Dutch Fine Spammers, AOL Reports Drop in Spam

teun writes "This morning the Dutch Telecom Authority, responsible for enforcing the anti-spam law in the Netherlands, announced their first two fines for Dutch spammers: 25,000 and 42,500 euros. These fines are based on the anti-spam law that became effective in May this year. Spamvrij.nl is very pleased with these results." gollum123 writes "According to AOL, its subscribers are getting less spam this year. There has been a reduction in both the number of daily email messages to AOL (from 2.1 to 1.6 billion) and in the number of customer complaints about spam." And finally, Saeed al-Sahaf writes "We hear so much about China being the source of spam. But a new study shows China and South Korea as distant second to the United States as the source of spam. Sophos, a leading anti-virus maker has released some findings, which claim that the good old US accounts for almost 42% of spam mails sent out this year, and they chalk it up to lack of security on most desktop computers."

Comments

Less subscribers?

[AtariAmarok]

""According to AOL, its subscribers are getting less spam this year. "

Less subscribers = less spam! AOL has found a way to reduce it, for sure: reduce the number of customers through overpricing and degradation of services. This results in fewer inboxes: Viola! Less Spam!

Re:Less subscribers?

[learn fast]

Viola?

I think you mean Voila!, a French interjection. A viola is a stringed instrument slightly larger than a violin.

Though Viola! Less Spam! does have a certain ring to it.

Nice department.

[lpangelrob2]

from the finger-in-the-dike dept.

Surely you jest.

This is good. But...

[pummer]

Are spam crimes really being enforced correctly? Some would say no. Shouldn't government be focused on combating spam itself by catching each and every spammer, rather than making an example out of a few? It's the same as the RIAA and music; no one worries about getting caught because the odds are so low.

Until we have a centrally-implemented system that tracks every spammer by IP and reports them to ISPs, we won't be making any real progress.

Re:This is good. But...

[RealAlaskan]

Are spam crimes really being enforced correctly?

Would it matter if they were?

The real problem is the companies which are willing to pay spammers to spam. When advertising your product via spam is illegal, spam will be a thing of the past. Yes, there would be joe-jobs, but our legal system is quite capable of dealing with that sort of thing. They manage to deal with that problem for all of our other criminal laws, to give you an example.

Outlawing advertising via spam would mean that the company which wants your money, and has to be accessible to take orders, would face fines and jail time for officers if they spammed. Soon, only the outright frauds would be willing to take that kind of risk, and even the idiots would eventually stop sending money to spammers who never actually sent penis enlargement pills.

OBVIOUS.

[sethadam1]

AOL reports a drop in spam because they falsely classify REAL messages as spam! Most network admins I know have had to deal with AOL at one time or another. They are pretty strict for a large ISP: they require valid rDNS records, last I checked, for one, and many times have my parents (stubborn AOL'ers) found legitimate mail in their spam folder).

In my company, one blocked false positive is considered a mortal sin. Report less spam doesn't mean you are great at blocking it, it might mean you're just too damn aggressive at fighting it.

Re:OBVIOUS.

[fimbulvetr]

Personally, I don't see any harm in AOL forcing you to adhere to standards.
In fact, I love it. Most internet problems stem from people not adhereing to standards, such as using ip adresses as MX records, not using a fqdn on an ehlo, or not listening to (550|450).

Despite AOL sucking donkey balls, they have contributed to making the internet a better place in some ways.

Wrong.

[Skynet]

AOL keeps accounts around long after you leave the service, in the hopes you will one day come back and reactivate. I had an email address there I deleted years ago, only to reactivate it and find I had mail waiting (mostly spam!).

Zombies

[confusion]

If you match up the extremely determined spammers, millions of really incompentent cable modem/dsl users and the roughly 234987234745 ways to get malware onto a computer, it is no wonder that the US is #1.

What's more surpsing is that ISP's have not done more to stop being the source of spam (ala blocking port 25 outbound).

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

Re:Thanks America...

[stratjakt]

RTFA, the spammers aren't in america, the zombied boxes they use to relay spam are.

No doubt windows in Korea or China is just as insecure, but does the average housewife in Korea have a 3.6ghz P4 with a gig of RAM and 120 gig HDD?

Plus, most of Asia has been RBTL'ed by now, no point in spamming from compromised Korean box.

I think that given sheer amount of insecure PCs with respectable specs in US, that are connected 24/7, the list makes alot of sense.

PS, upon re-reading, Sophos also includes Worms and trojans in their statistic, many big email worms have exploited a bug only exists in the US version of OE, IIRC, so now the list makes even more sense.

the humor of morons

[calyxa]

I'd rather see 'viola' than 'wa-la'...