Slashdot Mirror
CAN-SPAM Is A Bust
Doc Ruby writes "The Congressional chatter about 'canning spam', in the CAN-SPAM law since January, has turned out to really mean 'they can still spam'. TechWeb News reports that 'In July, compliance fell for the first time under one percent to a measly 0.54 percent', from its 3% max. The researchers claim the ball has been dropped by 'law enforcement'. Those police are probably too busy deleting the 80% spam from their email, like everyone else."
This all sounds very similar to the problem with a security system in a corporation. You can have as brilliantly designed a security system as you like, but if you have a hole on the inside (a person who is lax with keys, or passwords etc) then the whole security system falls down from the inside.
Similarly here, an act that's got good intentions ends up having a few well paid government people slip in an exception here for telemarketers or a leniency for charities etc, and when it comes to implementation, the whole thing falls down
Did anyone honesty think this law would stop spammers? I for one did not, these people do this for a living. They are going to find a way around the law, or in most cases just flat out ignore it.
Everyone has a photographic memory, some just don't have film.
I run a small home server off my cable modem for myself only - no big commercial operation. Been doing this for about 5 years or so... finally gave up last week after my spam flow increased from ~100/day up to ~100,000 (yes, one hundred thousand) per week in the past month or so.... Tried RBL's, Razor, SpamAssassin, DSPAM, Apple's Mail.app client.... stuff only helped so much. Constanting having to fine-tweak filters, re-train Bayes. It's too much of a hassle. Now I've given up. Set Postfix to forward all my mail to my Gmail account. Has helped quite a bit, plus when I do get a message that makes it into my Inbox, Gmail's UI makes it pretty easy to mark it as spam. I'll try this for a while.
The entire 'act' was a joke in the first place. Purely a political maneuver to gain votes ( remember an election race was over the horizon )
Most Spam either comes from bouncing overseas ( out of the US's jurisdiction ) or from zombie PCs ( already illegal due to the virus ) so I really don't think it had any chance to succeed anyway..
More importantly ( and worrisome ) is that it setup a precedent, with public support, for criminalizing behaviors on the 'internet'. Opening a Pandora's box for the future..
Perhaps a better idea would have been to hold the end companies liable, civilly not criminally, with hefty fines. Perhaps high enough they risk going out of business for allowing their product/business to be pushed via Spam...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
...they complain about the 0.2% that make it past the filters and blocklists to them. With the current growth, sooner or later it is going to collapse as even the 0.2% overflow their inboxes.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
They do use money and time to catch real criminals....unfortunately society has deemed pot smokers and speeders 'real criminals'.
it wouldn't help. A .54% compliance rate shows just how much the law scares the spammers: it doesn't. It's impossible to enforce compliance, and they know it.
Yet even if 100% of spam complied with the requirements of CAN-SPAM, it wouldn't mean the amount of spam would necessarily be reduced in any way. Spamming is completely legal under this law. An illegal scams make up a large portion of the spam we see here. The scam being scammed is illegal already, so the spammers feel no need to worry about breaking another law that essentially has little or no penalty and negligible chance of it being applied.
I can't imagine that anyone is genuinely surprised at the actual effectiveness of this useless law. No teeth if you obey it, no teeth if you don't.
In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they rarely are.
OK, sorry, the subject line is a troll, but seriously, I've never had a major problem with spam on my main account, and I've had it for 5 or 6 years. I just guard it very carefully and only give it out to people I trust. I have a throwaway account on Hotmail that I use to sign up on websites, etc., but even there, these days I only seem to get spammed once or twice a week, if that. I have junk mail filtering turned on for the Hotmail account, and I just ignore the junk mail folder. Works pretty well.
Am I the only one who doesn't have a spam problem? Hello?
I really think my tax dollors could be spent on something better..like maybe giving it back to me.
I don't want to hear any more right-wing whining about getting tax dollars back until the federal debt is paid down. I don't want my taxes to be wasted to pay for interest on a debt accrued largely by fiscally irresponsible Republicans like Reagan, Bush, and the younger Bush.
spam is a techinical problem that can be solved through technical means.
THEN FUCKING SOLVE IT ALREADY! We've had this problem for a decade and people like you keep saying that technology can solve it. So invent the technology, get support for it, get it deployed, and solve the problem. You're watching people drown in spam and you keep telling us that the government should do nothing because you're planning to pull a technical solution out of your ass. Some day.
Anything else is just an excuse to have government regulate computer use.
I think that the government should regulate computer use so that idiot conspiracy theories like yours don't waste bandwidth and storage on the net.
The spammers are starting to use media tactics, filling you with fear and sensationalism, and then using that fear to sell crap. Today I got one claiming I could protect myself and family from the supposedly deadly West Nile virus(neglects to explain that most of the people who do die from the disease had very poor helth to begin with) by buying this wonderful gizmo. Appearently they know more than the health organizations with a lot of scientist working behind them....
2. The can spam law requires law enforcement to track down spammers. Honestly - does anyone think Johnny Law is going to be going through those mail headers looking for the true source of spam? Lets be honest, the first chinese IP and they quit.
The problem is that the most famous spammers, the ones responsible for the majority of the spam, make absolutely no attempt to hide what they are doing. Hell, if they prosecuted Alan Ralsky (who even slashdot readers managed to pin down a while ago, without access to many resources the police would have) then there would be a dramatic message sent to the spammers. Ralsky has given numerous interviews and has admitted what he does repeatedly yet he still walks free. Why?
(oh, and a google search will show you that, at least last year, only 6% of spam is Chinese , 58% was American...)