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..."
Even a cursory follower of international affairs probably knows just how, ahem, "effective" the paper tiger that is the UN has been in accomplishing their intended goals and ensuring their resolutions are adhered to in places such as Iraq, Palestine, etc, while not being bogged down in internecine politics...
Although spam is different from war and peace, I see the same issue here. If one rogue nation chooses to defy UN law, there's not too much they can do...
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
... not many spammers are actually brought to court (at least not that I've heard about), so making it easier to prosecute them isn't going to do much. Am I mistaken?
ResidntGeek
Imagine if everyone used encryption. Would spam not then be a relatively small problem? If Bob spams Alice, then he gets his key revoked when Alice forwards it to his certificate authority. Now his key can be blacklisted by email clients. Carol receives Bob's message after Alice had it revoked, and as a result her email client sends the message straight to her junk mail box. Unsigned mail is not broken by this scheme, and a small charge for a signed certificate should be enough to prevent Bob from generating an endless numbers of keys at no cost. Again, assuming the majority is using encryption, unsigned mail is probably spam, but filtered to an unsigned mail box. No worse than what we have today. Revoked keys could be sent directly to the junk mail box, and all validly signed mail is whitelisted. This is by no means a new theory, and would require very little work to implement for a company like Microsoft or Apple. Would anyone care to explain why this is not in use? Would a dollar per certificate not be worth secure email and a relatively spam free existence?
I didn't realize that the UN was involved in this kind of thing. It is good though. I wonder if they will have a stronger influence than they have had with other issues (like war).
Now there is additional unified governmental support. Here is another article that talks about governmental cooperation to fight spam. This is in addition to cooperation we read about between Microsoft, Yahoo! and others. It'll be interesting to see how the spammers counter. They are a particularly strong bunch. Like cockroaches I suppose.
"Now the problem is rapidly spreading to cell phones. Nine of every 10 spam messages in Japan are now directed to mobile phones as text messages, Horton said."
Thats the scary part. How do we stop spam on phones? They easiest way would probably involve filtering by our service providers. But do we trust them to do that? And would they do that? I don't know about USA or Japan, but here in Jamaica, the majority of unsolicited text messages that I get actually comes from my cellphone providers (I have phones from two telcos).
J2ME, SMS enabled versions of spamassasin?
you boycott them
make a consumer alliance and boycott any ISP that fails to curb spam
boycott the hell out of them
Spammers will just move to places like this or setup a boat that can connect wirelessly from international waters.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
This topic was just on the James (Apache mail server) mailing list. I'm just copying this from the email I sent
... that may come to the attention of
w s/825808/pos ts) and is not very
From the article:
Top priority is "pornographic material
children," said Horton, who is chairing the meeting.
Define pornographic material. There are a lot of countries who would like to
ban pornographic material altogether, while the US Supreme Court struck down
the Communications Decency Act because it limits the rights of adults to
access said material. (http://www.epic.org/free_speech/CDA/)
And not to get in a flame war with anybody, but this is the same body that
elected Libya to chair the UN Human Rights Commission
(http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/ne
sympathetic to the US and it's allies (i.e. Britain, miscellaneous Eastern
European countries, and so on)
From Serge Knystautas Email:
"Anyone want to place odds on this helping?
I'll give you 9:1 that the UN does jack shit about the spam problem.
And 100:1 that the UN is just using this to try to take control of the
Internet.
-Vinny
--------------
Vinny Herr
Original Message
From: "Serge Knystautas"
To:
Sent: Tuesday, July 06, 2004 1:37 PM
Subject: UN against spam
> http://tinyurl.com/2ak9m
>
> Anyone want to place odds on this helping?
>
> --
> Serge Knystautas
> Lokitech >> software . strategy . design >> http://www.lokitech.com
> p. 301.656.5501
Ever hear of the Usenet Death Penalty (UDP)? So you go after the ISP's upstream. If they spam is flowing without restraint and complaints mount, and the ISP in question is doing nothing, the upstream connectivity provider may get enough complaints to warrant looking at the ISP's behaviour in light of the AUP the ISP has agreed with. Failure to abide by the AUP may result in termination of service.
Few ISPs will risk that...not for one chickenboning spammer who's actually costing them more than what s/he's paying.
More than anything else, tho, we need to pull the plug on the "bullet-proof" web hosting sites.
The main reason that spam is proliferating and will continue to do so is simple: it is a commercial activity, hence sacrosanct.
Governments today can make effective law against all sorts of things, but the sacred cow that they must never interfere with is people's and corporations' right to make profit. As soon as they mess with that, they can wave their economy bye bye as all the powerful corporate players jump ship.
Long-established commercial activity such as farming, mining, agriculture, retail, insurance, medical practice, etc. have equally long-established, effective laws that protect us from the abuses of their worst practictioners. Those laws were made in the days before "free enterprise" ruled the roost. Today, though, new enterprises are free to neglect their social responsibilities, and they will get away scot free because governments no longer dare to make effective law to inhibit them. They will make new law, yes, but not effective law.
So now the U.N. is picking up the ball. That's not surprising, because all the lost causes get booted to the U.N. eventually anyway, which is why they have gotten a reputation for being ineffective and goody-goody.
At the worst, grandma has to spend a buck to get a new certificate and maybe get a lecture about opening attachments in unsigned mail ;-) Being a good grandson though, you would probably install Mozilla for her, thus limiting the possibility of a worm taking advantage of her to begin with, no?
What can UN do? Threaten spammers with weapons embargo? Economic sanction? In the matter of spam, I can't see what UN has to offer that can possibily be effective.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
I don't think the parent poster could have been any more insightful. The UN is only as effective as it's individual parts let it be. If the security coucil would stop crushing the vast amount of proposals (points to the USA representative) perhaps they would get the big issues dealth with.
From my own observations when the issues are small enough to escape the attention of the 5 veto members (before they can veto it), then the UN is actually able to get in there and get some work done. Case in point: East Timor
Of course the unpaid bill that's crippling the UN owed by the USA doesn't help much either.
Of course how can anyone complain about the US paying it's dues to the UN when the members of the UN can't even manage to follow the law and avoid parking tickets. Of course once a parking ticket is issued you might think that it would be paid, but no the UN memebers think they are above the law.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
The problem with this theory is three-fold:
1. It places a load on the sending of legitimate e-mail. Not a big deal for people such as myself who's out-going e-mail is usually in the single-digits for the day (and often week), but what about for big ISPs or news services? The big ISPs and mail services (ie those that are needed to make such a system work) would require WAY more computing power to send out legit messages. Similarly you would need to calculate the solution in order to verify that the sender is actually doing the calculations and not just spitting a set of random numbers back at you, so the big mail servers get hit on both ends. When you're sending and receiving hundreds of millions of messages a day (billions in the case of AOL and MSN/Hotmail), that translates to a LOT of computer time and a LOT of added expenses.
2. I can pretty much assure you that whatever someone comes up with as an equation to solve some spammer will find a way around actually spending the pre-message computing time of solving it.
3. Spammers don't send e-mail using conventional mail servers anyway. A VERY significant portion of spam is delivered through broadband connected PCs that have been 0wned by some virus or worm. The quantity of vulnerble systems is pretty much infinite and there's nothing that's going to change this in the near future. In fact, I suspect that it's going to get MUCH worse before it will get any better.
I do tend to agree that simply making spam illegal is not going to do anything, the trick is in enforcement. Most of what spammers are doing has been illegal for AGES. Using viruses and worms to infect computers has been a crime in most countries for many years now. Same goes for illegal credit card scams, bank fraud and all the other trash that spammers are "selling". Hell, even the pr0n spam is almost always illegal as it often gets sent to children's inboxes. New laws are not what is needed, enforcement of existing laws is the trick.
Still, end the end, as long as there are millions upon millions of complete *MORONS* out there willing to spend their hard-earned cash to buy pills to "enhance their manhood", spam will exist in one form or another.