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USA, UK, Australia Sign Anti-Spam Memorandum
securitas writes "Computerworld's Todd R. Weiss reports that the USA, Britain and Australia have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for six agencies to share resources to fight spam. The MoU lets the government agencies 'share information and work together to detect, investigate and track spammers' as well as 'exchange evidence and coordinate enforcement efforts.' The agencies involved include the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), its counterparts in the UK and Australia, and several other consumer protection agencies. You can get a full list of participating government bodies from the FTC press release, 'Consumer Protection Cops Join Forces to Fight Illegal Spam'. You can also get the spam MoU full text in PDF format from the FTC. More at The Register, vnunet, The Age/Sydney Morning Herald and InfoWorld."
Who wants to be the first on their mailing list?
But did they have to email it to everyone?
What are the kind of penalties these spammers are staring at, if any?
Sunset over the lake, cool mist over the bridge; A leave upon the ripples, the snow reflects its glow.
share information and work together to detect, investigate and track spammers
So is this just forming some back channels to track anyone, or are their limits to ensure that only spammers are tracked. And if there are limits, how do they define a spammer?
China, Korea, and Brazil are absent from the list. It just figures the countries sending the most spam are not onboard.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
Governments will collect information about spammers to make their efforts more effective? Sure, fight fire with fire. I like it.
Now if they can just get China, Russia, and the other major spam producing countries to sign on, that would be useful. Also if they could actually track down spammers effectively and actually stop spam, then that would also be something.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
So is yelling "SHITCOCK!" repeatedly while standing in the power tools section of Sears. Doesn't make it right, though. Unless they let out out of the Tourette's clinic early.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Throw in Canada and New Zealand, you're looking at the founders of UKUSA and Echelon.
Maybe Fort Meade is renting out CPU cycles to Mr Richter.
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
So, who's going to win this steel cage match, the vast majority of slashdotters who'd gladly pay to see spammers drawn and quartered in the public square, or the smaller but feistier tinfoil hat crowd?
I just signed a Increase My IQ While I Slack Off Memorandum.
Tomorrow I'll sign the Give Me Your Money Memorandum.
I'm expecting good things from this! After all, I signed the Memoranda!
I just got back from a week long holiday to find 226 e-mails of which 170 were spam. I used to get far less but now my out-of-office (as enforced by company policy) replies automatically to spam stating I'm away thus reenforcing the fact that my e-mail address is a real and active one therefore even more spam gets directed at it. :-(
Omnis amans amens
what's "right" and what's the constituition is different. it's not nice to swear at a cop but you have all the right to. In fact, there was a case where a guy said "fuck you" to a cop. The cop arrested him and the guys sued the cop for violating his first amendment rights. The guy won. Even though it's wasn't nice to swear at the cop, it was within his rights and protected by the first amendment. The second that we infringe on someone's freedom of speech and say it's ok, we set a precedent that the freedom of speech isn't absoulte. It's just a matter of time before it becomes illegal to insult or criticize the president. That's not a democracy or republic, that's a dictatorship. Btw, i only know of 3 actuall limitations to free speech: Copyrights and patents witch are evil (Jefferson called them a "neccesary evil"). libel and slander, and threats or or things that can cause iminent danger (can't threaten to kill someone or yell fire in a crowded theater). Personally, i think we should just get rid of copyrights and patents or at least make them 10 years without renewal.
Now spam. For every 1,000,000 people who get spammed, like 5 respond. If those 5 morons didn't respond, the spammers would go out of buisness. Personally, instead of making it illegal to spam (spammers won't care about the law) we should just fight fire with fire. massive DOS attacks against the servers sending out spam for example.
Spammers will always find a way to spam so long as there is money in it. If that money is denied them they will stop. "CAN-SPAM" acts need to be changed to "CANT-SPAM" - and internationally at that - and spammers need to be hit where it counts - in their bank balance.
However - I do not see the above happening. All countries need to participate and co-operate, not just the ones involved in the press release, do you really see THAT happening? Also legislation NEEDS to be passed that the US have already shown they cannot - and most other countries will not dare to try - not good for the future there.
I suppose we will have to get used to the usefulness of Email becoming more and more diluted, of the endless race between anti-spam software and spammers getting round it and so on. I think we will still have the internet and inboxes getting clogged up with that rubbish for some time yet - if not from now on in.
Web Sig: Eddy Currents
What we need is an anti-spam deal with those Nigerian princes. Australian Spam would go something like this: "Sick of dingo's eating your babies? If so try our 100% guaranteed penis enlarging dingo scaring pills."
Commercial speech is the most heavily regulated. Spam is barely commercial speech.
I guess what I meant by "right" is whether it's culturally acceptable to do so. In my example, Sears, you'd be disturbing other customers by yelling in a private store and would be kicked out by a mall security.
It's not nice to say "fuck you" to a cop either, but it's not illegal, and if in a public place, you'd be even less likely to have something adverse happen to you (in a perfect world).
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
yay! we agree i gues
I was pretty sure it was also illegal to mug people in most countries but I still see hundreds if not thousands of people getting away with it and these people can't change how they look (AKA change where the e-mail spawned from).
Looks like another useless law which people will laugh at and shrug
I like muppets.
I've seen many articles about Carnivore, Echelon, etc. and how everyting is monitored.
Just how do they filter out spam?
Surely such back channels already exist. They'd just say you were a 'person of interest' on something vaguely terrorism related if they were interested in bending rules.
This doesn't indicate any new type of collaboration and isn't something they'd need to do to allow them to "track anyone".
They could do that already. This just means they are targetting spammers.
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In some countries it is illegal, and in others, although not illegal, it would likely result in arrest on suspicion of something or other, and a trip to the police station. They would keep you waiting for a few hours while they checked yout ID etc, just to make the point, find no evidence of other wrongdoing, and release you. It works well, and is fair enough, if you are abusive to the police you can expect to suffer at least inconvenience. In the UK they could likely add a real charge of "breach of the peace", which would get you up before the magistrates, and fined a modest amount. Quite right too, there is no need for abusive behaviour anywhere. But it works both ways.....
I don't get it.
All this bruhaha, yet still all they would have to do is using their existing laws and take down Ralsky, Richter and the rest of the well known spammers whose track record of criminal past and present has been thoroughly documented over several years now on Spamhaus and other sites.
Ralsky, Richter and the other gang of professional spammers know what they do, most of them openly admit what they do and many of them have boasted about it on several occasions in newspaper and TV reports about the spam trade (e.g. this recent German article and a slur of others articles).
So what are these agencies doing all this time? They keep saying "watch out, spammers, we're really going to get you big time, very soon now, now please don't move while we concentrate our efforts, but yes, we are going to get you!" - and they still don't actually go after them. Or am I missing something?
And while it seems to non-Americans that the new homeland security policity can quite likely send you to Guantanamo for a traffic light violation if you happen to look like the wrong ethnic group, these guys still get away with it.
I really really don't get it.
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You may like my a cappella music
The answer to Spam in not technical. The answer to Spam is socio-political.
Its making the sending of span for commercial purposes, as if there was any other reason, expensive by imposing large fines.
Spammning will always be possible, but not as an agent of profit, if you fine the people who its sent FOR a whopping great deal of cash.
The delivery mechanisms, the spammers, are irelevant. Charge the people who would benefit. The phony pleasure enhancer pill pushers and their ilk.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Seriously, I hear anti-spam sentiments every day on here. I hate spam myself, but it's semi-tolerable and it only takes 1-2 minutes a day to sort it out from the real e-mail I get. But when I get ~5 piece of printed real mail, well, doesn't anyone seem to mind that? So over the course of a year, I would get approximately 1500 piece of physical junk mail, and that must kill a bunch of trees I would think. I would actually prefer spam to printed junk. I am a quasi-environmentalist, though...
Gotta get me one of these!
Given the UK government has failed to allocate resources to tackle spam using existing legislation and information they already have as noted here, I won't get my hopes up that this is anything more than a publicity exercise for the "somthing must be done" department.
He also must cough up $16m in a separate civil case.
I think we're getting there. I can't wait till Al Ralsky goes down.
...and ask fellow SlashDotter(s) to complain about the governments' misallocating resources fighting spam instead of concentrating on improving economy, curing cancer, and "getting us out of a ficticious war".
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
arn't slashdot posters all spammers?
The More Laws, the less Justice --Marcus Tullius Cicero
Some executives at music companies in London were recently threatened with ASBO, which if breached can lead to 5 years jail, for sponsoring "fly-posting" (putting posters for music events/albums illegally).
Am I the only one that sees them doing what they always do, find a problem and use that to create more and bigger government?
And since when does the United States Government have any right to spy on "citizens" within the borders? And they have no right to give that info out to other countries.
Are all you people just plain stupid when you see this stuff? Stop it now!
Damn, people get a clue.
And stop being a US Government citizen with a social serial number stamped on your forhead making you owned by the government.
Well, I reached some sort of a milestone. Looking at the sizes of my mail logs, counting bytes, not number of messages - I see that in June, my mail was 95% spam, 3.53% MS Windows viruses and only 1.47% clean mail - sigh...
OK, so they're all in agreement. When do we start dropping bombs on the spammers?
Talk, talk, talk...that's all these assholes ever do.
There is a right time and place for your tinfoil hat, this ain't it. You should already realise by now that the other agreements (who needs privacy - not citizens - only the government) are already in place and have been for quite some time ;-). Don't forget polititions and their families get spam too.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Isn't it odd that we must shut down ISP's utilize millions of man-hours finding spammers? Is anyone following the money? Seems to me that should be much easier to find out who is collecting and shutting down that end rather than some (talented?) intermediary schmuck on a public terminal sening out E-mails