New Attacks on Spam

AttackOfTheDictionaries writes "Project Honey Pot started operating back in November. The Project provides its participants with a script that generates fake webpages with unique honeypot email addresses. The end result is that Project Honey Pot can connect email harvesters' IP addresses with the spam received by those honeypot email addresses. Which is pretty nifty, but left some people asking how that would help legal attacks on spam. Well, it seems that some lawyer over at SecurityFocus has an answer."

Comments

Follow the Money

[Lemurmania]

I've never understood why more attention isn't paid to punishing the businesses who advertise via spam. However well the spammers hide their tracks, there's a real company somewhere that wants to exchange services for cash. Why not attack this at the root? Why not make it a fineable offense to advertise via spam? Or would it be all-too-easy for a company to claim it never asked for the spam to be sent in the first place?

It just seems to me that if you punish the money, there would be little to no incentive to spam. Any IANALs (or IAALs) like to comment on why this would/wouldn't work?

License agreements

[TiggertheMad]

Ethan Preston, the lawyer that is linked to in the article above, mentions that the harvesters are forced to 'click through' a license agreement that has legal ramifications if broken. While this is a neat trick to put the screws to spammers, isn't it a bad idea in the grand scheme of things, as it lends more credibility to the 'click through' agreements that are packaged with software? If this were taken to court and upheld as valid, it could be used as a precedent.

Now, admitidly, there is an important difference in that in one case you cannot read the agreement before buying the product, but the overall premise that such agreements can be legally binding would be the same. Also, since this is a tactic that has been developed to target harvesters, who the developers know will not be able to read or comprehend the agreement, wouldn't that invalidate the agreement. Simply: If I trick you into agreeing to a legal contract, is it any good in court?

Also, as a side note, it would fall victim to all the same problems as EULAS. For example, if I was an evil spammer, I could probably get out of the clause by hiring a 17 year old to run the harvester for me, since a minor cannot enter into a legal contract, it would be no good.