FTC Adopts New Rule For Sexually Explicit Spam

enforcer999 writes "As you know, the CAN SPAM ACT preempted many state laws that were tougher on spammers. For instance, many of the laws that were enacted by states included a requirement that sexually explicit SPAM be labeled as such. The FTC, in charge of adopting rules, came up with a new rule that will require sexually explicit SPAM to be labeled as such. Hmm? I think the states were already trying to do this before the Federal government preempted them. Anyway, I wonder if it will work?"

Comments

It needs to be a standard label for filters

[Jason Straight]

without being a standard label of some kind it'll be useless, I need to be able to keep my kids from seeing it, like being labeled SEXUALLY EXPLICIT is going to keep my 14 yr old from clicking it.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[ITman75]

You can have rules or even blockers that will look for this key word of Sexual Explicit and have it rejected.

I think having this warning will be great. Just have a rule or filter looking for this in the subject line and then it rejects or auto delete it.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[LanceTaylor]

If it was labelled with SEXUALLY EXPLICIT then it would be easy to setup a spam filter that would never let your 14 year old ever see it.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[way2trivial]

maybe we need a responsible ISP to allow user/customer selected keyword filtering at the ISP level.

Mindspring sadly, is gone...
(yes, I know they were combined with earthlink, I still have my mindspring email)

but that would keep it from your 14 year old...

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[Jason Straight]

Come to think of it - I'd be happy if they passed a law that said they aren't allow to misspell :)

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[AKnightCowboy]

without being a standard label of some kind it'll be useless

Well that would've been a better idea. Just force spammers via the law to label all their spam in the subject line with a common word like "[UBE]" or "[ADULT]". Then let the READER decide whether they want to filter that stuff easily or not. The problem is, of course, that spammers don't obey the laws anyway and couldn't care less whether you really want to receive their crap so they'd ignore such requirements. If spammers played fair and clearly labeled their crap I would stop complaining because then I could just filter advertisements that I'm not interested in. It'll never happen though.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[Zocalo]

You jest, but I'm fully expecting to see a variety of creative spellings of "sexually explicit" as spammers pretend to comply with the law while still trying to slip by filters. There's five candidates in there for simple !/1/i/I/l/| substitutions alone... Unless the spammer is also responsible for checking the spelling, and liable if it's in error, then this is not going to be as effective as it might, and even if they are liable, I'm betting adoption isn't going to be stellar.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[dipipanone]

Well that would've been a better idea. Just force spammers via the law to label all their spam in the subject line with a common word like "[UBE]" or "[ADULT]".

I've got a better idea yet. Force all the spammers to label all their spam [SPAM] and we're all set.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[Tran]

If it had standard lables it would be filterable by ISPs, and that is why spammers will not adhere to the rule. Of course there are those that would want to receivwe this kind of spam. Hmm, maybe hte ISP will only block it at custoemr requests...

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[Tran]

Problem is some people may want to receive certain spam...

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[AndroidCat]

By the time the spam gets to the reader, it's already eaten bandwidth and storage along the way. If labelling their spam made it quasi-legal, the spam flood would be like a drink from the firehose compared to now (as bad as it is). Look at the figures large ISPs are publishing for the percentage of their total email that is spam, and growing amount of it.

Filters are great for the end user, but eventually we're going to run out of carpets to sweep the spam under. Labelling is not "playing fair".

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[Short Circuit]

The funny thing is, the rule benefits the spammers, too. Their target audience will be more likely to click on it.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[Steve B]

I'd be happy if they passed a law that said they aren't allow to misspell

Actually, what is needed is a clarification of existing computer-cracking law to the effect that any identifiable attempt to circumvent spam filtering is an illegal intrusion just like any other attempt to get into somebody else's computer without permission. The existing penalties for cracking are high enough to serve as a deterrent once a few high-profile scalps have been collected.

The spammer claims that "v1agr4" is just an innocent typo and not an attempt to get through filters? Tell it to the judge and see if he buys it.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[gauauu]

Nah.

If ISPs can succesfully filter spam, users will stop getting spam. If nobody receives spam, nobody will respond and purchase from the spam. Thus there will be no money to be made off spam. Thus there will be no more spam.

Sure, until that whole effect trickles through the system, there will be plenty of spam hitting the ISPs. But eventually the market will dry up.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem is some people may want to receive certain spam...

They want spam labeled so they can select for it. What's your point? Maybe you should finish your ideas instead of . . .

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the fascination with putting stuff in the subject line. RFCs 822 and 2822 already provide for labelling email with meta-data, they are called headers, and filters work just as well, if not better, with them.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[Old Uncle Bill]

Hopefully Viagra emails will fall into this category. Between that and the nudie emails, this would virtually elmininate the spam I receive.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[A55M0NKEY]

I read the Story of O and it's sequel at age 14. ( I was reading one of my parent's books they had to read in college "The Rhetoric of No" which had an article that mentioned it - I thought KEWL, a porno book I can probably get my hands on. I sat at the library and read it. I could have bought it at the Bookland but I was too poor to shell out. It didn't come with a Mature Rating sticker like CDs do nowadays.

Spam isn't any worse than that..

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[GuyinVA]

You mean you don't want your 'v!agr.a' How about 'sweet tee.ns sux cox' Or maybe 'h0t m0ms with y0ung studs'
[sarcasm]You know those are the best ones. If they weren't so good, the spammers wouldn't go thru all that trouble to misspell the text so that it will go thru the filter and into your mailbox! You're so ungreatful! [/sarcasm]

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[AssFace]

The last thing you want is for your child to have to end up thinking for themselves.

Definitely try to work out a way where the combination of a better computer filter and a national government can think for them.
That way it saves them the hassle of conscious thought and decision making, and it leaves you free to not have to talk about to them about such horrific nightmare topics like when men and women touch each other.
Hell, worse yet, your child might even be gay, or at least turned gay by spam.

A child seeing references to sex will quickly become depraved and very likely will just rape their way through the rest of their lives.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[Anonymous Coward]

What about spammers trying to sell [ADULT] [DIAPERS]? That would infringe on their rights.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[smithmc]

I agree 100%. This would make it much easier to skip over all those annoying emails from friends and jump straight to the pr0n.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[AndroidCat]

Yeah, that's true. But until we block spam to that last guy, with more relatives than chromosomes, who keeps buying spammed products, the spammers will just keep increasing power to the spam engines to reach him. They already depend on cranking out 100,000 emails to make a sale, and it doesn't cost them much more to go to a million or 10 million per sale.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[abb3w]

As the judge remarked the day that he
acquitted my Aunt Hortense,
"To be smut
It must be ut-
Terly without redeeming social importance."

Personally, I think most of the smut (either arriving as spam or available on the web) is really, really bad for young people to be reading.. but not because of the sexual content. The punctuation, grammar, and spelling is spectacularly bad most of the time-- even more so when the idjits are trying to beat a spam filter. And while I recognize that porn (like any other field of literature) has its archetypes and themes, usually the writing doesn't even achieve that: the characters are cardboard, the dialogue is wooden, and the plot is tissue-paper.

Todays kids should spend more time reading the literary classics of smut!

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations, you reiterated the subject line and got a +1 insightful for it.

Bravo, you are truly a Slashdotter.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[Anonymous Coward]

But Outlook and OE can't filter on meta-data, so those RFC-things can't be any good! (Besides, they're just requests.)

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[espo812]

Actually, what is needed is a clarification of existing computer-cracking law to the effect that any identifiable attempt to circumvent spam filtering is an illegal intrusion just like any other attempt to get into somebody else's computer without permission.

If you're running an SMTP server open to receive mail, you probably want people to send mail to you - which means you are giving them permission to access your system. If you're not running the server, someone is - and they want people to access their system (for the purposes of sending e-mail.)

This is the same concept as leaving telnet and the guest account avliable or anon ftp: clearly, you want random people to access your system (or at least you didn't take any effort to prvent them from doing such). However, I have heard of cases of people being prosecuted for doing just that. I've also heard of cases that if a banner says "welcome" at all this somehow makes it a public system and open to attack (after all, the owner is welcomming you onto the system!)

We don't need new laws - we need better technology. SMTP is admittedly broken. There are ways to fix it.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[martyros]

That's not really that hard... all the law needs to say is "It must be labelled 'SEXUALLY EXPLICIT'." If they label it '5EXUALLY EXPLICIT', well, they haven't complied with the law, now have they?

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

Except it will most likely show up as "SEXUA11Y EXP1!C!T" and other crap like that to try and get around those filters.

Am I the only one who gets spam mail that has absolutely no way to contact anyone about the product? Between Thanksgiving and Christmas 2003 I must have received at least a hundred e-mails for those mini-RC cars that were everywhere that year and not one of them had an e-mail, web address or phone number to contact in case you wanted to actually buy one.

Now I'm getting really weird spam emails that don't even seem to advertise a product, just a series of random words strung together or sometimes completely blank. Not even in HTML format, just plain text with nothing or just random words.

Are these some sort of bizarre test messages or if I read them out loud will they reverse some subconcious hypnosis induced amnesia and cause me to act out my mission to kill the prime minister of Malaysia?

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[Anonymous Coward]

But Outlook and OE can't filter on meta-data

They can and do. Tools | Message Rules | Mail in Outlook Express 6, for example. Most of the conditions are based around the meta-data, such as the To headers, Priority headers, and so on.

Putting keywords in subject lines is about as clever as packing multiple values into a single database field and trying to parse them out by hand - occasionally it can be a useful hack, but most of the time, it causes more problems than simply creating a new field.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[budgenator]

I doubt that most Viagra spams would fall into a sexualy expicit catagory, the sex is implied. Additional anyone sell prescription drugs without a prescription, isn't going to worry about this silly new law, because they were not worried about the old laws.

If you want viagra, just ask your MD, unless it's contra-indicated for you, he'll be glad to get you into the office on a regular basis for script re-fills.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[Safety Cap]

But Outlook and OE can't filter on meta-data, ~.

Outlook most certainly can run a rule based upon text in the message header.

If you're still using OE, then may god have mercy upon your soul.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[Steve B]

If you're running an SMTP server open to receive mail, you probably want people to send mail to you

If you are running a spam filter, you obviously do not want people to send spam to you. If someone sends you spam anyway, and does so in a manner that proves beyond reasonable doubt an intent to circumvent spam filtering (e.g. forged headers, alteration of filter-trigger words, misleading subject lines), he's trespassing.

I'm perfectly willing to allow someone to send spam, provided that it includes no features that can be identified as deliberate attempts to evade filtering. (As I said in the first message, the gray area of that criterion, like the unavoidable gray areas in many other laws, can be thrashed out in court on a case-by-case basis.) With that property-rights protection in place, it becomes a matter of free speech for the spammer and for the (few) people who would actually receive his spewings.

We don't need new laws - we need better technology.

We need both, just as we need both locks and police to secure physical property.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[cdyson37]

You can't just send someone to jail because they can't spell. Think what would happen to Dan Quayle.

"It's wonderful to be here in the great state of Chicago"

"No comment, but don't quote me"
-- Vice President Dan Quayle.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[the chao goes mu]

The blank ones are usually the result of test attempts to exploit some site's formmail. When I was a sysadmin for a web hosting company, I could spot spammers trying to exploit formmail by the large number of malformed requests. The gibberish emails are attempts to circumvent Baylesian spam filter (spelling? no sure). As to why they contain no other content, I am not sure. Maybe the spammer just doesn't get the concept. You need non-spam text AND your spam message...

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[djr1952]

While I generally like your idea. There are a few minor problem with:

I've got a better idea yet. Force all the spammers to label all their spam [SPAM] and we're all set.

First) SPAM is a Trademark word/spelling by Horment. See http://www.spam.com/ci/ci_in.htm

Second) Please define what is a "Spam type email" that doesn't legally cover almost every possible email message.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[the chao goes mu]

A standard label wouldn't be enforcable. Some spammer exploiting another site's sendmail script to advertise an off-shore porn site doesn't have too much to fear from US law.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

Yeah, I get a lot of e-mail that contains what appear to be snippets of text from a book before and/or after the main spam message, but its the ones that forget to include the spam message that amaze me... if it happened once or twice I'd ignore it, but I get 2 or 3 a day at work (someone in one of our Latin-America corporate offices sold a chunk of our corporate mailing list to a spammer - a chunk that includes my e-mail address - so I get a couple hundred spam per day).

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[the chao goes mu]

That should read "formmail". I got distracted. (Can't believe I made that mistake. After 2 years of cursing Matt's Archive for making spamming so easy... )

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[ultranova]

If you're running an SMTP server open to receive mail, you probably want people to send mail to you - which means you are giving them permission to access your system. If you're not running the server, someone is - and they want people to access their system (for the purposes of sending e-mail.)

This is the same concept as leaving telnet and the guest account avliable or anon ftp: clearly, you want random people to access your system (or at least you didn't take any effort to prvent them from doing such).

Um, he did take effort to prevent spammers from sending him e-mail. Namely, he ran the spam filter. If he wasn't running the spam filter, then he wouldn't care if incoming spam was trying to circumvent it, now would he ?

It's like running SSH with no guest accounts. You want only certain people to have access. You have taken steps to ensure this. Sure, the SMTP server will accept the mail, just as the SSH server will accept an incoming connection; the authorization is done once the connection/e-mail has been accepted. And the spam-filter-circumventing spam is just like a script kiddie trying to use some new exploit in sshd to gain access, and should be just as illegal.

We don't need new laws - we need better technology. SMTP is admittedly broken. There are ways to fix it.

SMTP works fine. What we need is to start encrypting all e-mail with public-key encryption, and discarding all nonecrypted mail. This will make mass-mailing impossible, because each email will need to be encrypted separately for each receiver (mailig lists will be whitelisted by subscribers, of course).

There is no way a protocol can ever tell spam from legitimate mail, unless we implement the evil bit ;).

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[Anonymous Coward]

This whole discussion is pretty pointless because we won't ever get spammers to comply with such a law in the first place.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[Anonymous Coward]

you dont have kids do you?

sorry i wouldnt want my kids to open an email and immediatly see disturbing shit.

get a fucking life and stop pretending to know what you are talkion about.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[Bluesman]

Except the ACLU will take the law to the Supreme Court since it's discriminating against people who can't spell.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[WWWWolf]

Well, that depends on what "labelling" is defined as. Is it defined in human terms ("You put this label there, and as every idiot can recognize it, it's okay"), or in computer terms ("Use a single, agreed-upon, standardized sequence of bytes that are machine-interpretable as well as human-readable")=

If it's defined as "The Subject header, purpose of which is defined in RFC 2822, must contain character sequence '[ADULT]' (represented in ASCII, ISO 8859-1, Windows-1252 and UTF-8 character sets as a byte sequence 5b 41 44 55 4c 54 5d (in base 16)), contained either in ASCII or Quoted-Printable (as defined in RFC 2045) representation of ASCII", I guess there's less room for misinterpretation...

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[Anonymous Coward]

Regarding obscene spam: If your kids' english skills aren't any better than yours, I wouldn't worry - they probably can't even read it.

I know, I know, it's pedantic to flame for spelling, and ordinarily I agree, but eight spelling mistakes in a 35 word post... you do the math. Assuming your math skills are better than your English ones. But then, they could hardly be much worse.

Look, if you don't want your kids to see disturbing shit, then throw out your TV, radio, computer, and library card. Cancel your subscriptions. Remove all books from your house and build a nice little plastic bubble around it. Find a way to telecommute (without your computer, which you already threw away), and get *real* friendly with the pizza delivery guy.

Everybody has to deal with things they consider offensive. Whoever told you that you have the right to never be offended by anything *lied*. *Life* is offensive. Being offended, and dealing with it in a reasonable, adult manner, is a part of everyday life in the real world.

Don't like the book? Don't read it. Don't like the show? Change the channel. Don't like the way she looks? Look away. Nobody's got a gun to your head. You have the choice. You are responsible for your actions. You appear to enjoy focusing on what you don't like, and then complaining about it. You seem pretty bored for a parent.

Besides, what responsible parent would let their kids on the internet without supervision in the first place? YOU made the kid, YOU do the child-rearing, NOT the government. Nobody forces you to have email or a computer, and nobody forces you to let your children use either while unattended.

For that matter, nobody forces you to not put your children up for adoption if you're not willing to do the legwork necessary to raise them - God knows there's thousands of people *eager* for the chance to do that legwork.

Suck it up and quit hiding behind your children, you lazy, selfish bully.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[KjetilK]

They do this in South Korea. I still see quite a lot of korean spam, but I don't know if it has helped. But how many languages are there in the world. The funny thing about spammers is that they don't care if you understand the language at all. So, you'll need to filter on them all. And the funny thing about some mail programs around here is that they are often configured to break RFCs by replacing Re: with something more L10Ned, namely Ad:

This is simply not a workable approach.

Re:It needs to be a standard label for filters

[AssFace]

For the record - while I agree with this anon comment - it wasn't made by me.

I never post anon on Slashdot unless there is some sort of cookie problem going down.

Place your right hand...

[akaina]

... on this issue of Playboy. Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help you Hef?

Re:Place your right hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

uh... what?

CAN SPAM ACT

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know, but it certainly is anoying.

Finally

[MrWim]

I'll be able to get the computer to select the spam I want to see from the spam I don't

Spam

[Ckwop]

Newsflash..

1.) Spammers don't obey the rule of law..
2.) Spammers can go offshore.

The way to deal with spam is to make it so it doesn't pay. Remember the illegal broadcast stations? The way we (in the UK) managed to shut them down was by making it *illegal* to advertise on them.

Do the same to spam and throw in a host of technical measures and we might be able to bring it under control

Re:Spam

[DrKayBee]

Besides look at how hard they try to spoof mail filters. I doubt if they are going to get scared by this law. Already we arre seeing spam with a mixture of words in it that doesn't trip the mail filters. I don't think the answer is in red-tape.

Re:Spam

[91degrees]

Spammers can go offshore.

True, but why would they want to do that? What's the point of being rich if you're imprisoned in one of the few tinpot little countries that allow spamming?

Re:Spam

[iammrjvo]

I'm with you on this, but I thought of something interesting. If you made it illegal to advertise with illegal spam, then couldn't spammers extort money from legitimate businesses by threatening to advertise on their behalf?

It's an odd twist, but nothing like this is below the spammers.

Yes, the business would probably eventually prevail in a court of law, especially if they could prove that they were the victim of an extortion attempt, but the hassle would be expensive in and of itself.

Re:Spam

[Raven42rac]

So your solution would make it illegal to buy things from the spammers? That is the analogue I drew. Why punish the "victim" and not the perpetrator? Would you throw a rape victim in jail? You also need a license to watch television in the UK. Don't get me wrong, I love the UK (Northern Ireland especially), but that is not an act I would like to follow. If the stations are broadcasting illegally, find out why. Is it because of restrictions on speech, red tape, exorbitant fees that only people with deep pockets can afford? The more voices you have, the better. I read a study that stated that ~60% of SPAM originates in the US (yay, were number 1!). I do not know if that means "starts here, then gets shot off to a Chinese server, then bombards inboxes back in the US". If so, where would the law take affect? At the originating machine? At the mailserver? Somewhere in between? We need to come up with some hard, fast guidelines worldwide if we have any serious desire to end the SPAM problem.

Re:Spam

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the US?

Requiring a warning in spam mail is clearly a away of explicitly ALLOWING spam.

Re:Spam

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it must be hell living on a tropical island paradise with only your steady million dollar income from spamming to keep you in pina coladas and sunblock.

Re:Spam

[Ckwop]

Nah you make it illegal for *companies* to hire other *companies* to send spam on their behalf :)

Si.

Re:Spam

[ITman75]

There is got to be something in international law about sendinding porn spam. Not only does some adults find it offensive but I know my neighbors kids get it in there email. There should be some law against that?

Re:Spam

[evilviper]

2.) Spammers can go offshore.

Yes, but you don't know step 3.

Step 3 is that GW Bush cuts off all international internet connections to any countries that don't agree with us completely, in the name of terrorism and all that.

Re:Spam

[Raven42rac]

Which leads directly back to your argument. Ok, I will cede this one to you. They can just hire someone outside US jurisdiction to send SPAM for them. Make it illegal for them to hire someone else to send for them, unless they are a US company. It's cyclical.

Re:Spam

[91degrees]

If you're not allowed out, it's still a prison.

Re:Spam

[Shalda]

Actually, about 10% of the spam I receive is marked with ADV:. This indicates to me that about 10% of spammers make an effort to stay just this side of the law. And I thank them; may SPAM filters have never failed to pick up any that are tagged as such.

But you are right about a few things. The feds need to start going after the spammers (and those that advertise with them - conspiracy charges?) that they can get. Also, state AGs need to start targeting offenders for violating state and lcoal obscenity laws. If you can't put it on a billboard on mainstreet, it shouldn't be in unsolicited email. Doubly so if the account is held by a kid.

And finally, obviously, we all need to move to an email system that isn't so fundamentally flawed.

Re:Spam

[goatan]

Yes, the business would probably eventually prevail in a court of law, especially if they could prove that they were the victim of an extortion attempt, but the hassle would be expensive in and of itself.

It's Likley this would be to much hassle for the Spammers, and they wouldn't be spammers if they into hard work. Also the buisness could probably turn around and sue for use of there tradmark Etc.

Re:Spam

[AndroidCat]

2.) Spammers can go offshore.

Just because a spammer is buying Chinese hosting, abusing proxies in Korea, or zombies everywhere, doesn't mean that they've actually moved offshore. After blowing through bogus registration, dummy names, corporate shells, technical mis-direction, the spammer is usually still living in some mortgaged-to-the-hilt house in the USA.

Their false trail leading outside the country isn't going to do much good when the law or someone with money (AOL) comes a calling.

Re:Spam

[Anonymous Coward]

(Score: -1 Doesn't Understand the Internet or World Politics)

Re:Spam

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps there would be something in international law about sending porn spam if there were such a thing as 'international law'

Re:Spam

[meadowsp]

Not only do some adults find it offensive but I know my neighbors kids get it in their email. There should be some law against that?

Re:Spam

[Anonymous Coward]

Newsflash..

1) Not all companies obey the rule of law
2) Companies can go offshore.

Making it illegal to advertise using spam would only stop the people who don't use spam in the first place. I doubt it'd have much effect on shady pharmacies run out of some guy's apartment or adult sites that can have their servers based in any country.

Re:Spam

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of prison lets you make millions in income and serve pina coladas?

Re:Spam

[Sethseekstruth]

Seriously---why not have a legal definition of spam, then go after those that reap the benefits of spam...spammers are in it for the money and if it does not pay they would not do it. And , it might be hard to track spammers but by it's very nature the "spam sponsor" is trackable, usually via the web address. are there any legal issues that would stand in the way of blocking access to a site that sponsors spam? Although, I guess some would could pay a spammer to "promote" Bush2004.com and knock it off the net....any ideas to stop that?

Re:Spam

[budgenator]

I once got a SPAM from the State of Illinois ,when I complained to them about it, they sent me a nice packet telling me about their states anti-spamming law, and how I opted in twice at some website (A commercial spammer site) I never heard of before.

Re:Spam

[91degrees]

A tropical island that you're not allowed to leave.

Re:Spam

[the chao goes mu]

I just had a thought. Since spammers tend to use exploitable mailer scripts and forge return addresses, what is there to prevent someone from using the Act to harass another website. Send out a slew of porn spams including a rival's url. Bingo! Your rival is paying endless fines.

Re:Spam

[Drakon]

Should there be laws against destruction of the english language?
Why not?

Re:Spam

[WhiteDeath]

I actually like this approach....
If your company turns up in SPAM, you get the following benefits:

1) a free tax audit (nothing like keeping it interesting)
2) somebody going through your books to find out who you paid to deliver your spam
3) somebody going through all your computers to see if you sent it yourself.

The company then needs to be fined at around $1 per item. If there is no proof of the number of items, government agencies are quite good at guessing what the number might have been (usually twice what it could possibly have been, and doubled again for good measure)

The spam provider also gets all the above.
This basically means it costs $2 per item, plus a huge amount if inconvenience, to send spam.

Ok, so you can't catch one or the other if they are outside your juristiction, but it would thin out the ones that are.

And the ones that aren't? Unfortunately the internet is designed to prevent anyone stopping anything. But eventually all the spammers will congregate in places with available bandwidth - those places will get pissed off with them, and make laws... moving the spammers to the next place with lots of bandwidth. This will be an exponential thing - the less places they can hide, the faster they will piss off the people they are hiding behind.
The best way to get this effect rolling is to start where the bandwidth is best... it has to start somewhere!

As a side note:
I did once work out that if it takes 1 second to delete each spam, and each spam is 1kb in size, 1 million spams consumes about (from memory) $7500 worth of user's time and network bandwidth to be processeed by the people receiving it.

I wonder what the total cost per day of spam is worldwide?

Re:Spam

[enforcer999]

That's the whole problem and I agree. If we cut off their financial incentive, then they will not continue. How do we go after the money? What we are seeing is that many of the legitimate companies are actually complying the the (I) CAN SPAM Act. The majority of spam and spammers do not obey the rule of law because they are crooks. Most spam are only scams anyway, whether it is email harvesting, phishing, phony or cheap products or the Nigerian crap. Because of this, it is difficult to trace the money. I will say that it is not impossible and I am sure that you will see quite a few law enforcement actions in the next year by local, federal and EU authorities but it is very tedious. I can tell you what law enforcement agencies need very badly. They need techies from /. to go to work for them. It would probably be a pay cut, but hey guys, don't you want to save the world from scamming spammers? ;)

Re:Spam

[Anonymous Coward]

I HOPE spammers try that! Without a money trail, they'd be hit both with extortion AND lying to law enforcement AND, likely, lying under oath.

Re:Spam

[robin147]

Illegal to advertise is good. How about one step further and find a way to locate and penalize the upstream feed of the spam. I thought I had a little technical savy, but cutting of the feed seems so obvious, it should be somehow do-able. Spam has got to cost aol, earthlink, and the rest that they ought to be able to manage it.

And in further news...

[heironymouscoward]

The International Federation of Spammers and Spyware Merchants announced that they planned to fully cooperate with all US federal regulations covering the transmission of unsolicited messages by email.

IFSS president Biggus R. Dickus said, "we are a responsible, family-oriented group of businessmen. Anyone who says otherwise can come and complain personally."

The FCC announced itself "very pleased" with the comments from the IFSS.

Re:And in further news...

[prash_n_rao]

I think they yould prefer it if you e-mail your complaints to them. This is for your own convenience... no more waiting in long queues to complain: just drop an e-mail.

They also encourage mass petitions by e-mail. You write a small e-mail with the complaints, forward it to your friends with a cc to IFSS (or even just your favoirite spammer), ask your friends to do the same.

The more people you forward to, the faster IFSS will respond.

Will it be taken notice of?

[madprof]

Given that spammers break the law so readily can this be anything other than another aspect of the law that they ignore?

uh?!

[mirko]

enforcer999 writes "As you know, the CAN SPAM ACT preempted many state laws that were tougher on spammers. For instance, many of the laws that were enacted by states included a requirement that sexually explicit SPAM be labeled as such. The FTC, in charge of adopting rules, came up with a new rule that will require sexually explicit SPAM to be labeled as such. Hmm? I think the states were already trying to do this before the Federal government preempted them. Anyway, I wonder if it will work?"

I highlighted in bold a point I am not sure I understood, is it willingly redundant or did the submitter write it twice because it went from the states laws to the ftc requirement ?

Re:uh?!

[mirko]

BTW, how will they get people-we-call-spammers to admit they explicitely send spam (if they do not admit they spam people, they will then refuse to label their mails as such) ?

Re:uh?!

[Raven42rac]

It is meant to be redundant. Redundancy and sarcasm come across better spoken than written.

Re:uh?!

[introverted]

is it willingly redundant or did the submitter write it twice because it went from the states laws to the ftc requirement

From the article, it appears that CAN SPAM merely says that sexually explicit material has to be labeled. The new FTC rule is where the label is actually defined.

What defines sexually explicit

[millahtime]

What defines sexually explicit?? There are some cases where it is obvious and some where it is iffy. Isn't it like sexual harrassment and in the eye of the beholder. Or would they use a rating system like movies??

Re:What defines sexually explicit

[Anonymous Coward]

That depends if "harass" is one word or two.

Re:What defines sexually explicit

[Trigun]

I don't know about you, but I'd much rather be explaining to my kids "Son, those are called breasts" instead of "No, most women can't fit a two-litre pop bottle in there, they don't like other women, and they definitely do not like animals in that way"

Re:What defines sexually explicit

[iammrjvo]

What defines sexually explicit??

"I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it."

Seriously, though. If any reasonable person on a jury in a court of law thinks that it's sexually explicit, then that's good enough.

Re:What defines sexually explicit

[Pig Hogger]

What defines sexually explicit?? There are some cases where it is obvious and some where it is iffy.

Fashion changes. I just distovered that those now-fashionable wrestling boots just turn me on like nothing I've seen before (more than blue spandex!!!) when worn by a chick...

Re:What defines sexually explicit

[Trigun]

But if it's a jury of their peers, then we're screwed. Imagine a jury filled wih porno directors and direct-to-computer marketers. The Sleaze factor alone would destroy the delicate balance of the planet.

Re:What defines sexually explicit

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be dating the wrong women! Except for the pop bottle thing and the animal thing. That's just disgusting.

Re:What defines sexually explicit

[danielsfca2]

Wait, are you saying you'd exclude topless pictures from the "sexually explicit" definition?

As far as how to define sexually explicit, I'd just use existing definitions of "sexually explicit" that we have for things like TV.

As with all things there is yin and yang.

[Anonymous Coward]

It will work with some porno spam, because some people want porno, and people actually selling high quality porno want people to decide to buy not be tricked into a cascade of pop-ups. And it will not work for some, but since they're incorporated in the Cayman islands and forging mail to be flsuhed out of chinese servers.

But wait till Jr. signs up for his first Victoria's secret catalogue, and his born again mom get Johnny Cochran....

how about labelling *any* spam as [SPAM]

[maharg]

not workable ? thought so.

same thing as XXX?

[esarjeant]

Isn't this just going to enable an industry to profit from the stygma of being "sexually explicit"?

This is the same thing that Rated X did for the adult movie industry.

Don't get me wrong, I'm relieved to see something finally being done about this but I think a stronger message should have been sent. Simply put, the email is unsolicited which means the recipient has no way to prevent the mail from arriving. Do you honestly think that curious teenagers who receive a sexually explicit content email (and it's labeled as such) aren't going to take a gander at it?

For that matter, I don't want my 10 year old having to sift through this stuff either. Sure, spam filters can do excellent work now but it's still not 100%.

Re:same thing as XXX?

[djmurdoch]

Simply put, the email is unsolicited which means the recipient has no way to prevent the mail from arriving.

??? That's what filters are for.

Do you honestly think that curious teenagers who receive a sexually explicit content email (and it's labeled as such) aren't going to take a gander at it?

If they're your children and you don't want them to look at such stuff, install filters.

For that matter, I don't want my 10 year old having to sift through this stuff either. Sure, spam filters can do excellent work now but it's still not 100%.

That's the point of this regulation. If the subject line says "SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT", then even the crappiest filter is going to be able to filter it.

Sure, spammers will probably ignore this regulation, but then you're no worse off than under the current situation, and maybe better: the spammers are clearly violating the law. You'll just need to track them down and convince someone to prosecute them.

Re:same thing as XXX?

[radja]

>the spammers are clearly violating the law.

not necessarily. a foreign spammer is not bound by US law, and doesn't have to label spam.

Re:same thing as XXX?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you honestly think that curious teenagers who receive a sexually explicit content email (and it's labeled as such) aren't going to take a gander at it?

Do you honestly think that curious teenagers aren't already out looking for sexually explicit content? Hell, most of them are out creating it, in chatrooms and IM if not in real life.

You know that webcam your daughter has? So do I.

Re:same thing as XXX?

[djmurdoch]

If the spammers are sending to someone in the USA, then they are violating the American law. Read it, it applies to "interstate and foreign commerce".

Of course, if the spammer is overseas it's unlikely they'll be convicted, but it would be great if they were forever barred from visiting because they'd be arrested as soon as they showed up.

SÉXÚALL 3XPL1C1T C0NTÊÑT

[heironymouscoward]

The rules say the subject must be in ASCII. They should have said "7-bit US-ASCII". Still, it's probably a non-starter. I can't see a single spammer complying with this.

For one thing, simple Darwinian competition means that spammers who comply will be at a disadvantage to those who do not, and will thus be eliminated.

Regulation does not prevent crime, it just moves it elsewhere. Crime - like spamming - must be prevented by making it uneconomical.

It should be a federal crime to _advertise_ via spammers, via spyware, and via trojans under the basic regulation covering consumer rights. Hitting the advertisers rather than the spammers would have a much greater impact.

Re:SÉXÚALL 3XPL1C1T C0NTÊÑT

[mumblestheclown]

Regulation does not prevent crime, it just moves it elsewhere. Crime - like spamming - must be prevented by making it uneconomical.

In the absence of punishment, kidnapping-for-ransom is very economical. You can make a lot of money very quickly! And yet, no rational person goes around saying that we should make kidnapping-for-ransom uneconomical by equipping every human with some technological anti-kidnap getup. Rather, we use regulation - including if needbe police forces and the threat and reality of stiff penalties to mitigate this.

The idea that regulation doesnt prevent crime is pseudo-intellectual philosobabble bullshit.

Re:SÉXÚALL 3XPL1C1T C0NTÊÑT

[howlatthemoon]

So if I want to hurt my competition, I hire a spammer to send messages related to my competitors' products. They get fined into the stone age and I win. The work it would take to figure out who actually is paying for the ads would be tremendous, I wonder if it ever could be enforced.

Re:SÉXÚALL 3XPL1C1T C0NTÊÑT

[Anonymous Coward]

Regulation by itself does not prevent crime. It is enforcement, backed-up by regulation, that prevents crime. In all countries kidnapping is a crime. But in many it is not punished, and thus kidnapping florishes.

There is no obvious way in which these FTC regulations can be enforced on spammers. Thus, they will do nothing to prevent the problem.

Re:SÉXÚALL 3XPL1C1T C0NTÊÑT

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear joe-job complaints here ever time. They really aren't that big a problem. When someone is accused of paying for spam. The FTC asks them if they paid. They ask them under penalty of perjury. Some of the guilty agree to be fined. The rest either tell the truth or rist going to jail.

Sure some of the guilty will lie and not get caught, but they also wont risk doing it again.

See, no one innocent pays a fine and the guilty people stop. Sounds almost perfect to me.

Re:SÉXÚALL 3XPL1C1T C0NTÊÑT

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

You're using "ANSI" (some ANSI standard) and ISO Latin-1/Windows-1252 in your subject title. ASCII is, by definition, codes 0 to 127, and US-ASCII. (That's why it's the American Standard Code for Information Interchange.)

According to the Wikipedia: "ASCII is, strictly, a seven-bit code, meaning that it uses the bit patterns representable with seven binary digits (a range of 0 to 127 decimal) to represent character information. At the time ASCII was introduced, many computers dealt with eight-bit groups (bytes) as the smallest unit of information; the eighth bit was commonly used as a parity bit for error checking on communication lines or other device-specific functions."

Even "3XPL1X1T" would probably not stand in a court of law as equivalent to the word "EXPLICIT", unless $#!+ were ruled equivalent to the word that it resembles.

Re:SÉXÚALL 3XPL1C1T C0NTÊÑT

[evilWurst]

NO. Because you'd need the money trail to prove the case... and the money trail leads back to YOU. Oops. Hope you like the view from your cell.

Short Answer...

[shadowcabbit]

Anyway, I wonder if it will work?

No.

The spammers don't care about the laws of the U.S. when they can just spoof the headers into thinking they came from outside the U.S.; and the U.S., despite whatever delusions my duly elected officials may be believing right now, can't enforce something like this on spam originating outside the States.

An issue like spam-- or any 'regulation' of the internet-- cannot be done piecemeal, on a country-by-country basis. Internet laws, in order to be effective, must be issued, interpreted, and enforced by an international body; otherwise the offender can simply research the laws of other countries and find somewhere where his action is either implicitly legal or not explicitly illegal. The U.N. does not count in this regard, as it was not created to be an international police agency. Either a new agency must be created, an existing group like Interpol must take responsibility, or the world needs to collectively shut up and take it.

Re:Short Answer...

[Eric Savage]

"The spammers don't care about the laws of the U.S. when they can just spoof the headers into thinking they came from outside the U.S.; and the U.S., despite whatever delusions my duly elected officials may be believing right now, can't enforce something like this on spam originating outside the States."

If the spammer is in America (as the vast majority supposedly are), then the email originates with them, even if the first mail server exists elsewhere. The reason people spam is because it's easy, I doubt any of them are going to move to another country just to be able to continue legally.

Let's say that most spam did move offshore, it becomes that much easier to identify through rules and such. If a particular country becomes a haven for them, and they get blocked wholesale, that country will likely take action as well lest they lose their legitimate businesses.

Also as some other people noted, they find spammers find following the money, and it's going to be hard for a spammer to claim they don't know where that came from.

Not good IMO

[WanderingGhost]

I don't like that. Anything that says "It's OK to send SPAM, so long as..." sounds bad to me. It's some kind of positive reinforcement to spammers... But maybe I'm not flexible enough? I just think I shouldn't be forced to use my bandwidth and CPU time to get a message and check that it's SPAM, even if "it's always tagged as such".

Re:Not good IMO

[scrytch]

> I don't like that. Anything that says "It's OK to send SPAM, so long as..." sounds bad to me.

It does not say that. Read the CAN-SPAM act. It basically says that if you include naughty pics IN the email AND there isn't an established client relationship (interpretation of this is why we have courts), then you MUST include the tag. If you sign up and don't uncheck a box, then such mail might come to you.

In a remarkable change of attitude, congress didn't want to get into either outright banning anything by content OR draft a 1000 page bill stipulating every possible best practice for email list management. What it did was go after some of the most blatant spam, and very specifically leave stricter enforcement up to ISP's who are still free to decide what enters and leaves their network. CAN-SPAM sure as hell isn't perfect, but it wasn't designed to be. It's a stick to whack the worst spammers with, and it still allows "my network, my rules" to prevail, so no spammer can truly claim CAN-SPAM as a shelter against being TOS'd.

Now it will be easier for kids to get

[192939495969798999]

If it's a standard label, that makes it EASIER for kids to see -- they'll learn from that kid at school that always had the Playboy's or whatever, what the label is. At least now you can't really tell which ones are boring and which are "exciting". ...Also, what defines sexually explicit? This sounds like first amendment stuff to me. Bad taste should not be legislated, only the 7 dirty words / a specific definition of "pornography" have ever been approved by the Supreme Court for restriction.

Another Waste of time

[patrick24601]

As we so often see spammers have no morals, ethics or are even interested in paying the slightest attention to the law. To me this is another example of a law making body making a new law to make themselves and the techingnorant feel good. This is a complete waste of joe taxpayers (i.e. MY) money.

Stolen sig below:
Karma: Chameleon. Comes and goes.

Re:Another Waste of time

[abb3w]

It's *almost* a complete waste of time. The advantage of the laws is that they make the Spamming activity specifically criminal... which can be used to go after the Spammers. Further, while I-am-not-a-lawyer, I could easily see a criminal case being made for consipiracy against any executive aware of the hiring of a spammer to advertise their company.

1. Spam hits inbox.
2. Extract corporate information.
3. Get freindly judge to issue a warrant for the company's accounts, followed by their computer logs.
4. Find responsible C-level moron.
5. Prosecute

Repeat a few times, and even the V1A6RA idjits will go away. The only remaining spammers will be the completely criminal (EG, Nigerian 419's and identity theft rings)... which are a separate barrel of prosecutions.

Of course, there's a little problem with my theory: you need to have investigators who will actually investigate, and prosecutors who will actually prosecute. However, the mobs of howling taxpayers seem likely to provide an incentive for this.

Excellent...

[hookedup]

Now maybe my email client rules will actually be worth something...

Furthermore...

[PeteDotNu]

...I propose that all spam should have the word "SPAM:" in the subject line, to make it easier for the recipient to filter out unwanted emails etc. etc.

Re:Furthermore...

[Walrus99]

My university (FSU, host of our glorious VP more...), has a great spam filter that looks for patterns in e-mail that indicate thats it is spam, e.g. return address doesn't match actual sender. If this legistlation goes through and if spammers actually comply, the filter could look for "Sexually Explicit" in the subject line and filter it out. This would filter out about 80% of my spam. (Well they said that I could enter the site for free if I just gave them my e-mail address. I didn't think they would sell to anyone else.)

standard /. answer, for your enjoyment

[cascadingstylesheet]

Anyway, I wonder if it will work?

No way! No law or regulation ever works, nor any solution that doesn't involve Perl.

And you can trust my /. certified predictions - as you know, we've had 15 more 9/11 incidents, and no terrorist has ever been caught, because they all use PGP, and are impossible to monitor or stop ;)

Re:standard /. answer, for your enjoyment

[Anonymous Coward]

as you know, we've had 15 more 9/11 incidents

And eerily, they all occur in mid-September. But how did you know about my birthday?

Hear that sound?

[thewiz]

It's the spammers laughing their a$$e$ off.

Until one or more of them are caught and fined HEAVILY or get thrown in jail where they get to be someone's hot, tasty biotch, they will continue to spray their garbage all over the net.

Legislating that someone has to do something is meaningless unless there is enforcement.

Oh, yeah!

[Pig Hogger]

And we know how criminal spammers are good at following the law...

Re:Oh, yeah!

[AndroidCat]

That's not fair! Many spammers assure me that they are complying with bill S1618--even when they're sending it from Argentina to a Canadian email address. Okay, so S1618/Murky was never passed, but they're trying, they're very trying.

Re:Oh, yeah!

[Pig Hogger]

Are you the "Android Cat" on NANAE?

Re:Oh, yeah!

[AndroidCat]

Of course, it's traditional.

Hopefully

[X-Nc]

It's become so difficult to find the porn spam burried under all the rest. If this gets done it'll really help me in finding the only spam worth reading.

(Yes, I'm being faces... fecaci... feseecious... ah hell, you know what I mean)

Re:Hopefully

[Anonymous Coward]

The word you're looking for is facetious.

Re:Hopefully

[lcsjk]

Funny, it still looks wrong even when you spell it right!

Re:Hopefully

[julesh]

I tend to find all the porn spam in a block at the end of my mailbox because its been sent with a date somewhere about 3 weeks in the future...

Re:Hopefully

[Anonymous Coward]

(Yes, I'm being faces... fecaci... feseecious... ah hell, you know what I mean)

fellatio?

ConSent not conTent

[screaming flea]

Of course this won't work. This proposal, along with most other efforts to legislate spam, completely miss the point that "what is spam?" is defined by the consent of the person to receive it, not the content of the email.

Re:sexuall explicit content

[anticypher]

I can't see a single spammer complying with this.

That is what we want. We want laws they can, and most likely will, break. Then throw them in front of the court facing 200 million counts of breaking this law. Watch the spammer plea bargain a short, 1 or 2 year prison sentence when faced with a possible 700 year sentence.

The U-CAN-SPAM act may have been a watered down compromise, but there is already action being taken against the worst spammers. They might be able to hide their IP address by using trojan nets, but the authorities are finding them by following the money trail, not the electronic trail.

With Asscroft in charge of the New Morality in the U.S., expect to see him going after all those Nasty Pornagraphers the day after this rule goes into effect. You can bet the DoJ already has files ready to go, just waiting for a new rule so they can establish heavier charges. The worst pr0n spammers will end up in jail, and that will be a warning to the others.

the AC

They already do...

[oberondarksoul]

It's just most of the porn spam is labelled as 'P.()R_|\|' or the like...

Doesn't matter what law

[Himring]

I wonder if it will work?

They never did stop truckers from using profanity over CB radios regardless of FCC regulations....

If a law is not enforceable, then it just don't matter....

Re:Doesn't matter what law

[mdfst13]

Truckers don't send out an identification number (IP number) every time they talk over the radio. Also, there is no way to prevent truckers from talking over a CB if they fake their identity (SPF: http://spf.pobox.com ).

When I was driving a tow truck, there was an incident where one of the dispatchers was worried that he would get fined for swearing. Fortunately, it turned out that he cut off the transmission in time. However, if it had gone through, he (or AAA) could have been fined. Unlike a trucker, he was identifiable and broadcasting from a defined place.

Same thing with television and radio, they keep the language within the guidelines because they can be prosecuted, fined, and/or suspended.

Open proxies and off shoring are more of a worry, but if they are selling in the US, some part of the transaction must take place in the US. That can be detected (they have to tell people how in the email or someplace accessible from the email) and blocked.

Re:Doesn't matter what law

[parksie]

OMG YOUR TRUCK IS BROADCASTING AN IP ADDRESS!!!! CABBIES CAN TRACK YOU ON THE INTERSTATE!!!

(yeah yeah damn lameness filter, whatever and ever amen and yes i do listen to ben folds and will this thing let me post yet?)

Re:Doesn't matter what law

[the chao goes mu]

I have yet to receive a spam that has both:
1) Non-forged mail headers and
2) A source that wasn't a compromised mailer on some web site.
True, the compromised web site MIGHT have the spammer's IP. If he isn't using a public machine (cafe, library, etc). And if he isn't using some anonymizer service and he isn't using a spoofed IP...
I don't think your reliance on IPs would work very well.
As far as transactions go, you are right if they are in the US. But, think of how many fraudulent mail order businesses break US law every year with impunity. Do you think spammers will fare any worse?

Re:Doesn't matter what law

[mdfst13]

"But, think of how many fraudulent mail order businesses break US law every year with impunity."

To select (i.e. suspected gullible) audiences. How many letters do you get from them? One a year? I would doubt it was significantly more. If I could get spam down to one a week (including those caught by filtering after receipt; i.e. I don't care if I read it or not, I want to average less than one spam a week using my bandwidth, etc.), I would be reasonably happy. Sure, hard core scammers will continue to spam. Radio personalities still swear over the air, despite the FCC. However, it is rare behavior.

Anonymizers (which can be blacklisted as well), forged mail headers, and compromised mailers can be countered with things like SPF ( http://spf.pobox.com ). It's pretty difficult to spoof an IP across the internet (much easier before hubs replaced switches).

Re:sexuall explicit content

[garcia]

We do? We want more government controls? Wow. Not from where I am standing...

We are so worried about spam that we are going to through everything out the window to stop it. The more and more you let the government take over the more and more YOU will also lose in the future.

This law is, again, very narrow. They will get around it. Our laws do not protect what they can do from overseas, with spam relay bots (hijacked, for hire, or otherwise), and with ficticious names (which, BTW, laws concerning the DNS records are worthless).

So, let's follow 9/11's lead everywhere and stamp out these criminals at the cost of our own liberties.

Nice.

It'll never work

[CaptainBaz]

Your post advocates a

( ) technical
(X) legislative
( ) market-based
( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

Re:It'll never work

[julesh]

Damnit! I just used my last mod point and spot the funniest post from the last week labelled as 'informative'! :)

Re:It'll never work

[CaptainBaz]

I was slightly surprised to see that myself :)

Re:It'll never work

[Anonymous Coward]

Damnit! I just used my last mod point and spot the funniest post from the last week labelled as 'informative'! :)

Doesn't matter. More poeple will probably repeat it. It's an old joke. CaptainBaz just copied it from somewhere.

Re:It'll never work

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

Actually, the idea is to let the spammers break the law and then arrest them:

Your post advocates a

( ) technical
(X) legislative
( ) market-based
(X) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(X) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
(X) Other: Too much effort from the legal system required

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

Re:It'll never work

[FleaPlus]

Wow, this is probably the best post I've seen in quite a while. I'm just putting a comment here so I can find it easier later. ;)

Re:It'll never work

[Anonymous Coward]

This same table is posted on every spam article. It's pretty standard and has so far applied to every anti-spam idea. Unfortunately.

Can't we just declare spam "terrorism" and kill some people under the patriot act?

[SPAM] cooperation, can't be that hard.

[Allen Zadr]

Absolutely! Really it'll work. All we need to do is get all of these legitimate electronic marketing firms to cooperate with this plan.

Since they are legitimate electronic marketing firms, they will have no problem cooperating.

Anybody know the postal address of any of these legitimate electronic marketing firms so we can ask them nicely to cooperate?

...What do you mean you can't figure out what legitimate electronic marketing firm sent you that E-mail? Yeah, the one with the subject line of, "Bset P@R!N0 sevirice axldirlx". Yeah, just look at the header. Do a lookup for the IP address in the received line... See, it resolves to 'ftc.gov' - funny I didn't know the FTC was in the Email marketing business, Hmph - we'll just ask them to label their Emails...
Problem solved

What are you saying. Of course the FTC sent it, the E-mail headers wouldn't lie. That's been illegal since January 1, 2004. Surely, you don't expect me to believe that these legitimate electronic marketing firms are breaking the law!

Re:[SPAM] cooperation, can't be that hard.

[Nuclear Elephant]

I'm surprised we haven't heard any tipper gore jokes yet, having been the mother of sexually explicit lyric labels on CDs. Of course, a majority of people on slashdot don't buy CDs, so perhaps they didn't know =)

Analogous to a partial-birth abortion law

[Anonymous Coward]

The religious right kooks are paving the way - just as their tool John Ashcroft has been promising and proclaiming for 4 years now - for an assault on pornography in general, and especially on the internet.

Spam is an issue that made it to government because it's a tech issue that everyone can understand on the face of it. And on the face of it everyone opposes it. Much like "war on drugs" or "war on copying" it provides an Evil Target for everyone to rally against that can never fully or truly be banished, and as such can be used as a long-term vehicle for pork projects of even the slightest relevance.

Mark my worthless anonymous words, seemingly-innocuous laws like this will be used as the framework for net anti-porn bills in the near future. Remember, the "innocuous" NET Act Clinton signed into law? Its "only purpose" was to "close a loophole". It yielded the DMCA in half a decade.

Seized by the assets :)

[Audigy]

Well, there always was the AOL spammer who was reprimanded in a relatively high-profile way... I'd like to see more of this in the future, really; I wonder what the guy's sentence was...

Did anyone notice any effect on CAN-SPAM before?

[WalterSobchak]

I certainly did not notice that CAN-SPAM became effective 1/1/04. Or actually, my filters are still filtering out a very similar number of messages.
Does anyone have information of some kind, if legislators think that this law actually worked?

As much as I would love to see spammers prosecuted, I doubt CAN-SPAM has done anything to reduce spam.

Alex

Re:sexuall explicit content

[Steve B]

We want more government controls?

No. We want the existing legitimate government controls (i.e. "Don't steal services. If you do we will throw you in jail.") to be enforced.

What, are they wanting a 'Heads Up' er, um

[RCO]

Ok, they want warning about things popping up in their ma... Hmmm, that doesn't work either...

Now what

[MrRuslan]

is evryone gonna do? No more penis enlarment products means bad news for the economy...they will now have to advertise trogh illigal channels...it's like prohibition all over again.. (Disclaimer: Im kidding for those with a bad sense of humor)

Re:Now what

[Anonymous Coward]

Disclaimer: Im kidding for those with a bad sense of humor

I think *you*'re the one with the shitty sense of humor.

MOD PARENT UP

[dcocos]

http://www.theocracywatch.org/

Re:Did anyone notice any effect on CAN-SPAM before

[BCW2]

I started getting more about a week after the so-called law took effect. Of course anything written that is approved of by the DMA won't work. The do not call list works and the DMA hates it.

hypothesis

[moviepig.com]

Immunologically...

Suppose a new filter/protocol/etc. were developed which instantly blocked 99.9% of spammers. Might the inevitable remaining few become somehow particularly "lethal", e.g., to a then more credulous public?

(Sure, bandwidth would be conserved. But doesn't Moore's Law render bandwidth an eventual non-issue?)

Re:hypothesis

[StormReaver]

"(Sure, bandwidth would be conserved. But doesn't Moore's Law render bandwidth an eventual non-issue?)"

Moore's Law deals with the processing power of personal computers, not the availability of bandwidth. Gates' Law (any increase in processing power will be immediately consumed and wasted), of course, counteracts Moore's Law.

Here an idea...

[Duke Machesne]

Nobody likes spam, right? Everybody's against it, right? Wastes billions of dollars in bandwidth and nobody buys that shit anyway, right?

So, how about instead of
labelling it, how about they just
make it illegal?

Re:Here an idea...

[mu-sly]

... because that involves actually creating a law that has real balls, and enforcing it.

The chickenshit laws they are coining at the moment have no effect on spammers whatsoever, yet still enable politicians to be seen to be doing something about the problem.

Politics in this day and age is nothing to do with what you're actually doing, just what you are seen to be doing. The current anti-spam laws are nothing more than populist spin campaigns to win votes from the uninformed masses.

MOD PARENT UP

[mu-sly]

Where are those mod points when I need them?

Anyone remember?

[The AtomicPunk]

Back when there were States Rights? :)

'course that was before we had double jeopardy...

Re:Anyone remember?

[physick]

But if you regard spam as trade (and its sole aim does seem to be to get you to pay money) and the spam crosses state borders, which almost all of it does, then the Congress has the right to regulate it not the states. I think this is what Section 10 of Article 1 of the constitution says.

war on spam

[olscratch69]

Now that the federal government is getting tough on spam how much longer before the is a "war" on spam. This war on spam is brought to you by the same people that brought you the war on drugs and the war on poverty, so don't get your hopes up. I would rather the government kept the filthy little hands off the internet and email. I know that there are alot of people that hate spam but I hate television comercials a hell of a lot more then spam. I can't remember a time when the federal or my local government got involved in something and it turned out for the better. The less the government intrudes in our lives the better.

pointless can spam

[xmorg]

I just got one this morning. It went straight to my trash thanks to mozilla. The subject read.... "older women love huge (explitive)"

Use Unicode, Go to Jail

[MrZaius]

"The final rule requires that the mark appear using elements of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange ("ASCII") character set, and a definition of the term "character" has been added as part of that change. "

Can't say as I think the rest of the rule makes any sense, but I couldn't help but laugh when I saw this bit. Lord forbid we allow non-ascii subject lines!

Re:Use Unicode, Go to Jail

[julesh]

Unicode (or at least UTF8, the type of unicode which would be most applicable for embedding unicode in e-mail headers) is a direct superset of ASCII. So, as long as you stick to only the ASCII characters, you're fine to use unicode.

Re:Use Unicode, Go to Jail

[Anonymous Coward]

If I read your single-line quote correctly, without having read the article myself, it requires the "[This_is_porn]" part to be ASCII, not the entire subject line.

what I want to know is...

[jonwil]

Who makes money of these "hot xxx webcams" anyway?

I assume that either:
A.you go to the site, see the "free" cam (not that I would visit these sites) then get sucked into paying if you want more.
or B.you got to the site, see the "free" cam and then get sucked into clicking on some ads on their site (probobly xxx as well)

Here we go again ...

[Mr_Silver]

Your post advocates a

( ) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

Re:Here we go again ...

[CaptainBaz]

Beat you to it. nyah!

Re:Here we go again ...

[Mr_Silver]

Ahh well, you win some you lose some :o)

Re:Did anyone notice any effect on CAN-SPAM before

[mdfst13]

A better question (IMO) is "Did CAN-SPAM's legalization of formerly illegal spamming methods *increase* spam?" Remember that several state laws were weakened by passage of CAN-SPAM.

In CAN-SPAM's defense, the real test of the law will be if it pulls spammers out of circulation. Most of them were breaking the law prior to CAN-SPAM (for example, joe jobs are illegal). The mere presence of the law won't change that. It will take a couple years for the punishments to go through.

it's is already a spam...

[S3D]

Isn't it about the same as to make a law binding all criminals report to police upon comitting crime ?

Re:uh?! Its good grammer!

[lcsjk]

Yes!. It's not redundant, and the writer wrote it once to tell what the Feds were doing and again to EMPHASIZE that it is identical to what some states were already implementing.

Danger, Will Robinson!

[base3]

By tying regulation of spam to the content, government is establishing a back door (no pun intended) that could be used to regulate other online speech. The mortgage spams are just as bad as the bestiality ones, and should be persued with the same vigor without regard for content.

Re:Danger, Will Robinson!

[AndroidCat]

As always, spam is about consent not content. Perhaps all this smoke and mirrors is to distract from people noticing that spam from politicians is now "legal"?

Some of my Hotmail spam.....

[phillk6751]

Has started to end the subject line as ADV:ADLT, which in my book makes me think it means "Advertisement:Adault". I thought maybe it has to do with new anti-spam laws, or does hotmail do that with their own filters? It's still pretty cool noticing this. If the spammers let you know what kind of spam they're sending to you, and keep a general rule, you can decide which types of spam you do or do not want to recieve....although i'm sure not many of us would want to recieve any, but hey...it's an interesting idea to me.

Oh, thank god

[kneecarrot]

They need to do something. My penis is getting so long I can hardly walk.

sometimes federal = better

[TTL0]

Hmm? I think the states were already trying to do this before the Federal government preempted them. Anyway, I wonder if it will work?"

sometimes you can nail people easier and harder when you make something a federal offence vs. a state law. i think certain types of gun possesion work that way.

also you can sue the spammer in federal court. although he will not show, the judges ruling may set a precedent to help prosecute onshore spammers.

ms outlook rules

[WormholeFiend]

we need to tell everyone that has windows PCs to set up two easy rules in outlook:

first rule: From Line contains -- add all the email addresses of people you know
Action: stop processing rules.
second rule: All emails
Action: move it to specified folder - Deleted email.

After then can browse the deleteds to make sure they didnt forget any of their friends.

Much later when they are sure they have everyone theyll ever receive email from in their list, they can just modify the 2nd rule to "delete from server".

Whitelist for Dummies.

Maia MailGuard

[Anonymous Coward]

My ISP uses Maia MailGuard, it is just wonderful, I almost don't have to use spamex.com any more.

It has white/black listing, rescuing of of improperly labelled email (which it does only rarely), and lets you cruise through the quarantine bucket. I get 40 legit messages a day, I use the web interface twice a week, attended time 10 minutes total.

It always traps Netsky/MyDoom whatever. Always. This is just a great tool. So simple, even a social worker can use it. Tell your ISP.

What about this

[Anonymous Coward]

Make spamming a Capital Offence.... Send spam and get "The Chair", or have an open season on spammers... I could see that trophy on the wall :) As stated above in many places, spammers do not care if they break the law and they can go offshore. What can be done? How about going after the companies that hire the spammers, make them responsible for the spam. If companies know they are going to be held responsible for causing tons of spam to be sent out, they'll make sure the spammers start sending mail to just the people who requested it..... what would that be, 10-15 people? Spam works because it makes money. People respond and buy things from the site, that will never change. When one person out of 100,000 responds and you send out 15 million emails, well, you do the math. To me it would make more sense to just email the people who requested it, you would not need as much bandwidth or as many servers, and you would sell to a higher percentage of your list. Sure, you won't get impulse buyers, but you also wouldn't be despised by 99.9% of the world. I would rather be liked by many and poor than hated by most and be rich.

Open to Interpretation

[ddelrio]

Does "$%T E E N S L O T S will sock yur cawk!%$" count as a sexually explicit label?

Not helpful at all

[JohnGrahamCumming]

How does this help at all? Surely they could have come up with clearer labeling:

SEXUALLY EXPLICIT: MMF
SEXUALLY EXPLICIT: MFF
SEXUALLY EXPLICIT: BiMMF
SEXUALLY EXPLICIT: MMMMMMF
SEXUALLY EXPLICIT: DP/BBBJ/ICS/MFFMFM/BBW

I mean, how I meant to find what I'm looking for.

John.

Re:sexuall explicit content

[Tackhead]

> So, let's follow 9/11's lead everywhere and stamp out these criminals at the cost of our own liberties.

To paraphrase Scott McNealy, your liberties are dead. Get over it. Given that we've already paid the cost, can we at least get something in return, such as the ability to read our email again while reading the occasional reports of once-proud spammers reduced to quivering pulpy messes during prison gladiator battles?

You know...

[OS24Ever]

...I'm getting to the point where I want to say 'if they go offshore to hide from SPAM rules in the US then let's unplug them from the internet connections into the US. The whole country. If they won't play ball then let's play hardball.

Though that could scream censorship and all, but still something has to be done when US citizens are exploiting the legal loopholes to fill my inbox with dick enlargment, cheap software, and now the new trend seems to be XM Radio hawking).

There are technological ways around them, but we can't let them flounder too long or someone like MS will step in and 'save' us and lock out internet email unless you pay a microsoft tax.

I know spammers don't just spam email addresses. They dictionary attack SMTP servers. I moved hosting companies for my domain to a 'lesser known' domain and my spam went from 100s a day to 10 - 15. Unfortunately 7 - 9 of those 10 - 15 are the ones that manage to sneak through every filter I use for some reason.

I know this is rather incoherant foaming rant but I'm just getting so fed up with this crap it's not funny anymore. We need to treat all spammers like 419s and hunt them all down

PICS labels?

[Fastolfe]

Why advocate a plain-text arbitrary (english) label at all? Why not use PICS labels for mass e-mail? If you're going to legislate labelling of some kind, at least do it in a flexible, extensible fashion.

Maybe I do want to receive sexually-explicit spam, just not too explicit. I'd like to tune my spam filters to suit that requirement, not along an arbitrary government-specified line.

Re:Did anyone notice any effect on CAN-SPAM before

[mog007]

The CAN-SPAM law actully quadroupled the amount of spam I get now, and only 25% of that spam actully follows the guidelines of the law, with putting a mail contact address on the bottom of the spam. The majority is still the same old stuff, with half-assed l33t to bypass spam filters, and nothing but a website to visit for the latest penis enhancement or hot lesbian teen girls website. It generated more spam, and only a tiny bit of that newly generated spam follows the rules.

Re:sexuall explicit content

[garcia]

To paraphrase myself. Fuck you. We should NOT stand idly by watching this shit happen. I may not feel that I have the clout to push this on a national level but I do want to express my voice to anyone and everyone who will listen locally.

Perhaps that will at least get SOME people to think along the lines I do.

Trademark

[McDutchie]

SPAM is a trademark for luncheon meat. Hormel requests that unsolicited commercial e-mail be referred to as spam, not SPAM. Since they are nice enough not to sue everyone's asses for diluting their trademark, I think the least we can do is comply with this simple request.

A Law that everyone uses Mozilla Mail?

[PetoskeyGuy]

It's the only thing I know of that reliably labels emails as spam. Surely they aren't expecting the spammers to do anything.

Right...

[Anonymous Coward]

Force them to LABEL their spam.
This is like the IP security RFC posted last year around April 1
ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3514.txt

They are already labeled pretty clearly now...

[cjmnews]

Here's what's in my inbox now:

• Re: Girls Gone Wild
• Big round @sses being pumelled with cokk
• Hot @sses being pounded hard
• Re: Rough sluts

Those seem to be clearly marked as explicit to me.

Are there people too thick to know what's inside these messages?

Re:They are already labeled pretty clearly now...

[cybercreek]

The problem is that I want a single thing to look for in the subject line that would allow my outlook Outlook Express 6 to toss them into the delete file without me having to update the message rules every few days.

I don't want to have to continually update the message rules with new subject lines they porn industry creatively comes up with (no pun intended).

Re:They are already labeled pretty clearly now...

[cjmnews]

I have had to use the white list method.

All domains are blocked. *.com, *.net, *.kr, etc.

Only those who work in the company, or are on my list of 25 valid email addresses actually stay in my inbox.

Now if I could only get Outlook (what the company forces us to use) to read the spoofed headers to eliminate the .05% of spam that looks like it came from within the company I'd be spam free.

Warning sexually explicit language

[g0bshiTe]

mail -f fuck lesbian asians now szAl1

rm penis enlargement

mail -f pee cam jJJjhr

Re:Did anyone notice any effect on CAN-SPAM before

[jfengel]

It wasn't going to take effect immediately. The law doesn't by itself stop spam, because it doesn't define spam. The law was only the first step.

The second step was for the FTC to define the rules more precisely, and this recent decision is part of that. This ruling makes it easier to go after a specific subset of spammers (those sending out pornographic spam.)

Pornographic spam presents different problems from plain old spam because just looking at it has what many people consider to be a negative effect. There's not much you can send me (34 year old childless male) that can shock me, but there's a lot of stuff I'd just as sure you'd not have your children seeing.

Neither the law nor the regulation actually stop spam, but they now make violations very explicit (as it were). The next step is to start taking violators to court. When violators are convicted and fined or sent to jail, THEN you might start seeing a decrease in spam.

Yeah, I know the usual counterarguments: offshore spammers, morons with relayware, etc. I'd like to see if solving part of the problem decreases spam and then, hopefully, allows regulatory and enforcement efforts to concentrate on what's left.

I'm still waiting for the FTC to issue its designated marking for general spam.

What qualifies as sexual?

[phorm]

Thinking of some of the spam I've seen:

"Jane and her barn animals" - Illegal whether it has a disclaimer or not

"Jane does six guys" - sexual

"Jane's webcam" - sexual, but does it count if they manage to keep the email content itself down to 'innuendo' status (and the actual crappy pr0n being on a linked page).

"Enlarge your breasts/penis/etc. Viagara alternative, etc etc" - probably the greatest in volume of spam in contrast to the above, but does it qualify as sexual? Female/male enhancement tends to deal with sexual organs/performance but is not actually pornographic in content.


Really, it seems to me that the really nasty stuff is already illegal anyways (animals, underage, etc), and the majority of emails I get to my servers are in the nature of enhancements which may or may not count.

Re:What qualifies as sexual?

[msim]

i've noticed that about 50% of the spam i get is for cialis, "the patch that works", online meds, f|acc!d P-e`ni$ enh^ancement.

The other 50% is loosely comprised of Nigerian spam, hosting spam, "janes webcam" and harder core spam.

Viruses come and go fluctuating with lack of security and updates in windows.[1]

[1]I could be more accurate in the statistics, but that would require i be at home and that i drag out my spamfilter.

Re:Did anyone notice any effect on CAN-SPAM before

[JCholewa]

> I certainly did not notice that CAN-SPAM became effective 1/1/04. Or actually,
> my filters are still filtering out a very similar number of messages.

That's actually a really good point. Some time late last year, I was getting about 1200 emails a day, nearly all of it spam. It absolutely inundated me and nearly rendered me helpless. I learned how to code mail filtering programs in perl, then I learned how to use stuff like procmail and spamassassin and clamav, and when that stuff is used in conjunction with a mail client with bayesish filtering capabilities (like Mozilla), spam becomes manageable.

But I checked my procmail logs a couple weeks ago, and I discovered that the number of daily emails I'm getting (again, nearly all of them spam) have jumped to over 2000.

I guess the law really didn't do anything after all.

--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main

Bulletproof enforcement in one easy step

[Cardbox]

All that is needed is the enactment of a simple law: if you purchase any product as a result of receiving spam, you are free to repudiate the debt. In particular, if your credit card was charged, your credit card company must credit your account on receiving evidence that you made the purchase in response to a spam.
This avoids all the tedious process of law enforcement: no-one gets prosecuted, spam remains entirely legal, free speech isn't affected...

Yay! More rules from the US Gov't! We're saved!

[penginkun]

An open letter to the people at the U.S. Government(TM):

Dear Sirs:

Thank you for your interest in stopping spam. That is, spam the unwanted email product, not the Hormel meat substitute product. Though you may feel free to stop that as well, if you like.

Unfortunately, spammers have proven time and again they don't CARE about laws, rules or the wishes of the people. They're doing this to make money, and it's a damned easy way to make money.

Therefore you'll need to alter your attack on these pernicious vermin by instead offering bounties for their heads. Issue "Spammer Hunting Licenses" and let the spamees take care of the problem in a way which should end the problem once and for all: Killing the spammers.

Alternately, you could start mandating jail time for spamming. You government types really like making mandates, and this one is right up your alley. You could even make another "three strikes" type law, only this one would have a mandatory death sentence instead of a mandatory 25 year prison term as the ultimate solution.

I offer this advice to you free of charge as a concerned citizen and as a frustrated netizen who's tired of the lame come-ons and illegal offers for prescription drugs and cable descramblers. If you choose to use these ideas, I seek no recognition or recompense. Seeing them implemented will be reward enough.

Thank you, and Good Day.

Preempted not the right word

[Moridineas]

IANAL, so take this with a grain of salt, but I believe the way federal law works is that this would define a minimum--if states wanted to do MORE than the minimum, that's fine.

greylisting + spamtrap RBL == works

[RonBurk]

I recently did my first little test of greylisting + spamtrap RBL. This is where you tempfail any email you have any suspicions of for about, say, an hour, to see if the (suspected) spammer will, in that length of time, transmit something to a known spamtrap mail address. For my test, I accepted all mail so I could look through each one to check for false positives.

The result was: only about 2% of the spam would have gotten through. I think I can improve that rate by increasing my local spamtrap database to augment the larger one at cbl.absuseat.org. But even if I can't: 98% of spam eliminated in a 100% automated fashion, no tuning and tweaking and training. Completely automated spam removal, totally driven by the spammers themselves (they tell us what IP addresses they are using today by using them to send spam to a spamtrap address).

Greylisting + spamtrap RBL has some niggling problems, such as dealing with mailing lists that use a different sender address (and maybe even IP address) when they retry a tempfailed message. However, these problems seem manageable compared with solutions such as teaching every user to train a Bayesian filter.

To defeat greylisting + spamtrap RBL, spammers will have to locate all the spamtrap addresses in their databases and remove them. Good luck!

Greylisting + spamtrap RBL may not be a silver bullet, but it sure acts like one on my system.

Keep your dirty tags out of my subject line!

[hta]

I vastly prefer other labelling schemes.
draft-malamud-no-soliciting-07 has been approved by the IETF as a Proposed Standard, and allows for per-jurisdiction labelling without cluttering up my subject lines with this kind of labelling.
The only good thing to be said about labelling is that lack of it can be considered prima facie evidence of bad faith...

Oh, it will work.

[dacarr]

Just watch for the crap coming in with [Pr0n] in the Subject: header or something.

Facetious

[pjt33]

One of a handful of English words to contain each English vowel once. (If you count 'y' as a vowel, then "facetiously" still works).

Re:Facetious

[bgeiger]

And one of two that I'm aware of (the other is "abstemious") that contains each vowel once, in alphabet order.

Re:Facetious

[pjt33]

Throw in caesious.

Re:sexuall explicit content

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps that will at least get SOME people to think along the lines I do.

Everybody should think the same, right

turn yourself in

[Doc Ruby]

BushCo screeches about "states' rights" when it means abandoning federal protection of citizens' rights, but preempts state laws when it means kowtowing to medieval fundamentalist christians. Combine this FTC requirement to identify your "explicit" email (by what standard of "explicit"?) with the new FCC crackdown on "indecent" media communications, and all that's left is for you to pay your own bill when they arrest you for "antisacred" messages. Fuck that.

Input & Public Comment...!...?

[K space]

Three (3) week period of public comment? Eighty-nine (89) total public comments?

Where was everybody??

I don't think I need to mention how many comments are posted to slashdot every...say, hour.

Maybe the FTC designed a well-thought-out regulation with expert input into the technical requirements of the rule. Maybe they stress tested those technical measures designed to control the industry whose participant's primary work duty is to find ways to weasel / sleeze-el around anti-spam efforts. And maybe we all don't have any responsibility to provide a little input on a regulation that potentially places technical (see the "brown paper wrapper") and content controls (loosely-speaking) like motion pictures have, onto pervasive personal communication. Now, I haven't yet read the full text of the regulation, (just the FTC notice/release) or the 89 public comments (mostly by private citizens) but does anyone else still see potential for both unenforcibility and abuse? (Note the "valid physical postal address" requirements, and what defines "SEXUALLY EXPLICIT" spam and then falls under the various controls....)

From a quick search of stories, from the front pages search and my swiss-cheese memory, I don't see the this story posted before the end of public comment on the rules. Rrgh. While I'm not usually particularly vocal or active on these issues, I'm as guilty as anyone else in missing this FTC RFC, but... does anyone else see a big collective OOOPS here? 89 total public comments?

Where was everybody?

It's actually "sexually oriented"...

[fmaxwell]

Seriously, though. If any reasonable person on a jury in a court of law thinks that it's sexually explicit, then that's good enough.

Don't you think we should at least require a majority of them? By the way, the FTC requires the label "[SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT]" on all e-mail which is "sexually oriented."

The problem with this kind of law is the significant risk of the law being thrown out as being too vague. If someone is tried under that law in Salt Lake City, "sexually oriented" might be interpreted to mean a picture of a woman wearing a skirt that doesn't cover her knees. A Los Angeles jury might decide that "sexually oriented" is nothing short of photos of full penetration. Is a text ad for a site that sells lingerie "sexually oriented"? How about an ad with photos of women in bikinis to advertise www.ladies-swimwear.com? Is that "sexually oriented" or is it a site about beachwear fashion?

It's not the government's role to decide what is, or is not, sexually oriented. They should simply make sending spam, or paying a third party to send spam, illegal. They should pass a law like Virginia's, which entitles a recipient to damages from the spammer if they win in a civil suit. They should require that ISPs investigate spam and take action within 48 hours of receiving notification, reporting back to those who filed the complaints about what, specifically, was done, and whether they know the identity of the spammer (so that people decide whether it's worthwhile to get a court order to sue the spammer). They should shut down the connections of those who send spam (I don't care if it's someone's moronic relative who clicked on an attached virus that turned their system into a spam relay).

Spam is theft. Period. It is theft of bandwidth, theft of storage, and theft of CPU time. It's not a free speech issue. It's not analogous to physical junk mail. It's not like telemarketing. Laws can be effective whether spam is sent from with within the US or offshore. If you disagree with me, then go here and read so that you don't waste your time and ours with old, tired, discredited arguments.

Re:It's actually "sexually oriented"...

[iammrjvo]

Yes. I meant by a majority of the jury.

I guess that a spammer advertising a sex site better hope that he's tried in LA and not Salt Lake.

Sexually Explicit SPAM??

[StormyMonday]

I've never seen sexually explicit SPAM*. Sexually explicit spam? Sure.

"SPAM" is a tasty processed-meat product composed of cholesterol, saturated fat, salt, and water (read the label). Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail.

So when an e-mail says "This message is not SPAM", it it technically correct.

* Insert crude remark here about "porking".

DONT Keep your dirty tags out of my subject line!

[Anonymous Coward]

Existing mail filters (even hotmail's custom filters) can be configured to block whatever labels you choose.

Other labeling schemes would require modifications to existing clients.

Fighting Spam is part of the war on Terror

[cybercreek]

I totally agree.

Those that want spamming to continue always come up with ideas that have never been tried do not work. If we don't start stopping spam we will never stop spam. Plug the holes as we go.

Those that put all of their energies into reasons why we cannot stop spam are aiding the spammers. They need to put their energies in addressing and eliminating spam.

The truth is that most spam originates from a relatively small number of sources and all we have to do is shut them down one by one.

Consider it an extension of the war on terror.

Re:Fighting Spam is part of the war on Terror

[nnappe]

Consider it an extension of the war on terror.
So, why does the government need a law? Why dont they just put spammers in Guantanamo and replace them with corporate executives who founded their campaigns?
But, well IANALAINW (iamnotalawyerandneverwill)

Finally...

[Anonymous Coward]

my penis will stop becoming larger!

Re:Maia MailGuard stupid moderators

[Anonymous Coward]

MMG is great for us peon non-sysadmins. It really works well.

Here's a solution and the twit mods can't boost it so the +3 snobs will see it. Oh well your loss.

Well...

[Dieppe]

I, for one, welcome our new Sexually Explicit Spam Overlords...

it IS a standard label for filters.

[danielsfca2]

RTFA. It says you have to have the following in the subject line:

SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT:

The article also implied that it had to begin the subject line:

The final mark is shorter than the proposed version. The Commission proposed that the mark be "SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT-CONTENT: ". Commenters opined that an excessively long mark would tend to crowd out all or part of what the sender might wish to say in the subject line. The Agency determined that a shorter mark,"SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: ", likely can achieve the desired purpose as well, or nearly as well, as the longer mark; The final rule excludes sexually oriented materials from the subject line of a sexually explicit email message;

Clearly, if spammers were allowed to stash it at the end of the subject line, this "Crowding out" would not be an issue.

overtaken by advances in spammer technology

[keithmoore]

Basically I don't think this will work because today the vast majority of spam is either (a) submitted from offshore where it's harder to trace who sent it (the senders may be subject to US law, but you have to find them in order to punish them) or (b) sent through a distributed network of relays deployed by viruses (and thus they are sent from innocent people's computers and the real source is very difficult to trace)

CAN-SPAM might have been a good idea when it was originally drafted (I give them the benefit of the doubt) but it's been overtaken by advances in spammer technology. meanwhile, can-spam has the potential to harm legitimate uses of email because (at least, as I understand the law) any business that sends out email could be liable for infringement if one of its employees happens to send out mail that is judged sexually explicit.
My concern is that employers will either start monitoring outgoing email or that they'll impose filters on outgoing email in an attempt to block anything that might be sexually explicit. (and it doesn't have to be images - the rule makes it clear that mere words can be considered explicit).

FWIW, the comments I submitted to the FTC in response to their notice of proposed rulemaking on the "sexually explicit" content label and the "plain brown wrapper", and my reaction to the final rule, can be found at http://www.cs.utk.edu/~moore/opinions/can-spam.htm l

The states weren't "preempted"...

[evilpaul13]

The state laws weren't overturned by the addition of Federal laws regulating SPAM.

Anyone hear of Terry Nichols? He was convicted in Federal Court for conspiracy (and murder, iirc), and he's now being tried in at least one state court for the same crime with basically the same charges.

There are a number of other criminal laws you can face double jeopardy on (although the legal system doesn't consider the same charge twice double jeopardy if it's prosecuted at different levels of gov't), so why would 'CAN SPAM' laws be any different?

shift the costs back onto the spammers

[Myrthe]

The best response to spam I've heard of is to visit the pages they give links to, and the sub-pages on their site. ATM I pay to read their email, but by doing this the spammer would pay for serving their page. (Think of it as a gentle slashdotting). I got two questions.

(1) Are there drastic problems with this approach that I'm not seeing ? Care to redo your list ?

(2) Is there software that will do this for me (basically: given mails I mark as spam, spider the linked page)?

cheers,
Shane
p.s. If someone can point me to who first suggested this idea, I'll be happy to give credit.

Over this!

[Any Web Loco]

Look - helpful as this wee form is, it turns up every single time someone posts a story on spammers. Can either the Eds or the story submitters do us all a favour & include this form in the story descriptor.

Can I sue for sexual harassment?

[bluGill]

I don't see how explicit spam is any different from sexual harassment. If I used the same tactics Spam is using on me to a women I'd get a sexual harassment case thrown my way.

Any lawyers care to comment on why I can't sue Spammers for sexual harassment? Better yet, anyone with to help me do so? I get enough penis enlargement spams to qualify as being harassed.

money money money

[Anonymous Coward]

You know if spammers didn't make any money from people actually buying their services, they wouldn't do it. And how else are we going to find out what new porn sites are out there to subscribe to if there is no advertising I mean spam.