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Spammers Pleased with 'Anti'-Spam Act
grung0r writes "A post at Ed Foster's Gripelog explains why the new anti-spam law that Congress is passing isn't a good idea: 'it's clear that only the Direct Marketing Association, Microsoft, AOL and a handful of others had any input into the law, because it's carefully crafted to allow the big marketers free reign. And the loopholes it provides them will be more than big enough to provide aid and comfort for the smallest and sleaziest of spammers as well.' More about the problems with the law can be found at cauce.org." The direct marketers are dancing in the streets over it.
The lack of the private remedy is bad (there's nothing more intimidating than looking down the barrel of a loaded lawyer), but at least the law requires the spam to be labeled. That will make it a lot easier to filter out - - provided, of course, that those anonymous sellers of penis lengtheners obey the law. If you can't trust someone like that to be a law-abiding citizen, who can you trust?
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
But I love it when pleasers are spammed!
With the new bill, we have to rely on and trust the 'opt-out' option, something we've been trained NOT to do.
Those who can do: Do.
Those that can't do: Spam.
they bought 12 van halen cds for the price of 1
Seems to me that the act is pretty pro-business all around. It's pro-business in the spammer sense since it lets marketers send unsolicited mail and it's pro-business in the anti-spammer sense since the existence of spam will keep anti-spammers in business!
What more would you expect from a capitalist country?
John.
Of having a civilisation if all people are going to do is constantly undermine everything people work for? It could be a hit and a miss with this post but i am unhappy with all the news i hear. I stopped watching TV because its so depressing and now where ever i go on the net, there is conflict after conflict. Its seems that no matter what we create for the benefit of everybody there is countless others who will undermine it and more importantly get away with it. Everything can have a negative effect on society but it seems everybody wants to rob or cheat it. But if its a way of life where does it get everybody? The people who cheat eventually die and leave a shithole for the rest of us.
Jonathanjk.com
...into thinking this would stop spam anyway?
Nothing can stop spam outside of God.
Blogzine.net
clifgriffin > blog
..just like the anti-virus industry. The laws have glaring loopholes through them but were worded well enough to calm down the masses. Now the anti-spam software industry will grow like mad as spam continues to flood inboxes. It's no coincidence that Microsoft was consulted on the spam laws, they have a vested interest in the after market antispam business.
Trolling is a art,
Guess we're stuck with Plan B.
(Just Kidding)
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Microsoft co-authors a piece of legislation that goes easy on spammers? I say they're just sharing the love they got from the "don't let us catch you doing it again" DOJ verdict they got.
As for AOL, they should change their "You've Got Mail" to "You Ain't Gonna Stop Getting Mail" voice. So easy to use, no wonder it's number 1 indeed.
...end of story. The filthy assholes have NO sense of responsibility. They don't care that they're pissing people off every day or that spam traffic is choking the internet. Kill 'em all, and make 'em suffer.
Post you politician's e-mail addresses everywhere you can. Don't sign them up for SPAM, as that wouldn't be opt-in. Let the spiders find them and hit 'em hard. See if they support it then.
What a bunch of morons. Why do I vote again? Oh yeah, I stopped voting since I realized it doesn't matter who wins - things only get worse but never improve.
Can you say..Moooooooo
Ok, is this really the name of a spammer or is this a hoax?
Your friend and well-wisher
m0smithslash
http://www.ferociousflirting.com
Our government will shortly be saying that they can not regulate Spam unless they can watch all things moving across the wire. This includes the Net and Voice. The US government is slowly setting up the reason for why they have to monitor everything in our lives.
"My guess is the number of people willing to risk that amount of fines and jail time is not many," said William Nussey, chief executive of Atlanta e-mail service provider Silverpop.
Like that's stopped those spammers that trojan machines. They'll just keep going, and now add "legitimate" spam to the mix. Stuff is going to get a *lot* worse
"This bill is not going to single-handedly eliminate all the spam in the universe overnight all by itself, therefore it's a waste of time and not worth the bother and typical of big government trying to control things and yadda yadda yadda...."
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I hate spammers, but this law is meaningless, as are ALL anti-spam laws:
1. Spammers will ignore the law. Which leads to the next point:
2. Laws are meaningless unless enforced. How will it be enforced? When I get hit with spam that violates this law, who do I complain to? Who will investigate my complaint and then pursue and punish the spammers?
3. Where will all the money and resources come from to enforce this law (see point #2 above) -- to actually enforce this law will take FAR more money and resources than anyone realizes or will admit.
And even if significant money and resources are allocated to enforce the law:
4. What about all the spam originating from servers outside the U.S.
I wonder if AOL would pay more attention to this if they had to record someone saying "you've got spam!" to be played six times for everytime the "you've got mail!" sound plays. Perhaps then they'd actually try to do something about it.
#define DRM chmod 000
I thought polititions were smart about naming bills (USA Patriot) so that they could dupe the electorate into thinking anyone who didn't vote for it was the spawn of Satan.
I don't know how signing a bill called "CAN Spam" is going to help anyone get re-elected.
A post at Ed Foster's Gripelog
Does that make it a glog?
So Brian Morrissey, the Senior Editor of the DMNews, thinks spam isn't all that bad. That consumers shouldn't be able to sue to take back their inboxes.
I guess we can't say he's not putting his money where his mouth is, though... he put his email in a clickable link right there on the DMNews.com site.
Of course, some spammers may exclude dmnews.com from their spidering. That does Mr. Morrissey a huge disservice! Clearly, unsolicited email is something he strongly supports, and we should help him in any way we can.
So if anyone would like to include bmorrissey@dmnews.com on their email list, I'm sure Brian Morrissey would not mind at all! After all, Mr. Brian Morrissey (whose email address is bmorrissey@dmnews.com) is Senior Editor of "The Online Newspaper of Record for Direct Marketers." He probably knows the Webmaster and the Postmaster, too, and I'm sure they would never consider UCE to be Abuse.
This has been a public service of the Slashdot community. Don't worry, you can thank us later!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
The DMA (Direct Marketing Association) web page has an opt out of junk mail page hidden in there somewhere, where for 5$ via internet or free via mail you can opt out of junk mail. I did it and it works remarkable well. It takes time to start up , but all members of the DMA are required to not send to addresses on the opt out list.
I was pleasantly surprised.
Of course one has to wonder how many spams are from legit businesses that are members of DMA?
It's not going to stop SPAM just make it honest. They have to provide a real address, label it as commercial, and provide an opt-out that really works. How does this keep me from getting SPAM? I don't give a rats ass about opt outs or addresses I don't want this crap in my in-box to begin with. I'm not even going to mention the bastards overseas who are under no obligation to follow these rules( like they would if they had to anyway).
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
Mr Troll,
With this first post, you are spoiling us!
The site has rather conservative advertisements. For example no pop-ups or animated adds in the middle of a text body. What would the site look like if it had the same advertising to content ratio direct marketeers create in their mediums?
!thhp ...tnemnrevog gib
The US government still hasn't clued in to the fact that The Internet is a global resource. As such, local entities such as governments are going to have very little power to control it.
The proper solution is to get off our butts and start migrating away from SMTP.
With this new bill marketers must offer an unsubscribe link and respect it. However these is no guarentee your address might reappear by methods they'll claim were opt-in. Additionally we have all been trained that by clicking unsubscribe guarentees you MORE spam and not less. While *some* spammers might follow the rules and properly label their spam and offer reliable unsubscribe options, the shady spammers are guarenteed to gain. Their already operating illegally under a shroud of secrecy so being caught isn't really an issue and they might even see higher click throughs on their unsubscribe links :(
it's clear that only the Direct Marketing Association, Microsoft, AOL and a handful of others had any input into the law, because it's carefully crafted to allow the big marketers free reign. And the loopholes it provides them will be more than big enough to provide aid and comfort for the smallest and sleaziest of spammers as well.'
AOL and MSFT probably deal with more spam headaches than anyone else. I don't really notice them using spam, just trying to filter it in vain from their services.
It looks like some bizarre vicious circle: the spammer doesn't even care if you are going to respond to the "opt-out" clause in their mailings simply because by the time the opt-out reaches them, they wil already have sold your address to 5 other spammers and made their money on you.
Am I wrong or the bill simply doesn't address the list reselling practice? (Granted, I haven't read the actual legislation - just the press coverage).
"Under the federal law, consumers cannot sue og have sex at any given time."
"The bill bans harvesting of e-mail addresses from goatse.cx sites and breaking into computers to send spam."
Why did you add that junk to the article? Was it supposed to be funny or something?
Mod parent down.
GL
If you think about it, marketing as a whole is idiotic. Marketing doesn't produce anything. It's just about steering the masses toward one product at the expense of a competitor, whose product could actually be better.
How about a world where you simply submit your new product to a system of independent reviews, which then informs consumers of their options? I think it would be much better than the system we have now, where effective marketing tends to border illegality.
Marketing isn't needed. Marketing is an ongoing demonstration that mankind is unsophisticated. Get rid of marketing.
I saw last week that something like 49% of the UK population now has regular access to the Internet. You'll start seeing significant percentages like that across industrial democracies. And, once they have been online for a while, well they are going to start getting seriously pissed about spam.
Maybe it will take longer in the US, as the politicians seem more insulated from the voters, and more beholden to corporate interests than other democracies, but those politicians are going to start getting the message loud and clear from a mojority of their electors 'FOR GODS SAKE DO SOMETHING EFFECTIVE ABOUT SPAM!!'
And why the hell would Microsoft be opposed to an anti-spam bill? Spam must cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars in Hotmail hardware, filtering and abuse staff.
"Hey Guido, I'm gonna make you an offer you can't refuse. Gimme five bucks, or my friends here with their big fucking baseball bats are going to practise on your kneecaps, tough guy. And no, wiseguy, you can't get a receipt. By the way, same time next week?"
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
then they are entering a business transcation with you.
/images directory.
At that point, feel free to inquire over, and over, and over again about all of their services, and not purchase anything. And their upstream marketing service providers. Chat up their 1-8xx call center staff. Try to see if they're free on Friday.
You will strangely find the front pages to all their websites VERY interesting, worthy of 200 views per hour. Especially all the images in the
It's pro business, after all. Pro-ISP and Pro-Telcom... hehehe.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
There. You have it. The anti-spam bill is a pro-spam bill.
I still wonder how the government will justify the fact that spammers use, without paying a red cent, the facilities of others to do their dirty deeds.
This is in direct contrast to other direct marketers. Junk mail? Every letter requires a 37 cent postage stamp. Junk faxes and phone calls? These require payment by the sender of flat phone rates and calling charges.
Spam, however, is virtually free for the sender, piggybacking on other people's equipment. It's the first form of direct marketing *in history* in which the unhappy recipient pays (through increased ISP costs) for the priviledge of receiving messages.
The US government, in effect, has declared that all online citizens will be forced endure, and to pay for, receipt of unsolicited spam -- and, what's more, have no recourse, as private individuals, in the courts. A sad day overall.
The more the laws are written by marketing companies that insist on their right to use other people's property to send their unsolicited and unwanted advertisements there will be plenty of anti-spam jobs and business opportunities for geeks like us.
In addition we can keep blacklisting large blocks of addresses as we please. That is the best private right of action that we have. As long as the DMA does not get a law passed that prohibits black hole lists and filters then we are at least empowered to protect ourselves with our ingenuity.
Deep down everyone is a Ferengi.
It's really sad because as of late I have nearly abandoned email as an effective tool for corporate communication. To begin with spam is so terrible that any legit emails are bound to get lost. Yes I have a 98% effective spam filter but still 2% are lost and on top of that it took me months to train it to this level of reliability. Additionally with all the server side checks I'm finding that more and more of my emails never even reach the recieptants. Whether it be that the spam filter catches them or the mailserver deems my mailserver too small to trust. Are there ANY alternatives that seem to have the possibility to go mainstream or should I just continue to rely on my phone and fax for communication which sucks!
administrator@whitehouse.org
postmaster@whitehouse.org for starters
any more suggestions?
--This sig is not spam
OK, so this law is passed and everyone gets one free shot at spamming people. Will this little fed stamp-of-approval stop ISPs and businesses from filtering out this spam? Will spammers be able to litigate using the ole restraint of trade argument, if this is signed into law and makes spam legal?
If this bill was just a waste of time and money, then I wouldn't care.
But this law is worse than no law at all,
since it prevents the states from passing laws that have a chance to do something, how ever slight.
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
this is a bullshit law, but fortunately it will impact my users and myself on a minimal level. Why? I heavily firewall off spamming isps at my mail server plus i do several rbl checks after the firewall. Any spammer stupid enough to even try spamming me gets an immiedate block. So bring it on Dma, i still got PLENTY of space in iptables for you.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Plutocracy: a government by and for the wealthy, i.e. spammers have the money to buy lobbyists, who in turn buy politicians, who then pass convenient laws for the spammers. It's all so tidy and efficient.
I'm as cynical and jaded as the next genX geek, but it still pisses me off that no one gives a shite about the common good. You get the sense that those in power would laugh out loud if you even mentioned it. Bastards.
Oh by the way, even good legislation would be useless against spam. How is these people are too stupid to figure that out?
Alright, I always thought Schumer was stupid weak minded liberal who thinks government can solve all of life's woes, but this proves it:
"It's not going to solve all the problems, but it's the first real step," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. "The public is demanding something. It's going to happen. We're going to get it done."
Okay, spam is not a government problem, it is a technical problem and no amount of praying or laws (Smart or dumb) are going to solve the problems of spam. Now here is the list why:
1) Most spam that ends up in U.S. mailboxes comes from overseas, so no US law is going to stop that.
2) Spam actually works on an economic level, if it did not, then no one would spam. Spammers spam, because spam works. Destroy the profitiblity of spamming and spam will go away.
3) Spamming is easy. Make it so addresses can not be spoofed, email headers can't be forged and MX records have to match up with A records (All those modem pool modems would not be able to send because no will accept mail from a machine that does not have an correct MX record). I think if you fixed this, then a lot of the spam would just go away.
Linux O Muerte!
Did you even bother to read the article? Yes, it has to be labeled as spam, but the label isn't defined. As a matter of fact, the label is up to the spammer to decide! The FTC is PROHIBITED by this law from defining the label. So how are you supposed to filter out mail based on an arbitrary label defined by the sender?
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
At least the "do not call" list has made junk phone calls come to a complete halt. Only a very few exempt calls sneak in. I think consumers will demand more once they see that junk spam is not reduced. I have to agree that by far the worst spam is the fraudulent kind. Fake Vi;a|gr-a, male un1t enhancement pills, and varius p0rn are the worst offenders (in both senses of offend). The "legitimate" spammers are the easiest to silence. But, unfortunately, that will have to wait for a later date.
Spammers make a choice to hijack systems to cover their tracks, leech bandwidth to make others pay their costs, increase the burden on mail servers everywhere, and flood the Internet with needless traffic.
How is a new law going to suddenly convince them they're doing something wrong, morally or legally?
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
ITS LINKING TO PORN CORRECT LINK! ADMINZ, PLZ BAN CATO FROM TEH INTERWEB Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like lolling.
The law we actually need to deal with spam is a an allocation of $10million to the FBI to investigate and prosecute violations of existing laws where such violations include the use of bulk email. Then the FBI would have the resources to track down some of the spammers who are using hacked systems to send spam.
Only once the Department of Justice has done everything they can to enforce the current laws should new laws be passed.
You really need to hear what these execs have to say. Don't forget to check out the DMNews website. In case it's slashdotted, try again! Then try again! And if you're not sick of it yet, try again!
sulli
RTFJ.
Modification of original article text: "Under the federal law, consumers cannot sue og have sex at any given time."
A registry and opt-out links are of no help to me when the message also contains no information identifying which of my e-mail addresses they addressed their spam. Mail to any username at my domain goes to me. With Bcc'd spam, I can't identify the address they used to tell them to stop.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
If anyone here thinks for a minute that this abominable piece of legislation is an "accident" caused by those writing it being non-technical, wake the hell up.
Every single word of this bill was intentionally crafted to do what it does -- make Congress look anti-spam to everyone except spammers. This is a Congressional "wink and nod" to all the scum out there who are more than happy to cost you money to try to sell you something.
Remember, kids, messing with other peoples' computers "for fun" is bad and wrong and the FBI will hunt you down. If you're going to make money at it, and of course you allocate some of that money to bribing^Wlobbying Congress, thats a whole different story. Sigh.
I know that we've been debating spam the effectiveness of Spam legislation here on slashdot for the last couple days. YES, it might momentarily stem the flow of spam, but really laws like this allow too much leeway! If you think this will stop spam you have another thing coming!
Technology on the other hand is the way to go. I recently got feed up with my hotmail account due to spam and I switched to another free site called Shadango.com. It allows me to check both my students address and hotmail thru one interface and it filters the spam out of my email, which is something this new law won't do.
I'm not saying that services like Shadango.com are the answer but they are definitely a step in the right direction! And that's my two cents!!!
Brian
TROLL-KRU OF THE WORLD UNITE
I have to believe that Microsoft understands what spam is doing to the internet, and they must want it to continue working. They are the ones running hotmail after all. No one can buy them off, and any money they might make off spam wouldn't even be visible next to their other products.
Obviously this won't get rid of any spam, but it will do two useful things:
1. For "legitimate" spammers, it will be easy to filter them out, preferably at the server level. (I wonder if we could convince, say, AOL to bounce all email self-designated as spam.)
2. For illegitimate spammers, we will now have some sort of legal recourse. I know that this won't be easy, since illegitimate spammers don't include valid return addresses, but it's a start. We can also use it to punish legitimate companies who use illegitimate means to acquire email lists, since they _do_ have well-known addresses.
Immediately, we've gained very little, and it's the least-offensive spam that is most easily filtered out. But if this is just the first step, maybe we can get to the real bad guys eventually.
What did you expect from politicians? Did you really expect an effective law? If it doesn't line pockets or permit illegal activity, it's not worth their time of day.
is that the govvies are at least TRYING (however uselessly) to solve some of the spam problem. I would've given each spammer 40 lashes, but seeing as special interest groups (including spammers) dominate government nowadays, I'll take what I can get.
Spam Laws are just the good guys version of idiotic things like the DCMA and they are an abuse of the legislative process.
The appropriate laws are fraud and deceptive trade practice laws and they are already on the books. Enforce them and with a vengence.
If you want to stop spam then design a better router and protocol and dump that shit in the bit bucket. Trying to legislate your way out of a problem never works...fix the problem instead.
From the text of the bill, the mail must provide
But what does that mean? Putting "[AD]" in the subject title? Adding a "is-spam: true" header? Ending the message with "BTW, this is spam"? Some of them? All of them? Any could be could be considered a valid indentification but the vast variety of methods and phrasings could make it very difficult to actually filter out based on these "clear" identifications.
Just out of curiousity, what would Microsofts vested interest be, in the anti-spam business?
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
The text of the bill requires that SPAM be labelled in the subject line (The subject must begin with "ADV:" or "ADV:ADLT", as appropriate) which takes all the guess work out of filtering. The only SPAM you'd have to worry about is SPAM trying to skirt this law, which means that this can't "make things worse" as some are saying here.
the main cause of spam:
I hate it when companies "rent" out their lists to marketing groups, after stating in their privacy policies that they do not sell their lists. This shit should be illegal, end of story. It's misleading, morally wrong, etc.
It's similar to letting people rent a copy of the cd you bought last night at Best Buy, or renting a copy for free off of Kazaa.
Take a few hours of spam, and fax it to your congress person and senators. Include a letter that explains how the bill is such a bad idea and it will increase the spam. I sent 25 pages to my people with a letter that explained that this was 6 hours of spam on a Sunday. That the bill, if passed will make this much worse. That only opt-in will work and that there must be statutory damages and a private right of action.
Of course, they are welcome to opt out of this campain, from each of us who add them to the list. They may get the point if 500 people do the same thing every few days, and they have to opt out from all 500.
Fight Spammers!
Like the last story, this law will only really effect the spammers who are already following good practices. The bad spammers will not be affected by this, just like pirates will not really be affected by any DRM.
I'll never understand anyone that would apply some sort of tropical paste or consume anything they got from a spam that has intentions of enlargening a part of their body. I mean, can you imagine if this thing doesn't stop growing? I mean imagine if this thing that doesn't stop growing get supplimented with something that makes it 'rock hard' for days on end. Could you imagine the issues? And on top of that, the gaurentee you get from these people is "MAYBE" you'll get your money back, if you can hunt them down. So you're stuck with some sort of 12 foot, rock hard object that you have to walk around town with. They should be sent a darwin award with each purchase too..
It seems to me that legislative and technical measures against Nigerian toner enlagement offers have only had limited success. For some time, it has occurred to me that an attack on the spammers business model might be a more effective strategy. It only takes a very few idiots who respond to spam to keep the bad guys in business. I suspect there will always be idiots, so this is not likely to be an effective way of attacking spamers. However, they may still be vulnerable on the cost side. For instance, if every slashdotter was to ask a spammer to spam on their behalf (and then of coursze not follow through, or pay up), then spammers would be forced to spend a great deal of time and energy detecting real customers amongst all the time wasters. This would undoubtedly raise their costs. All it would take is a few people with 'disposable' e-mail accounts, to give spammers a real headache. Has anyone tried this approach? Would anyone be prepared to organise such an effort? I am sure that I know a few people who would be more than willing to spend 10 mins a day causing spammers trouble. What do you all think?"
Is that it doesn't do anything. The govvies weren't trying to help "we the people". They wrote and enacted a law that shelters spammers from "we the people".
How can you tell if a law is unjust? If it makes **ANY** provision at all preventing people from suing those who break the law.
We have been denied access to the third branch of government in order to protect the business interests of spammers.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
Politicians are useless. Law enforcement bodies don't even have cyber-crime issues anywhere on their priority list, much less the resources to fight it.
I encourage the population to engage in a number of active efforts to negate the value all these advertisers have, and their tendency now to bombard us all into oblivion with their repetitive, misleading and obnoxious messages.
* When you get spam, report it to Spamcop. Don't even bother with cutting-and-pasting the html source, the web hosting companies of spammers don't care about complaints. Make sure the complaints go to the ISPs who manage the IP space the spammer is operating from. But more importantly, when you report spam to spamcop, the source gets immediately flagged as a spammer and thousands of systems around the world refuse to accept mail from the source. It's VERY effective and the sooner you report spam, the more effective it is. The crap messages don't even get to peoples' mail servers this way. It WORKS!
* Turn off your TV and refuse to let yourself be turned into a quivering ADHD blob with the constant barrage of commercial suggestions. If you must watch TV, do yourself a favor and get a TiVo (it will be the best money you ever spent) and record what you want, when you want, take back your life and best of all skip the commercials!
* If you're feeling the need to waste time complaining, send a letter to your congressman and senators telling them that if they don't put more resources into cyber-crime enforcement you'll make it the center of your life to ensure they can't get elected to anything ever again.
* Spread the word that the only realistic solution to spam is licensing outbound mail relays via a sanctioned body that is nowhere near as incompetent as ICANN. We need an opt-in, international SMTP mail relay whitelist with ethical rules for being included.
* If you've had any bad experiences with companies who've ripped you off, do us all a favor and put up a web page on it and list it with the search engines. Peoples' apathy towards getting railroaded encourges the continuation of these scams. Know someone who's been burned by home-mortgage scams? Publish it! Put it out there forever. Every little bit helps to educate the feebleminded populace,make them more skeptical of suggestions (as well as editorial packaged as "news") and negate the value of quantum advertising.
* Forget client-side e-mail filtering as a spam solution. It will never work and it is a black hole of resources, time and money. Filtering is good for viruses and idiots who still insist on clicking attachments, but it won't ever do much for the spam problem.
* Encourage your ISP to employ relay blacklisting to thwart spammers so they can't even connect to remote systems.
* If you still find yourself occasionally watching tv and are annoyed at misleading ad campaigns, do what I do: dial the 1-800 number repeatedly over the course of the commercial's airing, making the advertiser's efforts counterproductive and sending a message that you're tired of being bombarded, emotionally manipulated and lied to.
* Don't buy any products advertised in any manner in which you find offensive or annoying regardless of the quality/desireability of the product.
* If you still feel your penis isn't big enough, just go to the local store and buy some multi-vitamins or just deal with it. You don't need a bigger penis, newer car, a George Forman grill, closet organizer, no-money-down real estate, second mortgage, questionable mexican placebos packaged as drugs, or to see Holly hump a German Shephard. Pick up the phone and go hang out with friends who like you for who you are and don't buy into the media's constant message that you're inadequate and money will solve this.
According to my Popfile email filter 87.26% of all the email I get is spam.
I am very thankful for popfile.
Is there any possible form of active counter measures that can be incorporated into spam filters? I like the idea of having a spam filter down load and ignore the contents of every URL listed in every spam I recieve. *BUT* that would allow someone to ddos anyone by just sending an obvious spam with a bogus URL in it to a few million of us.
Stonewolf
While this law is weak -- it is nice that it isn't going to prevent Business 2 Business Unsolicited Commercial Email. We should start slow, and get more strong. I'm not talking *bulk* UCE here. Many startup tech companies spend _alot_ of time finding potential business customers and making them aware of services that are being offered. A carefully researched electronic mailing usually can return a high response rate if the people being addressed are the appropriate contacts in the companies in question, if the message is clear and targeted well, etc. I'm glad that the current law will not prevent this sort of necessary communication. In short, if you put your email address on a company website as a contact or listing you in your position with an email; or you are listed in the directory of a non-profit or similar organization... you should be willing to receive UCE.
What this law does, and I'm glad to see it, is ban fradulent UCE. And many bulk UCE techniques, such as harvested lists or guessing names. In general, I think the problem is with bulk email, not in general commercial email. If you're email address is listed on your company's web page you *are* in my humble opinion soliciting commercial responses and I'm glad this legislation does not ban this sort of communication as the god awful, anti-business, California law did.
Parent is a troll. Please mod down.
As far as opting out goes, I figure what have I got to lose?d omain.com">), right?
Most spammers can verify the validity of your email address because of those script images (ex <img src="spammer.com/address.php?addr=myemailaddress@
I didn't do it! Unless I was supposed to do it. . . (hmm. .
spam is the least of yOUR problems right now?
I simply use the whitelist feature in my free xmail.net account which blocks all spam. Spam laws are useless since most spam comes from mud hole countries in any case. Good luck in threatening some Nigerian 419 scam artist with an anti spam lawsuit!
No wonder big business is happy, its not going to destroy the wildlife and its surrounding environment... Its more selective with its ability to destory...and thats US the netizens.
Jonathanjk.com
MOD PARENT DOWN!
I don't want you to call me to sell me something, I'll call you.
I don't want you to mail me with advertisements, I'll mail you.
I don't want you to knock on my door to talk to me, I'll knock on your door to talk to you.
I don't want you to send me an e-mail, If I want your product, I'll send YOU an e-mail.
I don't want to drive down the street and look at your signs, I want to see the trees.
I, like many other intelligent people, like to buy things that we need, or want based on research, or discussion with friends and their experiences with the product or service.
So, in conclusion, remember two things,
1. Forcing your product on me is a good way to NOT sell it to me.
and
2. Don't call me, I'll call you.
I think that laws can't hurt things...but i also know that technology certainly helps things. I actually was a beta-tester for shadango.com about 6 months ago. I've been using it ever since and my inbox has been virtually spam-free. I don't know if spammers just don't know about it yet or if their filters are just that good.
Plus it's got a bunch of nifty options like a file manager, disposable email addresses, and it's got 20MB of space.
Definitely worth the gander....
-Kevin
Forgotten (or ignored) in the cited rant, the law before congress now also mandates a "Do Not Spam" list. This would make moot the question over how the spam was labeled, questions about opt-out, and everything else. It would make it illegal to spam you in any case.
This is a good thing. I'd get on the list, whitelist all of my foreign correspondents, and consign the rest of the world into a seldom-checked file. This would be quite nice.
The real solution is e-postage. But for that, a federal do-not-spam list is a good idea.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Which is of course completely wrong. There to appear to service providers who are helping the spammers. These organizations will not respond to complaints. The organizations will say that it "is not our problem" even though it appears they receive compensation from the spammer. The organization seem to have a business model that depend on spammers. However, because they are only the conduit, they are not held responsible.
In some ways this is ok. Just like UCE would be much more palatable if the sender did not forge headers and use other deceptive practices. What i would like to see is the ability to prosecute service providers that do not enforce a minimally acceptable terms of service or have a pattern of behavior that aids the spammers.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I assume they are dancing in the streets because they bought 12 van halen cds for the price of 1
I suspect they also have viagra hard penises and oxycontin enhanced stares. Careful, they might charge. Keep your distance from these swine. They might request your credit card # to verify your identity.
The price of capitalism is marketing
There's a fine line between making the text offensive/misleading and adding in a few words that obviously don't belong. I'm well aware of the normal trend of trolls modifying stories, however this doesn't really qualify on a significant level. It's not funny or offensive - in essense, why'd they bother putting in the effort?
GL
Mr. Morrissey can think and write as he wishes - but I should not be obligated to read his output (or that of the millions of spamming brethren he represents) or have either me or my business pay for them. Spam forces others to listen to the author's viewpoint and forces the unwilling listener to pay for it. Spam as free speech is a method not entirely consistent with the 1st Amendment you claim to defend.
If spam is free speech, then there's nothing wrong with Mr. Morrissey getting some. If it's wrong, then there's something wrong with his defense of it. Your defense of his stance is thus not consistent. Don't worry, though, there's still time for you to join the SCO legal team before they go out of business - they could use your incisive wit to support their further incursions into legal insanity.
What about spamming them? Each person is a separate advertiser, right? So each slashdotter can fire off one message /day. Even if the pols try to unsubscribe, it's a combination of senders and advertisers, right? So one slashdotter can authorize the rest of the slashdotters to send an email, then another, etc.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you're in the USA, Spammers SHOULD be happy and you should be happy that they're happy. It's called the First Amendment and it's a lot more important than anyone's petty convenience. Some of those anti-Spam fanatics really just don't get it. But they should would if those short-sighted folks ended up without a First Amendment. A little trash mail is a very small price to pay for protecting our precious rights, like the First Amendment.
...as the "let the market decide" mantra of the capitlists. Letting the market decide has been an abyssmal failure as I am certain this federal anti-spam bill is likely to be. Both of these failed approaches rely on businesses being "good citizens" which they have proven over and over again that they are not. If there is some way for a business to bypass a law or rule in order to make more money, they will do it. But, the current administration doesn't have a problem with this. As long as they are in power, we are going to see more of our freedoms taken away (like the right to the pursiot of happiness which in my case is a commercial free life) and more of the corporate "rights" bolstered.
Keep this in mind when you're at the polls in 2004: "Businesses are not inherently good".
Un-news
I will try this tonight or tomorrow. Very clever.
sulli
RTFJ.
> -- A proud patriot and Republican voter
My condolences.
Don't like it here in the good old US of A?! Piss off and move to fucking France, asshole!!!111
-- A proud patriot and Republican voter
That's like saying just because criminals don't obey gun purchase laws means all gun control laws are useless.
Hey, ya gotta start somewhere.
Come again? Violaters get an award but spend time in prison?
Make it international, and you could buy your way out of prison. Sounds like a heckofadeal to me!
Insanity is a gradual process; don't rush it.
"On Saturday morning, after an all-night session, the House voted 392-5 to pass the slightly amended version of CAN-SPAM."
Is it me, or dd this article make you want to know what those slight amendments were?
-no broken link
wire cutters, cat 5 cable, 10 seconds.
About, oh, 80-100 characters to the right of the Subject line is a very clear label - "afdgkbj gfda hnrabs sf bgfb sfgfda nhmflwje" :-)
Don't like it here in the good old US of A?! Piss off and move to fucking China, asshole!!!11
-- A proud patriot and Republican voter
This is what was bought and paid for by the corporate authors of this bill.
Maybe a little activism will help? Anyone interested in writing letters to congress-critters and newspaper editors? Maybe appearing on local news explaining the issues? Post a follow up to this if you are. I ain't the most photogenic or articulate guy so I have to help out in the background. If more than a few responses show up, we'll get organized and do, I don't know what, but something. I'm just P.O.'d right now.
Don't like it here in the good old US of A?! Piss off and move to fucking France, asshole!!!1111
-- A proud patriot and Republican voter
``This bill does not stop a single spam from being sent. It only makes that spam slightly more truthful. whoo hoo! now my penis realy will be 20% bigger!
never drink kool-aid from a big vat
This is the worst thing to hit in the spam wars yet. Mainsleazers are given free reign to "prospect via email" and this law will be like all the rest: Window dressing that won't be enforced. Without private right of action, this bill is toothless--the victims of the crime are at the mercy of the enforcement authorities. Seeing how well the enforcement authorities have done so far -- remember how Monkeys.com and Osirusoft.com both got Denial of Serviced off the net by virus-wielding spammers and the Feds paid *no* attention to the complaints by both operators? -- this law will be enforced no differently: NOT AT ALL.
Feel free to call your senators and house members up and *thank them* for the spectacular way they bowed to the forces of $$BIG MONEY$$ yet again. And ask them kindly if they can spare a bottle of Astroglide(tm) to ease the situation.
Practically speaking, it's not as bad as folk are making out; sure, it means we'll still get too much crap, but these days the only spam that gets through my filters is thatwhich deliberately includes big sections of low medium frequency non-spam words to try and pollute my bayesian corpus. None of the spam that complies with this law will fit that bill, so I won't see it.
And don't forget, spam is like a little ping to tell you your mail server's OK - if you don't get any for a while you know something's up. These guys are doing us a service!
Don't like it here in the good old US of A?! Piss off and move to fucking China, asshole!!!111
-- A proud patriot and Republican voter
Which will be treated as the national opt-in list by the first foreign spammer to get a copy of it.
sulli
RTFJ.
Spam is totally out of control. Even if laws were made to counter spam, they wouldn't be enforcable because they aren't tracable. However, something must be done. They cause huge problems for users, who must sift through penis enlargement and get 7 billion trillion buckets of ice cream licking stamps to get to the actual email they read (my personal inbox consists of over 300 pieces of spam a day, with as little as 3 or 4 emails I care about). They also create huge problems for mail providers, especially ones for smaller ISPs, who have ALL that traffic. It probably destabilizes the entire internet as whole. It'd be interesting how much bandwidth spam email takes up over the course of a day. BusinessWeek alerted me to a good idea for how to eliminate some spam. Using a similar technique as web forums and such that have those cool randomly generated number images, email systems could require that a user enter a number to send an email. It'd reduce the amount of auto-gen spam by a huge number while still not being too much of an irritant to users.
bahahaha! what a fuckwit.
Some people have two emails; one is called a "spam farm" (I think). This email address is what you put on any form or webpage that requires it to get stuff done.
The other you give to friends etc. If your spam account overflows, who cares? You didn't give that address to anyone important.
I concur.
All pansy liberals should be moved to reeducation camps.
After we accomplish that, we'll get the pansies and liberals left over, then we can get the gun-owners, the labor agitators, the activists, and anyone else subversive.
Get Martin Luther's "The Jews and their Lies" for required reading for how we are obligated by Holy God to drive and burn out these terrorists non-white scum.
Good old free America.
Some of the changes are listed in a news release from Sentator Burns' website:
The final CAN SPAM Act includes changes not in the earlier Senate passed version, including increased damages up to $250 per spam e-mail with a cap of $2 million that can be tripled for aggravated violations. For e-mails using false or deceptive headers, the cap does not apply. Additionally, the revisions to the earlier bill enhance FTC enforcement authority.
This means that the House gets to vote again on the revised bill - probably after Thanksgiving
...I wrote to my Senators and my Representative, describing why I'm so disappointed in what they've done. I'm willing to bet that most Senators and Reps were first introduced to computers when they got elected, and someone showed them the magical wonder of "electronical mail."
I think we need to educate them, folks. Write them and explain why this issue is so frustrating.
I know it's been suggested before. I'm no IT expert, so maybe I'm talking out of my ass. But here goes: Suppose there was an e-mail protocol similar to ftp -- that is having a control port and a data port. Very long crypto keys would be exchanged over the control port for authentication -- a key-pair for every sender/receiver. Then, if the header of an e-mail over the data port is missing the correct key, the mail gets dropped. The keys could be kept on a database at the users ISP. The keylength would essentially keep the spammers from effectively guessing and reaching an inbox. If a key were compromised, notify the ISP to drop the key. Then establish a new key with whoever the previous key worked with. As an added benefit, you would have some information about who compromised it. I'm sure those more experienced in these matters will shoot this full of holes. But perhaps with modifications it could work. My $0.02.
I use a whitelist email addy for my friends and family and I use junk email addys when I sign up anywhere for anything that might result in my getting spam. As for an email account for buying things on the Net, I use it only for buying things and I don't have any spam problems. Unfortunately, many people have email addresses which they can't change or which are posted on websites, so for them spam is a problem, but for me spam means nothing.
fucktard
The decision to implement Spam filtering is going to be made, long after the apps that it runs against are implemented.
And anyone that is shopping for apps/servers and is sufficiently aware of problems like Spam, is going to be aware of the sercurity holes prevalent in MS code, and will avoid their stuff anyhow.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Well if the spammers are pleased by the bill it most certainly means our legislators wasted a bunch of our money for nothing.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Chomsky explains all this in his writings. Basically, what with the extremely low voter participation rates in this country, we have pretty much given over control of the state to corporate interests. The govt and the media collaborate with corporate interests to make sure we are a captive audience for advertising, and a captive labor pool.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
+1 Sarcasm
Not that I can find the exact text of the law anywhere, but everything I've read about it says that only ISP's and Attorneys General can sue spammers. My question is what consitutes an ISP? I'm an end-user in most sense of the term, but I own/host several domain names for friends/family, including email services. I do this as a favor and don't make any money off of it, but I am providing an internet service. Does this mean that I can sue spammers as an ISP? After all, it's my mail server, my paid-for bandwidth (even if just a DSL connection) being wasted, and my time wasted trying to beef up my filters to keep the spam out.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
stfu, paedophile
I can't see anyone has mentioned the hilarious and honest name of this new act: CAN-SPAM ("Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act").
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
I found the lnguage in the very first sentence in the DMNews article to be refreshingly honest. It refers to California's anti-spam bill versus federal spam legislation. It looks to me like they are acknowledging that the purpose of the federal legislation is to promote spam.
It is typical for details like this to be filled in during rulemaking by a body such as the FCC.
From the CAUCE website: The law would only permit the FTC, state Attorneys General, and ISPs to bring actions against violators.
So what, under the definition of this legislation, is an ISP? Can you hook up a modem to your home box and claim to be an ISP because you have the capability to supply dialup internet services? If so, then you could hook up a modem and start suing the spammers....
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
The law only gives the FTC the authority to make the list. But the FTC has stated they have neither the resources nor the technology to implement such a list.
where does it say this in the bill text?
Once the law is in place and spammers are allowed to let fly with impunity without fear of prosecution (because, as one person pointed out, it's free for them to use the resources of others in order to do so), then someone will get the bright idea of making it cost money to send spam.
And viola`-- they will have conned us into begging them to "tax the internet", which is something they have been trying to figure out ever since it showed up on their radar screen. Sure it's neat, but how can we TAX it?
This weak-minded conservative appears to like it:
"Now we can go back to looking forward to opening our inboxes in the morning because we'll have notes from our friends rather than herbal supplements and mortgage offers," said Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M.
The only weak mind in action at the moment is the original poster that sought to link this useless bill to his paranoia of "librul" politicians. Or perhaps it was a carefully crafted troll designed to look like an idiot?
or only UCE directed at consumers. I mean, I have a new type of razor I want to sell. Why should a company get spam and a person not? Oh, beacuse the company has listed their email address on their main page?
If they are happy - I'm not happy...
Why did the government consult the spammers? You dont make a deal with the criminals do you? Why should the government get involved with these people? They are the ones causing the problems and will most likely have it written so that the law will be ineffectual.
For a world power the United States sure has no backbone when dealing with criminals! Once lawyers get involved, it appears all the military might in the world proves to be useless.
"You're on my side and the dark side, like Lando Calrissian?" --Gimpy, Undergrads
It's time for the people to stand up and use technology to deal with the problem.
And maybe it's high time we all demanded a law that prevents our politicans from getting any money from businesses or orginazations.. We pay them enough already it's time they represent us not those who fund their campaigns!
So we're getting rid of spam. And telemarketing.
And while they're at it, how 'bout a law against junk (snail) mail? You know, i'm tired of those coupons that Val-Pak keeps sending me. Let's write legislature against them too. You know, those women at the cosmetics counter at the high dollar department stores harrass my wife every time she walks by, can we get a congressional inquiry on that as well? i really hate going into my favorite consumer electronics store, buying a new whatever, and then being harrassed by the folks trying to sell me a performance service plan. let's fine these guys!
My point is these are all inconvenient, even rude ways to sell products and services. I hate spam as much as the next guy, but should we really involve the government?
pansy liberals should be moved to reeducation camps
Well, it would be alot cheaper if we just accuse them as terrorist, that way we don't need a trial and we can impose the death penalty -- who wants to re-educate when we an exterminate! The Nazis had the right idea.
Anti-spam legislation is useless for two major reasons. First, state sponsored anti-spam laws are ineffective at holding spammers accountable for spamming. The methods of hijacking misconfigured international email servers allows an effective anonymous status to those who send the spam. Second, I don't see why home users cannot effectively use whitelist filtering to control inbox spam issues.
Since the postal mail address of the spammer must appear in the body of the email, we will be able to make a list of those addresses and filter based on that.
This is actually better than filtering based on a single tag like [ADV], as you will be able to whitelist and blacklist based on the postal address.
Bad news, pyros: of the 200-odd major spammers who account for 90%+ of the world's spam, most are US-based. They are only routing their... um... product... through offshore servers to avoid detection. See the ROKSO list at SpamHaus.org.
Seriously speaking, I have absolutely no idea whatsoever why anyone is bothered by spam. My ISP runs SpamAssassin, which spam-scores every inbound message and munges the headers with that score. My procmail sorts anything over a particular score into a spam folder, which I periodically empty, usually with a cursory glance to see if there are any false positives (I haven't seen one for four months, by the way). Anywhere from zero to five spams reach my inbox every day, which I delete; if the number starts to creep higher, I might lower my filter threshold. And that's it. Total labor input from me is about fifteen minutes a week. I spend more time than that rinsing out the office coffee pot. So why all this outrage and law-making and angst?
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
"On Saturday morning, after an all-night session, the House voted 392-5 to pass the slightly amended version of CAN-SPAM."
Awesome name for an anti-spam bill dudes! No wonder DMers are dancing naked in the street
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
So spammers now must rent a mailbox to stay legal but there is no law that says they must collect their mail. Valid opt out mechanism means nothing because they could take you off the viagra mailing list as you requested but still send you spam for every other client that comes to them. Many spams say they are ads in the body of the message but we need a way to drop the connection before it gets to that point. And "honesty" is only a relative term amongst lawyers.
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates called the bill "a milestone in the battle against spam."
Now I *know* it's a bad law.
As usual, this law just seems to raise the bar for the little guy. So in the future we will still get spammed but instead of getting it from some dick in a Florida trailercourt, we will get it from MSN and AOL who have layers of lawyers and billions of dollars.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
I know that you voted for the 'anti-spam' measure recently enacted. However, as many watchdog groups predicted, it has completely failed to stem the flood of spam. In fact, it's gotten worse. Please see the attached piece of mail as a representative sample of what's getting through."
Repeat, with minor variations, with a sizable quantity of the spam that you recieve in your personal inbox. Heck, print some out and send them by post. Even if only a few come in from every hundredth person in their district... that'll get their attention. Label the emails different things... "My response to your vote," "Commentary on recent legislation," "upcoming election." It can't be argued that they don't have a business relationship with you if you're in the US, as they represent you in congress.
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
"If, as is expected, the Senate gives final approval and President Bush signs it into law, we may well be witnessing the end of Internet e-mail."
Basically allowing the deluge to continue as it has been, isn't really going to cause a huge change. We're annoyed now, we'll continue to be annoyed. So be it.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
I think we're preaching to the choir complaining about the effectiveness of the bill here, but it might not be a bad idea to address what someone else mentioned, of using technology, but NOT to deal with the spam problem. In truth, this isn't a spam problem, this is a law-enforcement, political priority problem.
Maybe this has been done before, but if not, it seems like a great idea:
How about if we get everyone within their local calling region with the resources to hang a modem on their PC and map an e-mail address that goes directly to the fax machine of their local senators, representatives and district attorneys?
While letting spammers hit these e-mails and bombard politicians' fax machines seems appealing, it might be even more effective to make it very easy for people within their regions to send an e-mail that goes to a politicians' fax machine. (We know most of them don't read e-mail)
I'd be willing to do this in my region. What if we got enough people to do this so we had a nationwide network of e-mail/fax gateways? It seems it would be much more effective to bombard a politician's fax machine with frustrated cries from their constitutients than home-mortgage scams.
While the law doesn't specify a way to mark a message as spam, it does say:
"(2) PROHIBITION OF DECEPTIVE SUBJECT HEADINGS- It is unlawful for any person to initiate the transmission to a protected computer of a commercial electronic mail message if such person has actual knowledge, or knowledge fairly implied on the basis of objective circumstances, that a subject heading of the message would be likely to mislead a recipient, acting reasonably under the circumstances, about a material fact regarding the contents or subject matter of the message (consistent with the criteria are used in enforcement of section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act (15 U.S.C. 45))."
So if you were to write a negative test on "this is not an ad" in the subject line, any spam getting through would be breaking the law.
Not realistic, just an illustration that this bill isn't COMPLETELY useless. At least it makes forging headers explicitly illegal, that alone is a big step.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, this is just a tribute.
i dont know why people want to regulate everything, when there is no real need, i find my emailproviders spamfilter extremely effective, it alone kills off over 95% of the spam i get. while i find maybe 1 or rarely 2 spammails in my inbox, the filter catches 30-50 per day. and the best thing is that the whole service is free.
It was to be expected. It is the way it had to be.
Consider what politicians are doing every day: Trying to sell their ideas as todays sliced bread. Are the pamflets they are handing out at election time spam or information?
How do you spot the difference between "get rid of your debt" and "we clearly need more jobs for people".
Of cause - you can't - you asked the politicians to limit something they can't live without.
Just watch. Now that there would be rules in place, the spammers could easily sue ISPs who kill the spam before it gets to their intended recipients.
The only way to end spam is to use a whitelist. Of course this requires a spoof-proof DNS/IP address technology.
Here's the plan:
Write a secure (no buffer overrun braindamage) MTA type server which encrypts from MUA type client to client (PGP with key revocation would be a good start), uses a non-spoofable user/group identity protocol (encrypted, of course), rigorously defined base data types including support for end user defined data types, which delivers only to those identities listed in a whitelist. Support identities of "other" and "anonymous user", in addition to normal identities, with the MUA deciding whether or not to accept delivery.
If separate ciphers were used for encryption of data and encryption of routing and whitelist information, the MTA's could push the whitelist private keys throughout the MTA delivery chain (kinda like routing information forwards throughout the net) and do the whitelist checks as early as possible to kill spam faster.
Each MTA would still run the whitelist check when requested to deliver data and when MTA foo receives a delivery request from an MTA bar, which MTA foo had already forwarded a whitelist to which it knows should have rejected that delivery, MTA foo knows MTA bar is a spammers MTA and can act accordingly.
With a worst case senario of a Spammer MTA in the network, it could be isolated (removed from the MTA whitelist) and new whitelist keys distributed. This assumes the DNS/identity server is clean. In any case data encryption is not compromised, since whitelist scrubbing and data routing is encrypted with a separate cipher.
Allow the encryption key generation and whitelist to be transparently implemented on part of the MUA's. Architect the client and server such that data transport, data encryption, user identification, MTA identification and data type identification are separate plugin modules allowing for differences in hardware or software and easy upgrade of components via version controlled component interfaces.
Give this new protocol a new port to use and license it in such a manner as to prohibit embrace and extend changes, user identity spoofing, MTA identity spoofing, content type spoofing, component version spoofing and SPAM.
This should seriously curtail spam. Additionally it will prevent the carnivores/corporate spies and BOFH of the world from snooping our data.
In this case he's right, but I had to force myself really *really* hard to read your post, instead of giving it the standard "subject contains 'Chomsky'; roll eyes and scroll down" treatment. I do the same thing with any subject containing "Ayn Rand" (and a few others, too). I suspect a great many other people have subconsciously trained themselves in the same way.
I really don't have a point here, just musing about the effect certain words have on my opinion of a post before I even read it.
0 1 - just my two bits
And we made sure there's no useful legal remedy against you!
As an added bonus, we're going to require, at no extra charge, already included in your kind and generous campaign donations, a special feature whereby your victims have to go to your very own webpage to hunt for some "opt-out" mechanism - wink wink!
Just think of all the pop up ads you can sell!
Spamming has never been so profitable and thanks to your very own congresspeople, such as Billy Tauzin, every legitimate business trying to pump up next quarter's earnings has a whole new "legitimate" revenue stream!
We heard your concerns that requiring an identifier might make effective spam filters possible, reducing the profitability of the CPU time and disk space of your victims that you steal, so we made sure the mechanism is utterly useless by making it illegal for the FTC to define a uniform identifier!
But what's that you say - those jail times and fines sound scary? Not to worry - nobody but the FTC can even instigate a prosecution and to do so, your victims have to "prove" your address obfuscation was intentional haha! Ever hear of someone proving a negative?
So no worries - you're home free, thanks to us, your humble legislative servants. We've delivered, now give us our next contribution.
Sincerely,
Congress.
Sounds like its time for the Open Source community to create a do-not-spam list server for the Feds to host. Screw waiting for the Feds to take another 10 years (i.e. from 1991 for the do-not-call). Give a whole new meaning to DNS - DO NOT SPAM, because such a list srever would have to be as grunty as a root DNS. I also envisage a hash server for real spam too to show that the do-not-spam was searched. The spammer does an MD5 hash of the spam message and then passes this to the do-not-spam yes/no server with your email address. The do-not-spam replies back with a timestamped cryptographic hash made up of the spam MD5 hash+your email + yes/no reply from do-not-spam. Thus end user mail servers can verify that the spam content is intended for that particular email destination and was not-not asked for. Sounds like an easy to implement thing to me.
Actually it would be technically quite possible to make spamming so (computationally) expensive that it wouldn't be feasible. Only the e-mail clients would have to be changed slightly..
a sh cash.html
http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hashcash/
http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hashcash/docs/h
Consider TV ads. You get, say, 15 in a half hour. Watch more TV, see more ads. Watch less TV, see less ads. If a new advertiser wants to get a TV ad to you, they have to displace some other ad. You still get 15 an hour.
Same with ads in magazines. Read N pages, see K ads. Read 2N pages, see 2K ads.
Same with banners ads on web pages. View a slashdot story, see a banner. View two stories, see two banners.
With spam, if someone wants to send you a spam, that adds one to the total number of spams you get. It's not tied to the amount of mail you send, or the amount of non-spam you receive, or your amount of time online. It is capped by your mailbox capacity, but that is about it.
No form of advertising should be allowed that is not directly tied to the rate of consumption of something at the recipient end, unless the recipient agrees to it.
Note that this means that not only is spam bad, but email advertising even from companies you have a business relationship with, unless asked for, is bad, even though that is usually not considered spam.
what kind of a dumbass lets Microsoft and AOL, of all corperations, make the decision on an anti-spam bill?
So may be I miss something but I think the solution to the spam problem is not that hard to find and it is not by legal measure, will take only some technical expertise in implementation and relies basically on the economics of spam and some organization.
The economics of spam have been described like this: the costs of sending spam do not vary significantly wether a spammer sends hundreds, thousands or bazillions of mails. With zilch costs per spam mail a return rate of 0,0000001 still makes a lucrative business model.
Now do the calculation with setting the costs/spam at 1, 3, 5 cents (and it makes no real difference which currency you take here) - suddenly spammers see themselves confronted with a risk. IANAMBA but I assume that even a minor fee per mail would push most of the spammers out of business, leaving only the trademark behemots who in turn will be easier to grasp for some regulation like that US legislation discussed.
Who would suffer?
Everyone sending mails facing a new fee?
Nobody cares about real mail traffic, there should be some generous margin gratuite to cover most of the legitimate users, say 20,000 mails/day.
Those millions of legitimate mail list servers with a community around them? The bulk of them would be covered by a quota of 20k mails/day but some would not. So there should be some mechanism to validate a list server by it's recipients' vote (like counting/checking subscriber submissions or asking subscribers to forward some incoming posts to an address).
Policies of this kind would have to be implemented by ISPs and doing it would cost them real money. Plus, there would probably be a need to have some authority to handle disputes and testify compliance. That body would need some financing as well. On the other hand, ISPs who enforce such policies should receive a significant rebate on a global spam tax added on all interconnection fees. Again, there may arise the need for some authority to organise this.
So we get a white list of testified ISPs with low spam probability. Getting on this list pays for an ISP since it helps avoid the spam tax. The 'good guys' get more customeers since they can offer less expensive services, the other ISPs have the freedom to go on like they wish, but they face the costs they induce as they have to pay the spam tax. The spammers may spam as they want but they will end up paying for the trouble they make, one way or the other.
What it takes to create such a structure is: a) an according intiative and b) a accepted body to conduct. Icann? What are they doing anyway with regard to a problem which has grown to be a threat to the net?
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
According to Yahoo!, this afternoon the US Senate approved changes to the 'Can SPAM' Act, i.e. S.877. If I'm reading this right, it means that the Congress will need to go back and vote on the measure again before it hits the President's desk. Since House members are already off for the Thanksgiving holiday until Dec. 8th, we'll still have several days to let Congress know that we're unhappy with the bill before the final vote. While I realize there's little chance we'll see any major changes in the bill, you never know, stranger things have happened.
Personally, I was looking forward to suing SPAMers here in California. It sounded like a nice new occupation for all of us out-of-work IT staffers.
Namely: to comply they have to mention it's spam. Yeah I know the law doesn't say HOW they have to mention it. But they have to do it somehow or other. The english language and its derived acronyms are bountiful, but not infinite. Sooner or later, all the boilerplate phrasings are going to make their way into my bayesian filters. Likewise with the boilerplate for "opt me out".
I suspect a lot of spammers will comply (or at least emulate the appearance thereof), so as to paint themselves as "legitimate". My filters thank them in advance, for they shall feed well. *insert sfx: deep booming evil laughter*
Mullen, let me explain why I disagree with at least one of your arguments.
First, though: namecalling never helps. Whether this senator is liberal (whatever you think that means - I think it means "in favour of freedom" - cf, your dictionary) or not should not affect his arguments. Now as for your arguments.
[1) Most spam that ends up in U.S. mailboxes comes from overseas, so no US law is going to stop that.]
Not true: US law can stop the beneficiaries. The sleazebag with the PO Box in Reno who in the end receives your penis patch money.
[2) Spam actually works on an economic level, if it did not, then no one would spam. Spammers spam, because spam works.]
Yes. But if we make it even just a bit more difficult they will not earn money as easily.
[3) Spamming is easy. Make it so addresses can not be spoofed, email headers can't be forged and MX records have to match up with A records ]
Mmm. Now who believes in big government? The government dictating how tech works? That is hwo we ended up with Bell, selling 1940 style phones in 1980...!
Cheers,
Michael
---
BDOS ERR ON A:>
Unfortunately, all the improvements to SMTP that I've heard proposed would still be rendered moot by the insecurity of Windows.
Strong authentication to a mail server that knows you personally? Unforgeable headers? Hash cash? Great ideas, but not ones that will have any effect on millions of compromised Windows systems each sending a small number of messages properly through their own mail servers.
Do you have some improvements in mind which would obviate the zombie-army problem? I'd love to hear them.
I think we can all agree on that: The Serial Slashdot Troll.
After all, you should know.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Even if there were a way to limit how much spam you get based on how much mail you send, what gives anyone the right the spam you? Unlike TV/Radio/Etc, spammers are NOT providing you with mail service. In much the same way as telemarketers don't supply the phone system but still hassle you every minute about a lower mortgage.
And btw, this proposed law will do nothing. Take a random sampling of spam you receive and check the IP address. All mine comes from China. Do you ever get the idea that this country is run by D students?
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Lois, this isn't my Batman glass. - Peter
No. It's even narrower than that. It only applies to the specific line of business of the specific company being advertised. So one spammer can send you a Viagra spam, a mortgage-refinancing spam, an inkjet cartridge spam, a long distance spam, a cigarettes-by-mail spam, an extend-your-warranty spam, an online greeting card spam, a dating service spam, a credit card spam, a debt-consolidation spam, and a wireless video camera spam. You then have to opt out of each one separately.
Chances are, your Congresscritter and Senators voted YES!!! But to be absolutely sure:
-
Congressional roll call vote
-
Senatorial roll call vote
And if your representatives voted YES, vote for ANYBODY else. This isn't just about screwing up our inboxes and the Internet itself. A Yes vote means that the representative is so dangerously and completely clueless about technology as to endanger us all.You want a person clueless enough to screw this up deciding what high-tech weapons systems DOD gets, or what NASA projects need funding, or about anything else having to do with the Internet? The Net isn't just about geeks anymore. It's the communications backbone on which governmental, military, and business communications depend. Imagine the kind of traffic the last Windows megavirus attack being normal on the Internet. Is this likely to improve its efficiency?
Will this help businesses (other than spam) function better? Would you like to be in a war zone and discover that you can't find what the hell you've been ordered to do because your inbox is full of "Penile Enlargement" messages, each in full compliance with S.877 with a real snailmail address on the bottom?
Most of us have been saying for years that our Congress is dangerously and fundamentally clueless about technology. The DMCA passed by comparable majorities. At least in areas where the voting machines aren't e-votescam hardware, we might have a chance to get rid of some of these idiots.
This is about to become proof visible even to Joe Sixpack that Congress does NOT know what the fuck is doing. IF Joe Sixpack is told what it means. The typical Internet user is Joe Sixpack now.
Don't depend on the media to get this story out.
Finally, here's the honor roll of every single member of Congress who voted NO. (there aren't any Senators who opposed this. Vote for these guys and support them, regardless of what you think of the rest of their political views.
- Honda
- Kucinich
- Paul
- Jackson-Lee (TX)
- Lofgren
We know that bad decisions about technology by elected officials can endanger our jobs, the economy, public safety, and the lives of members of our armed forces. So far, it's just us that knows because the comprehension gap between us and Joe Sixpack is just far too great.If Joe Sixpack is getting 50 spams a day instead of 20, and he is informed that a law passed by his representatives made this possible, he'll get it. So as soon as this happens, tell your non-tech friends and families and co-workers.
Don't worry about the "Do Not Spam" registry, anyone who opts out of US spam will get it replaced by Nigerian and Chinese and Taiwanese spam. How long before spam ads for the "Do Not Spam" registry CD of "XX million e-mail addresses confirmed by the US Government" show upin your e-mail?
This is a unique opportunity. Don't let it go to waste.
Tech Public Policy stuff
"CAN SPAM" Act, indeed!
"Yes Sir, Mr. Ralsky, now you CAN SPAM all you want, because we're overriding all state laws--especially the ones like California's, that had some teeth--and legitimizing spam! Also, it denies all private right of action, and allows hundreds, if not thousands, of loopholes for creative 'direct marketers' like you to use!"
I wonder how much bribe money--oops, I mean "soft money"--it took to buy this bill. It's worse than no Federal anti-spam law at all.
Congress has been bought off by the spammers, and they've sold us all down the river.
Thanks for the info. I checked out http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-danisch- dns-rr-smtp-03.txt
Good read.
Put a "Kneecap Spammers for Jesus" bumper sticker on your car. If you see anyone giving you a shifty look, grab your hammer!
You better not be spamming my RAM!
Help protect civil rights from abuse by the TSA - visit TSA News Blog.
http://www.tsanewsblog.com
We must take action before this crap bill is passed!
You apparently missed the part where this bill was passed last week. Only the lack of a presidential signature is keeping it from law at this point.
Jay (=
Proof AOL/MSFT support spam:
. . . And On The 17th Day Of June, Microsoft Said: "Let There Be Spam!"
6/17/2003
AS MICROSOFT ANNOUNCES LAWSUITS AGAINST SPAMMERS IN WASHINGTON, IT WORKS TO LIMIT ABILITY OF CALIFORNIA SPAM VICTIMS TO GO AFTER SPAMMERS
SACRAMENTO - Backed by Microsoft, America Online (AOL) and Yahoo!, the Assembly Business & Professions Committee today refused to permit a vote on SB 12 by California State Senator Debra Bowen (D-Redondo Beach), a bill that sought to create the country's toughest anti-spam law by requiring advertisers to get permission from computer users before sending them unsolicited ads.
"Spam accounts for more than half of all e-mail sent, sticking businesses with a $20 billion tab for unsolicited ads they didn't ask for and don't want," said Bowen (D-Redondo Beach). "Spam isn't legitimate advertising and it's not free speech - it's basically high-tech junk faxing that forces e-mail users to pay for someone else's advertising campaign through slower computer service and higher Internet access fees."
Today in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft announced it filed 13 civil suits against U.S. spammers for sending unwanted, deceptive, commercial e-mail to Microsoft customers. Meanwhile, at that same time, Microsoft was testifying in Sacramento, California, before the Assembly Business & Professions Committee against Senator Bowen's bill, that would have banned spam and created an "opt-in" system for sending unsolicited commercial e-mail. If enacted, it would be the strongest anti-spam bill in the country, but Microsoft opposed it because it would have required businesses to get permission before sending e-mail ads (a concept known as "opt-in") and would have allowed individual e-mail spam victims to sue spammers for $500 per spam.
"Who do you trust to protect your e-mail inbox in the war against spam, Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo! or the Attorney General and California's Privacy Rights Clearinghouse?," asked Bowen, referring to the three leading opponents and the two leading supporters of SB 12. "If you don't want to be sued for sending spam, don't send spam, it's not all that complicated.
"Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo! sit in committee with a straight face, saying they're trying to improve the bill, while at the same time they're back in Washington, pushing measures to wipe out this bill and every single anti-spam law that states have adopted over the past half-dozen years," continued Bowen. "Why? Because they don't want to ban spam, they want to license it and make money from spammers by deciding what's 'legitimate' or 'acceptable' unsolicited commercial advertising, then charging those advertisers a fee to wheel their spam into your e-mail inbox without your permission."
SB 12 repeals California's "opt-out" spam statute in favor of a tougher "opt-in" system modeled on the federal law that bans unsolicited fax advertising. The bill requires companies that want to send e-mail ads to get an e-mail user's permission in advance if they don't already have a business relationship with the person. SB 12 allows any Californian who receives unsolicited ads to sue the sender and the advertiser in court for $500 per spam and the judge can triple the fine if he or she finds the sender willfully and knowingly violates the California ban. The bill also requires the court to impose an additional $250 per spam civil penalty to be directed to high tech crime task forces throughout the state in any spam judgement.
A June 10 report by the Radicati Group found e-mail spam will cost companies $20.5 billion in 2003, and by 2007, businesses will be forking over nearly ten times that amount of money, or $198 billion, to battle spam. A June 2 report by MessageLabs, a private anti-spam service, found 55.1% of all e-mail sent in May 2003 was spam. Jupiter Research found U.S. e-mail users received more than 140 billion pieces of spam in 2001 and an estimated 261 billion pieces in 2002 - an 86% increase. A Harris Interactive (www.harrisinteractive.com)
Make 'em pay! http://Payola.org #include "stddisclaimer
The language of the law essentially defined spam as "unwanted email from a commercial source". This means that if you didn't want it, it was spam. That means if you didn't want the confirmation email which said "the book you ordered is on it's way, and here's the tracking number", it was spam.
The problem with the law was that it was too broad, and would prevent any commercial entity from sending email (ie: it didn't just deal w/spam).
Ya know, that would be a really GOOD idea. I've been recieving bounced email from mail daemons because some spammers have been using my email address in the 'from' and 'reply-to' fields of their spam.
To stop spam, we must make it unprofitable for the spammers to continue sending it.
I always thought opt-out stuff was a joke aside from the regular reasons because they say "it'll take 24-48 hours to process it in our system", but I've always had a hunch that in that time frame they just sell your info to someone who you haven't opted out from.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Chomsky is PLAINLY wacked out for suggesting that the USA with its extremely low voter turnout as compared to other western democracies...and that leads to corporate control of our govt. Just how paranoid and insance that Chomsky must be to suggest such a thing....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Amusing as that phrase may be to the spam king, the correct spelling is "free rein". As when letting the horse go where it wants to.
Might be all that is needed ....
MB
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
Then signed by the president.
Fight Spammers!
I can't see what the big deal is. This is a first version = anti-spam 1.0. How many programs do you write that are perfect first time? Well, that's how many laws are perfect first time.
There will be anti-spam 2.0, and 3.0 and so forth. Each reflecting voter wishes, AND money donations, AND actual lawmaker beliefs/knowledge.
Be happy. Educate a congressman. And write some code.
I thought the name of the act was self explanatory.
According to the recent article on it in Slashdot, the act was called...
The CAN spam act.
Not the anti-spam, or stop-spam, or castrate-spammers, act, or anything like that.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I would have never thought that these new things allow spammers to act freely. Not only does this annoys me to an extent the fact that we get a whole bunch of unnessary trafic added to our connection thanks to the spammers who have all their time in the world to do all this... I recalled there was some news about somewhere in US, a state, is putting ban on firewalls. These days, common win32 firewalls are equipped with spam blocking (basic, but somewhat efficient in someways). If I were to live in that state, I wouldn't even care about having my firewall on plus with a whole bunch of other ways to block unnessary internet traffic.
To: /dev/null
Right.
We're just going to have to undo this. I think we can do this. We're the people who explain technology to the clueless around us, and we can prove what we say in non-technical terms.
Know anyone at your local paper? As soon as the new spam epidemic hits, explain that the spam was directly caused by a fake anti-spam bill written by the spammers themselves, add the URLs from the original article for explanation . Tell everybody you know who isn't a tech type. Write op-ed letters. Talk shows. This is something that can be gotten across "people to people".
The American people need to know that our elected Congress is totally, absolutely clueless about technology and there is no solution other than replacement.
I'd avoid the "Do Not Spam" registry before it shows up being spamvertised as "50,000,000 e-mail addresses confirmed by the US Government"... I think the Nigerians will have real fun with this.
Imagine Congresscritters taking public credit for "anti-spam" legislation, and discovering that everybody is correctly blaming them for the amount of crap hitting our inboxes doubling or tripling.
Tech Public Policy stuff
This is such complete bullshit!
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
I just read all 56 pages of the law. Here are some points people are misunderstanding.
1) Creating 5 hotmail accounts with false info or 5 domains with false info isn't illegal. It is illegal to do so by script or other automated means and then send spam from it.
2) While opt-out lists only apply to the specific line of business (if the rcpt sees on that name and not the parent company), once a user opts-out it is illegal to give/sell that email address to anyone. So you can't take the address and start a new company to send spam as another post suggested.
3) The FTC gets to decide on a subject label for all porn spam.
4) Address harvesting off websites is illegal. I think that is a good thing.
5) Not just the FTC can prosecute. The SEC can prosecute mesages related to investments, FDIC for banks, etc.
6) Any state agency or official can bring a civil action.
7) The FTC is required to develop a plan for offering rewards to those who report violators of the act. Hopefully, Congress would then implement it.
8) The FCC can make harsher regulations for delivery of email over wireless service. So if you read your email on your phone, that sounds pretty good.
I agree that this law really sucks and doesn't do much. But it does do something. It makes it illegal to fake headers, use a mail relay without permission, and not honor opt-out requests. It won't stop every person, but I would hope it would help stop those few top spammers who are responsible for most of the spam out there. They are U.S. citizens and we have plenty of people who can track the spam back to them.
One problem is with the ISP civil action limitation. While I can understand not wanting the court system flooded by a lawsuit for every spam message sent, I think it should have been written to apply to anyone running a mail server. That is who has the real problem with spam, not just ISPs. (For many businesses, their ISPs have nothing to do with email.)
The only thing that bothers me is the requirement for a physical postal address in all spam. For businesses that don't have a physical presense, I'd prefer to see website, email, and/or phone required.
> Subject: Does SPAM size really matter? You bet it does!
>
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>
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>
> Click here to to learn more about our exciting product.
> Click here to stop receiving these mssages.
> aafrdebcjfzeav kwrpcarplcyqc oujagydvocugp afwofsdcbxg
I know, it's does seem to be too good to be true, but hey, they guarantee your money back, so what have we got to lose?
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
- Private right of action
- Right of action against email "Advertisers" rather than just the
untraceable spammer who sends the message, as provided by CA's new
17529.
- Much larger penalties. It's not the $1000/message CA law would have made but it is up to $2500/message -- at the judges option which would make it easier for
small ISPs to mount an action without having to do a class action to
ensure a spammer is stopped for everyone.
- Right of action for local District Attorneys -- S.877 only allows
state AGs to bring criminal actions, not local county District
Attorneys. I'm having enough difficulty getting San Mateo County's DA
office to move forward on our complaints with criminal actions. I've
no hope the AG of California will do anything -- they prefer to do
only civil actions unless there is a conflict with the local DA's
office and the AG has to step in.
There is some ray of hope in this debacle perhaps. Initial conversations with our lawyers seem to show that as worded, many portions of state laws may stand. JoeAlmost everyone is missing the fact that laws, even when well written and targeted, are poor substitutes for economic solutions when the undesired activity is economically driven and economic solutions are available. And this law seems particularly badly written. It is pointless to whine and wring our hands over this, since it's fundamentally bad policy to wait for someone else to save us from things we're unwilling to deal with ourselves. Anti-spam legislation was bound, if not to fail utterly, at least to start very badly, like Billy Bob's Mail Order Plans For Home Fusion Power. If you'd like to empower yourself, read the remainder of this post. If you'd just like to gain the satisfaction that there is hope,, read this post.
Why does spam exist?
Most spam seeks to sell something, directly or indirectly. Most spam solicits visits to what might be called "beneficiary Websites" -- the Websites where the touted products are actually sold, usually via e-commerce. Some small percentage of spam solicits responses by phone or fax, a smaller percentage by snail mail, and a very tiny percentage advises you to come to Jesus or some such with no response solicited.
So almost all spam exists because someone hopes to make money from it, and almost all spam solicits responses to beneficiary Websites.
Forget who sends it: Who is responsible for it?
OK, so the largest percentage of spam solicits visits to product or service Websites. Follow the money. Other than the rare "Joe job," such spam is obviously sent either by the Website operator or by a contractor acting on behalf of the Website operator. No one else stands to benefit from the responses to the spam, so no one else will lift a finger to attract traffic to the Website except in some very rare scenarios.
So the true beneficiary of the spam, who is also the party who funded sending the spam, is generally readily visible and reachable. The true beneficiary is almost always also the true source of the spam. The question is: knowing this, what can one do that will be effective?
Counterattack the source
Paul Graham, the researcher and LISP expert who advanced Bayesian filtering a little over a year ago, followed up a few months ago with a paper on Filters that Fight Back (FFB).
The fatal weakness in spam that attempts to attract visits to beneficiary e-commerce Websites is just that: it invites us to visit, and explicitly so. When we accept the invitation and visit the beneficiary Websites, the additional traffic marginally increases the costs of operating the Websites. "So what?" you might ask.
Here's what: the Websites count on the millions of recipients of the spam who are not interested, not to visit the Websites. The flip side of the near-zero cost of sending spam is the near-zero cost of the unresponsive among the recipients. The Website operators send or cause to be sent millions and millions of spam emails but they only have to pay for the server capacity and bandwidth for the tiny response rate from the morons who actually buy stuff. While we can't easily change the low cost of sending spam, we certainly can change the low cost of hosting the servers that have to handle the Web visits that can result from spam. We can do that simply by accepting the invitations contained in spam, and not only accepting the invitations but clicking on every link they have, to make sure to navigate through all their pages.
But that sounds like too much work!
Sure. And dangerous, too, because your browser may not be configured for maximum security. If it were, you wouldn't be able to surf most of the major sites on the Web. But there's a completely legitimate set of tools for downloading Websites for offline browsing. WebWhacker is an old one that
Look at the bright side: there's always seppuku.
It covers precisely the range and points that were widely accepted by the end of the conference. And yes, that means it ended poorly.
A few of us tried to make the point that filtering done at the receiving end does nothing to stop the wasted bandwidth. Furthermore, carrying that extra bandwidth, whether a given user ever sees it or not, means greater equipment purchase, maintanence and replacement costs, and those costs are passed along to the consumer.
Unfortunately even some of the supposedly anti-spam community got suckered into accepting "labeling" and "the false positive problem" and other nonsense. I think they were trying to be fair to the few truly ethical online marketing folks, but in so doing forgot to consider the actual numbers related to the issues, and lost track of perspective.
My hero of the conference was Commisioner Swindell, the older ex-Marine gentleman who found himself seperating a spammer's lawyer and his intended target it a near brawl. I spoke with him, and he was one of the few there who maintained the recognition that the problem is far greater than the stuff that annoys people when they find it in their inbox; an equal problem is that part of their bill due to spam whether they receive it nor not.
A suitable response to this law would be for everyone (in the US at least) to forward any spam they receive to the inboxes of the boneheads who initiated and supported this law, with the statement "IT AIN'T WORKING!"
"Nuke 'em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." -- Lt. Ripley
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
nm
Yes, Spamcop, I remember that brilliant service. The biggest easiest email-DOS there is. Go over to their website and check out the fine print:
;)
SpamCop administrators do not, and cannot verify the claims made by it's users. Not only are there simply far too many reports filed for anyone to manually review them, but even if we were to, there is no way for us to know whether a user actually did or did not solicit a message prior to reporting it as spam.
Therefore, it is trivial to DOS a domain:
-Get a couple of free emailaddresses
-Fake a spam coming from the domain, just use a real spam and change the headers
-send a report about the fake spam to spamcop using the free emailaddresses you've got
-Bingo, the domain cannot send mail to all mailservers that use spamcop for filtering
-if you want to be a real bastard, repeat every day, and they will never get of the blacklist
bottom line: do not use spamcop
For the same reason as US companies offshore many other functions. They get offered a better price. Simple as that.
For those of you who believe the Spam issue turns on some property right or involves theft of services, do you also believe that buying a TV and hooking it to your cable company makes you the owner of the cable network? ISP's are generally subject (in the US) to the same laws as telephone company and broadcasters - their networks are essential public property (as is the Internet) and they are obliged to carry legal traffic. And that includes calls to sell you a newspaper subscription or ask for a political contribution to your "Do Not Call" home telephone. As an Internet subscriber you have every right to block traffic you don't want from reaching your mail queue, but you have no right to demand that I refrain from sending lawful e-mails. No offense intended. It's your First Amendment, too. Defend it; don't throw it away.
These are our reps - what can we do?
.gov email systems and get them on board with their own legislation?
Personally, I have saved every single SPAM message I have ever received, and have a 10-year 30,000+ message deep resevoir of them. Like Groundskeeper Willie's "retirement grease" I am hoping a class action will one day finance my tropical off-shore data center/submarine factory/hermit crab farm.
But seriously - what next? Should I start faxing my archive to Washington? Set up forwarding addresses to
If we do nothing, it will be years before something else is done. I used to get junk faxes, and even after repeated requests to the junk-fax system's 1-800 to remove my number with their add/remove system, nothing happened. So after finding a pile of vacation offers on the floor one morning a week later, I added several numbers via their 1-800 - mainly the local Better Business Bureau's fax machines. A short time later they stopped.
THAT is the sort of thing we need to do here.
kulakovich
did anyone ever think to just shout, "SHUT UP!! .... lousy vikings.... "
"You want a toe? I can get you a toe by three o'clock... with nail polish."
Act NOW!
Fight Spammers!
Did I say I didn't like it in the USA? No.
Am I a communist? No.
Am I a coward who hides behind an Anonymous Coward name? No.
Those would be examples of MS having a vested interest in the Spam industry, not the Anti-Spam industry, actually.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Private Invite Only Email clients that unless the sender is on your invited list the mail doesn't get in. Hotmail has it and I have never been happier.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
...is here.
;-)
Just kidding
Why? Because the politicians are not going to outlaw spam until they've tried some nonsense approach like this one. A year or two from now, it will be clear that this law was completely useless and did not help. At that time, it's possible that they'll do what they should have done in the first place, and require confirmed opt in for any email advertising.
Without this step, the next step will never happen. So while I consider it useless, I still think it is necessary.
Bollocks! The word 'unwanted' doesn't even appear in the bill. (err... does /. have censors - oh right- no just moderators that vote posts up or down).
Make 'em pay! http://Payola.org #include "stddisclaimer
'unsolicited' is a synonym for 'unwanted'. The hypothetical scenario I describe still applies, as the bill allows joe schmoe to decide what is and isn't wanted instead of clearly defining it in the law.
Though in all fairness, the revision of the bill you linked to has gone through several revisions since I last read it, and now it isn't nearly as bad. Read it without all of the 'advertisement' words and you'll read something much closer to what was posted on slashdot earlier this year.
Yes, Spamcop, I remember that brilliant service. The biggest easiest email-DOS there is. Go over to their website and check out the fine print:
SpamCop administrators do not, and cannot verify the claims made by it's users. Not only are there simply far too many reports filed for anyone to manually review them, but even if we were to, there is no way for us to know whether a user actually did or did not solicit a message prior to reporting it as spam.
Therefore, it is trivial to DOS a domain:
You obviously know very little about Spamcop. Spamcop doesn't DOS anything. Spamcop's RBL encourages exactly the opposite. It keeps spammers from DOSing everyone else. It also helps id the real source of spam so innocent victims of forged spam are not DOS'd by bounces and the [responsible] ISP from which the spammer is operating can take action to stop this as quickly as possible.
As far as abusing the reporting system, every system can be abused. And Spamcop and other responsible services have means to deal with it. That's no excuse to deny the value of the service. Should we not use cars because some people have run down pedestrians? Should we dismantle the telephone system because people make crank calls? Get real.
What I then do is signup for Amazon with amazon@mydomain.com or eBay with ebay@mydomain.com and so on... as a result I have a perfect mechanism for tracking who spams me and, more importantly, who sells my account. Those all end up in my inbox until I create a procmail rule, which geekmail lets me do, to filter messages to that account straight to the trash.
Amazing what would happen if we could all prove the source of the resale of our email address and go after them, hein?