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."

Comments

China, Russia

[nycsubway]

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.

Coincidence

[BenBenBen]

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.

I just got back from holiday...

[danormsby]

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. :-(

Re:I just got back from holiday...

[Anonymous Coward]

Technical solutions to spam do exist, and they're pretty easy to implement. For instance, your email could simply ask you to verify if you want mail from a new address or not. If outlook,hotmail,gmail and a few other major email programs did this then spam would be useless pretty fast.

So whats the problem?

The problem is that these companies WANT you to recieve unsolicited email, like ads and crap. That's how they make their money. Email filtering programs are impossible because they try to distinguish "bad" spam from "good" (that is, paid for by a major corporation). Since computers cannot make aesthetic judgements like this, spam will forever exist inside the margin.

Re:I just got back from holiday...

[carndearg]

The vast majority of spam I receive has random from and reply-to addresses. Thus an autoreply just bounces harmlessly off into the ether, or if it's really unlucky, into the catchall of whichever hapless geek owns the random address the spamers mailing software picked.

So dont worry too much about your company policy signing you up for more spam, if your spam is like mine all they are doing is generating more internet background noise.

In fact, count yourself lucky that you have such a high useful mail to spam ratio, I wish I had that little spam.

Shared resources?

[stripyd]

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.

Wow! New gov't agencies, more gov't employees, tax

[Anonymous Coward]

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.