I finally said to please stop calling/take me off your list. I heard "but first you have to..." fading to a click as I hung up. Do they really think that harassing me every day is going to get me to sign up? Needless to say, add your work number to the do-no-call registry if you haven't already and all your email addresses to any do-not-spam list, otherwise they all just get channeled into whatever "port" you left open....
--- What?
Never underestimate the inventivness of spammers and conartists... For example I could envision a legit spam such along the lines of:
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Dear Sir no doubt you have been receiving messages on increasing your penis size.
Let me take this time to inform you that my company Hammer Inc. has a US Trademark and copyright on the term "penis enlargement" and a patent on our exclusive fully herbal penis enlargement treatment plan. All those other companies are violating our establish copyrights and infringing on our patent. We have very strong IP rights in this area let me assure you.
So therefore let me offer our treatment at an incredible savings, just sign up now and we will give you 30% of list. Your lover will love you for it...
v/r McBribe CEO Hammer Inc.
Oh wait, it WILL work. When everyone on the list starts getting 100x the SPAM they used to, they can all click through to the sites to force them to pay for the "customer" hits.
Did the SPAMmers write this?
Patriot Act, Amendment IIV: Spam originating from out the United States is here by considered a national security issue, punishable by at least military occupation up to and including total Nuclear Devastation. Execution of penalties not subject to review by the United Nations or any other debate club. There that should about cover it.....
How is this not an international please-spam-me,-here's-my-favorite-and-most-privat e-email-address list? Even if it prevents US companies from spamming you, it's like a golden list for most spammers in the world.
And even if they MD5 each address or something not-totally-braindead, it turns into a us spammer hash-checking, finding it on the do-not-spam list, and selling it to a foreign counterpart as a quality address.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
This is horribly flawed.
This list will need to be distributed for spammers to check it for compliance. When it gets distributed it will be explicitly added to all spam lists by illegal spammers and list aggregators. All current and future illegal and foreign spammers (i.e. most of them) will then bombard everyone on the list with more spam.
As usual they will get away scott free thanks to hijacked servers and IP blocks foreign immunity & the usual shady practices.
This is unworkable.
I bet this legislation defines spam as "unsolicited commercial email" instead of "unsolicited bulk email" is because political spam is not commercial email. Political spam is bulk email. They are above their own laws.
cpeterso
Five years in prison, and potentially up to $6 million in damages, all for spamming?
Now, I appreciate that spam, for a lot of people, is a major problem. I know that as a user, rather than an admin, and a careful one at that, I don't see the true extent of the problem. I get perhaps a couple of dozen spams a week to a single address that I was foolish enough to have in plaintext on a website a couple of years ago. To me, it's no big problem - Mozilla Mail's junk tools catch 95% of them. Still, I'm aware that spam is a serious problem for a lot of people.
But five years in jail? That seems somewhat excessive to me. I condemn the RIAA's lobbying partly because of the excessive penalties they seek; I cannot, in all conscience, support similar penalties for a crime which, to me at least, doesn't seem a great deal more heinous.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
they're talking about it on cspan at this very moment (4:14 PM Central, Texas Time)
tune in for the fun. hahah, they have a "do not spam registry"..
Writing a spam email: $3
Purchasing a list of 1 mil email addresses: $1,000
Computer and net connection to send 1 million emails: $900
Getting caught for spamming: Priceless
(Literally, see
unlimited damages for fraud and abuse."
I wonder if that includes cruel and unusual punishment?)
Fixes: .1 cent per would be enough) to send email, SPAM would not be profitable.
1. Convince entire internet population never to respond to SPAM - impossible.
2. Add some CPU cycles to send each email. If mail servers were required to perform some reasonable expensive operations (calculate some expensive hash) that made it cost some money (even
3. Require white listing before email accepted (send some message requesting to be put on accept list first, recipient must approve).
2 or 3 could solve the problem, but neither will happen until the system becomes completely unusable. Nobody likes to adopt new technologies, and no two vendors are going to agree on the proper solution until forced.
He needs to hurry up and go work for the mpaa like he's
The sooner he goes to work for them, the sooner the damage he's doing to consumers with the legislation he's pushing will stop.
I think if most ISPs (especially the large ones) would agree to redirect (access-lists/filter-lists, etc...) all foreign-ip-based email traffic to a central us "white-list" repository this could help the US reduce the spamload...
My 2 cents.
Hopefully, the do not call list will not be a "downloadable" list, but instead use some sort of DNS lookup. I would hate to have the list used as a source list for emails that aren't spam.
And if you think that all unsolicited emails are spam, I am sure the definition included is unsolicited commercial email. This means that political parties, disenchanged PETA activists, local PTAs, pseudo for-profit charatible? (think auto donations) organizations, etc. would love a large free list of good email addresses.
The alternative to ban all unsolicited email probably would not pass constitutional muster and I am not 100% sure that cure would be "better" than the problem.
It seems like the meat of this bill is in this clause:
So, basically, spam all you want as long as the recipient isn't on the do-not-spam list, and as long as the spam is labeled. Point-by-point for today's news release:The bill is opt-out. Enough said.
Won't work, for many reasons that have been copiously explained elsewhere. Primarily, great, give the spammers a list of valid email addresses.
The pornifity of the email is irrelevant. Spam is spam. Again, you have to say "no," possibly thousands or tens of thousands of times. Opt-out.
But non-fraudulent spam is ok? I thought fraud, whatever the medium, was already illegal.
I just don't see the point of a law where enforcement is not permitted.
Spam is abuse of the email system. Who can sue for these statutory damages? The ISP, the recipient, the states?
Actually it provides an out for the infringer's SERVICE PROVIDER, not for the infringer. And the service provider only gets the protection if they immediately take the page down and only put it back if the infringer claims in writing that they are contesting the takedown notice.
This is another one of the bad things in the DMCA. Certainly ISP shouldn't be responsible for their user's actions but this turns them into police which is exactly what they should not be.
US: We think you've been spamming from inside your country!
Saddam: Hey buddy! We're not spamming! The UN Spam inspectors didn't find anything!
US: That's because you've got mobile spam labs which you can drive around the country! That's it! We're invading!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"The right of action granted in this section is an individual right. No action brought under this section or based on this section may be maintained as a class action under Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure or any State law, rule, or procedure for class actions or other representative actions"
Why oh why did that put this provision in there? If this provision was omitted, every blood sucking lawyer this side of the Atlantic would already be setting up shop to start filing actions...
Personally, I generally dislike the concept of class action lawsuits. But this is a perfect example of where they can be applied for the public good. I mean why try and enforce something like this when you could get all the lawyers to do it for you?
- sigs are stupid
"We provide the service you consumers cried out for, BUT IT's GONNA COST YA!! He He He He Heehhhhh"
Good god, never get rid of old hardware. Just store it in a box somewhere like your grandma saving old National Geographics. They'll be good for something eventually, I'm sure.
Especially once the {MP,RI}AA and the BSA gets the bill mandating DRM on all new computers rammed through Congress (SSSCA/CBDTPA).
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
Simply block all email from S Korea or an Eastern Bloc country on your email server.
As soon as those countries start to proscecute spammers they can be unblocked.
It's pretty fucked up when someone can decapitate two people and not go to jail, but send some unwanted signals down a wire and you are now spending the next 5 years in Lompoc, married to the guy with the most cigarettes.
Well, there's that term again. Why does eveybody focus on opt-out? I would rather see a law that says no commercial email unless you opt-in. You could spend a lot of time opting out of spam, even if it worked the way our Congresscritters believe.
I want proof, in writing, that I opted in before they can send me anything.
Try this on for size next time a telemarketer calls you at work, "Who the fuck gave you this number? This is my work number. You do not call me at my work number! If you ever call me here again, I will find out where you work, I will come there, and I will bitch slap you into the middle of next week! Do I make myself clear?!"
I can't claim credit for this though. I heard this tirade from about 5 cubes over one day when a telemarketer called a contracter at a company I was working for at the time. The level of anger this guy managed to send down the line was impressive. You don't have to be polite to telemarketers. You don't have to listen through their speil. You just need to tear into them like a rabid badger the moment you realize what you're dealing with.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
What I would like to know is how they plan on enforcing this on the international community. Getting the EU to agree shouldn't be a big deal, but 'problem' countries (ie China & Russia) will be the clincher. Without international enforcement this law isn't worth the paper it is written on. Spammers will just get a copy of the list and run to some banana republic and proceed to fill everyones email with crap.
There are problems with this law and international enforcement is the largest. After that there is how will forged headers be handled. Somebody sends out spam using your domain name and the FTC want millions of dollars and prison time. I see domain holders needing to get insurance against regulation as well as lawsuits.
love that. Imaging having the ability to filter all mail from non us sources. Doesn't china have something like this?
I'm sure if we do it for the children though, that'll make it ok. Or maybe as a way to 'Fight Terrorism'.
This is great. It repeals the more stringent antispam measures, and creates a big database of live email addresses to be handed out to spammers. Only Congress could be that smart.
What is the upside again ? Oh, that we can busily send in email addresses to be included in the registry. I'd say send in every @senate.gov address you can find, but, I suppose only stupid spammers will not filter those out.
Thank you for that, eaolson.
This whole bill is a waste of time, for any of several reasons you've elcidated. Additionally, note that the limited jurisdiction of US Law (ie, the United States) makes this even more worthless.
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
Are you a lawyer? I am. I am not incorrect. The safe harbor provision has been widely-interpreted as applying to Web sites as well as OSPs. Web sites which, like /., allow anyone to post on them are considered OSPs for the purpose of DMCA.
And since Web sites are often maintained by various people, the DMCA safe harbor generally applies, which is why most commercial Web sites have DMCA contact info for an agent to receive notices of claimed infringement.
Obviously, if the infringer infringes on purpose, there is no safe harbor.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Congress has now legalized spam by making it opt-out. This is wonderfull since the opt-out list is bound to be abused. Spam will be a very serious problem real soon now and the opt-out law will have failed. The opt-in law can't be far behind this one.
has their mitts in this one too?
I agree with out, but it's best to start with commercial spam. The 1st amendment is a big problem when you try to stop other kinds of spam. Political spam is pretty easy to stop. If I never buy a larger penis because of spam, the spammers don't care. If anyone spams voters, they are in big trouble.
Much of the spam we get comes from mailing lists. This kind of scheme would require every list admin to submit all their mailing list addresses to some stupid opt out lists. There are many examples of this not being practical, such as the Debian bug tracking system which has a different email address of each bug (and there are over 200k). FWIW, it does receive spams that clutter up bug audit trails and are extremely annoying. Being allowed to spam should not be the default.
But it seems to me that it does contain one significant provision: it forces spammers (those who operate in the US anyway) to use real return email addresses. That mans we can mailbomb 'em, right? I always thought that was the real reason spammers hid behind forged headers. And since mailbombs are non-commercial they are not spam, so it's ok to forge your headers, right?
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
You know, as a US resident and citizen, I don't expect our laws to carry weight around the world. I routinely hunt spammers and get their sites yanked, accounts revoked, etc. Most of my spam doesn't even arrive in english much less originate from within our borders.
How in the world is this going to stop some nimrod in Uzbeckistan or Korea from spamming me?
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
Obviously the guy who uploads Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines to a Web site is an infringer.
The question is, should the owner of the Web site (read: OSP for DMCA purposes) be liable for copyright infringment as well? That's what the DMCA's safe harbor provision is supposed to address. Innocent, unknowing Web site operators should be able to be notified that someone was being naughty when the weren't looking, and take corrective action before being carted off by the IP police.
Disclaimer: I am not defending DMCA; rather, I am just trying to explain why that language in the parent of this thread was included.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Read the converse: Email sent which does not inform someone about unlawful use, or does inform them about lawful use, *IS* Unsolicited.
So, if you are actually using copywritten material illegally, the copyright owner can tell you about it. If you're not using it, or not illegally using it, and the RIAA or MPAA comes along and tells you otherwise, it's spam.
paintball
U.S. Laws only reach as far as U.S. borders.
Where have you ben for the last decade? After the U.S. passes laws like this, other countrys generally pick it up as thier own. The fact that this has happened with copyright law, and DMCA-esque legislation is bitched about CONSTANTLY on slashdot. Getting this passed in the US is a natural for step for the same regualtions to be passed in other countries all over the world. This is the first time that I see that effect being advantageous though.
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
1) Set up email account and put it on Do-Not-Email registry
2) Set up email account and do not put it on Do-Not-Email registry.
3) ???
4) Profit!
paintball
I like to propose feel-good legislation just like the next guy, but I'm wondering if anti-spam legislation is going to make any difference at all, other than raising my taxes.
First, you'd have actually identify the original sender of the garbage messages in order for justice to be served. Good luck! I've yet to reach a valid abuse/admin contact (the junk goes one way it seems), or even turn up valid contact information about a junk-pump's registered domain (junk-pump being a junk-mail relayer's collection of misconfigured MTA boxes). Upstream providers just don't want to get involved either.
Second, solicited advertisements are getting just as bad, and or worse in my case. Companies that I do business with are using some of the big junk-mail relays to get out their unwanted messages. There is such a thing as abusing the privilege of using my e-mail account as a free billboard. My vendors send me garbage on a daily basis now, regardless of the fact that either a) I specifically stated I don't want to receive it, and b) I uncheck those "receive e-mail offers" boxes whenever I see them. I don't really have a choice, because I need to receive quotes through e-mail, and they interpret that to mean "you have unrestricted access to my inbox, please deluge me with unwanted ads."
Third, info-spam is getting to be a problem, too. It's not a straight ad per se, but more like a mailing list that I've never signed up for. I get countless "tech tips", product reviews and security advice from companies that I've never heard of. The combination of these adds up to a lot of server wasted space, network bandwidth and time for me and my users, and I have to wade through a whole "screen" full of garbage to get to the important messages of the morning.
I have no choice but to start blocking the sending accounts (or domains) at my mail server. We are a government entity, and we just don't have the manpower or the funds to go after these people. A do-not-mail-list will reduce the amount of unwanted junk I get by maybe 2 messages a day. I guess there will just have to be some type of infrastucture change. I'm think something along the lines of making it impossible to receive e-mail from random unknown accounts. Something in the message header that the server can check against a trusted certificate server, that closes connections from unapproved accounts.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
yeah, like the overseas spammers will give a damn... :-(
On a strictly moral basis, I don't have a problem with sending spammers to jail. Spammers steal the resources used to transmit their messages, and they steal the time of those who must deal with those messages (system admins and recipients). They're thieves, so I won't cry if they get stuck in jail.
But--it makes me sad that laws like this have become necessary. Remember how smart we thought we were in 1990? We had a new way of communicating that was a wonderful world-wide medium for the uncensored exchange of ideas. Better yet, it was free, and you could do it from work! The stupid people (the ones who paid you, for example) didn't even know that the net existed!
There were ways of dealing with those who broke the rules--the died by the mailbomb, or were slain by more subtle weapons. (I remember dealing with one spammer by asking him via email whether he had found his asian bride, lost weight, and scored his drugs yet. He had expressed an interest in all these things via public fora--using his true name.)
Then came the Eternal Fall: behold, the masses came to the net, and found it good. The etiquette and civility (ok, even flamewars had their rules) of the old net was defenestrated. Meaning drowned in noise. Chaos rules.
If we were half as smart as we thought, none of this should have happened. To address the point at issue, we would have thought of a technological way to authenticate email addresses, and prevent the forging of "From" headers to disguise the domain of origin. So what's the deal--is it maybe that we weren't as smart as we thought, or is it that there are just so many more of them than there is of us?
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
There are very legitimate reasons for unsolicited mail from one corporation to another. While I completely agree that emailing a personal email address is bad showing, emailing a corporate address that is posted on the company's webpage with a commercial solicitation should be explicitly "ok". Yes? Perhaps "bulk" emailing ( > 100 per day, let us say) is bad pratice, however, there are reasons for targeted solicitation, no? Does this bill cover this eventuality?
Presumably, this was passed under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. Hence, the commercial spam requirement. Congress doesn't have the power to regulate anything that they choose to. The Federal government is a government of limited powers, and they can only pass legislation when it falls under one of those powers.
At least, that's my take on it. Oh yeah, IANAL.
This will be ineffective. Congress understands computers and related technology about as well as my mom, so this type of bill will fail before it even gets going.
a mehere.us etc.) for each mail.
I've got a filter list going in my "spam" account on yahoo...but it is very interesting how I'm getting emails lately.
1) The spammer is changing the mail sender IP address by a stepping of one address approximately every 3 hours.
2) The spammer is changing the subdomain (e.g. xx1.spammerdomainnamehere.us...xx2.spammerdomainn
3) The spammer is changing the sender's name and email address with every message.
4) The spammer is changing the actual domain name every few hours as well. I get about 30 a day from the same people...with one of the changes mentioned.
Litigation won't help, since this type of spam is obviously intended to circumvent spam filters and blocks, spammers will get around the law and we'll be in a designer drug situation (we all know how well the war on drugs has gone).
man rtfm
A friend of mine once said:
The Republicans are the party of evil. The Democrats are the party of stupidity. When they do something bi-partisan, it's both evil and stupid.
A couple of notes:
- Content of a message is not relevent.
- Significantly, spam is spam if the recipient is irrelevent. RIAA/MPAA's messages would be sent to specific people.
RIAA/MPAA might be evil bastards, but their not evil bastards because of this....
Yes, it's a sucky law in that it pre-empts state laws, allows NO right of private court action on the part of individuals (only ISPs) against spammers, and (worst of all) has adopted an opt-out model.
Here's why it may be a Good Thing in the long term.
If this bill passes into law in its current form, the huge influx of spam that results will serve to bring the entire E-mail network to its electronic knees. The effect will be similar to what happens when too many cars try to use a two-lane highway simultaneously. This includes the very systems that 'Big Business' uses to communicate with their branch offices, employees in the field, telecommuters, etc.
It also includes many U.S. government servers. Military networks -might- be more immune than the public Internet, but unclassified military E-mail still flows over that same public Internet at some point. It even includes the very systems that the spammers want to send their traffic over.
Come to think of it, ANYone who uses E-mail is going to be affected.
See where I'm going with this? When E-mail, as a system, is brought to a standstill by those who would cheerfully abuse other people's private property for their own ends (the spammers and "mainsleaze" businesses that want so badly to make spam legal), how long do you think it will take for Tauzin's "Legalize Spam" act to be repealed, and for the sponsors of it to realize what an awful mistake it was?
Sometimes, you just have to let things fall before you can pick them up.
Meanwhile, I've never been more grateful that I have the resources to be self-hosted, server-wise, including DNS. ANYone, individual or business, that spams me or any of my other users will only get to do it once (assuming their initial attempt even makes it through our filter and blocklist setup).
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Everytime I hear about the politicians proposing laws for the "Internet", I think they are morons.
1) there are no borders on the internet. packets go around the world within seconds.
2) the source and destination can/are often spoofed/proxied.
3) they keep looking at ways to "tax" emails.
do politician dream of electric stamps?
4) you cannot regulate chaos, only surf the probability waves.
My concept for ending spam is.
Email readers (with many options)
- sort incoming by spam filter score into folders
- each folder has retention options
- user provides feedback to MTA on spam that clears filters.
how spammy is this message ? (1-100 scoring)
MTA stuff
- user feedback used locally only at first
- if a high spam feedback score (by site/user/content) from many users send the score to other MTA
- if sender address invalid, send error message back to all MTA listed in message & trash the message.
- if sender address does not allow replys, trash the message.
- if multiple (to/cc/bcc) email addresses all must be valid.
- list of top (100) site/users sending to invalid address made available to other MTA's
- users that make the list are throttled down
- MTA's that do NOT throttle bad users and/or provide the list are throttled by other MTA's
This is my opinion based on what little I know and understand of the rumors and lies Thanks, Randal
Does anyone know if this bill permits the right of individuals to seek private action against spammers? At the very least our state laws can be even more restrictive. That's a good thing I suppose.
Section 8(b)(1) of this bill says that any and all state laws passed regulating e-mail are now superceded by this law. That means if your state lets you directly sue spammers, you can't anymore.
If the spam includes sufficient information to track down the sender, it's not subject to the provisions of the bill.
.sig
If the spam doesn't include enough information to figure out who sent it, then it is subject to the provisions of the bill.
Gee, thanks a lot congress.
Might as well pass a law that says that it's illegal to rob a bank unless you're wearing a name tag with your correct name.
I just hope no ISP decides it's now OK for their customers to spam as long they include a P.O. box in the spam.
-- this is not a
Leave it to our elected "representatives" in Washington to mess things up. As always...follow the money. Opt-Out instead of Opt-In. Who gets the fines and monetary penalties? All this hooey is just feelgood spinmeistered legislation. Once again, the feds screwed up. The government doesn't have to put up with the spam, the users do. If they wanted to do it correctly, then it should be mandatory Opt-In and the fines don't end up in the useless government wastebaskets but in the victim's hands. Keep the monetary limits present. Keep the jail time the same. When the legislation takes place, ALL lists have to be cleared. Even businesses that you do business with have to clear their list and you, the user, have to opt-in to get the mailings. Yes, we know that the spammers will move offshore and wreak their brand of stench from outside the states. Another interesting provision that could be entered is that if there are offshore spammers sending in their garbage, block those domains from access into the US. Allow access out of the US but not in. I am sure that the host governments will complain about the shutoff of access but it is a great way to get their attention for them to can their spam. This may be the least workable but it is worth the consideration.
Under "Definitions", "Initiate" includes "or procure the origination or transmission".... A more commonly used phrase is "cause to be sent".
Under "Sender", it includes the party offering the product, service, etc.
Put these together, and this means you don't have to go after the spammer. You can go after the party being advertised. Spammers are hard to find. Businesses CAN'T be hard to find, or they can't do business.
Sue enough of the busineses and word will get around: "Don't use spammers."
Hopefully "harvesting" can be stretched to include usenet.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
As far as the effectiveness of asking spammers to "remove" email addresses, we have done some study on the matter. Below is a partly snipped declaration I made regarding some Florida spammers who use "remove" requests as a source to harvest new requests.
You can imagine once spammers all go to internationally registered and thus untraceable domain names tracking this sort of trickery will become tougher. We tell our users that we know from first hand experience that responding to and attempting to opt out of spammers lists are a bad idea. This law is just a license to spam.
ISP's cannot stop spam, so how is a bill going to? They don't! Most spam has a false return address and a fake user account and is going through a relay server that probably does not reside in the state or even country that the spam is going to. I get more spam from asian countries and my filters are getting better at trashing that stuff out.
The problem with some of this legislation is that it is going to end up costing the end user money to send and recieve email. Deal with your own spam your way and get over it.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
The funny thing is, that actually happened to me once. My wife and I flew into Chongqing, one of the larger cities in China. As we walked out of the airport to get a cab, we were besieged by swarms of people trying to shove fliers, coupons and business cards (mostly for hotels and restaurants) into our clothing, bags, and luggage pockets. I was circling my wife and shouting at them in what little Chinese I knew to go away. My (Chinese) wife was throwing the cards back at them.
The funny thing is, I don't think anyone was trying to pick our pockets, though they would've had a good opportunity in that situation. (We checked everything thoroughly once we got to our hotel.) I kind of wish I had a videotape of this as it would make an amusing story about entrepreneurship gone wild. The strange thing is, this only happened to us in this one city, not in any of the other cities we visited.
[o]_O
...Is can you have Pork in and anti-Spam bill?
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
Clearly there is no legal recourse, only technological. I don't personally know anyone else who uses this solution, but I'd love to hear from people who do.
#1 -- I will not "OPT-OUT". Ever. I have, on occasion, will decide to OPT-IN. Those thinking OPT-OUT are blocked on the first (#1) violation. No questions asked and only a personal phone call, if you know me, will I allow further such traffic.
:)
Just as I refuse/block UNAVAILABLE calls and judiciously decide what profanity of choice to use on PRIVATE callers.
With _any_ OPT-OUT type of choice shortly I'll simply white-list a very few and block everybody else. Email is pretty much dead already anyway. How many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of business' are there in the US alone? For next to nothing they'll all be spamming me -- no thanks.
I guess this means I won't be getting funds transfered to my bank account from Africa. Darn.
Yet another delusional law where the U.S. government actually thinks it can do something to control activity on the internet. As if, somehow, this law will be upheld world-wide simply because it applies within the territorial boundaries of the United States.
No doubt it'll be just as globally effective as all the previous laws passed by Congress concerning the internet.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
We were only a few weeks from the day when California's anti-spam law flatly prohibited it.
This is a huge sell-out.
That might work would be to fine the owners of the websites that the SPAM links to for ordering. These are the people that pay the SPAMMERS. This would make them rethink their marketing stategy, and stop me from receiving the same thing from 12 or more "different" sources every day. Charge them $50.00 for each repeat on the same day. If 100,000 people complain, you are now talking serious money! The volume would be cut by two thirds minimum.
I think I could tolerate that!
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Now I have to study the bill, since it may pertain to me.
I'm running my own domain, and I created imaginary characters as my tech and admin contacts. Now they go to real email addresses on the server, but the details of these imaginary prople including street address and phone number are bogus when you do a whois, and the email accounts are just collection points for spam and the occasional "upgrade offer" from my domain registrar.
I also have a few spambait email accounts that I delete when the S/N ratio gets too bad. Since only certain trusted friends have my "real" email am I in violation too?
What constitutes registering an email with "using false details?" I wonder how this stacks up with the right to privacy? Looks like some deep, dull reading is on the schedule.
And yes, the email used here is a pseudo-account: all info relates to a MMORPG character.
The 1st amendment is a big problem when you try to stop other kinds of spam.
Why? The first amendment says that you're allowed to say whatever you want.
It does NOT say that you are allowed to force people to listen to you, nor does it say that you are allowed to use other people's resources to say what you want.
There is no free speech issue when it comes to spam.
I just did. The House is in session, debate on S.877 has concluded, and the vote will be some time in the next few hours, in the middle of the night. Congressional staffs are still in their offices at midnight. Tell them to vote NO on S.877, because it legalizes spam. CALL NOW
How is this going to stop the spam coming from outside the United States?
I'm sure I'm not the only one who would end almost all US based spam given one document - a signed pardon.
just visit various spammers, liquidate them, no consequences.
Hell, I'd even make a very large campaign contribution to Bush for that piece of paper, and I can't stand the man.
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2
Congratulations. You're the first poster I've seen on this thread who got it right.
I'm guessing that our level of spam is going to at least double as a result.
The only good news in this is that anyone challenging an incumbent stupid enough to have voted for this has a campaign issue good for beating on the incumbent with.
Something tells me that a Congresscritter who "helped legalize spam" is going to be in very deep shit with the voters whose inboxes are filling faster than ever before, and it's only a matter of time before ISPs have to start charging us all more to pay for the increased bandwidth and filtering the new crapflow.
Tech Public Policy stuff
add "sending of unsolicited commercial email" to the already insanely loose definition of "terrorism" in the Patriot Act and let ashcroft lock up all the spammers with no due process.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
actually matter, until it's actionable to go after ther people who paid to have that spam sent? Somebody, somewhere writes a check to some spammer, in order to get their spam spammed. If that's not illegal, or at least actionable, then what's to stop Joe Spam Purveyor from paying somebody in a mud hut in Indonesia to spam the whole U.S. with his amazing MILF gallery?
"Oh, well I'm sorry if you don't appreciate my random murders!" - Crow T. Robot,
I saw it as a way for John Ashcroft to consolidate any possible state suits under his ability to decline to press charges against an innovative new business practice.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
"Spam is unsolicited bulk email. This uses the term 'unsolicited commercial electronic mail message' - whether an email is commercial or not is irrelevant as to whether it is spam."
Yes, this is an important detail. Case in point: I run a website for a local group of peace activists. A few months ago I got spammed from someone promoting their anti-war website. He had compiled the email address manually by surfing anti-war websites on the internet.
I replied telling him not to spam me, but he didn't think what he had done constituted spam.. or at least he pretended not to.
This bill could still die. Call your Congressional office. The staff is still there, very tired, and answering the phone.
But nobody else will.
Nice one.
If the feds realize this (dictionary attack on encrypted or gov't held list), they'll have little choice but to ruin email in the US. Essentially, the only method they'll have to have all bulk email come through specific gov't servers which filter the do-not-email addresses out and send it along, without letting it get back to the source. This is only a step away from having ALL email go through the gov't before it gets to its recipient.
GL
Of course by placing your email address on the list, all you are doing is making it publicly available to all spammers both inside and outside U.S.A. That will really cut down on your spam, NOT.
Yup. I'll settle for this bill, because I'll just add three lines to my .procmailrc and bounce everything with ADV: in the subject line. Situation ends up no worse than today, and it may be better.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of open source MTAs were immediately patched to bounce anything with ADV: in the subject line by default, during the SMTP transaction.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I say Hormel Foods should sue the government for using the trademarked name of their canned meat product on this legislation without permission!
I never receive any un-wanted mail be it advertisements or something else from Danish people. But guess what: I get a lot of un-wanted mail with origin from the US, and so far - there is nothing to do about it, since spamming is allowed over there. So please get your own laws in order with respect to spam, and we will have moved a little further towards a co-operative world.
The FTC can harden the list against dictionary attacks by using a salt value: each entry is the hash of the address plus a unique pseudorandom string published with the entry. Then you need to re-hash for each address you're trying to brute-force, instead of comparing one hash to all the addresses.
Ask me if I've been required to disclose any crypto keys.
You sort both lists, and we're talking about an O(1,000,000) job, not an O(450,000,000,000) job.
That's assuming your sort is O(n), of course. But you can get pretty close to that with an index-based sort on pseudorandom data.
Ask me if I've been required to disclose any crypto keys.
Is anyone truly stupid enough to beleive that any bill legitimizing "opt-out" can be called "anti-spam" by anyone other than scumbag scammers and politicians (no small amount of overlap there)
That they have the power to see it inserted in a bill that has absolutely NO relation to them whatsoever is the problem.
The U.S. Congress has managed to sneak other, seemingly even less related, statutes onto the books through riders such as this. For example, "technical correction" that briefly removed the right of a recording artist to own copyright in his recordings was attached as a rider to the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act of 1999, which in turn was a rider to a budget bill.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It ought to be up to the user, not the ISP as to what mail they receive, and not all ADV: email is undesireable.
If The User(tm) can opt in to your promotion by whitelisting your promotion company's domain, what free speech is being violated?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Why would you have to say no all these times? It's a single registry!
If the "single registry" doesn't let the owner of a domain add *@hisdomain.net to the registry, then spammers will continue to Rumpelstiltskin the domain's mail server until they get a hit. This is especially true of vanity domains, for which *@hisdomain.net forwards to a single address.
Was "Who has the right to sue the spammers?" a question for clarification, or were you pointing out a fault with the bill?
Looks like the former to me. Will ISPs be able to bring class action on behalf of their customers?
Will I retire or break 10K?
You're original statement is still wrong. Under either meaning of the word "infringers" the statement is not correct.
The proof is offered in your Terminator 3 example.
That person is not immune to copyright infringement even if they follow safe harbor provisions to the letter. It only protects service providers. (And before you say it again, yes, I agree that includes many website operators.)
What is my non-lawyer brain not understanding here?
The state wants spam abolished mostly because its alot harder to keep track of the emails going through. Spam was making it harder for them to spy on our emails. It has its pros and cons a pro would be no more annoying shwang enlargment pill emails and to better help a nations security. but we also sacrifice our own privacy at the same time.
I want to know.... Who spoke for me when all this SPAM showed up say that I OPTED in in the first place? Why do I have to OPT out of something I never asked to be in? Does this mean that every company that sends me mail, is inpersonating me? Isn't there a law against that? If I sue each company for speaking "for me", just $0.01, I think I would never have to work again. I don't know why our stupid government officials are the way they are. It's simple. Be like all the other countries. Britain, $5000 lbs fines for spam. Spam meaning ANY unsolicited email. Hey USA Government, get with the program. Make it illegal to be automatically OPTED in. Give us SPAMees a way to sue should the spam get sent to our children. Make them disclose ALL information about themselves should the SPAM us so we know where to go and protest on their front yard. You do this, problem solved.
Although not from the USA, I'd appreciate an explanation of that broad comment. It does not hurt the freedom of speach as far as I know, so what is the ground for deeming it unconstitutional?
- Assaf
if the ISP isn't even giving the user the chance to whitelist the email because it's being blocked at the gates
Not with any of the e-mail providers I've used. They simply route junk mail into a different IMAP folder.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Yerricde only has 19 more posts to hit the big 10k total comments. Cheer him on!
The ban on "misleading" headers is unclearly worded, but appears to ban sending email without headers that are actively helpful to "law enforcement". It's not clear whether this bans anonymous remailers in the US, because some of the mail they remove headers from _could_ be from spammers, even though spam is an abuse of what they're intended for. It does look like the bureaucrats (mainly FTC) who implement the policies will have enough definition-making ability that they could probably treat it that way.
In general, the bill fails to differentiate between forging a From or contact email address that's a real email address belonging to someone else (whether joe-job or random), forging a "nobody"-type address at a real domain belonging to someone else, forging a fake address at a real domain belonging to someone else, using a fake address at a real domain that the spammer's allowed to use, using an address at a fake domain, or other things. Forging the address of a real person is highly annoying to them, and might already legally count as forgery. Forging yet another bogus hotmail address is annoying to hotmail, but less annoying than a real address; using "dont-bother@dont-bother-replying-we-wont-read-it. com" isn't misleading at all, just non-helpful.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"criminal charges for fraudulent spam with up to five years in the poky"
Be a wordsmith, be creative, beat the law legally.
Well now, here's my solution... So, the government makes a law requring all email hosts such as hotmail, yahoo, excite, msn, ladee da companies to make a new email inbox protection system. That system would be simple... so simple it's funny. The bulk of junk emails come from software that lets the spammer make up a fake return address and so he doesn't have to send junk email from a real address. Well, this fake return address that is pasted onto the email and sent from the spammer's pc is going to get blocked. The new systems will read the return email address, send an encoded return reply and validate that the email address is real and is being sent from a real email provider and not from a home pc.( http://centralops.net/co/EmailDossier.vbs.asp ) SIMPLE AS THAT! The only way to get around that is to actually send junk email from a REAL account such as one under HOTMAIL or MSN, but that would be just plain stupid. The sender's IP address is sent attached to every email... last time I checked (maybe the same happens for homemade emailing, but I'm not sure). Or if that isn't readable, HOTMAIL or MSN can be contacted, and they would have the IP address of a certain sender in a user's access log. My IP address starts out 64.***.**.*** ( http://www.whatismyip.com/ ) the digits automatically pinpoint the general location of an internet service, for me it's ********.net Once the service provider is found (simply by using a traceroute -free to use on the net) you send a complaint to that provider or a warning from your lawyer to block future spam. As a final suggestion for the government's 'pursuit of happiness', the email spammer should get his picture put on the front page of the local newspaper with the caption reading: "(name) PROBABLY SENT YOU THAT LATEST JUNK EMAIL... *here's what this person did...*" With the ability to block fake emails and track real emails that are spam people can report spammers and those spammers could be charged heavy fines by the government.