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.

Comments

Great, but what about spam from outside?

[metlin]

Great idea, but what about spam originating from other countries?

First off, there is no assurance that spammers will adhere to this in the first place - if they are using trojan-ed systems and the like, there is no way you would be track them down.

Sure, some of them may, but if there is any way they can hide behind the anonymity mask, there is no reason they have to adhere to this.

Secondly, most of the spam I receive are not even from the US. Most of the stuff is from Asia or worse, eastern Europe. Do these regulations apply to them, too?

From the release (emphasis mine) --

The final rule follows the intention of the CAN-SPAM Act to protect email recipients from unwitting exposure to unwanted sexual images in spam, by requiring this mark to be included both in the subject line of any e-mail message that contains sexually oriented material, and in the electronic equivalent of a "brown paper wrapper" in the body of the message.

What is _any_ really? Is there a way FTC can regulate spam from other countries, or is it just for intra-US spam? If it's just the latter, it isn't much use. On the other hand, if it's not, how on Earth are they going to enforce it?

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[stephenisu]

NEWS FLASH!! This just in..

Those "Untrackable" spammers are selling a product, a product via credit card. Don't think too hard on that one.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[Robmonster]

This is the same counter given to every law that triesd to combat spam. They are always unenforcable.

I dont think there is ANYTHING that can be done by governments that will reduce spam levels. The spammers know its wrong, but they dont care.

If anything they will AVOID using these tags, a they know their emails will be filtered out if they include them. A spammer is after eyeballs on emails.

The real problem, as ever, are the people who BUY services from spammers. Cut off their income.

Same arguments for an unsolvable problem.

RM

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[metlin]

Sure, but the point is most porn spam is asking you to visit site foo-bar or something like that. Or maybe buy a product from some place.

And anyway, the sites that the spammers link to can always plead ignorance. *shrug*

Hey, I asked these spammers to help me out, but they did not stick to the rules. Don't blame us.

And maybe this will see even spam being outsourced ;)

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[mcc]

This is something I mostly bring up in the debate regarding general spam, but something that is very important to keep in mind is that if we can force spam to originate from outside of the United States, this is a major win. The fact is that every existing form of technical spam prevention-- blacklists, whitelists, graylists, filtering, etc-- are made noticeably easier if one can make assumptions geographically limiting the locations of spammers. Even if by "geographically limit" we just mean "outside the U.S.".

The thing is though I don't know how applicable my argument here is in this particular case, since as far as I'm aware (?) you don't filter porn spam any differently than the rest of it. However, spammers seem to be very loath to subscribe to any kind of law or decency if it means more work for them. Perhaps some spammers will get themselves screwed out of business because they don't follow this law and ISPs sue them.. a thinning of the herd, if you will.

Need we say it?

[bendelo]

Spammers lie, cheat and break the law. I can't see this being enforced succesfully.

Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

there's porn on the Internet?

So does Viagra Spam count?

[billstewart]

I get lots more mail about this than actual porn spam these days. Some of it's more explicit than others....

It's working?

[tbase]

I'm actually seeing some mail labeled this way in our junk repository - but all of them violate CAN-SPAM in any number of ways, primarily the fact that they have no return address. I don't know why they bother, other than the fact that they're probably better able to reach their target audience with this method /setting up filter to 'Important Stuff' directory

I guess the big question is...

[teamhasnoi]

Is offering to make my penis big enough to tear an Amazon in two sexually explicit?

And what about if you're easily offended or get your crank turned by Norton of antivirus fame?

It seems

[Mz6]

It seems that the FTC thinks that SPAM is handled.

- We don't get any uncolicited emails anymore thanks to their CAN-SPAM act.

- Life is great and it's easy to remove yourself from these lists if you don't want their emails.

How about trying to come up with rules to STOP and regulate unwanted spam altogether before adopting rules to regulate sexually explicit ones? Once the rules come to completeley stop this, non of these new rules even matter!

I can see the weasling now...

[zulux]

Headers will come in mutiple forms that will fullfill the letter of the law, but attempt to foil basic filters:

[SÈXUA?Y-EXPLI?IT]: More Pr0n for you.
SeExUally-Explicit: More pr0n for you:
More pr0n for you (Sexually-Explicit)
[Sexually]-[Explicit]: More pr0n for you

Anywhere in the subject line?

[lightspawn]

So if this substring can be found after 300 characters of spaces, is the spammer still complying?

Here's why

[nanojath]

Here's why the porn industry doesn't like it - because porn spam is ready made for people with "impulse control problems." They don't really care if you, person with reasonable self-control, deletes their spam, as it cost them whatever ridiculous fraction of a cent to send. They really don't like it if Mr. self-recognized porno compulsive can filter their stuff out.

The law IS having an effect

[daves]

Our incoming spam rate, normally a clean, rising, exponential curve, dropped 20% the day CAN-SPAM went into effect. It happened again the day last month that it was announced that 4 had been indicted under the Act.

Of course, spam is still up 30% over the end of last year...

Re:The law IS having an effect

[letxa2000]

In this day and age, anyone who isn't using Bayesian filtering for spam protection is just begging for spam. In this day and age, anyone that claims that Bayesian filters can't solve the current spam problem has either tried the wrong Bayesian-based product or doesn't know what he/she is talking about. And those that say Bayesian filtering won't work "forever" because spam will evolve to get around it are preaching gloom and doom about a future that is far from certain.

I've been using Bayesian filtering for 1-1/2 years and my success rate just keeps inching up. In May of last year I was at 99.5% success. My Bayesian corpus has grown in the last year and so far this month I'm averaging 99.98% success--only two have gotten through, and one of those was in a foreign language. I can't even remember the last time a pornographic spam got past my Bayesian filter.

And in the last year we've seen silly attempts to get around Bayesian filters, such as packing the message with lots of random words, or excerpts from books or the Constitution or what have you. Time and time again those messages actually get a higher Bayesian score than they would have if they had just left the random words out.

There is still no known effective way to get around Bayesian filtering. I personally don't think there will be a way around them, but regardless: Bayesian has been the answer for nearly two years and shows no sign of weakening in the near future. USE IT!.

I really don't see

[Evets]

I really don't see why the US needs to force their sexual discomfort on the rest of the world. US regulations on the web (or any countries for that matter) are not welcome as far as I'm concerned. The internet for the first 10 years I used it represented a truly free society. It seems now that it is a society being pillaged by governments around the world.

Re:My issues with this...

[JesseL]

a) Would you rather see 100 variations of "hot sluts that dig farm animals want to meet you tonight"?

b) So there are people who may see an explicit image before they scroll down, that goes now too. At least most people will benefit and none will suffer.

c) Similar to point b. If 99% of people can't figure out how to use the tools they've got, so what? Why not do somthing to help the other 1% of us anyway? The people who don't want porn spam will still figure out pretty quickly not to open massages titled "SEXUALLY EXPLICIT". Right now you can't tell anything from the subject line - porn spam comes with subject lines ranging from (no subject) to "Your Mother Called".

One way spam fighting.

[miffo.swe]

The best way possible to fight spam must be to fine the companies marketed by spam. Someone surely forks the dough to get spam invading everyones mailbox. I have a hard time imagine someone sending spam just for fun. By cutting off the money the incentive to spam is reduced and it should wither and become a much smaller problem.

Filtering and making a new shiny mail system dont help. All it does is make the spammers invent new ways to send spam.

What makes spam such a big industry must be the companies who pays for it, go get them!

Now I'm Screwed

[tds67]

When I e-mail naked pictures of myself to my friends, I usually use "SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT:" in the subject line.

Now my friends' e-mail filters will send my e-mails directly to the trash bin. Thanks a lot FTC!

Why clutter the subject?

[photon317]

The Subject line is for human perusal, not for machine categorization. The proper way to implement such a thing has always been an X-header in the email's headers. You could use this to categorize all types of junk spam, allowing mail clients and mail service providers to filter them at will.

Imagine something like:

X-UCE:

Where type is "porn", "commercial", etc... or even use PICS-like content-rating systems in there too.

Why the Subject field???

What about the opposite problem?

[mamba-mamba]

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
--

Porn Industry != Spammers

[Jonathan Quince]

I don't know why the porn industry is complaining about this,

I can say with some certainty that the "porn industry" isn't complaining about this. All of the best affiliate programs enforce TOS that prohibit spam. (You spam, you get shut down and lose the $$$ in your account that hasn't yet been paid out.) Don't insult the legitimate porn industry by linking them with spammers.

Saying that the "porn industry" protests this regulation is like saying CVS or Walgreens protests regulations on Viagra spam or OfficeMax protests regulations on inkjet cartridge spam. There are legitimate players in the industry, and there are scam artists feeding at the bottom. Guess which group is responsible for the spam.

Of course, none of this means anything about the regulation itself, which will most certainly be ineffectual at reducing spam or filtering porn spam. IME, the only tool that can produce a real impact on spam is a 2x4 applied forcefully to a spammer's skull.

La la la la la

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

What a great idea!

[spidergoat2]

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.

Re:Wait a minute... (Slightly OT)

[Landaras]

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