Slashdot Mirror
UN Takes Aim At Spam Epidemic
clester writes "CNN reports 'The United Nations is aiming to bring a "modern day epidemic" of junk e-mail under control within the next two years by standardizing legislation around the world to make it easier to prosecute spammers, a leading expert said Tuesday.' The full story reports that as much as 85 percent of all e-mail may be categorized as spam and that the problem is rapidly spreading to cell phones in the form of text messages..."
How much will legislation actually do though?
Until a method is found that kills or significantly makes spam nearly impossible to send or makes the profits significantly less than the costs of operating, all legislation will do is drive the spammers further and further underground...
be stopping real travesties like war and disease?
...the UN won't be able to do anything about spam. As hard as they try, the war against spam will not be won with legislation. As more legislation comes around, the spammers move to countries where nobody cares about the legislation and it all starts again.
The war against spam will be won by smart filters!!
Oh jesus h. christ, NOW I feel better that the UN is involved. I am sure the spammers are cowering in fear right now. I am sure after a year of debate, the security council will pass a resolution (9-6) that says spam is bad, but only after concessions are made regarding human rights to enough countries to get the full 9 votes....
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
...They'll pass a resolution against spam and that's the last we'll hear of it.
-R
Yes, cause who would listen to a part of the UN that is pushing this? the silly ITU.(International Telecommunications Union). These are the guys pushed the standards for telephones, like dialing internationally, and equipment working together.. Bet your local telecom and cell companies all followed the ITU's mandate to the letter, or else they wouldn't interconnect with the rest of the world.. Which is a pretty good idea, if you ask me.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
That doesn't mean that nothing can be done... I and everyone else with a firewall in front of a mailserver can blackhole those nations that choose to tolerate spam.
I can't wait for IPv6... It should be even easier to throw away traffic from entire nations than it is now.
Instead of pushing our leaders to pass more unenforcable laws that will expand government regulatory power, let's go after ISPs (and entire national networks, if need be) that tolerate spammers.
Go after ISP's using what? New laws? No laws? Vigilante teams? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Just what do you mean by "go after" if it does not involve passing new laws to prosecute violating ISPs with? You do realize that no law prohibits an ISP having a spammer as a customer, don't you?
So how shall we "go after" ISP's with no new laws?
Edith Keeler Must Die
Is to punish the ones that hire spammers and spammers themself.
Everybody can read who's advert it is and where the owner of the advert resides.
The problem with paying for the certificate is that then all e-mail certificates are controlled by a central authority. Also, there is no way that the encryption scheme used for the encryption could be open, as if it was, then why pay for the certificate? Good plan, but I don't see how it would work.
thisnukes4u.net
Email savvy people can't come up with a palatable solution. Most non-tech savvy have solutions that throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I imagine the great minds who make up the UN will support the idea that generates the most money for the lobbists of thier supporting country. So it looks like we are going to get a sender-pays-Microsoft or sender-pays-Verisign antispam solution.
.. take some time and know what you're talking about. Don't dismiss the United Nations because a bunch of right wing idiots on TV like to make it their whipping boy. The UN does a lot of good all around the world. And if anything, the US is more responsible for crippling the UN's effectiveness than anyone else.
dunno.. we haven't had a world war in half a century..
That is not due to the UN but to the arsenal of nukes which backed up the Cold War. It was only the threat of total annihilation that prevented WWIII.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
standardizing legislation around the world to make it easier to prosecute spammers
Must have been asleep, but I didn't realize that it was within the power of the UN to 'standardize legislation' in any given juristiction upon the planet.
Bitter sarcasm: This should come as a great relief to the countless vitims of murder, genocide, torture, displacement, starvation, disease, opression and the myriad other insults, which more than half of humanity fears on a regular basis.
What was the mission of the UN? Ladies and gentlemen, get a real job..
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
It required Iraq to account for the weapons, sure. It permitted the use of force should Iraq fail to comply, yes. But who was to judge this?
The UN was to decide if Iraq complied, and according to the inspectors, Iraq was. The US decided Iraq failed and took matters into its own hands, defying the UN and even threatening to endager the UN workers who were still there.
Also, weapons deteriorate. The Iran conflict was when? 1980?
If you were asked to prove you did not possess something, how could you comply? By allowing me to search your property. That is the only way. You cannot prove a negative, but you can prove something cannot be found with reasonable means and time. The UN workers were busy proving that. Sure they were taking a while. It's a big country. Bush was simply eager to get his war on. (A video of him before his solemn announcement demonstrated this.)
So who defied the UN?
In stead of ostracising countries from communication with email, they should be helped with stopping SPAM traffic from their network and helped back onto the internation email sending stage. If nothing else the UN could at least help with that. Not just punishing a whole country of innocent users with the few bad apples in them.
Again and again we see examples of the thought process that maintaining a blockade against a country will force that country to comply with international demands, and again and again we see years and sometime decades of suffering by citizens before a resolution is actually reached.
I may be sounding like I'm taking this a little out of perspective, but how quickly citizens from the so called developed countries with this attitude would cry out that their freedoms are being stepped upon if someone dared to blacklist them.
...but it will end with censorship of many other things. France and Germany already do not allow the schwastika to be sold or displayed in their respective countries. How ling until they pressure the UN to ban this from the internet? What about China and anti-government speech? Letting the UN get involved will only make things worse. Much, much worse.
...but the UN tends to be generally ignored by lots of countries... especially the US, want an example?
Bush: Hey UN, can we go to Iraq?
UN: No
Bush: Duly noted *promptly invades*
Even if the UN passes this, the US (which originates a good amount of the world's spam, probably won't want to do this, for lots of reasons, one being that the US likes to be unilateral now, and lots of people in congress and the like don't really like the UN, but this might spur the US to do its own plan which actually does stuff
Actually the ITU adopted standards that had previously been established. They just decided to take credit for standards that already existed.
Two possable outcomes.
1. 13 years from now someone other than the UN will get feed up and actually address the problem pissing off the rest of the world who apparently started taking kick backs from spammers.
Slashdotters seam to think this is the outcome however it appears this only happens when the UN takes on it's ACTUAL mission of world peace and not more trivial matters.
(I know spam is a big deal but compaired to world hunger (ignore the obveous joke here) disease and war I'd say spam is kinda the same as a cop ignoring a murder to chase after a speeder)
2. Draconian laws that permit the UN to deside what is or isn't acceptable in e-mail.
With some lobbying and bribes spammers get to continue to operate BUT other things don't.
Spam hunter efforts, Linux dev e-mail lists, Slashdot (all of it), Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern.
The merrits and diffrences between the cenesorship of Limbaugh and censorship of Stern aside the United Nations was founded to premote world peace (hunger and disease intersect this as nations will go to war over the resorces needed to resolve thies issues).
However as of late the United Nations has abandoned it's cause of world peace in favor of it's own form of world domnation.
Take a look at the issues the UN has taken on as of late:
IP law, Hate Speach and now Spam.
Each of thies issues can be used to craft laws that control what people can say.
IP law: Copyright law is itself a big buggabo. It's not so much the control of what is said but WHO may say it. Copyright law has already been used to control political speach.
The "I have a dream" speach should be public domain. It was a public speach and shapes public policy to this very day. However the famaly of the man who originally uttered those words now clame ownership over all his words making political debate on those issues cumbersom or in some cases impossable. IMAO that is the only value to a copyright on public speach.
Hate Speach: Today political organsiations clame all opposing ideology as "hate speach" (much as Microsoft clames Linux is unamerican) as a means of sillencing opponents.
Spam: Spam isn't very well defined and it's pritty easy to use the terminology to pick and chouse what is or isn't spam. This could easly be used to sillence political speach.
I also believe the UN is picking this one up becouse certen political parties are using spam for fundrasing. Obveously even lagit antiSpam laws would have some effect on the political front however thats not really anybodys fault but the spammer politicians themselfs.
I don't actually exist.
The UN outlawing spam will work as well as the UN law outlawing genocide.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Why go after the spammers? We simply need laws to sue companies who sell their products via spamming services. If companies get sued a lot employing spammers - their business practice won't pay off anymore.
As long as people buy the crap that is advertised and as long as some company can make some decent profit from spamming it will continue.
Destroy the economical basis of spam - then most companies won't use it.