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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."
Lather, rinse, repeat...
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
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?
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.
Sometimes sleazy content of spam? Since when has spam not been "sleazy?"
Like a dream I had last night...
...
One day, one of my colleagues came to me and asked (absolutely furious) " Why do DON'T you send me gay porn on my email address? ".
Then the 70's pr0n music started
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
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
Counter-sue the employees for downloading pornographic images while working.
And for using their work email address to subscribe to dubious web sites.
Try sending 100,000 letters without postage and you will see how effective the USPS spam blocker is!
For as long as businesses allow incoming SMTP e-mail, their employees will always be exposed to all forms of Spam, including pornographic. ;)
I don't know about that.... I haven't received a single piece of spam my entire time working here, and none of my coworkers have ever mentioned it either. So I guess the head office must be doing something right.
Or maybe they're just afraid to spam @doj.gov
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
Funny part is snail mail has the same bugs and I don't hear anybody yelling "Snail mail must die!"
After a few truckloads a day of snail mail spam, I'm sure that thought must have crossed Ralsky's mind.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) 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
(x) 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
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) 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
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) 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
( ) 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
(x) 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!
Shooting at people.
No thanks, I rather like having some.
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
which is why you should stuff as much as you can into the 'prepaid reply envelopes' that they generously provide. :-)
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