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Ohio Law Could Send Spammers To Jail
ej0c writes "We in Ohio are set to save you from Spam. The legislature, with AOL's help, passed a tough anti-spam bill (Reuters). Spam in Ohio, and you'll be in the can for 6 months, with fines of $25,000 per violation, or $2 to $8 per e-mail. Text of the Act."
Ohio Inmate #7779: What are you in for sir?
Ohio Inmate #2466: Nuttin' much, assault and burglary. How about you, cutey-pie?
Ohio Inmate #7779: Selling penis pumps online.
Ohio Inmate #2466: Eyyyyxcellent...
Sigs cause cancer.
Doesn't the federal "CAN SPAM" act prevent state laws from taking effect? I thought that was one of the main provisions that kept the new California law (at the time) from happening.
Save me from popups while you're at it.
Well, I do all my spamming from China. Come get me.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
...who owns a Zombie machine. I hope that was taken into consideration.
Does not atone for what you did on November 2nd.
I'm finally getting the other folks in my office to use Thunderbird as an email client, the big selling point was spam filtering. Trends like this may make such FOSS evangelism harder, since people (esp. the lawyers) can just rely on the law to protect them rather than go to the trouble of trying software that didn't come with the machine.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Scenario... innocent dumb user has their computer hijacked and made part of a spam botnet.
Did they just spam? Are they now off to jail?
1) Does this affect spammers who operate in Ohio but send the spam from outside of the state? Or outside of the country?
2) Does this affect spammers from outside of Ohio who send spam into the state?
I wonder if jail time will be an effective deterrent for spammers. I think the lack of any real teeth in current legislation has kept the current spam laws from having any real effect. Even if the spammers are actually fined the fines represent a significantly smaller amount than the potential profits from spamming. If this passes, is upheld as legal, and is enforced it will be very interesting to see what kind of spam, if any, continues to originate from Ohio.
-- Gargonia
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn.
It won't stop spam though... probably won't even slow it down.
What it has the potential to do is throw a few of the scumbags in jail, which is worth doing.
We send drug dealers and drug buyers to jail, we should treat spam the same way.
We should punish the idiots that buy things advertised in Spam.
One could argue that the "war on drugs" is a failure, and for the most part they'd be right, but I was a kid in the mid to late 1970s and the culture has changed dramatically with regard to drugs. People used to smoke weed on downtown street corners, it certainly isn't that way anymore.
Take away the incentive to send the spam out and fewer people will risk it.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Now all we have to do is get all the spammers to move to Ohio and we are set.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Hopfully this will be an example to the rest of the world. It would make a banner advert I saw earlier nicely illegal.
It detected I was using Linux (No, FreeBSD) and Netscape 5 (No, Mozilla) then told me that my system could be optimised (yippie!) by installing some Windows-only software.
Deceptive? I'd say so.
Quite amusing though.
Hormel factories in Ohio have been stormed by enthusiastic but confused SWAT teams. Hormel spokesmen could not be reached for comment, as they are being held at gunpoint.
Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
I could be wrong, but it looks like the prison term would only apply if the spam is fraudulent. If this is the case, then I don't have a problem with it. Prison seems reasonable for attempted fraud.
There are already *plenty* of laws under which to prosecute spammers. They simply aren't enforced... The problem is not a lack of laws, it is a lack of resources/motivation/knowledge on the part of law enforcement. I would much rather see a commitment to spend a few million actually *doing* something - and when you consider the drain spammers are on the economy, it would be money well spent.
SSL Certificate
A prison term is the only way to truly deter someone from spamming. Financial penalties are pointless. When Joe Trailerpark decides to start spamming, he is faced with the choice of doing something that is financially lucrative or doing the next best alternative which would probably be something along the lines of working at Taco Bell. The way he sees it, even if he were sued for everything he had, he wouldn't be any worse off than he would have been by not spamming and taking the shitty fast food job. Prison on the other hand would make him really stop and think, and most likely he would decide that spamming just isn't worth it. Sure some people will do it anyway, just like some people sell drugs, but that is what the legal system is there for.
I am not being a troll, but for all the known spammers, there are so many unknown, who live in other countries. How is a state law going to prosecute these people? How/Will the law be implemented. This remains to be seen.
Maybe this is a warped way to improve the conditions of America's prisons. Once they're filled with non-violent offenders like spammers, drug-users, and copyright violators, there will be less incidence of assault and rape behind bars. We'll leave that for the outside.
Ohio legislators sent an anti-spam bill to Gov. Bob Taft on Tuesday, with the aim of joining other U.S. states that have laws that put people who flood the Web with junk e-mail behind bars.
I guess if you use webmail the "Web" could get flooded with junk "e-mail" (previously known as email for at least 10 years), otherwise the "journalist" looks pretty dumb right from the 1st sentence.
If signed into law, it would outlaw Internet ads that are deceptive or misleading and ban people from setting up false accounts to send spam, the junk e-mail that clogs consumers' online mailboxes and taxes the resources of Internet service providers.
The measure would also allow the state attorney general to impose criminal and civil sanctions against spammers.
fraud n.
1) A deception deliberately practiced in order to secure unfair or unlawful gain.
2) A piece of trickery; a trick.
3) a) One that defrauds; a cheat.
3) b) One who assumes a false pose; an impostor.
I know of no state in the United States where fraud is already legal. I'd be content with enforcement of existing laws before wasting time and effort passing new laws where enforcement of either the new or existing law is nonexistant.
why don't we go after spammers in snail mail?
I really don't want advertisments ANYWHERE unless I say ok, so why is snail mail exempt? Granted, most of it is not offensive ( except for the odd jury summons ), but that doesn't change the fact that it's unsolicited junk mail, albeit arriving via physical means instead of electronic.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Tough lawyers and Walcher* coming,
We're finally on our own.
This winter I hear the drumming,
Spam dead in Ohio.
Gotta get down to it
Spammers are mailing us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her swamped on the ground
How can you spam when you know?
* Representative Kathleen Walcher co-sponsored the bill under discussion.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
We grew up and smoke it in our own homes now.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I am all for taking a tough approach to spammers, but putting them in jail? Have you heard about the prison overcrowding problem?
Why don't we instead seize all of their assets, profits, and make some money for the people, instead of having to pay for them in jail?
I've always thought that the criminal penalty should be from one second to one minute per message sent, comparable to the amount of time the spammer intended to cannot be served consecutively with any other penalty. No upper limit on time served; all persons involved in a conspiracy to spam should be subject to the penalty independantly.
statistical estimation based on all available information from ISP's (link utilization, etc.,) should be used to estimate the number of spam messages sent. messages blocked by spam filters still count, as the unsuccessful sending attempt indicates intent to waste the time of the recipient.
This is more feel-good legislation that will probably have no teeth because it takes too much work for too little result. Real change requires going back to holding ISPs responsible for spam -- cutting the worst off at the uplink when they don't put some minimal effort into keeping their users from spamming.
Maybe that'll mean certain countries are delinked until a scrupulous ISP shows up. It'll do a hell of a lot more than prosecuting a handful of spammers here.
I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.
-- W.C. Fields
Additional civil cases may be personally filed with the state over spam. This is stating that the attorney general has no judical power in the courts of Ohio. Such as the normal separtation of state and federal branches and laws. If the federal goverment fails to honor the CAN-SPAM act. You can still seek compensation through civil action through Ohio court.
Good news for me, however it is hard to say if this will help. I can see ISP rates going up due to increased labor with judical action requesting for records.
Punishing American spammers but letting the Chinese off seems awfully unfair to me.
Ohio Inmate #66092: Burglary, grand theft, passing bad checks, what're you in for?
Ohio Inmate #73507: 4.5 million pieces of email a day, selling bogus pharmaceuticals, green card lotteries, advertising pr0n and promoting online casinos. I was making $250,000 a month before the troopers knocked on my door.
Ohio Inmate #66092: Oh, master! I am not worthy! I am not worthy!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Your post advocates a
( ) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which vary from state to state.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires cooperation from too many of your friends and is counterintuitive
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(z) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever worked
( ) Other:
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
( ) Other:
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures cannot involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures cannot involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
( ) Other:
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Nice try, dude, but I don't think it will work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Hit them where it hurts, their bank account. Confiscate any and all funds attributed to the spam.
And then take their bank's license away for having paid interest on said funds.
The only thing that kills roaches like that is other roaches.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Follow the money. If it comes back to Ohio then they've got a case.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If you want to make a dent in spam, there are two entities to go after:
I skimmed the act, and it's not clear to me that the businesses that commission spam are also under the gun here. I also didn't see provision for private cause of action ala junk fax.
Well, everybody should do their part. China is good at controlling Internet Access, and spammers are one group of criminals for whom labor/re-education camps would be actually approporiate and helpful. When they start a crackdown on spam under international pressure, I am sure they'll have excellent results.
In the meantime, Ohio can jail CEOs of companies that advertise through spam.
Physical spam is actually more of a nuissance IMO because it is wasteful of real resources and takes up space in my trash bin (requiring me to empty it more frequently, requiring me to buy more trash bags). Also, I live in an apartment building in which the communal area is regularly a trash heap from tenants who refuse to take their unwanted flyers and catalogues with them when they retrieve their mail.
'nuff said.
in essence, if a federal law does not specifically permit an activity, it is within the state's power to prohibit that activity. The State law here [but IANAL] appears very clearly written and defines all its terms and the crime described in those terms with some precision. If a spammer is fighting this law in court, they will have to show that the Fed regulation [sorry, text not available to me here] explicitly permits something that the Ohio law has prohibited. [Law is NEVER as simple as the people enacting it would wish or would promise their constituents.]
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
webmail?
I know the DMA and other bodies are big political contributors, is there anything similar among spammers?
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
Wait a second -- you seem to be implying that if something isn't punished in another country, it shouldn't be punished here. Why not punish them here? It's not going to stop all spam, of course, but it doesn't make sense to scoff at each individual step because it doesn't solve the whole problem immediately. Even if all we do is stop all spam from inside the US (eventually, I hope) it'll then make it that much easier to identify spam and deal with spam.
I avoid most of the annoyance of spam by carefully protecting my email address and using my provider's spam protection services (Yahoo). However, I can't stop my relatives from sending jokes, heartwarming stories, virus scares, urban legends, chain mails, and bogus Disney offers. I say we lock them all up for 6 months, too.
Yep.
We've got the Dept of Homeland Security, FBI and CIA chasing terrorists around the world and tracking down their fundraising, but without pursuing all the spammers, for all we know, terrorists are raising funds with phishing and selling junk through spam. Their contempt for people is so complete that they'll slaughter their own countrymen and consider it an acceptable loss in pursuing their goals, so they'd have no problem offering anything and everything to those gullible enough to take them up on whatever offer or hand over their passwords, credit card numbers, bank account numbers or personal identification bits.
The problem with W. is he still sees the enemy as something that you can shoot or drop a bomb on. No wonder people say there's a problem with intelligence.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I require is a short list of every SMTP server IP address in your state so that I may be informed enough to comply with your legislation.
Thank you,
Nigerian P. Freely
Wouldn't Florida be a better place for a law like this?
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
And send that scuzzbag Alan Ralsky to prison.
BTW, anyone got a link to the interview from the Daily Show?
If the spammer's cell mates were given some of the penis enlargment pills during the spammer's visit.
Fight Spammers!
we already have anti-spam laws.. I dont know about you others states.. I believe its a $500 fine per spam message payable to the recipient of the spam. The problem is tracking the spam to its original source.
If this had been a law designed to send copyright infringers to jail for six months, I doubt we'd be hearing the many 'hell, yeah!' responses posted so far. We should all be uneasy about 'tough' laws which can send people to jail by criminalizing online-specific types of behavior.
...
I'm not claiming that copyright infringment and spamming are equivalent activities, but I'll bet many of the same arguments people would use for criminalization and tough sentencing in one case are applicable to the other.
There are laws out there already against fraud and deceptive advertising, just as there are (old, established) laws against copyright infringement. We only start running into trouble by trying to 'update' these laws for the internet age (think DeCSS, DMCA, etc.). IMO, little good comes out of these 'tough updates'.
And so I say "tech solutions for tech problems" and keep the government and courts out of it as much as possible
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
Okay... so we just slap really stiff fines on people who spam, or who break into people's houses, or sell crack and heroin to kids, and stuff like that. What happens if they can't afford to pay the fines, or they make so much that even with the fines they still turn a profit?
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
Would it be legal to set up a web site where people can place a bet on a date in the calendar. Then, if a known spammer that date, the gambler wins the money? I suppose a cleaver person would figure out a way to win the money, but that would be outside the scope of the web site.
There are 10 types of people in the world... those that understand binary and those that don't.
are we supposed to feel bad for spammers... send 'em to gitmo....
Get your torrents...
set up the death penalty for this. Once someone starts spamming, they wont stop spamming for the rest of their life, so i say we need to stop them so they dont have a life of spamming. We used to kill people for treason (up till the 60s IIRC), and im pretty sure that spamming is worse than treason!
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. - Catcher in the Rye
Quoth grasshoppa: "Granted, most of it is not offensive ( except for the odd jury summons ), but that doesn't change the fact that it's unsolicited junk mail, albeit arriving via physical means instead of electronic."
.
Ok, I know this is getting off on a tangent, but *what* do Jury Summons have to do with junk mail? Granted, it might not be solicited, but since it is government business, involving you directly, and not just a mass-mailed advert, I'm a bit confused how that fits the definition of unsolicited junk mail. .
Oh, and how are jury summons offensive?
I just hope the penalty is $2-$8 per e-mail, or $25,000, whichever is HIGHER.
Hitting em in the pocketbook is usually pretty reliable. Assuming you can enforce it in the first place, but that's another discussion. =P
Erioll
By allowing a private right of action for individuals, you get some of the smaller-time spammers.
There is one spammer, AVTech Direct (Avtech Direct 22647 Ventura Blvd. Suite 374 Woodland Hills, CA 91364), that I and about 10 others filed suit against for spamming. A $5000 small claims judgement won't get them, but if they had 100 or 1000 judgments for $5,000 each for spamming, they may not spam anymore.
Fight Spammers!
I had an idea for a TV show. It's called Spam Cops and it would use a similar format to the current show Cops. Every episode would focus on a differant scam. It would start out explaining how the scam works, then a commercial, then we get interviews with people who were taken in by the scam, perhaps using pixelated faces. Then, a commercial. Then an investigative segment where the spammers are tracked down. Then, a commercial, then the cops bust into the spammer's office and beat them with clubs. Then, commercials. Then, credits.
Seriously, it would at least educate the people out there. They would know not to fall for Phishing scams, and maybe they would switch to Firefox or at least change their IE settings. And they would see the effects that spam is having on real people.
Ohio Inmate #7779: What you here for?
Ohio Inmate #2466: I massacred almost an entire town, for the hell of it. What about you?
Ohio Inmate #7779: I spam inboxes
Ohio Inmate #2466: You make me sick!
Ohio Inmate #7779: *Lowers head in shame*
Physical spam is bought and paid for by the companies that send it. If a company has to fork over cash to get a return, it will have to justify that cash outlay in terms of ROI. The same theory that goes for the billboards and Race car sponsorship. A spammer is not the one who spends the capital to transfer the message to you, it is you who is burdened with cost of recieving said message. Junk mail creates employment from the ad layout guy to the printer and to the delivery channel. Spam is an end run around the advertising practices that have stood the test of time.
Stay tuned for new sig...
Here's what I'm yapping about:"(F)(1) The attorney general or an electronic mail service provider that is injured by a violation of this section may bring a civil action in an appropriate court of common pleas of this state seeking relief from any person whose conduct violated this section. The civil action may be commenced at any time within one year of the date after the act that is the basis of the civil action."
We have that same (or damn close to it) language in our state law. Notice the word "may", that's the key. If the AG chooses not to he doesn't have to do shit. He can let it all flush away. They should have put that word as "must", which would have mandated action. As it is, this law is no better than Iowa code 714E that we've had for a while now and not one case has been put to the measure, sadly.
I predict no real help from this "feel-good" legislation.
That is in fact totally correct. If "Joe Trailerpark" is faced with a consequence along the lines of a 6 month prison stretch then he's going to take that into account when deciding whether he really wants to make that fast cash and certainly it sounds harsh. That's why it works. Is Joe Trailerpark a "criminal" though? Probably not but that's exactly why this could be effective.
I have a law enforcement background (8 years of MP work in the army followed by another 5 years in civilian law enforcement) and this reminds me of something I learned many years ago in one of the endless ongoing training courses I sat through. The subject was capital punishment as a deterrant but the basic idea still fits.
We went over a series of case studies with interviews that clearly showed that the death penalty was not in any way a deterrant to the people who had consented to be interviewed. They either never considered it or the idea that they might be caught and sentenced to death for doing what they did was in no way a factor when they made the decision to commit the crime.
When another series of interviews were done with people who agreed to discuss the death penalty most of the respondent stated that they would consider the possiblity of being put to death a big factor in whether they would commit a murder regardless of the circumstances. They also were very much under the illusion that having a death penalty in place helped reduce the number of murders.
Basically it comes down to the mindsets of criminals being very different from the mindsets of the average person. A harsh sentence deters those who in most cases wouldn't do it to begin with and barely registers with the people who would. In Joe Trailerparks case finding out whether he decides to spam in the face of prison time will be pretty revealing. Some of them, probably a majority of them will be deterred from doing it. Others, probably far fewer, regardless of how harsh the penalty may be will do it anyway.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Can someone recommend anti-spam software that works well with pop3 and Thunderbird? I tried McAfee. It only filtered about 50% of the spam. Even reporting all the missed spam to McAfee didn't help, I guess it's not a learning system. After a few monthes, i was still getting only 50% spam filtering.
There are 10 types of people in the world... those that understand binary and those that don't.
I don't like spam anymore than anyone else but my advice to you is to install a spam filter and shut up. I get one piece of spam a day. If you can't bare that toll, time to get off the Interweb. Sending people to jail is not the answer.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
Does not atone for what you did on November 2nd.
Maybe they'll invade Michigan and capture Alan Murray Ralsky... It wouldn't be the first time there was war between Michigan and Ohio.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'm a bit confused. When CAN-SPAN passed, I remember vividly that one of the major problems with it was that it negated state anti-spam laws. Yet here in Virginia, AG Jerry Kilgore just, amidst much celebration, sent a spammer to prison for years. Now Ohio intends to pass this law. Another commenter has pointed out that this Ohio law seems to be based on a permissive clause of CAN-SPAM that permits such laws to be passed.
Can state anti-spam laws only be passed if states have been expressly granted the power to do so under CAN-SPAM? Or am I missing something?
-Waldo Jaquith
That part made me think about the physical mailbox that collects pounds of wasted paper every week.
We're so damned concerned about having to sift through spam and the time we waste to delete it, that we've ignored a tremendous source of waste that infiltrates our homes every day.
All those free credit card applications, retail catalogues, AOL CDs, and grocery store fliers incur a cost to the environment. Why aren't we focusing more attention on something that's causing real harm to the world?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
There are multiple Americas. There share some common needs, and have some common traits, but the East Coast has different needs and wants than the West Coast. Different still are the needs and want of the South, the Southwest, the Industrial/Great Lakes Region, the Northwest, and the Midwest (Grainbelt).
Farmers have different needs than auto manufacturers, and insurance companies, and stock brokers, and software houses need.
This is why states rights is such an attractive doctrine. A solution for Kansas, may not work for Alabama, and a solution for New York might make no sense for Nevada.
My Heart Is A Flower
Yeah... those democrats and those unions really saved those lost Timken jobs. ROFL!!
Theft of service.
It costs that person distributing flyers - the paper, the toner/ink, etc. That comes out of their pocket, not yours. That is why I'm willing to tolerate junk mail - because I'm not footing the bill for it.
On the other hand, those of us who pay for bandwidth, servers, etc end up footing the bill for spam, because its our system that has to accept/store the crap.
Imagine if the junk mailers started sending their crap COD through the mail, and expected you to pay for it.
Now, if spammers want to pay me a monthly fee of around $10,000 to cover expenses associated with them using my resources, as well as make sure my users get paid for the time they spend reading the spam, I may let them in.
Ahh, one can dream...
Brielle
IANAL, but I think if you get convicted of a crime, all assets from that crime are 'confiscated'.
I don't like spam anymore than anyone else but my advice to you is to install a spam filter and shut up. I get one piece of spam a day.
Who the hell cares how much spam you hide from yourself, spam ostrich? Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean that it's not there. You still paid for the bandwidth the spammer used. If you're using your ISP's mail server, you paid them for the storage and delivery of the spam. Spammers are costing everyone money.
If you can't bare that toll, time to get off the Interweb.
While your time may have zero value, others do value their time and an attorney, CPA, or other professional using the net should not have to invest his time, or his money, fighting off spammers. Spammers are stealing from him and hurting his ability to earn a livelihood and should be jailed just like any other thief. Why the hell should millions of people have to invest billions of dollars and countless hours just so that spammers can spam without fear of jail time?
While your little geek-boy spam filter might suit your needs, I've worked with someone who consults to the real-estate industry and real-estate agents are bombarded with spam -- as well as legitimate business newsletters, business communications, and client communications. In order to be competitive, they have to post their e-mail address online. And that means that it gets harvested. They can't afford to lose a commission on a half-million dollar home sale by posting some javascript obsfuscated mailto link that doesn't work with the buyer's or seller's web browser. Nor do they want to get important mortgage rate information scrapped -- but they don't want some spam with a refinance-your-home scam.
I have my own domain and probably get two to three pieces of spam a week through my blacklists and filters, but I'm a grown-up, so I recognize that what I, as an individual, do isn't going to work for most businesses. If I bounce all mail from Taiwan, that's fine. If a business does, they might miss out on important correspondence that translates to large sums of money.
Instead of arguing about whether a legislative or technical solution will work better, why don't we do both? Obviously Ohio spammers can simply move to Jersey or something, but this is a strong precedent that hopefully everyone else follows. Also, I've seen some comments about SPAM laws not being enforced. Well, if the DA can get actual prison time and the politicians tell the DA that anti-SPAM is a priority then maybe law enforcement *will* bother finding and prosecuting these cretins. Why would a DA bother now if they know they'll have to fight for months and the spammer will walk away with a 25k fine, which the spammer will make up in a month?
The technical ideas are being proposed, and we are learning about which ones are promising (note to M$, byte me). This process will take 5+ years to codify into some IETF stadard and get deployed in some meaningful way. In the meantime we can let our politicians do something useful by making the spammers we can catch pay in a big way (with community input I hope). This means prison time; just like embezzlement must carry a prison sentence because the financial incentives are so great and the chance of getting caught in time are small enough to be enticing. That is the *deterrent* factor. The malicious grin we get from this law is the revenge factor of punishment. This law has both.
While the materials for the flyers and other physical junkmail left on my property are paid for by someone else, *I* have to pay to get rid of them.
No one is paying for my time however trivial that may be to pick up the trash around my front door. I also pay for my trash/recycle service to haul the stuff away. And finally, when I get spam, nobody is alerted to the fact that I may not be home, since spam doesn't collect on the front doorknob.
Should I send a bill to the junk-mailers for hiring the neighbor kid to keep my doorstep clean?
What law would I be breaking if I had a couple of tons of scrap paper delivered to your front lawn? Seems to me this is the same thing leaflet-leavers are doing, just to a lessor degree.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Wait no more!
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
I agree completely. We should start with mandatory execution of ALL violent offenders. That would leave much more room for non-violent criminals. Thank you so much for making the suggestion!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
...is that if and when spam is ever eliminated, it would mean the end of Spamusement. http://www.spamusement.com/ I actually look through my spam to find the weirdest subject headings to send to the guy who makes the cartoon. It's the best use for spam I've yet to see.
"I'd rather stay here with all the madmen, for I'm quite content they're all as sane as me..." ~ David Bowie
This is as silly as the idea that you should serve jail time for copying copyrighted materials. While there is some economic impact of spamming, there is little actual physical harm done by it.
Instead, I think fines should be enforced. And a rate of something like $1/message seems fine to me (pun intended).
Jailing someone is an extreme measure to take. I might argue that it's cruel and unusual.
IBM got slapped down by San Francisco for sidewalk graffiti spam; it seems reasonable to me that anti spam laws should focus on the folks paying for marketing services.
This would incentivize firms to require companies that being retained for marketing purpose to affirm that they won't spam.
Marketing firms that do spam would quickly be driven out of business.
Seems pretty simple. Or am I missing something?
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How is this flamebait? "Ohio" is a protest song written as a direct result of the Kent State incident. If expressing a certain level of dismay at the parody of the song is "flamebait" then the original post with the parody is certainly no less flamebait then this is.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
The only problem with jail as the answer is that it is too pleasent to be a deterrent.
Remove the TV's, books and all other forms of entertainment. Make prisoners work for their living and generally make sure they do not want to go back to prison.
There is too much acceptance of unsociable behavior, the idea that such behavior does not warrant strong actions promotes more extreme behavior.
Spamming is unsociable and society should expect strong action to be taken to punish those responsible. It is not a crime someone commits accidentally, it is committed by people who care more about themselves than society, why on earth should society treat them leniently???
I know you were obviously very fed up with the retards^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpeople whining and complaining about how spammers should be handled here.. and I agree with you. Your diatribe was refreshing and sane, at the same time!
/. - and learn to think about the consequences on society of the treatment you are demanding to be given to others.
We don't need to send spammers to jail, and what the hell is the deal with lumping spammers together with drug dealers? Spam won't kill you if you delete 100 messages per day or 1000. The only thing mind-altering about it would be that it turns whiney 15 year olds that don't pay taxes anyway (which pay for people's prison stays, by the way) into total asshats. As if they weren't already.
Grow up,
A wise person makes his own decisions, a weak one obeys public opinion. -- Chinese proverb
Charge these people a fine of say, double what they made on their scam.
The problem is people in prison also cost us money. A lot more money when they were flooding my inbox with spam. It cost something like $20,000/year per prisoner here in the U.S.
Just fine the shit out of the bastard and move on. It would also be prudent to spend more time/money on anti-spam software, which would protect you from spam coming from offshore (i.e. out of your State/countries jurisdiction. If there is such a thing for the U.S.)
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Lois, this isn't my Batman glass. - Peter
I think ISP filtering is a *much* more desirable mechanism for stopping spam. Really, I even prefer individual filtering over ISP filtering (the perfect mix is when the ISP has a simple interface for the user to enter in filtering rules for their inbox), but either is better than a first-amendment-violating-law against spam.
Don't become a regular here, you will become retarded. -- Yoda the Retard
If they don't want to receive spam, I can just delete their email accounts.
A very few years ago, there were less than a hundred major spammers. And most of them were low-rent operations. One arrest per week would have killed off the spam industry.
Now that organized crime is involved, it's going to be much harder.
On the other hand, "legitimate" spam is almost dead. You see few spams today from any business that is even vaguely legitimate.
Why should I (an Ohio tax payer) pay to keep a non-violent criminal in jail? Most jails are so over crowded they parole people early to make space. I don't care if you want to fine spammers, but don't ask me to support them in jail. Jail should be for people who are a danger to society, not for someone who sends junk emails.
I always get tongue-tied when I'm trying to respond to a Bushie. My point was going to be that the picture he linked to was based on land area, not population. I got done typing up a post along those lines twice and nixed it both times.
I mean, if this guy doesn't already realize that his argument is stupid, how am I going to convince him? I already know that he's willing to defend Bush in a public forum, which makes him an idiot and closed-minded. It feels like trying to teach algebra to a kid who can't do fractions (which is my job, by the way, so I know exactly how it feels).
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
I just settled with Global Web Promotions, but cannot discuss the terms. But, part of what encouraged me to settle is that the FTC has gone after them (and I am helping with that) and had an injunction and order to freeze assets granted.
Fight Spammers!
What penalty do you propose for crime? I don't want a buy your way to freedom justice system.
What if someone sets fire to your house? That isn't a violent crime, just a destruction of property. I say throw them in jail.
You didn't fill it out! I'm so disapointed.
Why not go after the people that use spam to advertise? I would think if you took out the incentive to use spam to get your name out, then you would take away spammers. most spam i get is for US based companies.
why is no one going after those that use spam to advertise? this seems the logical thing for me.
I already know that he's willing to defend Bush in a public forum, which makes him an idiot and closed-minded.
Do you really think evey bush support is an idiot? If that is the case, doesnt that make you closed minded?
I greatly disagreed with John Kerry as a candidate, and as a politician, and as an american. That being said, I COULD understand why people would vote for him. Without resorting to phrases like "ignorant bible-thumping tobacoo giants" or "intolerant, bigoted, hatemongers" can you think of a reason people voted for bush?
I think people voted for Kerry mainly because they disagreed with Bush's Foriegn policy, or did not like him personally. I think Kerry lost because he did not connect with voters, only jumped on issues... he made himself a challenger, not a candidate. People root for an underdog but they dont vote for him.
There, See? I discussed why people could vote for Kerry and I didnt even mention Frenchie-Communist, Wishy Washy, peacenik hippies.
How about Taxing Spammers like they do Casinos and the Lottery. The States take a split of the money and keep things in check. You would also have to have liscences to spam. This is if your company spams from anywhere in the world. States which are strapping for cash will get additional revenue, things will continue as they have been, and excessive spammers can be congratulated for keeping our taxes down.
Amnesty International don't think so
Neither do these guys
Nor does Human Rights Watch
A quarter of prisoners aged 18 to 25 claim they have been sexually assaulted while in custody
Rape isn't funny
Amnesty International don't think so
Neither do these guys
Nor does Human Rights Watch
A quarter of prisoners aged 18 to 25 claim they have been sexually assaulted while in custody
What about the silent killer, fax spam?
Can they stick fax spammers in that bill while they're at it? It's worse than regular spam, IMO, because aside from time, it also wastes ink and paper. This is especially hurtful to non-profit companies like the one I work out. We're not overloaded with fax spam, but it's still a nuisiance.
Too bad this form doesn't say what WILL work, although if I get its drift properly, "do nothing" is what it's advocating.
--
Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
Anti-bush is not pro-kerry. If you can't stand kerry, there are plenty of conservative third party candidates. There are plenty of valid non-kerry votes you can cast, but I don't see any excuse for voting bush under any circumstances.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The previous post was for the New International Translation. Here's the King James:
And found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting:
And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers' money, and overthrew the tables;
And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father's house an house of merchandise
The NIV version makes it seem that he made a whip for the cattle, the KJV seems to say that he used the whip rather more liberally. Of course, I can't read the original, so I don't know which might be more accurate.
I don't read AC A human right
over half the people out there voting are below average intelligence
Don't know what definition of average you are working with, but that statement doesn't seem to be possible.
Last time I checked, if over half of something is below the average, doesn't that lower the average to make exactly half below average?
Are we talking about me here?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I'm rolling my eyes as hard as I possibly can.
Share and rate p
Let's talk about holes you can drive trucks through.
What we need is an anti-spam law, so that people who steal everyone's network access and email addresses can actually be prosecuted (including the people who fund them). Then the various technological techniques to counter and track the spammers down have a chance. It's still legal to spam in Ohio, and elsewhere. Why would we expect people to stop spamming when it's still legal to do so? Some people will stop doing things that are illegal, and for the rest, it's only possible to enforce laws that are actually passed.
Murder still happens, even though it's illegal. But many people won't murder for fear of punishment, and we have a whole infrastructure set up to catch and punish those who break the law. Time to bring the spamming thieves into that list.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
A prison term is the only way to truly deter someone from spamming.
;-)
...
... some people will do it anyway, just like some people sell drugs
So execution wouldn't work then
Prison on the other hand would make [Joe Trailerpark] really stop and think
Why should it, if nothing else has? Joe's whole problem is that he has no frontal lobes - he does not clearly anticipate the consequences of his actions. That's why he's living in a trailer park.
Yes, well "some people" are all that is required. The whole country is knee-deep in drugs, even though only some people sell them.
"The good reader is a rarer swan than the good writer."
Yea, I'm going to have to sort of, disagree, here. If someone has no ability to control their actions at all and never thinks about the consequences, the most effective way to make money fast in their minds would be to rob a bank. The reason that individuals who spam probably wouldn't do this is fear of getting caught and going to prison. So presumably they have some control of their actions and consider consequences which keeps them from doing really bad things. They might, however, have no morals and ethics, which is what would lead them to spam. They would know that the current laws and systems of enforcement do not provide a huge deterrent to spammers. If prison time were a real possibility, they might be exactly the type of person who would be deterred. Spam wouldn't be such a problem if we only got a few spams a week, but when mailboxes clog up with hundreds of spams a day, that adds up to serious money.
That innocent dumb user is going to be left in the poor house after their legal bills build up. I can see the headlines now, 86 year old woman sent to jail for 6 months after computer sends out spam.
"That is why I'm willing to tolerate junk mail - because I'm not footing the bill for it."
Not only that, junk mail actually helps keep your mail costs down. Note that the mail person generally has to drive the same route, regardless of whether there is mail to deliver to you or not. With junk mail, the junk mail pays part of the cost of the route. Eliminate the junk mail, and you still have the same route.
By contrast, spam only increases the resource usage. It doesn't contribute anything financially, and even if it did, there aren't the same overhead costs with email as with snail mail.
Snail junk mail is more like television commercials. If commercials were banned tomorrow, all the broadcast channels (other than PBS) and some of the cable channels would go out of business. The remaining channels would go up in price.
What if the circumstance is, you are George Bush.
Actually, an effective law would need to allow for whats known as a "private right of action" where individuals (or groups of individuals, classes, etc) can *SUE* senders of spam for damanges.
Anything requiring DA's to be involved will not be enough of a threat to spammers. And yes, it needs to be written without regards as to the *content* of the spam, as you note.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
"...can *SUE* senders of spam for damanges."
does that include the persson who had theer system broken into and turned into a spamming server?
THere can not be an effective law against spam. Too many questions, too expensive, to time consuming,and our courts have better things to deal with.
The efeffective solution to spam is user awareness, and confirming the email was sent by a real person.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
First off, I would say a fire is pretty damn violent.
Sending SPAM can not phisically harm people, burning down a house can.
Plus someone burning down homes a danger to people.
Now, assume it's a perfect scenerio, no people or non replacable personaly belongings in the house, no risk the person will do it again. Then I would rather his wages were garnished, and he do community service instead of going to jail. In this scenerio Jail will not change the behaviour(one time incident), cost the tax payers a lot of money, and have no benefit to me what-so-ever.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
IANAL (But You Knew That)
You try them in absentia, they don't show up to defend themselves, of course, so the State wins a monetary judgment against them. Then the State Prosecutor will place a lien on the company's assets in the United States.
If the company does not have assets in the US, the company will be forced to pay any such fee prior to aquiring any assets in the US.
And many chinese companies don't want to be placed in that situation. They may not even be able to do business with US firms.
"Piter, too, is dead."
Flash is a very powerful tool - and an interpreter for a single-code multiplatform OOP language that does what Java applets promised but never delivered. (That's mostly Microsoft's fault, not Sun's, but it doesn't matter now)
True, it was a lot less powerful a few years ago. Also true, many people make Flash websites that should be html, or that are terrible design in some other way.
But it's the only solution for truly rich interactive web content.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
First, it's a joke. I don't think you got it. Have you never seen this form before?
Many, many times. And, had the post been modded "+5 Funny", I might not have replied as I did, but some people actually took it seriously.
Second, you neglected to address "Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business," which is the key problem with "following the money," particularly if the spammer is out of the country.
Wait a second. You just said that it was a joke and implied that I was dimwitted for replying seriously. Now you are arguing the merits of what was posted. So is it only a "joke" when you want to ridicule me for replying?
Framing people is an age-old problem that the legal system has grappled with countless times. This is no different. What's to stop me from anonymously destroying your career or business by means other than spam? What could stop me from signing you up to receive NAMBLA mailings at work? Why couldn't I kill a man, smear his blood on your car door handle, and anonymously report having seen you kill him? This is not a new problem or one that is unique to prosecuting spammers.
Therefore the following can apply:
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
Most cases would be open and shut. The AG's office would subpeona the credit card processing company who would identify the person collecting the money. The AG's office would get a search warrant and seize his computer. They would find HTML source for the spams, copies of the spam, and/or other records of the spamming activity, including who he paid to send it. They would find a home filled with penis pumps, miracle weight loss pills, or whatever else he was hawking through spam. They would bring the case to court and assert that he did not advertise through any legitimate means (radio, TV, postal mailings, etc.) and make a rock-solid case that his entire business was predicated on sending spam. End of story. It's kind of hard to claim that you had a legitimate business selling penis pumps if you didn't have a storefront or any legitimate form of advertising.
I think you mistake "ease" with "lack of thinking things through."
I own the domain anti-spam.org. I am a member of CAUCE. I have consulted with a company which produces a spam-filtering appliance. I have studied many laws and proposed laws, including Chris Smith's, which was the most promising before it was killed. Unlike you, I have thought the problem through for a period of years while your "thought" on the matter seems to consist of checking boxes on a 'funny form.'
I'm from Ohio. Spammer's pay bills (ie bandwidth, servers, employees, salesmen, etc..).
They're gonna spam regardless. But now they go to Michigan to make their loot, and guess what - you just rid my state of some taxpaying people that would have bought stuff from my neighbor's store and from my business.
I hate spam just as much as you do. But this only starts "brain drain" in its state. I don't see why Ohio would do this - It should be on a federal level.
Berto
I can handle the spam......but can Ohio run a an honest election? Precincts with 3,800 votes for Bush, but only 800 voters in total suggest Ohio's priorities should be other than spam.
Only boring people are ever bored.
If we could make the case that spam hurts Big Business, surely we could get the U.S. government to force the rest of the world to adopt draconian anti-spam laws, as they do with copyright laws to protect the entertainment industries.
My Windows program is very sensitive to spam because it uses a different method I find more effective than the leading statistical method to stop spam. It works for me, an individual who was fed up with spam and malware and wanted to get rid of both of them for good.
My program lets you decide what kinds of email you want.
Fear not, the program can be configured to 'save spam' in order to avoid deleting important email. The best thing to do is to set my software up on a 'wide open' public POP3 email address and direct correspondents to private 'wide open' email addresses as needed for the ones that get past the filtering.
All I can say is that proper usage of it will make receiving spam and malware 'almost impossible'.
P.S. No lewd/derisive comments please. My software may not be a perfect fit for you but it is for me.
To put it bluntly, I pity spammers/scammers/computer crackers now. Their email is worthless to me--i'll never see it. Should I see it on rare occasions, it will be in a harmless, inert state or contain absolutely no content at all.
I'm sorry, usually I don't complain about my moderations, but this is stupid. The parent remains at plus 3 for mocking peace martyrs. My plea for fixing its moderation isn't fof-topic. Doesn't anyone have any class around here?