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Congress Sends Anti-Spam Bill To White House
sunbird writes "At just after 5 o'clock EST, the House concurred to the Senate's amendments to the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 (or "CAN-SPAM") (bill in PDF format: here or here). Although the bill will prohibit certain tactics (such as hiding return addresses), critics state that the bill does not go far enough (see this press release). The bill will provide criminal penalties for violations of its provisions (up to five years behind bars), but will not allow private parties to sue spammers. News reports indicate (SF Gate or Forbes) that Bush intends to sign the bill. Prior Slashdot articles are here: 1 2 3."
We covered this. Spam becomes legal 120 days after this is signed, even in states where it wasn't legal before.
Despite popular opinion, a US law will only stop domestic spam, and the weaknesses of punishing the actual company hiring the spammer have been made clear before e.g. Hiring someone to spam your competitors product.
Why not continue working on more effective spam traps and stop legislating morality.
Vegetarians eat Vegetables, Humanitarians frighten me.
The ability for private parties to sue spammers when there is a documented attempt to stop it might help. Most people can't do it, but there are enough people who know what they're doing to be able to track the actual individuals down that it would seem to be helpful.
We the Congress of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect spam heaven, establish Protection, insure domestic Annoyance, provide for the miserable defence, promote the general Chaos, and secure the Blessings of Financial Freedom to ourself and our Contributors, do ordain and establish this Anti-Spam Bill for the United States of America.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
Phrase the bill in a way to let them think they're banning pornography! Genius!
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
supposedly the bill was placed on the president's desk a few hours ago, but he threw it out thinking it was garbage.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
First of all, why doesn't THAT surprise me in the least? In other words, "legitimate" marketers, like them or not, get free fun of your inbox the way they do your mailbox. Except, of course, it costs next to nothing to spam people so it will be like them jamming 1000 unwanted credit card apps, catalogs, and other miscellaneous garbage into your mailbox everyday.
Now, some of you might think that "legitimate" businesses won't try to abuse this. For you poor, naive fools, let me tell you that I work in a "legitimate" direct mail company and we junk mail the shit out of people. They ask us to stop? Ok - we stop selling their name and address and then we stop sending them stuff. Of course, if they do business with us again, the whole thing starts over. Yahoo!, in fact, appears to have already caught onto this idea within the realm of spam. Expect to see changes in "privacy policies" to be used more frequently as excuses to override requests not to spam.
In short, expect your spam count to rise. It will just be a little more "honest", as the CAUCE release notes, not a better situation in general. Go Congress. I'm just sooooooo proud of my government at times like this.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
The only hope I see now is that maybe the E.U. will get their act together and show up the corrupt U.S. idiots.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
..not to vote for Bush in the coming elections!
No, now spamming is to become legal in the US, it will continue to be the spam center of the world.
Here's a list of the email addresses of all your Congressman. Maybe someone can whip together a script to send them an email asking them to repeal this law, every day until they opt out or repeal the law. Extra karma points for randomizing the title among non-misleading possibilities. Then we just gotta get every single slashdotter to run the program.
In addition spammers need to be hunted to the far corners of the global and made to pay their stupidity. However this is done, i.e. death, jailing them in pound you in ass federal prisoners or beatings with heavy sacks they need to be eliminated and enough fear generated to scare off any potential replacements.
All it will take you to succeed with your inventive and novel product is to bring it to the world's attention. May I suggest a marketing campaign designed to target your audience rapidly and with discernment. I realise that commercial e-mail campaigns have had only limited success in the past, but feel that your product would make an ideal subject for such a campaign, blending the futuristic worlds of computer technology and biochemical research.
Remember: 1 hundred million emails can't be wrong. If we send a billion, someone might even buy something!
(It's funny. Laugh.)
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
What we really need is a law to ban all laws with contrived acronyms.
I got some spam I would say...hey, I am the president, I ain't signing this bill. I hate spam. etc.etcc
the dyslexic in me read "Congress Sends **** Spam **** To White House". I wonder if Bush has as much use for penis enlargement pills as Clinton might have. Do you think Cheney would be interested in helping a nigerian banker's widow move 6 million USD out of africa?
okay, I have to go back to my boring life now.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
We loved you all the time you were alive.
We'll greatly miss-you.
This isn't going to cure all spam overnight all by itself therefore it's pointless.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
At just after 5 o'clock EST
Doesn't anyone use UTC anymore?
You honestly think that they would have voted for this bill if they actually used their e-mail?
Devote your resources to bringing them bad press in their home district. Remember, all politics is local. Getting e-mails that their staffers will just toss won't bother them a bit. Getting embarassing questions during fundraisers about how they legalized spam will. Remember, this is an election year. Make spam an issue, and they'll HAVE to defend (or reverse) their position.
... would put as much time into forming realistic and meaningful legislation as they spent coming up with titles that form catchy acronyms.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I have a question. Does anyone know for certain if this will pre-empt existing laws in the various states that are more restrictive than this farse that Uncle Sam is pushing through? For example my state has had an anti-spam law for 2.5 years now and I want to use it. Can I still sue a spammer for violating Kansas's anti-spam law? I'm thinking that I can because I read once that this law would pre-empt laws that aren't already on the books (like a new California law IIRC). Can anyone say for sure though. I know I'd like to know and I'm sure others do too.
This doesn't really change much, in that state laws by definition are powerless to stop spam. California will have NO luck whatsoever prosecuting a spammer outside the U.S, and very little luck with a spammer in Wisconsin. There is certainly nothing in the law that requires ISPs or anyone else to deliver spam, so existing blocking and filtering techniques are not affected. Technological solutions are really the only thing that can make an impact on spam, and it helps to be able to prosecute someone who forges headers.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
Just wait until our Open Warfare Doctrine goes pre-alpha. Open relays are the reason the US Navy has been increasing it's stores of cheap (~$50,ooo) cruise missles.
You honestly think that they would have voted for this bill if they actually used their e-mail?
Oh, I'm sure they use e-mail. We just gotta find the right addresses, and incorporate that into version 2.0.
Getting e-mails that their staffers will just toss won't bother them a bit.
Oh well, at least it will bother their staffers.
Remember, this is an election year. Make spam an issue, and they'll HAVE to defend (or reverse) their position.
No they won't, because chances are their opponent will probably have the exact same position.
Grover Clevland...now there's a guy who knew how to veto.
You could just look over to your e-mail inbox and revel in the pile of offers for making said penis even bigger, or making it even more warm and tingly by viewing photos of naked celebs, or keeping it stiff by buying giant mountains of 100% natural herbal viagra-like products.
Of course, you'll need some way to purchase all those things, so you probably ought to take up that nice Nigerian gentleman on his offer to pay you 10% of the 50 million US dollars he wants to transfer into your bank account.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
(Yes, as a matter of fact I did steal that from The Onion, why do you ask?)
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
I should like to point out that most politicians, including senators, run their own small to large businesses, of all shapes and sizes in some way- keeping their hands far enough away to avoid conflict of interest.
Do you really think that THEIR companies don't spam people?
And of course the usual suspect lobbies don't help much either, considering this is also politics + business.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...it gives each marketer in the United States one free shot at each consumer's e-mail inbox
Can a subcontracted person be defined as a 'marketer'? I.E., Joe Spammer pays 'John Smith' $50 to one-time spam 3,000,000 addresses from his email account. 'John Smith' uses a valid return address but abandons account after the dirty deed is done. Technically within the law?
Tell Cheney they've discovered oil where spammers are located. Watch the bombs start falling.
Ignorance is the root of all evil.
Have you perhaps looked at laws and their selective enforcement lately? A woman can rape a child, have his baby, and sue him for child support, maybe she'll go to jail. A woman can lie to a man she's not married to about whether a child is his, and even if this is later shown to be false, he is still obligated to pay her money? A woman can be with a man who doesn't adopt her pre-existing children, and if they get used to him, he now owes THEM money?
W.T.F.
The Democrats want to take you money and give it to someone else, because they feel guilty about being rich and lying all the time, so you should too. The Republicans just want to make sure you're not thinking bad thoughts, and fucking the right person, unless that person is a mistress, in which case be discreet so "those" people don't end up in *their* country club. Oh and rich people should be allowed to fly to europe for abortions, but poor people should be forced to have kids, preferably uneducated, to keep the price of manual labor affordable.
I know it doesn't allow Private Parties to sue, but I have affiliations with a smaller company that is an ISP for other ISP's. They have like 8 OC48's. Would THEY be able to sue people due to spams I receive through their network?
The President's come under some criticism of late because he hasn't vetoed any bills in this term. Maybe we can give him a reason to change that.
White House contact info is at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/ The most effective communication for this type of this thing is a real phone call and fax.
If you decide to fax a note, the general rules of thumb are to address the issue in the first sentence, to keep it short, be concise with your reasoning, and to note anything that gives you expertise relating to the issue.
These guys actually do keep track of the mail.
I hate SPAN as much as the next fellow slashdotter. But having the goverment get it's hand into this sets a bad example. I really think the free market should be able to take care of this. Not the goverment.
Life is not for the lazy.
Actually, my US senators and representative do use e-mail and have responded to my comments. No more meaningfully than to snail mail, but they use it. I feel no more disenfranchised when e-mailing them than I do when I used to send letters.
On the bright side, my state representative uses e-mail very effectively, both responding to my comments, sending out information and requesting feedback on topics with which he is concerned.
The only one I fail to hear from is my state senator, who gets elected by the party majority on the other side of my district and ignores anything that deals with my concerns.
The state rep admits spam is out of control, and recommends using good filtering because anything politically palatable enough to pass will be weak and ineffective. Long live open source MTA's and MDA's, rule-based and Bayesian filters. Really, can any legislation keep up with spammer technology? Heck, those open source solutions are about 97% effective from my data and require tuning to stay effective.
Know why this is called the "CAN-SPAM" act? All that spam is going to have to get redirected somwhere... how about Canada?
I should note one interesting wrinkle. Unlike what is common in other Federal laws, the act "supersedes any statute, regulation, or rule of a State or political subdivision of a State " but says _nothing_ about the District of Columbia. Soooo, if people can rally the DC council to pass a California-like law, perhaps there may be a new place to host your mail servers.
A final copy of the act can be found on my website. http://www.hypertouch.com/legal/s877-eas.html
I'm pretty pessimistic about things right now. Here are my chief concerns about the bill.
1."I CAN SPAM " Act legalizes unlimited spam -- even after"opt-outs "
The "SEPARATE LINES OF BUSINESS OR DIVISIONS " clause in the act permits spammers to send repeatedly to you even after you've opted out as long as they change domain names, a.k.a. lines of business.
The impression we have is that the DMA asked for this so that one cannot opt out of spam from the Fortune 500 by giving notice to their corporate HQ, you have to track down each"Division. " But more to the glorious point from the Viagra spammers perspective, see what happens if I opt out of a spam for today's mail bin: (picked at random)
By my sending email (or going to Prosize-Health.biz or whatever hoops they choose to put up for their process), I can"opt out. " However that spammer will be able to spam me LEGALLY from all of their other lines of business, e.g. Biggersize-health.biz, etc. Note that the spammer's email only represents itself as Prosize-Health.biz... All they have to do is spend $7 every couple of weeks for a new domain for their new"Line of Busines " (they might even bother to call it a new Division) and they are home free. There is NOTHING I can do to stop this. I can track down every big spammer and personally serve them with an opt-out, but that doesn't trickle down to their thousands of "Divisions. "
Let's be clear -- Spammers are already talking about this open license on their bulletin boards and mailing lists.
2."I CAN SPAM " punishes only the spammer, not the marketer
By rotating through US based spammers, or using untraceable overseas spammers, often in Russia or China, businesses will be allowed to advertise via spam with abandon. The great strength of the upcoming California law is that is target both the marketer and the spammer. That will be gone when California laws are made void. For example, we have been trying to get Discover Credit Card to stop sending spam to us for over 18 months. They literally just regularly rotate through new
In certain circles, a well-timed question about whether it was their intention to support purveyors of pornography and fake penis-enlargment medications might work wonders.
How does one ask a public question like this in a way anybody would see it?
What about their relatives emails? Family's? Friends? Just start emailing away...
and not the spammers. I remember a while back there was a posting about the telemarketers that gave their phone number. After a few phone calls, they decided they didn't like their own medicine very much and even changed their phone number. Like most things we American's take on, we work our asses off for a very short period of time and then get tired of trying and most of us give up. I propose that we contact the companies whose products are advertised in spam, and inform them of how we do not approve of their marketing method.
Yes, spam is cheap and that is why it is so profitable for not only the spammer but the company that paid a direct marketing firm to advertise their product. Most companies have toll free numbers. If 1/1000th of the people who recieve spam for a product from a company in the US called this company, their marketing model would fall apart.
This would at least reduce spam for somewhat legitimate products. However, at best, we would only pull this off one time, and in a few months, all these companies would be right back at it.
If I drive fast enough at the red light, it'll appear green.
tend to use proper english and other tells that crap spammers don't. I have no problem with spam that's sent that follows rules. It makes filters much more effective.
I had a problem with spammers sending spam with popunders. I added in a rule to Mercury to delete any message that contained the line "script langage=javascript." BAM. No more of those. In fact, I'd really appreciate if all spammers would use Java-script in their messages.
Don't like Yahoo spamming you? Guess what? They follow rules and guidlines for their messages. All you have to do is figure out what tells their messages have and configure your mail server to block any messages that match those tells.
No, this isn't going to fix the whole spam problem but at least it's making it easier to block.
I don't get any e-mails with the ADV: in the subject either. More spammers should follow that rule. "Legitimate" spammers do follow that rule. So I really don't care if the government gives them an out. My mail filter can handle them just fine without legistlation.
It's the idiots that invent new combinations of words and letters that are a problem. We need legislation to be able to go after those we can as well as techical means and social means to get them to knock it off.
There are laws about litter, too. That hasn't solved the litter problem but it helps a bit. And just like litter, everyone needs to do their part with spam. Maybe we should take a hint from Singapore and start caneing people who spam.
Not doing anything because it's not 100% is just silly. There is no silver bullet for spam. It's nice to know that Congress has the sense to at least make some kind of dent. On top of legislation we also need technical solutions and social solutions.
Pretending we should just focus on one solution is going to accomplish exactly zero.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
I currently have a Hotmail account. One of the things that annoys me is that emails from Microsoft can't be blocked by the internal filter. They always seems to be writing to me, to alert me to the fact that if I pay I can get more features. This to my way of thinking is spam. Will this be blocked? If it is, what does it mean for emails that alert me to the fact that my inbox is nearing its limit? Will they be forced to start deleting my emails if I go over limit without warning because they will be banned for alerting me. I know, I know, I shouldn't even bother with Hotmail, but sometimes it is useful to have web-based email addresses, and this type of issue will surely affect all mail providers.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
Now that it's a federal offense to harvest addresses from the web, I've just updated Seed Spambots to embed more IP/epoch in the email addresses.
Freshmeat Page
Freshmeat hasn't yet updated to 1.02, so the links are out-of-date.
The 1.02 version: demo download
Like the part where Hitler suspended civil liberties "temporarily"?
Yeah, right.
Since I haven't been following this issue at all, and since it probably doesn't matter what any of us think about it anyway because our elected representatives don't actually represent us anymore, my only contribution is to point out that the Hormel Meat Company operates an actual Museum of SPAM near their corporate hq in Austin, Minnesota. Anybody been there? How about a mini-review?
I'm still waiting...For the Hormel company to file for patent infringement for the use of the word Spam ...They've been making spam since 1937, long before the internet was around
:) )...
(not that their site isn't high tech
Harumph!
How in the hell did this get modded informative?
Had you read the bill (which is more than most congresscritters do, but I digress) you would have seen that:
In other words, laws like Washington's are affected not in the slightest.
Wake up, /.'ers, the sky isn't falling. True, it isn't the greatest (or even a terribly "good" antispam bill,) but politics is the art of the possible. Nowhere is it more true than in politics that the perfect is the enemy of the good. We'll get a good law eventually.
That's what might get Congress's attention. Put 50 million email addresses on their do-not-spam list. Put the fear of losing an election in your Congressman.
I wouldn't register my REAL email address on that list, of course. Heaven forbid that the spammers get ahold of it. But I have a couple of Hotmail addresses that I use for all dubious lists, postings, and web sign-in forms. (Hotmail because it amuses me to send the spam to Microsoft and make them pay for the bandwidth.) If we could all register 50 million addresses of ANY sort on that list I think there might be a chance to get real legislation passed.
Maybe it's not a fool proof plan (this is the US Congress we are talking about here) but it can't hurt. So sign up and sign your immaginary friends up too. I know I'll be making email accounts just to add to this list, in case I like suddenly need a new spam free email account.
but will not allow private parties to sue spammers
Just to be sure, and because I'm too lazy right not to read through the legalese.... does the law explicitly prohibit private parties from suing spammers?
And then, what about state laws, I already read a comment that quoted: "This Act supersedes any stat-ute, regulation, or rule of a State or political subdivision of a State that expressly regulates the use of electronic mail to send commercial messages, except to the extent that any such statute, regulation, or rule prohibits falsity or deception in any portion of a commercial electronic mail message or information attached thereto."
but if an exception to this is rules that prohibits falsity or deception etc. would that mean that states could allow private parties for fraud and deception?
And how would this affect a private party from suing for a Denial of Service attack, which could be considered above and beyond "use of electronic mail"?
If this does limit spammers to using legitamite email addresses then at least I can update my procmail scripts to bounce email from entire domains that spam.
Regardless, I'm thinking of implementing a whitelist/greylist system.
And if I had a clean email address what I would do is not give out my real email address to anyone and use sneakemail to filter all my email. Even though I get a dozen spams a day, I still use sneakemail to see if anyone I do business with is giving away email addresses.
This signature used to contain a cute kitty virus with ansii art. Please set the slashdot editors on fire. Thank you
Here is how we will finally win the war on spam.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
You might think spam is a curse, but if this bill actually stopped spam, just think how many companies would see down-spiraling sales due to decreased advertising audience. That would bad news for the economy; for shareholders and employees alike.
By passing this law, the hopefully spam-jammed internet should create increased demand for bandwidth and therefore increase sales in infrastructure hardware as well as spamming and anti-spamming software. IANA economist, but that should boost the stock market pretty good!
Finally, far be it from my to suggest slashdotters are unpatriotic, but would it kill any of you to actually BUY something from an email advertisement? Why not do your part to keep your country's economy moving?
Also, don't we owe some gratitude to the legislators who have our index funds' best interests at heart?
How does have an undergraduate degree, a Master's degree, and/or a Ph.D. equate to you knowing what you're talking about? Sorry, but most everything I learned in college has little to do with reality and lots to do with impressing equally out-of-touch professors.
So now they will send spam to you with a subject line of "Hi" about Mini RC Cars and Viagra and you can't do a thing about it under Federal or WA law. California law did prohibit that, but we're hosed. The one thing you might be able to preserve is a private right of action in a state court, but that will be a battle someone has to be willing to finance. The big ISPs won't do it, they'd rather file in the Federal Court down the street from their HQ.
My bayes corpus was working fine (less than 1% false negative, less than .2% false positive, and only on the really spammy ones) until the db got corrupted about a week ago. :( Good news is that getting a large enough spam corpus to retrain the system is easy. Bad news is that getting a large enough non-spam corpus to balance that out will take a while. Lesson of note: before trying to feed 1600+ messages into sa-learn, make sure you backup your .spamassassin directory first! Going to have to write a shell script to handle that for me...
Just for the curious, I think the bayes_db file got corrupted because the training process went on for so long. I had sa-learn on automatically, so there may have been competing processes (learning ham/spam) trying to write to bayes_db, and messing up the lockfiles. Just my wild-assed guess at this point.
Considering the FTC's prompt aggressive approach to enforcing current consumer protection law, I have little faith in this latest legislative foray. Be it stock scams, penis patches, pornography, or purchase drugs on-line, SPAM already breaks CURRENT laws. I have yet to seem effective enforcement of the laws we already have, does anyone honestly believe that this will this really make a difference?
Until the people that are harmed (i.e. the people that own the mail servers) can sue for damages, and pursue the SPAMMERS on their own, nothing will change. If you don't take the consequences out of the cyber world and put it into the real world, we will continue to get spammed. While this is a tiny, tiny, tiny step in the right direction, until tour government allows/starts using much more aggressive tactics, very little will change.
What about baseball bats and cousins named Vinny? It seems to me that it would be hard to send spam with broken fingers and knees. [ Don't flame me, notice that tongue in my cheek! ]
Cluge
Angry People Rule
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
This is just an off-the-wall idea that just occured to me. I use Mozilla T-bird with Bayesian filtering. If a spammer 'circumvents' the 'security measure' that prevents his junk from getting in my mailbox, can I take him to court?
Help find a cure for cancer. Join the [H]orde
The intellectual elite of Kuro5hin.org insists that there's nothing wrong with this bill, and has already voted down two stories which claimed otherwise. Since those "in the trenches" of technology and culture see nothing wrong with it, then you are surely mistaken.
Parent is obvious flamebait and neglects to provide evidence why we liberated Afghanistan if we're only interested in oil! The invading Iraq over oil is as tired as jokes about Monica's blue dress.
http://spamgourmet.com/
Lets you easily give a different email address to each different list/website/company you deal with, to limit the amount of mail you get to each address, plus set up trusted senders... works well.
I'm curious as to why you assume everyone gets offers for penis enlargement, naked celebs, or herbal shit to get hard. I have never received any of these. Have you ever considered they only send them to people who need them?
Folks..you've heard it. Your elected officials want spam. Let's give it to them.
http://www.spamware.org/spamware/iwantspam.asp
Warning : If you submit your email address, you will get bulk emails.
Not that I'm disagreeing.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
I was totally going for funny. Thought maybe somebody would try to get digs back in at the Democrats or whatever.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Of course, proving that your address was harvested could be challenging. Address tagging, anyone?
...spammers retaliate by launching a massive DoS attack against the entire US senate!
-AP
It may interest you that the EU has passed a directive requiring opt-in. Several states have implemented this into national law already.
Fines here in Sweden are stiff, up to $500k for infractions.
This law has no silly exceptions for charities, religious institutions, etc. The notable exception to the spam law is if you have a previous business relationship with the sending party; I think such an exception is reasonable -- assuming an implied acceptance of marketing material from existing business partners, if nothing else has been stated. In the same breath, though, let me mention that such an acceptance of marketing e-mail within a business relationship can be expressly revoked at any time, even if previously expressly permitted, also as mandated by the same law.
In Sweden, this law goes into effect on April 1, 2004 (I don't know if there is a hidden meaning in that, but I hope not).
It is also interesting to note that the law is very broad in scope and covers all text-, video-, and image-based communications where the delivery has a store-and-forward model -- it explicitly covers SMS messaging as well, for example.
Now, with this said, I shouldn't hope too much that the US, like you say, "show up the corrupt U.S. idiots". The current administration is not known for its humility and desire to learn from other people and cultures.
(In fact, as a side note, I am amazed at how this administration has managed to turn the mainstream attitude in Europe from "want to be an American too" to "would pick up arms tomorrow against the US if I had the opportunity" in just a few years. It's absolutely unbelievable how arrogant the current president has managed to come himself across to the world; I'm not sure the sheer level of this is realized within the American borders.)
I think Afghanistan is more on revenge motive. Iraq, both oil and Bush elder's (the first Bush) agenda that Bush Junior wishes to fulfill.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
Clearly we have the best Congress spammers' money can buy. I may have to change my email address to use Shift-JIS or strange ISO-8859 characters now.
Thank you, O Congress! May I have another?!
[nt]
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
If you have e-mail trap addresses, forward them to president@whitehouse.gov. If you want, fax the whitehouse at 202-456-2461. If you do fax a letter, you may want to include a copy of 1 day's worth of spam to the letter.
Of course, if you do this every day, they can opt-out.
I spoke to a couple of representitives who told me that the bill was voted on before they had a copy of the bill, so they could only vote on it, based on the title and not read the bill.
Fight Spammers!
Put 50 million on the list? Why limit it to that? I already have several thousand I use. I could put those on there.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
There's been a last-minute change in the bill. The version passed by the Senate and approved by the House was to take effect 120 days after enactment. A last-minute change makes the bill effective January 1, 2004. This prevents California's tough anti-spam law from being in effect for over three months.
Quoth the poster:
So now they will send spam to you with a subject line of "Hi" about Mini RC Cars and Viagra and you can't do a thing about it under Federal or WA law.
Why not? Washington law specifically forbids "false or misleading information in the subject line." The Federal law specifically does not pre-empt any law dealing with falsity. The primary reason that spammers had in falsifying information in their headers was that many states had prohibitions on spam. WA (and MD, etc) put laws on their books prohibiting emails with such falsehoods which nicely side-stepped the problem of being content related.
And they still do. Friend, if you think the spammers are going to start putting their real IP addresses in the headers, you're smoking weed. If you think Washington's law has made a difference in this regard, you're on crack. No, I suspect that there will be plenty of grist for my mill for the foreseeable future.
So, tell me again what the problem is?
"S877" goes into my blocking keyword list today
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The one small bit overlooked by this piece of alleged anti-spam legislation is that it never tells anyone not to spam.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
But having the goverment get it's hand into this sets a bad example. I really think the free market should be able to take care of this. Not the goverment.
[sarcasm]The next thing you know, the government will move on from spam and start restricting other forms of theft. Pretty soon, it will be illegal to steal your neighbor's electricity.
It's like rape: why does the government have to make it illegal? The free market could solve the problem with technology (rape whistles, chastity belts, stun guns, etc.).[/sarcasm]
When spammers are stealing bandwidth from people and costing businesses and individuals money, then the government should do something. What I'm upset with is that the government has done too little.
500 megabytes in length. Now that spammers have to start using valid return addresses, maybe they'll start receiving and honoring my unsubscribe request.
In a bizarre bit of twenty first century irony, Congress has begun using zomby computers all over the internet to flood the white house with copies of the anti spam bill.
"The president said I am tired of people e-mailing me about penis enlargement etc.... I want to receive something substantial about reducing spam. I guess we misunderstood him to mean that was what he wanted in his inbox" said Tom Daschle.
"The worst thing about this e-mail is that the last line says 'The president of the United States hopes that you will send this to 75 of your closest friends' That guarantees we will see this for a long while" states Dick Cheney.
Did they send the bill to whitehouse.gov or whitehouse.com?
uce@ftc.gov
:)
.gov addys).
Please note that I have no authority to request e-mail to this address and any e-mail sent to it will be unwanted and unsolicited, thereby may result in prosecution of up 5 years in prison.
So have a field day, and I hope those web scrapers find this address
(Unforetunately it probably won't work since a smart spammer will not send e-mails to the
Causing Chaos Everywhere,
Nik J.
The strange world of a loner, in a populous city, drowning in society
...not even on the Internet. When I first hear of this, I was like, yeah, right, how worthless. But then I remembered Echelon - the monitoring system that for years has been operated by the U.S. N.S.A. that monitors every single bit of information coming in and out of the U.S. In recent years, it has been expending to including most of the English speaking countries. When this law and others like it, the Echelon hardware could be upgraded (if it has not all ready) to provide a full national firewall for the U.S. - just like China and some of the more rabid Arab countries.
Mmmm, maybe spam is not so bad. This is just like the argument that we need to suspend the Bill of Rights in order to fight "terrorist" and child porn.
An interesting note in the bill. It provides for 20% of the civil damages awarded in a case where a spammer violates the bill, for parties who provide information (proof, evidence, what have you) that leads to the successful procecution of a spammer. Sadly, by the way the bill reads, that's not a huge incentive, after all - the max cap for any civil suit seems to be US $1 million, and standard being $25.00. Of course the main issue is how effective will the bill be? We all know the truth - it won't be. Why? No one in Congress has any idea how to technically stop SPAM, or trace it, or the ability to enforce it outside the US. My suggestion on the issue of the bill? Grab all the SPAM you can that you get sent, and forward it to (a) your Representative, (b) your Senator, (c) the President. Challenge them to track it down. Be sure to give 'em all the header info, of course. I'd love to see in a week how many of the SPAM messages they get - they can actually trace to the companies that sent them. Nice try Congress. Better luck next time.
Could this technically make the use of nym servers illegal? Remailers in general?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I am not too good at fractions, but looking at my Filtering Summary I would say that the current problem is MUCH MUCH higher!
DAY_SUMMARY Wed 3 Dec 2003
198 #operations
140 spam
58 passed
0 whitelisted
DAY_SUMMARY Mon 8 Dec 2003
388 #operations
242 spam
146 passed
54 whitelisted
DAY_SUMMARY Tue 9 Dec 2003
76 #operations
40 spam
36 passed
10 whitelisted
DAY_SUMMARY Thu 4 Dec 2003
192 #operations
94 spam
98 passed
2 whitelisted
DAY_SUMMARY Fri 5 Dec 2003
341 #operations
181 spam
160 passed
14 whitelisted
DAY_SUMMARY Sat 6 Dec 2003
83 #operations
59 spam
24 passed
10 whitelisted
DAY_SUMMARY Sun 7 Dec 2003
141 #operations
105 spam
36 passed
24 whitelisted
The Timing on this will work out just fine. By this summer it will be clear that this bill didn't stop spammers from flooding people's inboxes. We will have proof that these measures are ineffictive, and with the Elections approaching it will be easier to put preasure on the Congress Critters for a more effective law.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
"So now they will send spam to you with a subject line of "Hi" about Mini RC Cars and Viagra and you can't do a thing about it under Federal or WA law. "
Why not? Washington law specifically forbids "false or misleading information in the subject line."
Why is "hi" misleading?
Friend, if you think the spammers are going to start putting their real IP addresses in the headers, you're smoking weed.
Won't they run the risk of getting fined then?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
- Subj: Did you get this email?
- Subj: Something to think about
- Subj: Re: what was on the news last night
- Subj: She was very pleased
But even if they are accurate, our user's in boxes will still get creamed:- Subj: 1.95% Mortgage Rate - NO JOKE
- Subj: have hundreds of lenders help you get the lowest rates
- Subj: Mortgage Leads as Low as $8.00/lead vovlmh.hhpdo tmfkieqjl ffkdly:
Now that last one, can I afford to bank roll a Federal Lawsuit on the gamble that a hash buster is ruled misleading by a jury -- and then gamble on what portion of the "up to $25" the judge gives us?Finally, the point is spammers can now consider putting their real IP addresses in their headers because what they are sending is now legal. If their IP addresses begin to get blacklisted, then they can and will again pump their spam through any number of overseas IP addresses without breaking the law. I do not like to black list all of Russia or China to block spam, even if I know I will lose little legitamate email. There is nothing illegal in the law about making it difficult to contact the sender, as long as its legal.
The spammer we brought a class action against, Link It Software (legal.hypertouch.com) did just that. After we filed they stopped sending through their California Sprint T-1 line and started sending via a front business in India (xactmailer.net) No hidden IP address of the "originating machine" but the domain was registered to some company in India and the header trail ended in India.
You're right. I was just using the time-honored knee-jerk translation of 10 SEK per USD. The rate seems to thrive in the neighborhood of that number anyway; I was using 10 for my mental lookups when the rate was closer to 13 SEK per USD, too.
I should probably consider changing that habit if it goes below SEK 7.50. Coming to think of it, isn't that rather close now?
Oh, and if you're interested in the governmental full paper with law text and stuff, it's here (in Swedish). For some obscure departmental reason, it's from the Dept of Agriculture...
The legislature will not solve this problem. The system will not be re-architected or overhauled to defend against this onslaught any time soon. Changing or attacking the business model that supports spam is unlikely to be an achievable goal for such a worldwide pheonomena.
The best thing you can do is to help educate people to cease being profitable targets for spammers, and help them setup the defense that, like any other computer-security approach is layered and simple enough to use to be effective.
For me, that's POPFile and Outlook 2003 (gasp--yep, plain old MS Outlook).
POPFile, for me is 99.54% accurate for my work email addresses and 99.18% accurate for my personal email address--both of which, interestingly enough, suffer from about 24% of all received email being spam.
Cooly enough, of the the fraction of a percent of spam that DOES get through POPFile, Outlook 2003 identifies about 90%. As a result, in the last week, despite receiving on the order of 200+ spam emails a day (I have email addresses I've used for almost ten years), I've only had 4-5 actually make it past POPFile and outlook 2003 into my in-box. And with Outlook 2003's properties that prevents me from loading embedded HTML images from senders I have not explicitly approved, my looking at THOSE "surviving" spam did not signal to the spammers that their message was ever viewed by anyone.
Your mileage may vary, but for me it's about as good as it gets.
I paid to register Postal Inspector / Spam Inspector...but instead I now use POPFile, which is free (donorware) and open source. (The Outlook choice is a business necessity).
-Camisade
This could have the added benefit of...
- if we did not choose to have our information shared at the time, it gives us an opportunity to go back to the "marketing partner" and update our records
- If it's a website that we HAVE agreed to share with marketing partners, then it might actual generate sales for the spammer seeing as they'd gain positive buzz from the association with their "marketing partner".
I could see this backfiring if illegal spam falsely states that they received the email addresses from big companies, like MSFT or HP. Some doublechecking and whatnot should be included.Perhaps if companies that sell email addresses included a single unique field in the information that's sold -- a field that would specifically be filled out and required for any emails that were sent. Then, if we received a spam that contained that unique piece of information we would know that the spam was, in fact, generated from the agreement with the "marketing partner". If the spam does not contain that info-nugget yet claims to be from the same "marketing partner", then we know that the spam is a bunch of hooey.