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E.U. Employers To Be Held Liable For Porn Spam?
Cowards Anonymous writes "Yahoo News has a story about a study of Europe's new anti-spam legislation. The overly broad wording of the legislation, according to the study, could allow employees to sue employers for not doing enough to stop porn spam. Businesses could be sued by their workers for allowing a hostile work environment. The author of the study advises companies running email servers to use filtering technology, and warn employees about the sometimes sleazy content of spam."
E-mail, as we know it today, has got to go. Non-authenticatable sending is a bug, not a feature. For as long as businesses allow incoming SMTP e-mail, their employees will always be exposed to all forms of Spam, including pornographic.
So, if the law basically makes it impossible to run an SMTP-based e-mail system in a business, that could be just the knockout blow it takes for businesses to finally see an incentive on picking a tigher protocol that allows better tracing of senders.
Lather, rinse, repeat...
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
I know of one business that is still running Windows 98 based computers in the office, with very little preventing the employees from wandering on the Internet to wherever they want. Not surprisingly, the employees end up contracting spyware and browser hijackers on a regular basis.
The management has had enough of the IT department having to clean up the infected computers, and has basically ordered them to stop wasting their time on such machines. As a result, one machine's homepage is now perma-set to a porn site. There's a running process that resets it whenever the user attempts to change the home page by any way, but it's using rootkit tactics to shield itself from being uninstalled by anything. The OS is hosed, it needs to be reinstalled.
I just can't wait until the first female employee notices what's happened to this male employee's computer and files the lawsuit. Sometimes, IT spending is just plain mandatory...
my uni is pathetic and refuses to implement any kind of anti-spam at all just so they can't be held accountable for anything.
force them to sort it out. and if they can't fix it then get rid of it. something will fill the void and either way the problem is solved.
Sounds like that is going to put a huge amount of burden on the companies. If I were running my own private business, I'd be inclined to unplug everyone's network connections and hand out typewriters. I don't know how strict the legistlation is, but it sounds to me that this might promote anti-technology.
You can do the same for any US employer using existing discrimination / harrassment laws.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
We should be celebrating laws that require business to do something about user-annoying IT problems. Legislating a need for IT translates to tech jobs that can't be cut... and that's more work for us.
There are solutions to Spam that companies can use, they just keep getting killed because PHB's say they fail the cost-benefit tests. However, when you throw the prospect of a big lawsuit in the face of a PHP, it changes the balance of the scale.
If this makes employers consider better spam-filtering mechanisms, surely that's a good thing for everyone. We know that it is more-or-less impossible to stem spam at the source, so legislating to impede spam at some other point is not entirely a bad thing.
Of course, the tinfoil-hat folks will be vomiting to themselves over the evil intrusive regulation, but come on, how hard is it to try to filter spam?
I just get spam telling me how small my penis is. I never get pictures of naked people!
:(
How comes I have to miss out?
The law is irrelevent, because not too many countries are following it.
From BBC news:
They also found that eight EU member nations have yet to implement the directive despite the deadline for compliance falling more than six months ago.
The rogue nations - Belgium, Germany, Greece, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Finland - have been threatened with legal action.
The problem with international laws is that nationalistic countries are generally inclined to ignore them.
Honestly, since I couldn't find a single link to the actual legislation, it's hard to tell whether employers could actually be held liable for spam, or whether this is just FUD.
Obviously, if an employer intentionally turns off the spam safeguards on one woman's machine, because she's very religious and he knows it'll freak her out, then that's sexual harassment through spam.
But spam that slips through the cracks despite reasonable efforts to stop it... I have to say, I don't think any court in the world would find a tort there.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
Problem is with vague rules, they are easily taken advantage of..
Sonuds like a lot of lawsuits in waiting.. Easy money... ( for the lawyers )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"European employers must be aware of the risk of new computer-related liabilities," said the researcher for the University of Amsterdam's Institute for Information Law.
"An important example of such a potential new liability is the risk of being held accountable for not protecting employees against unsolicited pornographic e-mail."
This could encourage companies from denying Internet access to employees, after all why risk sexual harassment lawsuits for something that is so difficult to stop.
On one hand you can have an opt-in list for employees, where someone must "allow" a person to send mail to an inbox. I use this for my Dads email account due to all of the spam (however, being his personal and business email address, I must constantly monitor the mail so that nothing important gets caught in the SPAM TRAP)
Which leads to the other hand, opt-in limits your ability to do certain things, for instance if you pass out business cards with an email or want legitimate, but currently unkown people to contact you it is a pain in the ass.
I thought the U.S. had the market cornered when it came to ridiculous PC requirements in the workplace. Honestly, you'd think that in all places, EUROPE...where there is topless advertising in magazines...would be sensible enough to tell its users, "Look, we're all grownups here, and we all know how hard spam is to deal with. There is no magic solution yet, you're going to have to deal with it." I mean honestly, how many people have spam tackled at home on their own, anyways? It seems nuts to ignore the difficulty of stopping spam in an enterprise environment when coming up with guidelines to punish companies for not doing so.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Delete a few of the mortgage spams, leave in the "Tentacle Rape" and "Beat her to death with your horse cock" spams.
Then run the mess through SpamAssassin, and say "Here's what we'd be free of if we could just get the administration to authorize installation of this Free software on our mail servers."
Hand both printouts to a female accomplice (preferably lesbian, or at least able to fake it), and have her do the talking to the Dean of Womyn's Studies office. "Demand the Right to be Free of Harassment and Traumatization in Our Free Speech" or something.
Your university's Women's Studies Department is a powerful weapon, but maybe it's time to use it as a force for good.
woohoo! britney boobies AND boss lawsit!
profit!
Next on their list is... copyright extention, everyone knows that.
European rational? "We have to extend to make our laws better then the American law, +40 years!".
American response, "Our copyright extention is only 20 years behind the europeans, +40 for us too!" the very next day.
The next day...
Slightly OT, but still...
One day, one of my colleagues came to me and asked (absolutely furious) " Why do you send me gay porn on my email address? ".
Turned out that some sleazeball spamfscker had harvested my work email address and was using it to send gay porn HTML email, using 'clever' JavaScript to open dozens of windows containing images of a nature I will not describe here (Think group goatse.cx here -- yes, it was that bad). The 'From:' header contained, of course, my spoofed address.
Fortunately, this was a rather tech-friendly company and the colleague was also a good friend. I was able to explain to her that this was, in fact, not coming from me. And I showed her how to disable JavaScript in Netscape Mail. She, in turn, relayed the information to the rest of her open-space co-workers.
I still shiver when I think of the potential consequences if she had shown the email to our bosses, instead of closing down all the windows and going into my office... A short time after this incident, our sysadmins (bless their souls) installed SpamAssassin on the Postfix server, with a very threshold. And that was the end of spam.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
...for that goatsex man I was subjected to?
1. Get Hired
2. Use new company email to sign up 4 LOTS of porn.
3. Wait
4. Get LOTS of porn oriented SPAM
5. Read the good ones.
6. Sue company for sexual harrasment
7. Make $$$ leave company
8. Buy fast computer for better looking porn.
Surely there are common decency laws in place already? If as an employer i bring porno into work, i would expect the sack, in additon on possible civil lawsuits. Whats the difference when compared to allowing spam / adware?
Is it any wonder why the best and brightest businesses and innovation come from the USA and Asia?
... and move to india or mexico
Thanks to the new E.U. standards, there will be no more email. Frankly, we at $company can't be bothered to keep up with their standards much less justify the expense. Please go back to inter-office memos, fax, & snailmail.
:)
But seriously, does the E.U. really have to impose itself on businesses this badly?
/*drunk.. fix later*/
We have a problem here. How do we stop the spammers from distributing unwanted spam? We can't. If they're running their operations from outside industrialized and regulated countries, there is virutually no legal recourse. My favorite solution is to have all websites pertaining to porn be labelled with an .XXX suffix. Problem? Unenforcable.
Now, the same problem exists with panhandlers. They are a societal ill that hinders commerce, encourages substance and welfare abuse, yet bylaws and law enforcement are impotent against the panhandlers themselves.
So: As my suggestion to local city council goes: if you can't fine the panhandlers (what are you going to do, take their "panhandled" money away?), fine the people patronizing the panhandlers!
Some big issues here that have to be worked out... liberty of speech comes to mind, but somehow make it illegal or a fineable offense to support unsolicited spam or pornography by way of spam. If the market dries up, so do the merchants. If the demand drops, so does the supply.
Or is it vice-versa? Idiots can be well-meaning people?
Where I work, we installed a Barracuda Spam Firewall. It works fairly well, but crap still gets through. And as we add our own REGEX filters, we find the false-positive rate increasing. The only real solution is to expand existing mail protocols to account for spam. Specifically, some changes to the SMTP protocol that require the sender definitively ID themselves before sending. This would provide accountability of some sort. I know, I know. Some people are going to attack me for proposing the modification of SMTP. What, then, do YOU suggest Oh mighty one?
Who is Twirlip of the Mists?
Is an employer required to open all snail mail to screen it for porn? Would that, actually, be illegal?
Sometimes sleazy content of spam? Since when has spam not been "sleazy?"
While there doesn't appear to be any caselaw handy there is a consensus view that it falls under the "duty of care" an employer has to their employees. That isn't a disaster since the law revolves around the ficticious "reasonable person" so it requires reasonable effort rather than perfection.
Similarly although case-law has yet to appear there are good arguments that someone failing to take reasonable care of their systems and getting viruses/being used to spam others could be liable for negligence.
"for every right there is a duty" is the basis of a lot of UK law
Damn straight! That's why Finland is now ranked as the number one most technologically advanced nation on earth, but I'm sure that private enterprise friendly China will be playing catch up.
KFG
If people used their email for legitimate work purposes it would limit the exposure to possible pr0n spam. In most cases people don't need internet or email access at work in the first place, hence this post :p
As an employer I would just take away the access (except from mine of course)
I'm just kinda curious as to why she thought THAT you would be sending her gay-pron and why she automatically assume that it was spam. You had better hope (if you're straight) that certain rumors haven't started - maybe you had better date a few of the ladies in the typing-pool and leave a few copies of Stuff/Maxim on your desk.
..........FULL STOP.
...in most cases, mail sent to you at your place of employement is considered business mail (i.e. the secretary or your boss can open it) unless it is specifically marked private or confidential.
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
That's a perhaps uninformed suggestion from the EU council. Spam varies from a worm to a porn advert. From a hardware store ad to money frauds from nigeria. And more than that, spam changes each day. You CAN fight it if there's a person working on your company on it 24 hours a day but you can NOT guarantee it will be 100% spam free.
Giving the right to people even for one single spam message to sue is totally a harsh decision.
Perhaps employeers could require employees not to give their email address to anyone. That would, of course, preclude them from sending any emails. This would definitely prevent their addresses from getting into the hands of spammers. Problem solved! No spam!
Or if that seems a little extremely, there could be an Email Czar that reads every email coming in and only passes the ones that aren't porn off to the recipient.
Hey, stupid laws require stupid solutions!
Join Tor today!
No e-mail client should ever request content from a remote server and/or load images without a direct action by the user.
Most porn spam loads images via html image tags or some other remote mechanism. (Usually with a web bug to figure out which address downloaded it so they can send you more spam.)
If the user has an e-mail client configured by default to download contact automatically then it needs to be corrected. That is the fault of their IS/IT department or whoever ordered the IS/IT department to use that client. I don't even think Outlook is that stupid anymore.
The other problem is that there are a whole lot of people who are unable or unwilling to just grow the hell up. So you get e-mail that describes sex. So what? Big deal! Sex is a part of life. Just delete it and move on.
But instead, these growth stunted pod people want to obscess over that part of life that they have not learned to accept. Instead of blaming themselves and their upbringing (or lack thereof) they are going to take it out on ANYONE else.
The best thing to do to avoid such legal problems is find out who these people are in your company and deny them ANY outside e-mail whatsoever until they can behave like a grownup.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
I think its time to stop this bullshit and wake up. Email is a medium where anyone can contact anyone else without prior permission. Therefore fundamentally you will get spam. If you want the system to allow anyone to email anyone else then you will get people emailing you things you dont want. No-one likes it, but thats how it is, and how ever hard you try and stop it by giving a computer the task of filtering mail someone will find a way around that, how-ever carefully you design a system so that the source of a message can be guaranteed, someone will abuse the system, get hold of a "certificate" and keep moving around! If you make it cost money, people will will start using different incompatable systems ? some free, some not. If you make laws, spam will come from other countries. If you make laws, people will take advantage of them and start suing everyone, and finally, if you make laws then you're going to stop someone somewhere from doing something good. If you want you can swap email addresses with people you want to talk to and only have mail from those addresses come through. You can use feed-back forms on your websites, and even human-checking "type the number you see" or "if jack is a red dog, what colour is he?" systems. Telemarketing is only slightly different in that the telephone network is more controlled and its more costly to hire lots of people to call 1000's than to get one computer to email millions. When you're on the bus and some weird guy comes up to you and starts talking about the alien race of chicken people you might not like it but you can always walk away, use a car, or carry a gun. Email might suffer from spam, but look at the advantages: its free, its globally recognised and compatible, and it doesn't need a central monopolistic system that could be open to abuse.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Good point
Counter-sue the employees for downloading pornographic images while working.
And for using their work email address to subscribe to dubious web sites.
What employee, unless a complete and deliberate virgin, is going to complain about porn spam at work? I, for one, welcome our sleaze sending overlords.
Hey, you can always say "that damn porn spam!" as soon as your boss starts looking.
...and of course, it wasn't accepted, but that's beside the point.
We had an issue here in the workplace where porn spam was getting through to a list. Basically this was the equivalent to an "info@..." list, where potential customers would email for product information. One woman who was required to read those emails started to complain about the porn spam. Even though I had spamassassin doing a heck of a lot of blocking, plenty still got through.
Let's put aside the web form option for the moment. Could she really sue the company for making her read the email to that address? From what I was told, I don't think so, since we had proof that we were at least trying to remedy the situation any way we could. Has anyone else run into a similar situation and had someone really sue the company?
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
My primary job function is R&D and I've told bosses for quite awhile that I thought it exposed the government to liability if we weren't using industry best practices to combat spam.
I even offered to ask the agency's legal section what our exposure was and was 'discouraged' from bringing this to Legal - I think because if the lawyers *do* find a risk the problem would be immediately escalated to HQ for resolution ;-)
Anyway, I researched several client, server and mail gateway products - everybody thinks combating spam is a good thing, but the higher-ups can't decide whether to automagically delete spam at the gateway (lousy idea) or just tag it and use client-based rules to quarantine it (much better idea).
Anytime you do rule-based mail deletion you open up the opportunity for me to explain to my boss that the reason he didn't receive my project was because the mail gateway ate it.
IM frequently less than HO corporations need to protect both themselves and their employees.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
The average Slashdotter: Visits Europe, eats posts, and leaves.
The Email Czar would also be an employee and would be exposed to more porn spam than the average user. Thus, this Email Czar would be able to sue the company for a really large amount of compensation !!!
I've seen this "person" comment in every single thread I've ever read.
And with a sig that links to a site I think it's pretty obvious that this is not one person making the comment but rather the staff from said webpage that collectively comment on everything.
And then, and this is a bit harder to prove, use other "smurf" accounts to then mod this account's posts up.
The overly broad wording of the legislation, according to the study, could allow employees to sue employers for not doing enough to stop porn spam.
I know pretty much nothing about European law, but here in the US we can sue anybody for anything. There are horror stories of criminals suing their victems for being injured in the course of their crime and winning. I've read the article twice and saw nothing that said this legislation would "allow employees to sue".
Spam has really gotten out of hand. I run an email server and run spamassassin with many custom rules and trap very close to 100% of spams. I kinda like challenges like this, so I don't mind (regexpressions out the wazoo, trying to teach a computer to be more "humanlike" throgh pattern matching, etc). But the time I have spent on this is amazing. I'm on the spamassassin mailinglist, and its the heaviest traffic mailinglist that I am on. So much time and effort is being wasted on spam, its not funny.
One proposal that a coworker suggested, that I had never considered would to _not_ filter, but instead do exactly the opposite. Respond to all spam mails! Think about it. If there were robots to auto reply to any email remove or go and follow all of the urls recursively on their server, especially https signup pages, we could DOS the hell out of these guys with their own spam.
Oh yeah, and its salisbury steak day children!
The discrimination / harrassment laws in the US put the responsibility on the individual accused.
I'm sure that Mitsubishi USA and Carnival Cruise Lines will be glad to hear that, as well as hundreds of other firms who have been found liable for creating/allowing a "hostile" work/customer enviroment.
I take it you're American? You should spell cheese K-R-A-F-T. Just don't eat any of the stuff, 'K? It's apparently unamerican, or something.
I don't know if you're from Wisconson though, so I don't know whether calling you a K-R-A-F-Thead would be considered a compliment or an insult, so I'll refrain.
KFG
You know what I wonder about? Why is it while I have a military email address that is out there ALL OVER the internet, and I get HUNDREADS of emails every day, I get no spam at all except from the occasional boiler-room that thinks I need an MCSE? No porn, no penis pills... What is it that DoD/USAF is doing to stop spam that others are not?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
when politicians get involved with problems that aren't political.
What's stopping these users from installing their own filters?
Next thing you know, empolyees will be suing employers for lost e-mails killed by the main filter.
As for SMTP being broken...you can already trace spam back to it's origin. All the way back to that open relay. It doesn't take brain surgery to fire up a DNS server or use an already existing one like DNSMadeEasy.com and assign your spam domain to the IP of the proxy you'll be using. The owner of the IP can in no way shape or form prevent "unuauthorized" domains from pointing to their IP. I pointed linux.icarusindie.com at Microsoft's web-site and windows.icarusindie.com at linux.org for awhile. MS's site automatically fixes the url while Linux.org showed up as my domain no matter where I went on the site.
Spammers already use tons of domains to host the product page linked to by the "click me." All they're going to do is put a mail server on that domain. So now all you're going to have are spams where the "click me" domain and from domain match. Whoopee.
You can already filter out "click me" domains which results in 100% accuracy (as long as you're not silly enough to think a computer can do all the work) and 0% collateral damage.
If your plan of attack involves some kind of "accountability," forget it. The internet is an anonymous place. You have to find a way to deal with the problem without this silly idea that spammers are somehow going to surrender and identify themselves just because you changed the protocol.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
one reason europeans move to the US to start companies is european governments strangle their entrepreneurs with regulations and taxes. It does not surprise me to see this.
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of businesses mandated to babysit their employees. I do not get spam on my work PC. I do not give out the email address when ordering, do not access non-business sites. People that did either of those above actions do get spam. So the only solution to this is to not only make said actions grounds for immediate termination, employers should also let it be known that whatever spam/spyware removal costs (and legal costs) incurred by the company will be passed on to the offending (former) employees.
Bush has done nothing but give poster examples as to why outranged people should join terrorist organizations and help fight America. The US, under Bush's lead, has committed horrible attrocities and it only goes to support the agenda of the terrorists: that we are a dangerous, threating force that must be stopped at all costs.
What you and many other conservatives don't seem to understand is that we are not the only people in the world with a political agenda. The people who have pitted themselves against us do so not because they are "jealous, freedom-hating evil doers in league with Satan", but because they have a grievance with us and they have no other recourse.
We need to quantify the injustices we have committed (and we have committed quite a few) and then figure out how to resolve those injustices. That's how we will achieve peace, but we will never do it because it requires us to get off our righteous high-horse and take a hit to our pride. Instead, we opt for the brain-dead solution of simply killing people, a course of action that will never solve the problem. Instead, it will create a never-ending cycle of violence.
Join Tor today!
"Go back and eat some cheese, you euro-fag."
I find the American cheese quite satisfying, although it does not suit all occasions. In fact, why don't I go and eat some cheese that tonight after work while laughing at the expense of the US worker I displaced by working in the US for the past 6 years.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Someday goatse is going to cause somebody with a frail heart to have a heart-attack, and lawsuits are gonna fly.
Table-ized A.I.
I think it's absurd for users to demand protection from the spam that THEY CAUSED by being promiscuous with their email address. I've had my work email address for almost five years now, and I've never gotten a single piece of spam because I'm not dumb. My coworkers complain about spam endlessly, and I have not an ounce of sympathy for them. Hotmail has great spam filtering these days, maybe they should be using it instead of their employers' email.
Obfuscating your email address doesn't prevent spam, although it also helps to stop the spread to some degree. Dictionary attacks are used to brute force spam into a company's email server, using the most commonly used names and phrases to guess the names of your inboxes. Unless you plan on also using very obfuscated addresses, throttling, and never posting your email address (even on the web), this plan won't work. Even if you did all of this, the next smartworm that infected somebody with your address in their addressbook would wind you up on a harvest bot somewhere. If you don't want to but a few people, just set up a Challenge/Response system.
I think it's absurd for users to demand protection from the spam that THEY CAUSED by being promiscuous with their email address. I've had my work email address for almost five years now, and I've never gotten a single piece of spam because I'm not dumb. My coworkers complain about spam endlessly, and I have not an ounce of sympathy for them. Hotmail has great spam filtering these days, maybe they should be using it instead of their employers' email.
I dont know why this was posted as AC because I was logged in.
Fuck off. I wasn't bashing the US, but merely pointing out EU, in its everlasting quest to imitate everything the US does, has, once again, managed to update their laws to copy what US already does.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It is a category error to treat spam as a software bug rather than as human misbehavior. It's true that technical measures can reduce or ameliorate the spam problem, just as technical measures such as locks and sturdy vaults can reduce or deter robbery. However, that doesn't make spam (or robbery) a technical rather than a behavioral problem.
There is no technical fix for spam. Real fixes for the spam problem must take place on the human level: enforcement of laws against spam and spam-related computer crime; refusal of connectivity to spammers and spam supporters; boycotting of firms which spam or benefit from spam.
Even more to post this as an Anonymous Coward, isn't it ? The article say that EU do this, if US also do it and someone say it, it is informative. If US don't do it then it's bullshit but not because US was mentionned in the post.
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
"probably mean a considerable loss in productivity. "
You then fire the lazy workers. No? Oh yes I forgot, no one gets fired anymore unless you goto work with a gun and kill a few people.
Then you get a few weeks of suspended pay.
I believe you are lacking a sense of humor.
I've always had the impression that Europeans generally don't care about pr0n and tolerate great amounts of it. My European friends have chided Americans for years for being too prudish.
Can any Europeans out there enlighten me on this?
Proverbs 21:19
He has done nothing of the sort. In fact, he has provided a strong disincentive and discouragement for them to join terror groups.
"The US, under Bush's lead, has committed horrible attrocities"
The opposite is true. He has stopped terrorists and tyrants from committing atrocities.
"The people who have pitted themselves against us do so not because they are "jealous, freedom-hating evil doers in league with Satan""
The Satan thing you made up, but the rest is true. Al Quada has gone on record that the real opposition to us is due to hatred of freedom, especially religious freedom. Did you know that the terrorists that attacked Spain had planned their attack long before the Spanish government joined the US to help Iraq? Their main grievance was that the Spanish people had thrown out the Muslim Moorish invaders hundreds of years ago. You think that is legitimate????
"but because they have a grievance with us and they have no other recourse."
Since the main grievance is "You are not Muslims!", a better recourse on the terrorist's part is to learn tolerance.
"We need to quantify the injustices we have committed (and we have committed quite a few)
You are lying, actually.
"Instead, we opt for the brain-dead solution of simply killing people, a course of action that will never solve the problem."
It sure worked in WW2. I suppose you think that the Gestapo had a legitimate grievance!
"Instead, it will create a never-ending cycle of violence"
Like it did in WW2? You must be in a fantasy world.
a crappy comment.
History is written by the victorious. We have yet to see the outcome of this. Fallujah will never be the new Warsaw Ghetto unless the freedom fighters win. Right now they are terrorists, and will remain so if the Yankees are triumphant.
I would personally like to see George Bush Jr. and Saddam Hussein duke it out in a mud-wrestling contest, but that will never happen, more's the pity.
blocking keywords like p0rn, porn, virgins etc if one gets through by using words like p.o.r.n for example - does that count as enough?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And how do you stop co-workers from sending giving your e-mail address to spammers by sending you "virtual postcards" ? It's as hard as stopping them from opening every attachement they receive.
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
Maybe the EU should try to imitate the US's prosperity and freedom first.
Would-be spam solvers are also well advised to remember that securing the entry point to the system is both the most important point of preventing spam and the hardest problem to solve. Explaining why clients cannot be trusted is left as an exercise for the reader.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
I've had an email account for 3 years that was totally spam-free. I was careful with it, wasn't "promiscuous" with it. I carefully shielded it by using a "spamtrap" address to vet companies - any company I start doing bidniz with is "on probation" for a coupla months, then if they behave and don't send me ads, I'll update my addy with them to my protected account. I do several other things also to protect myself.
Then a person to whom I'd given my email to stupidly answered the ebay-phishing email, got trojan'd and harvested. No, I wasn't stupid to give my email to that person. I needed to communicate.
I received 10 spams the next day, and I'm "WTF is all this $&#^@????". I'm soon gonna have to change my email cuzza this.
No matter how careful a user is, he/she must actually share his/her email address for it to be of any use at all (by definition).
There's no way to be sure that absolutely everyone to whom you MUST provide an email is as careful as you are.
Even if they and you are both careful, there's no garauntee that the M$ critical-security-flaw-of-the-week isn't going to be exploited and hit you or them 10 seconds before you/they click the button to apply the patch.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
We wouldn't even be discussing this issue here if email clients did the reasonable thing and didn't load images until asked. Sounds like an MS marketing feature that, naturally, everyone felt the need to duplicate. If an email client cannot have this functionality disabled, it is flawed software and is not suitable for a business environment. If the functionality can be disabled but is not being disabled, the IT personnel responsible for maintaining affected desktop systems should be reprimanded for creating unnecessary liability for the company.
This is yet another example of the government getting involved and creating harsher guidelines than necessary because companies refuse to act in the best interests of their employees. They deserve every last word of obnoxious legislation until they learn!
I do think that the employees are aware of what kinds of contents sex-spam include. So, is there any reason for them not go inside and have a peek? I thought all normal people do :S ;)
You took the words right out of my mouth. This story is supposed to have a bunch of comments about "stupid, prudish, litigious, usaians" posted by indignant, self-righteous Europeans.
I expect to step out of my office and find that everyone has a "goatee" (vandyke).
-Peter
Cut taxes. A lot
Privatise health care so that the people control it, and not the State
Privatise the official state media organs like the BBC.
Knock the unions down a peg by instituting "right to work".
No thanks, I rather like having some.
... but because they have a grievance with us and they have no other recourse...
...We need to quantify the injustices we have committed (and we have committed quite a few) and then figure out how to resolve those injustices...
I'm am not buying the argument that they have no other recourse. Far too often, people do the most outrageous things because, in their opinion, they have no other recourse.
What injustices? List some.
Proverbs 21:19
Snail mail does not have the same problem (in the US, at least). The most important reason is the cost per piece mailed. At nearly 40 cents per item, sending out the massive quantities spam is known for is prohibitive. If they want bulk discounts, they must be legitimately registered with a permit. That permit can easily be revoked and there is no other service waiting in the wings to pick up the business. Air mail doesn't sneak past - in fact, it costs more and still must move through the US postal service. There is no competing postal service within the US. The US postal service is a federal entity and there is a fairly good-sized body of federal law related to posted mail. This also means it has federal entities (FBI comes to mind) in place to handle investigation and enforcement when violations occur.
The only "spam" I get through snail mail is 1) local business ads (grocery store sheets that are not addressed, but delivered to EVERY mailbox), 2) political pamphlets (but this is because I don't ask off), and 3) those with whom I have had a relationship (BofA's many offers, SBC's nonsense, and so on). I have only twice in my life received chain letters. I have never seen a "Nigerian scam" or pornographic materials (that I didn't personally request).
==========
Until we have a system in which every person is accountable for the email they send and an international body of enforceable laws to prevent abuses, we will not have protection from spam. I prefer not to go the way of charging for emails just to stop spammers -- because that enriches one group at the expense of another to combat a third, when the first group could have come up with better options.
===========
On a side note, what filters out there can scan the content of the images embedded in the email for pornography? What filters can find every single misspelling of every term considered offensive? (Not to mention one I ran into trouble with. Trying to trim spam offering stock tips I tried filtering out the word stock. Unfortunately, stock has other meanings that various customers use it for.)
The only way for an employer to really cover their ass would be to review every email that comes in -- and this is guaranteed to get privacy fanatics up in arms. Of course, if it comes in on company email lines and is supposed to only pertain to company business, but that still puts at least one employee in the unenviable position of having to review every email and make a judgment call. (Hey, maybe that's the next big employment opportunity - email reviewer.)
In closing, I haven't read the actual text of the legislation, but I would think there is a pretty wide gray area here. Are the "online pharmacies" spams considered pornographic if they offer viagra? Or would only those with images or explicit text count?
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
it's funny. laugh
and get a fucking sense of humor you quacks
You will see the same tired list originally written by Stalinists whining that the US helped Chile kick out Soviet overlords in 1973, and the tragedy of the Soviets colonialists also being kicked out of Guatemala in the mid-1950s.
They will use this to justify terrorism. Expect silence when you point out that Guatemalans and Chileans are not part of the terrorist movement at all.
All I ever hear is the "US supports Israel" complaint. Since it is clearly their desire to wholly wipe from the face of the Earth every single Jew, I can't buy into the argument that anything the U.S. does to stop that is an "injustice."
What most Muslims have a problem with are their own governments and corrupt rulers. Naturally they can't do much about that because the regimes they live under are so repressive. The USA becomes an easy, "safe" target. For their part, the repressive regimes encourage this behavior, in part because it shifts the focus of violence from them to someone else.
Proverbs 21:19
...you can delete them once, they hide in some other start-up file reinfecting the machine. Trust me, some of these are near totally uninstallable by anything else but a clean reinstall.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"...you can delete them once, they hide in some other start-up file reinfecting the machine. Trust me, some of these are near totally uninstallable by anything else but a clean reinstall."
/a from the CD usually fixes it.
That's why you check autoexec.bat, config.sys, system.ini, win.ini and the registry */Software/Microsoft/CurrentVersion/Run* keys.
I love 98SE for this - it's extremely easy to un-fuck-up provided that no important system files were replaced with trojans, and even then a date check and extract
Absolute worst case, an install of 98 OVER the existing install usually fixes any problems, while retaining your files and a lot of Windows settings.
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
"Europe's new anti-spam legislation"
"The overly broad wording of the legislation, according to the study, could allow employees to sue employers for not doing enough to stop porn spam."
Jesus H. Fucking Christ on a Popsickle stick.
I'm sorry, but weren't these the same people that laughed at us, considered us backward, for being upset with Janet Jackson's breast being exposed on TV?
The party's over
If it works for email, then you should be able to sue an employer if somebody from outside the company mails you porn in an envelope. There's no precedent for employers being responsible for censoring incoming mail, and I certainly wouldn't want a few litigious opportunists to force it on society. Ridiculous.
- email costs the company X dollars per year in servers, spam filters, network, etc.
- email now presents a risk of Y dollars in terms of possible lawsuits
- the cost of doing business without internet email is Z dollars
Do the math: Is X + Y > Z? Then get rid of internet email access. They my keep the inhouse email, but no internet gateway. Other technologies for allowing cooperation among employees will be used.You might complain its not fair or believe it could never happen. Haven't you seen things that are perceived to be mostly "employee benefits" get dropped? I sure have.
So, the spammer-parasites are coming very close to killing the host upon which they depend. Its on life-support now and it won't take much of a shock to push it over the edge. In 5 years, you will see posting on Slash dot like, "Hey, remember in the bad-old-days when you had an email address? Can you believe people actually got spam? ha ha ha".
Your friend and well-wisher
m0smithslash
http://www.ferociousflirting.com
And that kind of spyware isn't classified as a virus or trojan by antivirus vendors because......"the user consented to it" and a corporation made it?
"You are clearly biased by the jewish-owned corporate media and its servants in the Zionist occupied government!"
(Watch someone attempt to insult you by calling you a Jew when you dare to question the oft-stated Muslim goal of extermination of the Israelis).
How about if the employee mistypes a URL or clicks a bad link ending in goat.cx (please don't go there) - is the employer liable because they didn't block that site. How about any other site
How about if it's a ground-level building with windows, and there's a flasher across the street... is the company liable for not shading the windows?
Now, if an employee had a known porn-spam problem, reported he/she was offended by it, and no steps were taken, that's a maybe. But even then the stuff is hard to cut off without sometimes impacting legitimate traffic.
Holding the employers liable for somebody else's misconduct is not very reasonable.
Take out all that multimedia gunk and give all employees Pine. You can still communicate just fine but images don't show. I receive lots of spam and a good deal of it is probably pornographic, but I never see the pic.s so it's no problem for me. (Okay, every once in a while I turn on full headers so I can look at the URLs and guess what kind of junk I'm enjoying not seeing.)
p g?" then he has nothing to complain of.
And if someone answers "Yes" to "really follow link to http://sickos-r-us.com/horrible-disgusting-porn.j
However, when it comes to showing pornography for sexual pleasure we ("Europeans") get much more restrictive. No country I know of shows pornography on public television before children are supposed to sleep, and it is unusual that it is done even in the middle of the night on public television.
Without referring to opinion polls in different countries, my guess is that a definite majority of Europeans is against unrestricted pornography in general - and definitely so in spam.
Artistic photography and films with occasional nudity is a different matter.
...it's a directive, and as such, must be implemented in national law, fulfilling certain stipulations. Those aside, there's a reasonable amount of leeway, and various States end up producing somewhat different legislation. So any theories as to what implications may result from this directive are theoretical (hence the word theories).
The eight countries mentioned comprise less than half the EU, even before enlargement this weekend.
While some EU countries ignore various directives, they quite often get in trouble, eventually at least. Ireland, where I am, is shortly to get in deep doodoo over non-compliance with environmental issues (Not enough special areas of conservation (SACs), and not protecting the few we have). In theory, the State may end up having to fork out millions until they sort out the issues (They've already been given a LOT of time).
EU directives, laws, etc. are supra-state in nature, not just vague international stuff, so can't be ignored indefinately. The EU is an extra layer of governance above national governments, despite not being federal.
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
Just because someone has a problem with giving their email address to unscrupulous spammers doesn't mean they should start whining to remove freedoms.
IMnsHO the answer is on the receiving end - people should learn not to give out emails to everyone if they don't want to get spammed.
For an interesting article, check out Wired
" In times past, anonymous speech sheltered the Founding Fathers' revolutionary arguments and emboldened commentators such as Mark Twain (aka Samuel Langhorne Clemens) to criticize common ignorance.
Last April, in MacIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, the US Supreme Court reaffirmed that the First Amendment protects the right to anonymous speech. Anonymity, the court reasoned, helps speech stay free. Focusing on political speech - the sort of speech that lies at the core of the First Amendment - the MacIntyre ruling stipulated that restrictions on anonymous political speech must be narrowly tailored and serve an over-riding state interest. "
When I got made redundant last time, about half the company went. I later heard that someone in that half subscribed everyone in the other half to what must have been every pr0n-in-your-email service they could find (which must then have sold the addresses on). The IT department (now person) was apparently powerless to stop it.
I think there were about 2 people I felt sorry for (both lovely girls who would have been mortified to receive this stuff), but otherwise I thought it was bloody hilarious and wished I'd thought of it.
How hard would it have been, with a copy of the staff list and the knowledge that everyone's address is firstname.lastname@company.com? Are the company negligent for having easily-guessable addresses? Or for firing most of the IT department?
For another example, our CEO wants to sign up to mailinglists of all our partners, competitors, etc. Both use their "secondary" email address for this spam-ridden mail.
Most of the "legimite" "corporate" use of email doesn't actually get your email address listed with porn spammers. People just like giving out their email addresses to everyone, and that's what gets them in spam-trouble. By giving a second throwaway account, most people's primary account stays nice and spam-clean.
There are two ways to filter: use purely mechanical methods (manually create filters for 'porn', 'p0rn', 'p.o.r.n', etc); or use some sort of machine-learning technique (e.g. Bayesian filters).
The problem with the first technique is that you will never be able to filter properly, because in order to prevent all spam from coming in, you will block important emails.
The problem with the second method is that SOMEBODY still has to look at emails and classify them in order to "teach" the filter. This is either the end user or some guy in the IT department. The point being, that SOMEBODY still has to look at it. Even if you can prevent the poor HR gal from seeing the man-cow anal action spam, some poor schmuck in IT can still sue you for forcing him to filter the whole company's email stream!
In other words, this has to be handled just the same way prank phone calls are handled. The company may be required to block certain sources of constant annoyance, but under most circumstances an employee should just hang up when a caller starts moaning and panting. Likewise, an employee should just hit 'delete' when they see porn spam.
aQazaQa
As an european living in North-America, this article , although true in its content, plays a lot of noisy drums for nothing.
Contrary to USA, europe does not have a culture of suing people or companies, and in particular against "hostile work environment".
I don't think the situation were an employee sues his company for receiving p0rn spam will arise often, since the employee will have nothing to win apart from losing his job and never find another one (suing your company is generally not a good thing on a resume). (I dont say you lose your job if you sue your company - legally you cannot, but we all know how easy it is to for companies to find other supposedly legal reasons to fire you).
Moreover, if your receive spam, it generally means that you have used your work e-mail address for non-business related issues, and you'll end up walking on dangerous grounds if you try suing your company for that.
So, to me, this article has been written by someone who knows laws, can forsee their effect, but do not know the european culture enough and makes the common mistake of comparing it to north-america. Or maybe he never worked in a company where e-mail is used for work.
Europeans is capable of telling the difference between nudity and pornography. Janet showing her breast on TV was not pornography, it was just stupid.
http://research.microsoft.com/~mbj/Smiley/Smiley.h tml
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
SPF ( http://spf.pobox.com ) does this at the domain level. At the username level, authentication would be guaranteed by the domain server.
.
The grandparent post's issues can be solved by always using the domain SMTP server (as opposed to using an ISP server or sending direct). Most people already do this. If the ability to send from a dynamic IP is really needed, I notice that DynDNS is listed as an SPF supporter at http://spf.pobox.com/faq.html
A second conversation (to verify) is not needed. Just push all mail through the SMTP servers. Then the receiving server can verify the sender on receipt (the sender's IP is known as part of the TCP conversation).
There is also a proposal called IM2000 that would offer most of what you want as well. With IM2000 only a message notification is sent. Using that info, your email client then gets the actual message from the sending server. If you verify the sending server in DNS prior to retrieving the message, you can be guaranteed that it is sent by the correct server.
Can't argue with the "bared breast" difference. As for myself, I definitely don't mind bared breasts at all (but that's probably because, like most American men, I am obsessed with them ).
The best duty I ever pulled in the Navy was the day I was assigned Shore Patrol on the beach in Malaga, Spain. Imagine being FORCED to patrol up and down a topless beach filled with hundreds of high-school and college-aged European girls sunning themselves.
Proverbs 21:19
Any cogent whitepapers out there detailing SMTP reform using digital signatures?
Most of the stuff I've been reading on PKI don't extend the problem set to Email verification on a global scale.
I use digitial signatures with PGP, and people who know me, can tell if the mail has been spoofed, if they are also running PGP. But that's a very small set. We use public keyring servers to upload our public keys.
Thinking seriously about the problem is difficult. Every solution I think of has an obvious weakness. Early on in the 90's, when I ran a small (500 user) ISP, it used to piss me off that all SMTP senders didn't have reverse DNS lookup. I hacked sendmail to drop mail from recipients that didn't reverse resolve. That, as you might imagine, didn't last long.
I then began quite enamored by a whitepaper that I read from a graduate student at the University of Washington. It detailed a plan for embedding a kind of "reverse traceroute" in the IP header of every packet sent. When you got a packet with a forged src-ip, the actual traceroute it took was embedded in the header of the packet. He managed to devise a way to represent the route in hex in a way that didn't blow past the IP header specs. I forget if he was "borrowing" the TOS field or what. Then I realized that was never going to happen, and even if it somehow found it's way into router code, many ISPs would probably disable it.
The question of doing strong authentication against an incoming SMTP connection always ends up being a Layer 8 discussion about who is the root of trust. Any opt-in system with a set of root trust delegators like Verisign would meet with widespread dissent at first, but could take hold over time. But I think rebeliions would take hold in large sections of the net. If you thought Alternet DNS was bad, imagine the ways a system like that would be corrupted. People would join the hierarchy of trust and then allow SMTP relaying to happen, deliberately, just to break the system down. Your machine would be busy every day just downloading revocation lists deciding who to trust THAT DAY.
I think the final answer is, everyone should just shut Email down, and the whole world has to use Google's GMail. All those Ph.Ds over there at Google, we can trust those guys to do the right thing, no?
I know what I want, I want to be paid to open my email. The postage would be some sort of token that I and my legitimate corresponders would pass back and forth. Anyone with a need to mail more than he receives would be required to buy postage. The problem is that these tokens may be too easy to coounterfeit.
How does the Post Office sell postage on the internet? I mean, can't you just download postage and pay for it with a credit card?
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
I store all my incoming Email. including the spam.
I could be sent to jail for that: I have kiddy porn on my drive. Just having the stuff on your drive makes you in violation of the Dutch law, and you can go to jail for that. Simple.
(The spam is useful for training filters, or to calculate statistics after the fact. If I know in advance I want to know how many spams I got every day, I can just tabulate them, but I might want to collect some other statistic and need info I didn't keep. So I just store everything. Costs me some disk space, but it's cheap nowadays.)
Although American law is based on English Common Law, Americans see a loophole where ever anything isn't spelled out in plain legalese. If Common sense was assumed to be part of the system, we wouldn't have so many frivolous lawsuites. As it is, any creative person can be a victim of something.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
fucking crack smoking mods...
it's a joke.
maybe it's offtopic, but it's a joke first and foremost.
*grumble*
American taxes just favor the rich.
Spam == Sleaze; // Sleaze - its not just for cheap porn anymore!
Why anyone would fight over that godforsaken dry strip of sand in the first place is what I don't get. At least in Unreal Tournament (etc) it's all about a spectator sport. :)
My solution, of course, would then just be to get rid of all email access for employees if one of them decides to sue, or even complains.
The threat of lawsuits for accidental porn has been around for years. Where is the flood of them? Can you even find a dozen? This sounds like a plot cooked up by a content filtering vendor. What a crock!
I'm sure that old Al wouldn't mind a single letter asking him to politely stop emailing you. Or perhaps he would be interested in legitimate business opportunities you might want to share with him?
Al Ralsky
5016 Patrick Rd.
West Bloomfield, Mi 48322-1543
1-888-531-4793
(248)661-3355
(248)661-5166
al@rxpoint.com
It seems to help. And the more people who send them their own junk back in their envelopes with "no thanks" written on it the better.
Just for your information, the term 'regex' is a shortening of 'regular expression.' It isn't an acronym and shouldn't be written in all caps.
Prostitution is legal in the Netherlands,
So now a brothel here cannot receive its own spam because the whores might complain about its sleazy content.
Aargh!
All I can think of is how my mother used to go on her email account and find the most disgusting spam messages imaginible. I definentley think that people should be held liable for things like this! However the reason that she got in this situation in the first place was beacause she was on windows with and wasn't carefull with her email address. Avoiding spam is common sense on the part of isp/company AND the user! I think if users are being bombarded by spam, especially pornagraphic on the fault of the isp/company then there has to be accountability. Just remember that if you use common sense then you might not have a problem with spam at all.
411 Y0UR 8453 4R3 8310NG 70 U5!! -NSA
so what if i was to post Pr0n spam using a letter as the medium to a company's employees? is it the employer who gets brought up in court? and i walk away? no way! and why should email be any different? this is just stupid madness... what is the EU thinking?
If all the businesses at once decided that they would move to a new system, what's the problem?
Also, why does implementing a new system imply ceasing to use the old system? There is absolutely nothing that requires the old system be completely scrapped before the new one can start.
Actual story:
After filling out and mailing all the forms at Junkbuster's declaraion page and it not having enough of an effect, I tried this: everything I got in the mail that I didn't want I wrote "Return to sender" on and stuck in the out box. Some of it went back. Most of it the post office stuck back in my mailbox saying "we can't return bulk mail" or some other BS. I just kept writing "Return to sender" on it and sticking it back in the out box.
One day, I got a note in my mailbox from the post office. It said to come down to pick up my mail. So I went down to the post office. As soon as I handed over the note, the clerk took back to the offices. A little later a stern looking man came out and had a little "talk" with me about how they would have to discontinue delivering my mail if I continued to "abuse" the system (I was halfway tempted to continue
What it comes down to, even after getting off of all the junk mailing lists, and contacting all the companies that send you junk mail to tell them to FOAD, you will STILL get mail that you can't return to sender or have turned off. For me, it's the flyers I get from the local grocery store, cingular and the penny pincher, even though I never read them.
These ones never have return addresses, and I have been severely tempted to start a movement to get a bill passed in congress to disallow these kind of "mailings" anymore. But, I'm lazy, and most days there's not a thing in my mailbox anymore. Wish I could say the same for spam, but that will be fixed soon . .
Nathan's blog
You will see the same tired list originally written by Stalinists whining that the US helped Chile kick out Soviet overlords in 1973
Learn history from the same place you got your degree - the back of a cereal box - did we?
They weren't "Soviet overlords" you gibbering idiot, they were a democratically elected government. But what's the point talking to a retard like yourself? You'll never read a book, go to a real library or anything similar, will you? You've got Fox News!
Fucktard.
fuck you!
Read about it here.
Seriously....
Short of scrapping SMTP with a replacement, this is the only effective way to quash spam....By making it effectively impossible to spam.
All other SMTP-level solutions I've seen introduce more overhead into an already spam-ridden communications medium....
"You'll never read a book, go to a real library or anything similar, will you?
I've read more than you will ever know.
"You've got Fox News!"
Yes. A great source of information, but not the only source.
"Learn history from the same place you got your degree - the back of a cereal box - did we?"
I think you learned yours from a Bazooka Joe comic book. You are so gullible, to believe the lies that Allende's fascist dictatorship was "democratic".
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
> Funny I was always of the opinion that peace came when you stopped shooting.
It does, but he said "promoting peace," which is not the same as "enacting peace." Dick.... Cheney!