Slashdot Mirror
FTC Porn Spam Regulation Now in Effect
gManZboy writes "The AP (through Yahoo) is reporting that the FTC is now requiring that all sexually explicit spam carry the wholly original 'SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT:' moniker in the subject line. I don't know why the porn industry is complaining about this, it seems like now everyone who really wants porn spam (not I!) can finally create a filter that delivers it to their inbox, highlighted, and bolded!" The FTC's regulation is available, and so is Slashdot's earlier story.
there's porn on the Internet?
Now my friends' e-mail filters will send my e-mails directly to the trash bin. Thanks a lot FTC!
It's fine, in this context, to require sexually explicit material to be labelled as such. But what about the opposite problem, where spammers label their spam as sexually explicit and then it turns out to just be a garden-variety multi-level marketing scam?
I mean, I would imagine that lots of people would check out explicit email once and a while hoping for a thrill, but not if it most of the purportedly explicit material is bogus.
The FCC should fine people who promise explicit material and don't deliver, too. Otherwise they might as well require the label to say "Unsolicited Junk Email".
MM
--
By including this sig, the copyright holders of this work or collection unreservedly place it in the public domain.
Your post advocates a
( ) 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
( ) 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
(*) 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
(*) 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
( ) 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
(*) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(*) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(*) 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.
( ) 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!
Now my 17 year old son and his friends won't have to waste their time actually searching for these sites. Email will readily mark it as such for them. I think it just goes to show we're making things too easy on kids today. He should have to shoplift Playboy just like I did.
Related to the parent's comment...
I can't claim this joke as my own. I'm pretty sure I read it on Slashdot months before.
Everytime I see one of those intelligence-insulting pre-movie commercials telling me that "by downloading movies off the internet I'm causing this stunt man's family to starve," I want to stand up and shout as loud as I can:
"HOLY SHIT!! You mean I can download movies for free off of the Internet??!!"
And then run out of the theater as quickly as I can.
- Neil Wehneman
My legal education, in nifty podcast format