UK Spam Law Goes Live

loonix_gangsta writes "So, the UK has taken matters into its own hands and, as of today, is making it a criminal offence to send e-mails or text messages unless the recipient has agreed in advance to accept them. The law comes into force today. Unfortunately much spam originates from the US so the UK had previously asked the US to co-operate."

Comments

This could help spammers.. ?

[junkymailbox]

in true slashdot style, NOT RTFA

The laws make it a criminal offence to send e-mails or text messages unless the recipient has agreed in advance to accept them.

IANAL the article is not clear on whether they're going to prosecute the companies or the spammers working for a company?
If they are going to prosecute the companies then i would imagine someone's going to do a fake spam to frame their competitor.
with the current way of distributing spam via viruses and zombies this seems like a great law to use to annoy your competitor.

Re:This could help spammers.. ?

[Otter]

My concern is the same as with the proposed California spam law -- what constitutes "agreed to accept" and at what level do I get arrested?

I've been job hunting recently and have sent several resumes to people with whom I've had no previous contact, generally having gotten their addresses from their friends who suggested I contact them. Including in the UK. Would I be eligible for prosecution under this law? Would they actually arrest me?

Re:Unfortunately much spam originates from the US.

[WildBeast]

What worries me is that people who's machines get worm infected might be the ones getting sued.

Re:Unfortunately much spam originates from the US.

[Andypoo]

This both worries me and pleases me at the same time.

Whilst innocent users could get caught up in horrendous legal battles, it also means that class actions against certain companies making horribly bug-riddled mail clients may also be forced to take place.

Of course, I shouldn't really wish legal battles on anybody, but in the view of means to an end..

Andypoo.
(Yes, this time I will use Plain Old Text)

Re:And yet...

[JawFunk]

Haha. THis was exactly my thought. How is this law going to be interpreted by lawyers, espeially in America. I work at a firm (law firm, coincidentally) and a third of our clients originate in London and Bermuda (UK law). It would be hilarious if they sued us for sending them updates on cases without notifying them or getting written agreement first, via mail! This is worse than the DMCA, I wonder how the UK courts will use or abuse this legislation.

Re:Wont make a blind bit of difference

[rbeltene]

Exactly. As a Sys Admin - I constantly told people that I didn't care what kind of spam hit their email (and it is amazing what gets through filters) NOT to reply to it because it just perpetuated it and definately increased the amount of spam they were going to get. I also recently cleaned a client's system (cable modem - no firewall) - they had so much spyware and adware on it that it took 20 minutes after the OS started before you could get the system to repsond - among it were three redirected hosts - guess what they were doing, all unaware.

Shutting out the worst offenders

[Macka]

There seems to have been quite an escalation of spam over the last couple of months, with my mailbox receiving double the amount it used to. I've managed to cut that down to just a handful a day by adding a blanket delete rule on all mails coming from earthlink.com, juno.com, verizon.net, sprint.com, concentric.com, att.net, rr.com, ukscby.com, ukscby.net and any address ending in .ar.

It's a shame that all users of those domains/services are now blocked from sending me legitimate email, but until they get their act together and clamp down on spammers, that's the way it's going to stay.

My junk filter catches 99% of the rest, but at 1/2 a dozen a day, that's easily manageable.

Hopefully the impending US Law will make life harder for them. Ok, it's not the best solution, but it's a step in the right direction, and will make it easier to take similar small steps in the future so that we end up get legislation that really does the business.

And before anyone pipes up stating that you can get rid of spam by legislation alone, sure I acknowledge that. But there is no "one size fits all" solution to this problem, it has to be tackled on many fronts. Both legally and technically! So this is an important arrow to have in the quiver.

Macka

Re:Unfortunately much spam originates from the US.

[Andypoo]

I deal a fair bit with tracking of spam (I wouldn't say I'm an expert or trained in any regard), but a lot of the spam (mostly pharmaceutical, penis enlargements, etc) seem to point back to sites hosted in China. I'd say the vast majority of these.

Whilst you can use a bit of 'guesswork' to determine that they may be from the US due to certain use of grammar, linked images, etc, the *majority* is just pointing to China and sometimes Korea (although this is more just delivery).

I don't know, maybe we're just being targetted differently being .au :) Perhaps all the US spammers are ignoring me as an unlikely buyer

I must say, that overall, US ISPs are fairly responsive to spam (at least in regards to hosted sites and DNS), as for delivery (which is mostly worm-related these days), I get very little response (if only I could get Comcast to act on those few hundred messages I reported).

Andypoo.

Re:Unfortunately much spam originates from the US.

[Zocalo]

While on the one hand this is bad since an "innocent" gets taken to court, but since the "a trojan did it your honour!" plea seems to be the in thing in the UK at the moment that's not too much of a problem. However, raising public awareness of the issue of not patching your system may lead to you been held liable for spam or worse is a good thing.

I'd actually like to see a few people found guilty of this and fined a negligable amount on the grounds they were "less than technically competent" or whatever legal euphemism for "dumb" the court comes up with. Making companies, and even end users, liable for not patching their system could be a good thing all round. The big problem with this though is patch availability; if the patch has been out for months, as in the case of Nimda IIRC, then fair enough. But what happens if the first thing the world knows about a problem is when the worm hits the Internet? Can you guarantee that your judge and jury can tell the difference and pass an appropriate sentence? I suspect the answer is, and will remain for some time, "no".

Attack the link destinations

[G4from128k]

Most spam is intended to make the recipient visit some destination and do business of some kind. Perhaps anti-spam laws needs to target the businesses that use spam to create business - the destinations of all those links in all those spams. Any company that sells viagra, ink jet cartridges, cell phone plans, or mortgages will have a more vulnerable point of presense than a spammer does. Even porn and gambling sites could be vulnerable because they require more permaneance than does a spam operation. If those companies where held accountable for their marketing affiliate's spams, then they might not engage the services of spammers.

Re:Goodbye Social networking

[Anonymous Coward]

>Regarding the job posting in this

>Sunday's paper..."

If they posted their email address requesting job applicants then it is obviously ok to email them.


And what if they didn't? What if the e-mail address was found from a contact section of the company's web site? Surely if listing the e-mail in the paper without explicity granting permision to e-mail has some insinuation of permision than the same would apply to the web site? If that's the case, don't most spammers get their e-mail lists from farming them from the web?

Maybe this is a gross oversimplification

[subjectstorm]

But why not simply form a "National Do Not Spam List"?

This sort of thing allows for blanket rejection of the bulk of spam. Legit companies could of course be made exempt, as with the DNC List (debatable).

We could then levy fines on a per-incident basis.

I'll admit that FINDING the spammers might be more difficult than tracking a telemarketer - but not a hell of a lot more difficult.

You also have to consider that, unless it's an outright scam like #419, somebody is paying the spammer. Making it illegal to purchase "leads" from spammers would also be a REALLY SWELL THING TO TRY. After all, buying stolen property (even if you didn't KNOW for sure that it was stolen) is still illegal. It's not really that hard for these mortgage brokers and discount drug companies to know if they're dealing with a legitimate source or not.

Just a few thoughts. Comments are encouraged :)

Re:Unfortunately much spam originates from the US.

[leerpm]

Again, you missed his point. These people are operating completely via proxies. The websites, the trojaned open-relays, the dns hosting, are based in Asia and operated discretly by career spammers in the US. The only way you can trace it, is either the fingerprint in the spam or by "reverse-hacking" those already trojaned machines to find the path back to the original spammer's location.

The implenetation is laughable

[Andy_R]

Being a British citizen recieving spam to a personal mailbox, I phoned the "Information Commission" to get them to so something about the 50 or so spams I have had since midnight when the act came into force.

Their procedure is for me to print out a 4 page Word document (no rtf, html or any other version!), manually fill in dozens of mostly irrelevant questions, and then snail-mail(!) the form to them.

I pointed out that mailing them 200 pages of handwritten notes every 6 hours was a bit impractical, and they told me they would ONLY investigate cases where I had CONTACTED THE SPAMMER AND ASKED TO UNSUBSCRIBE!

I told the person on the other end that replying to Spam is the best way to get deluged with more, and they agreed with me.

The only bright side is that they will soon put up details of how to bypass the Information Commission and take action on your own.

I'm going after Yahoo

[Andy_R]

This law is only really enforceable against reasonably legitimate companies with UK addresses. It needs a test case, and I've found a real doozy of a target!

For years now, Yahoo have been sticking html and text adverts on the end of messages on YahooGroups mailing lists, which bugs the hell out of me. So I just mailed Yahoo UK to tell them I'm not consenting to recieving adverts from them.

Technically, I can claim 5,000 for each one I get from now on. It will be interesting to see how this works out - maybe they will unsubscribe me from everything?