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

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

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%.

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!

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.

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.