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Can-Spam Increased Spam
andy1307 writes "According to New York Times, spam has actually gone up [Free registration required. You gave real info, right?] since the CAN-SPAM act went into effect. There is a graphic in the article that illustrates this increase. Before the CAN-SPAM act was passed, spam was about 60% of all e-mail traffic. Now it's 80%. In a we-told-you-so quote, Steve Linford, the founder of the Spamhaus Project, says CAN-SPAM legalized spam by giving bulk advertisers permission to send junk e-mail as long as they followed certain rules. Slashdot covered this story last year. For companies that offer offshore "bulk advertising" servers, business is booming. A survey from Stanford University estimates the global cost of spam in terms of lost productivity to be at 50 billion $ and 17 billion $ in the US alone. CAN-SPAM does give prosecutors some leverage to go after the merchants - but it must be proved that they knew, or should have known, that their wares were being fed into the illegal spam chain. " The BBC has a related story talking about rates of spam, viruses, and scam mail.
Who would've thought they'd abuse a new law?
Seriously, who didn't see this coming? Who loves clueless legislators? Spammers do!
I was truly hoping Can Spam meant sealing spammers up in airtight containers, preserving them for study by future generations.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
They don't call it the CAN-spam act for nothing.
what's the fraction of spam that's sent which is CAN-SPAM compliant? how has that increased? (no i didn't RTFA since i haven't registered. does the article answer this?)
A fact that seems lost on most journalists these days.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I don't understand why people hate fake meat so much? I mean, put it on sandwich, with some horseradish, and you're all set to go!
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
It's likely that spam would have increased anyway.
We don't want to know if the relative amount of SPAM has increased - that is no surprise given that it is supposedly a good (if unethical) business model. How about whether the rate of increase has changed - that would be the only analysis that would show CAN-SPAM legitimised some spam messages.
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This is the problem. Until the business of spamming stops producing profits, spam won't stop. It's beyond my comprehension why anyone would buy anything from spam.
CAN-SPAM legalized spam by giving bulk advertisers permission to send junk e-mail as long as they followed certain rules
So um... If they are following a standard set of rules, then logic seems to tell me that someone isn't apply their server side rules to full effect. No?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Welcome to Slashdot. Where correlation does not mean causality for things like piracy, but does for things like legislation inducing spam. The trick is to remember that the evidence supports your position, and then figure out why.
--LordPixie
So what's Can-Span (see title of slashdot article)?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
A growing number of so-called bulletproof Web host services like Mr. Gillespie's offer spam-friendly merchants access to stable offshore computer servers - most of them in China - where they can park their Web sites, with the promise that they will not be shut down because of spam complaints.
.br) and keep banning /16's and /8's until it is gone. The spammers are here to stay.
And this is exactly what we have been saying all along. No matter what laws are passed, no matter what we do to combat spam, the spammers will always find another way to make a buck.
One of the spammers quoted in the article claimed that he didn't care about the lawsuits... He was making too much money to stop.
If you're making too much money and they somehow make a law that actually works stick do you think that they are just going to go away? Yeah, I do, to other countries where those laws won't mean anything...
Keep those firewalls banning entire countries (.kr and
I've had this thought for a while, about what can be done about spam, and I have a couple of ideas for the /. community.
/. community thinks of these, or if anyone else has any ideas on what to do about spam. (And I don't mean better filters by this).
1) Legislate so that merhandise sold using spam cannot legally demand payment (eg via visa/mastercard). Puts alot of pain onto these companies, but also would make it quite unattractive to sell stuff this way if you knew that the money you got could be reclaimed if it was demonstrated that you used spam as an advertising medium
2) Employ teams of people to respond to SPAM (at a government level). SPAM works because they get a low return rate, but the people who do respond actually buy stuff. Thats what keeps it all going. If we made it so that a decent percentage of the replies were time wasters, the average company would suddenly have to employ lots of resources to deal with false responses. In effect, it would spam them. Suddenly its no longer as cheap to advertise this way.
Just a couple of thoughts, but I'd love to see what the
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
Correlation (or lack thereof) does not imply causation (or lack thereof).
If you look at the graphic carefully, you'll notice that there is a nice linear trend line. I'd like to argue that CAN-SPAM is entirely irrelevant to criminal activities, and posit that whether or not the bill had been passed that we'd still be exactly where we are today.
As a side note, with a 20% growth per annum, by next year illegitimate email traffic should reach 100% of all email traffic!
Nothing is to attribute this directly to CAN-SPAM. If you look at the graph supplied, there has been (on average) a linear increase in the % of email sent that is spam. Spam has always been on the increase and CAN-SPAM has done nothing to slow it down. Its all just a missrepresentation of the information.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I have to wonder if you can really say that CAN-SPAM made it get worse. To me it looks like there was a brief drop off, and then it resumed the normal climb. Do we seriously believe that a significant amount of spam wasn't sent before CAN-SPAM, because the originators were worried about it being illegal? Seriously?
We also expected the volume of spam to increase with or without CAN-SPAM. So what percentage of this current volume of spam actually complies with CAN-SPAM?
HAH HAH!
Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc
Definition:
The name in Latin means "after this therefore because of this".
This describes the fallacy. An author commits the fallacy when
it is assumed that because one thing follows another that the
one thing was caused by the other.
Examples:
(i) Immigration to Alberta from Ontario increased. Soon
after, the welfare rolls increased. Therefore, the increased
immigration caused the increased welfare rolls.
(ii) I took EZ-No-Cold, and two days later, my cold
disappeared.
Proof:
Show that the correlation is coincidental by showing that: (i)
the effect would have occurred even if the cause did not
occur, or (ii) that the effect was caused by something other
than the suggested cause.
References
(Cedarblom and Paulsen: 237, Copi and Cohen: 101)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
*sigh* and I mentioned this while it was still in the mysterious future, your funeral CmdrTaco :-/ I tried...
...in bed
Actually, the chart suggests that the act produced a short-lived decrease in spam volume, after which spam continued to increase at about the same rate as before the law.
Thanks for the new sig. Superb!!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Can-Span? Is that a law legalizing screwdrivers?
503 Sig Unavailable
The Signature could not be accessed. Please try again later or contact the administrator
Article Text:
A year after a sweeping federal antispam law went into effect, there is more junk e-mail on the Internet than ever, and Levon Gillespie, according to Microsoft, is one reason.
Lawyers for the company seemed well on the way to shutting down Mr. Gillespie last September after he agreed to meet them at a Starbucks in Los Angeles near the University of Southern California. There they served him a court summons and a lawsuit accusing him, his Web site and 50 unnamed customers of violating state and federal law - including the year-old federal Can Spam Act - by flooding Microsoft's internal and customer e-mail networks with illegal spam, among other charges.
But that was the last the company saw of the young entrepreneur.
Mr. Gillespie, who operated a service that gives bulk advertisers off-shore shelter from the antispam crusade, did not show up last month for a court hearing in King County, Wash. The judge issued a default judgment against him in the amount of $1.4 million.
In a telephone interview yesterday from his home in Los Angeles, Mr. Gillespie, 21, said he was unaware of the judgment and that no one from Microsoft or the court had yet followed up. But he insisted that he had done nothing wrong and vowed that lawsuits would not stop him - nor any of the other players in the lucrative spam chain.
"There's way too much money involved," Mr. Gillespie said, noting that his service, which is currently down, provided him with a six-figure income at its peak. "And if there's money to be made, people are going to go out and get it."
Since the Can Spam Act went into effect in January 2004, unsolicited junk e-mail on the Internet has come to total perhaps 80 percent or more of all e-mail sent, according to most measures. That is up from 50 percent to 60 percent of all e-mail before the law went into effect.
To some antispam crusaders, the surge comes as no surprise. They had long argued that the law would make the spam problem worse by effectively giving bulk advertisers permission to send junk e-mail as long as they followed certain rules.
"Can Spam legalized spamming itself," said Steve Linford, the founder of the Spamhaus Project, a London organization that is one of the leading groups intent on eliminating junk e-mail. And in making spam legal, he said, the new rules also invited flouting by those intent on being outlaws.
Not everyone agrees that the Can Spam law is to blame, and lawsuits invoking the new legislation - along with other suits using state laws - have been mounted in the name of combating the problem. Besides Microsoft, other large Internet companies like AOL and Yahoo have used the federal law as the basis for suits.
Two prolific spam distributors, Jeremy D. Jaynes and Jessica DeGroot, were convicted under a Virginia antispam law in November, and a $1 billion judgment was issued in an Iowa federal court against three spam marketers in December.
The law's chief sponsor, Senator Conrad Burns, Republican of Montana, said that it was too soon to judge the law's effectiveness, although he indicated in an e-mail message that the Federal Trade Commission, which oversees its enforcement, might simply need some nudging.
"As we progress into the next legislative session," Mr. Burns said, "I'll be working to make sure the F.T.C. utilizes the tools now in place to enforce the act and effectively stem the tide of this burden."
The F.T.C. has made some recent moves that include winning a court order in January to shut down illegal advertisi
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Weird, I've been getting less and less. Between my 4 accounts, I only get a few peices of spam a week. And my one account has been used as a spam-sucking email account for online forms etc.
lol: You see no door there!
hot-linking: as long as it's a big corporate bitch, it's OK! Way to set an example.
The figure shows that SPAM increasing rate was more or less the same before and after the CAN-SPAM law.
Ok, in plain text: It didn't accelerate SPAM. It just didn't do anything to stop it.
The only way we'll actually see a reduction in spam is to put true measures in the MTAs such that there is absolutely no way to mask the sender's address or host, and completely disallow any form of relaying. Then, you have to start setting up the MTAs to not accept any mail delivered by older versions.
Yes, I realize the impact this would have on the internet and e-mail delivery... but if you want to eliminate it, or at least be able to truly identify the sender, this is about the only way to actually do it.
OCO is Loco
Well, not dead, but dying. People aren't going to use something when they spend their time deleting crap they don't want. They'll use something else. Messaging, IP telephony, and similar things spring to mind. It always seems to get past spam filters, however well configured they are. There's nothing quite like seeing 2000 spam emails in your business email account every day to put you off email for life.
Can anyone say whack a mole? You either need to re-engineer SMTP or find better ways to remove the economic incentive. Can-Spam was just theater, like most other US legislation.
The only real way to stop Spam is to take action against the companies using these spammers services.
I realise this might not be the easiest thing in the world to do, given the shady nature of both spammers and their clients but on the whole I would imagine the companies are the kind of companies trading standards etc would be interested in anyway.
What we need is new laws and investment into shutting down dodgy businesses who feel the need to use spamming and other annoying bulk marketing.
Just blocking China and Korean IP space from connecting to port 25 does wonders for reducing spam. See: http://www.okean.com/iptables/rc.firewall.sinokore a
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
All trousers have two legs
All men wear trousers
Therefore all men have two legs.
Did he inhale?
This is the sad state of journalism these days. Why just claim that something had no affect when you can claim it was worse? Oh I know why, because news has become about entertainment instead of informing the public. And since bad > neutral, you get articles like this.
That a great deal of the (uninformed) public and the (uninformed/bribed , take your choice) politicians thought this would at least put a dent in spam here in the US.
Of course, the spammer scum (I know, don't need to add scum, spammer covers it) figure that it's a law for show, which it is..
The top 10 spammers are responsible for something like 3 quarters of the spam sent. If Only half of those spammers were locked up in jail (where you have to admit they belong, because of their tactics, never mind the UCE itself).. spam would drop noticeably.
The law needs to be improved. The law needs to have teeth.. and the law needs to chew some big time spammers.
That's the only thing that'll slow things down.
People Talking in Movie shows.. people smoking in bed.. people voting republican.. GIVE THEM A BOOT TO THE HEAD!
Is this some sort of density-related thing? Are they whipping the spam more, so that it is fluffy? This surely means that there is a lower percentage of real meat in the product?
Shame on... shame on you.
My other processor is big-endian.
As a user and a domain owner, the overall volume of spam isn't of particular concern for me. (Obviously ISPs and carriers have different priorities.) If CAN-SPAM succeeds even partially in demanding filterable subjects and outlawing address forgeries, that's far more important to me than whether the total volume goes up or down.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
> Can-Spam Increased Spam
Of course! You can SPAM! DUH!
Must-not-watch TV!
I've been wondering this for a while, and the recent article on Slate - http://slate.msn.com/id/2101297 on the economic logic of executing worm writers - compels me to put pen to electron with the following Modest Proposal:
Allow me to set forth a number of propositions:
1) Spam is now 60% or more of all email in the world, and increasing monthly.
2) The lost productivity costs to industry of dealing with spam is estimated to be from $10 billion to $20 billion yearly.
3) There are about 100 to 200 spammers behind 90% of the world's spam.
4) Thus each spammer can be estimated to cost industry globally around $100 million dollars.
5) The EPA and DOT value a human life at between $3 million and $7 million dollars.
6) Many people in the United States are underinsured medically. Some of them need expensive medical care they cannot afford, and therefore die as a result. Call the affordability threshold $100,000 to $1,000,000. If major ISPs and corporations could be ironbound to honour their word, admittedly no small task, then one could posit a regime where:
a) The leading 1000 connectivity consumers place half their antispam spending in escrow
b) Guido the Fish and Two Finger Tony get hired to smoke the top 100 spam offenders, reducing the need for antispam spending worldwide, and freeing the cash for:
c) The escrowed funds then get used to save a large number of lives who would otherwise be lost due to pricy medical care.
At this point, one must ask: What is a spammer's life worth? The economics of the situation means more people get saved than spammers blown away, therefore the sum total is that a greater good is served by the above scheme as more people survive with a higher quality of life than the status quo ante.
when Legislators listen to the industry its about to regulate when drafting laws to regulate them.
the line in the article that says this legalized spam, is pretty much right.
the only anti-spam laws that can work is to force an opt-in and to also make it criminal to employee/contract with a spammer.
even if you get the current batch of spammers to stop, the money and the drive to spam will remain.
you need to go after the folks like avenue a, and others who pay outside mailers to handle this and don't follow up on who is being spammed.
Is it 5:30 yet?
I think you need to stop drinking coffee.
I recently submitted a complaint about unrequested emails being received, and the sender refusing to stop sending. Got back a nice form letter stating spams a problem, they recommend I delete the spam and simply ignore the problem. My tax dollars hard at work.
I've been tempted to block portions of APNIC space, do this but have been stymied by the lack of a decent reference.
Is there one?
While I agree with your point, Slashdot's not to blame here. The headline of the NYT article is "Law Barring Junk E-Mail Allows a Flood Instead". So the conclusion jumping is being done by the Times here, not Slashdot. Of course, the sensationalistic tone of the submission is what got it posted. But give credit to the right group of exaggerators.
Seriously, spam would have increased without CAN-SPAM. There's no way to establish that CAN-SPAM actually contributed to spam increasing. The increase in spam since the inception of CAN-SPAM only shows that CAN-SPAM isn't succeeding in reducing spam, not that it's causing an increase in spam. /.'s editors should at least TRY to write a decent headline, instead of the usual distored, sensationalist bullshit.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Hah ! I'm honored. Thank you !
--LordPixie
is people who can't use correct punctuation (it's frustrating) and correct word choices (had no effect). And since illiteracy > literacy, you get posts like this.
All the people who ate carrots in 1875 are dead. OMG BAN CARROTS!
I hate sigs.
Spammers never had scruples to actually follow some law to spread their stuff. Not the majority using zombie nets to send from fake addresses and confirming your e-mail address/executing IE exploit when you click an opt-out link.
It's just the more spam they send, the less likely people are likely to respond, the better spam filters are developed, the more spam they have to send to make money... This will reach a peak and wink out because there would be just no way to make money. Did you see a door-to-door salesman lately.
How can this be? Spam is a pain in the ass when I have spend 1 minute a month checking/deleting the contents of my spam inbox, but I don't see how it costs that much money. Yes, I know time is money and even 1 minute of my time is probably worth something, but I just can't see it adding up to 50 billion. I can see companies purchasing spam blocking software, but again, not 50 billion worth. Could someone please explain where they get this figure from?
I think that's the wrong direction and a waste of taxpayer money. I'd rather see that money be used as the budget for a team following money trails to spammers.
I think the proper way to deal with spam is to crystal-clearly define it and make it illegal. Then have a division of the FBI that purchases items and follows the money trail.
If it truly is 90% American companies that are behind the actual products sold in spam this should work.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
thats CAUSALITY. you left an 'i' out of your .sg :)
One of the big problems with legislating an opt-out is that it will only work if you have a way of determining if it's a legitimate, versus confirmation that your address is real. Given that there's no way to determine what's "legal" spam, you can't safely use the opt-out option on ANY spam.
This may not have been true when you posted your comment - but at the moment, I see three separate, top-level, +5 comments reminding us that correlation does not imply causation, one of which invokes the Latin term for the fallacy involved.
:-).
So it seems that the pessimism is unwarranted
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
If you want to stop spam, you have to be willing to do the law enforcement on the fraud and illegality associated with spam. Follow the money and you'll start solving the problem.
As long as you led criminals operate, they'll continue to break the spam laws.
....right, because we all know that correlation equates to causality. In the same vein, the proliferation of the Machintosh is responsible for the rise in autism and velcro caused aided.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
it's a skirt. Just admit it to yourself and move on.
Sort of fits in with the whole "war on drugs" "war on terror" thingies. Not a very constructive comment, seeing as how I dont really have any better spam fighting ideas.
People just need to keep contacting the isp of whatever machine sent you the mail, and make sure that the machine gets cleaned if its a zombie, or the guy's account gets suspended if he is actually running the spam server himself.
Also I blame microsoft for allowing worms to spread the way they do, and not offering protection to the people who need it most. I also blame bush, rainy days, and that kid who used to beat me up in middle school.
These are the same people who put exemptions in the law to allow them to send unsolicited bulk email to you.
Me, I'm saving ALL my spam for the next election. (I also keep it so I can train my filters, but that's another story).
Any politician who wants my vote can have it easily:
FTFA:
Rememerb that SPF (Spam Preferred From but renamed to the fancier Spam Policy Framework) was catching on during this period, too.
CAN SPAM is a good illustration about how hard it is to write a law to solve a technology problem.
Just keep that in mind when worrying about DMCA, etc.
Imagine a world where tools like PGP become more and more successful because the corporate/government oppressors are trying to get more control.
Technologists just want to be free.
If non-spam email remained constant, then spam growing from 60% to 80% would mean that spam has more than doubled. A 267% increase. 6/(6+4)=60% 16/(16+4)=80%.
If non-spam has increased, than spam has increased further by that. Suppose non-spam has doubled, then spam would have increased by a whopping 533%. blah blah
-In Absentia- out, as always
Re:I THOUGHT TO I UP THE FUCK SHUT YOU TOLD
Remember kids, Jolt Cola and HP calculators simply DO NOT mix!! Just say no.
CAN-SPAM is easiest defined by what it is not; it
is simply the opposite of an imaginary CAN'T-SPAM
act. In order to ban spam you first have to
define it. Any gaps left in the definition, therefore, are implicitly legal. Hence, CAN-spam.
Heh.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
don't put your email address on public sites or give in to un-trusted sources. trust me it works.
A new mail system is unavoidable. Spam has already reduced the usefulness of email considerably, and it's only going to get worse. I think it's going to have to be a public/private key sender authentication and maybe a telephone system style termination fees.
Andy1307 is probably (prolly?) 12 years old or at least writes on a 12-year-old level. It's so difficult to trudge through his grade-school dribble.
"50 billion $" should be "$50 billion"
"...but it must be proved that they knew..." should be "...must be PROVEN..."
Flame me, mod me down, but Slashdotters with poor writing skills (skilz?) come across as idiots and not the technical elitists they pretend to be.
LordPixie has just made the most perfectly on-target post I've seen on slashdot (and I've been here a while). Damn.
Please bend the rules, powers that be, and mod this one 6, Painful Truth.
Kudos, sir.
...is that spammers need to work too. If the American economy is to improve, we need to make sure we're keeping all the opportunities WIDE open. To cast a wide net, so to speak.
;) Sex sells! Profit margins are up for not just the herbal viagra and natural propecia industries, but the Hummer market sees a bulge in its bottom line and can afford to stop sending out the herbal viagra and natural propecia spam for a bit!
Think about how the global economy would collapse if the spam industry were stamped out tomorrow. Originally, a lot of the spammers used to be in the telemarketing business. But the Do-Not-Call list damaged that industry, so they only had one place to go: spam. Most of the U.S. economy supports everyone else on the planet. If it weren't for the United States, who would buy all the stuff that all the other countries sell? India? Forget it. There would be no need for tech support, so India's growing economy would be destroyed if spammers were stopped. Japan? Their economic woes would grow exponentially when Americans stop buying SUVS because they aren't recieving "get a bigger penis now" spams. In fact, every nation on the planet would feel a great collapse in their economies if spam was reduced.
The Bush administration wisely chose the route of CAN-SPAM because it legitimizes spam as a marketing tool. Kind of the same way that multi-level marketing is legitimate too.
The only way to riches and success for every person on the planet is to encourage more spam! Think about it! Joe Smith in Utah gets a spam that says he doesn't need to be bald. He looks in the mirror and realizes that he doesn't want to be bald, so he buys into the natural Propecia from the whybebald.biz site. When he gets it in the mail and tries it, it works! Not that he's not bald anymore, but he FEELS less bald! So his confidence increases. This leads him to consider the herbal Viagra that he's been reading so much about in his e-mail. He gets that and... it works! He's able to finally get it up and give his old lady a good time again! Since he's riding high on top of the world, it's time for him to step out and buy a car that only men with large genitalia can own: A Hummer. We all know that term means...
So there you have it. If we allow spam to increase, it will naturally decrease as it induces buyers to have the confidence to buy what they are told they need in order to be virile, normal Americans. The fact that we've seen a jump to 80% is good news, not bad news! If spammers were put out of work, we all know there would be more muggings because people would be out of work. Since the welfare system was dismantled, all of the previous benefactors have moved to doing spam work for the wise marketers of other products. Penis spam supports the auto and gun industries. Porn spam supports the pharmeceutical and insurance industries. Loan spam supports the big box stores like Best Buy, Walmart, CompUSA, etc... So that's all there is to it. Spam is good for the economy and if you anti-capitalism anti-free-market hippies knew what was good for you, you'd shut up and join the party.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
... but I'll make some guesses based on what I've read in the comments so far.
It would seem that the article is attempting to draw a cause-effect relationship between the CAN-SPAM act and the amount of spam flowing about.
I haven't read anything that classified the SPAM flowing about as being in compliance or not in compliance with the law. But I can say that almost none of the SPAM in my inboxes are in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act and can conclude that the CAN-SPAM has had very little effect, good or bad.
They honest to goodness did a good job on the do not call list. They just need a better understanding of what they are voting on. Their previous failure might help them get a better law in place.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
my spam was significantly reduced, i mean like 5 emails a week with no false positives compared to 40 a day i used to get.
Nothing to do with the legislation though - i started using spamassassin
Which means that, despite new laws, SPAM has steadily increased. This includes both legal and illegal SPAM. How many messages in your junkbox start with [ADV]? Most of mine is still for illegal V14G4R4, penile enhancements, and copies of XP.
Interestingly, their graphs looks very similar to mine.
They passed a law called "CAN-SPAM", hoping that it would stop spam.... Isn't it obvious by the name that is allows people to spam?
I used to get easily 50 or more spams every day at one of my accounts... I implemented spamlist.org and now it's more like 5 or 10. Spamassassin on top of that cuts it to 1 to 5.
They say that spam accounts for so much lost productivity, but they fail to mention that spam has spawned a whole new race of products and services that keep people employed. The Anti-Spam industry is thriving and contributing to world economic growth. As with everything, spam may be a nuisance, but it does have its benefits. As usual, regular users are caught in the crossfire.
should have called it can-not spam
Got that tin foil hat on?
...and I'll say it again:
Spam isn't necessarily bad. It does have a use. If over-aggressive surveilance is something you fear, the camoflage that spam offers should be a comfort.
Think of all the spam you receive at work that slips past the filters- do you really think that corporate security has the time to manually filter everything else for the inappropriate emails your girlfriend keeps sending?
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to think about the implications that stegonography presents.
DISCLAIMER: This post was not checked for speling and grammar- if you complain- you're a whiner
1) Make it illegal to send SPAM from the US. :)
2) Make it illegal to have ANY financial relationship, direct or indirect, with spammers no matter their origin.
3) Make all earnings coming from products sold thru SPAM, illegal. People will have then to do moneylaundring, which is illegal, too!
Even when spammers use foreign ISPs, many reside in the U.S. With my proposals 2) and 3), you're forcing them to MOVE OUT.
There are many on here that are saying "Spam was already increasing, CAN-SPAM didn't cause more spam."
I think that's incorrect. I worked for a company that decided to pump out millions *more* emails *because* of CAN-SPAM. That stupid law really has helped "targeted email marketers" (notice how they change the term to avoid the word "spammer?")
They said "Hey, it's legal, as long as we follow the guidelines in the CAN-SPAM act.." and increased the volume of email.
CAN-SPAM really has caused more spam. It's empowered spammers. It's a green light to bombard users with unsolicited email because CAN-SPAM has stupidly easy to follow guidelines.
I wish it wasn't true, but I've seen it with my own two eyes.
does anyone else find amusement in the line that talks about "the global cost of spam in the US alone"? US != global (unless "global" has some new meaning of which I am unaware)
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Sounds like slashdot. So, since you obviously support this decision, you must believe that ordinary citizens should be obvious from my ability to move, and does not mean causality for things like piracy, but does for things like piracy, but does for things like piracy, but does for things like legislation inducing spam. Because it is to remember that the tfm should include a description of all worlds, and then figure out why.
I think spam would have gone up irregardless of CAN-SPAM
At first I got the impression that they did not read it, but just voted, but then when it seemed like it would not pass in 2003 -- as time ran out, it just flew right through and got signed. This is makes me think that some payola was involved.
Fight Spammers!
Go after the companies profiting from the spam. I'm getting multiple spams per day peddling penny stocks, OTC stocks and other stocks. The spams are being sent by a spammer hired by a company that was hired by the public traded company, and paid in cash and stock for the promotion. So they are complying with, or attempting to comply with SEC regulations on disclosure on who paid them, and how they were paid (stock and cash) for promoting the public traded company. Since the SEC/NASD is so closely following how the promotions are being paid and implemented, the "merchants" in this case the public traded companies are fully aware that the company they hired to promote them is using spam to promote them. They are avoiding being prosecuted for spam by purportedly complying with Can-Spam regulations (they aren't, the spam doesn't comply to return email, headers, and other problems, though they do have opt-out addresses iirc), so they are using Can-Spam to legally spam.
Someone/some AG/some state/someone who has the power and who gives a damn has to get on the SEC's and the NASD's asses and demand that they implement rules that absolutely ban all forms of spam for promoting stocks. Violation? De-list the company. The ultimate nuke switch. These penny stocks, otc stocks, small cap stocks are basically pump and dump stocks for the benefit of boiler room and even legit (if there is such a thing) stock brokers to use to reward big money clients so they pour more money into their accounts for further investing, and to reward other Martha Stewarts and legislator clients. They get their favored clients in early, pump up the stocks, then dump the stocks on the smaller investors, getting themselves and their favorite clients out at the top.
Penny stocks/pink sheets/otc/small cap stock spams are the easiest spams to shut down, if the will is there. Spam your company for a better stock price? Get de-listed. Simple, fast and very effective.
that had powers to shut down computers that scan or send spam then we could really do something about this.
This would have the effect of making it unprofitable to spam where each spam sent could cost them dearly.
Fight Spammers!
The only way to stop spam is to drop it in the backbone routers. This will eventually happen and we will end up with a censored net.
That headline seems to imply that the act is ineffective, not that it has caused an increase of spam. The worst thing that headline might be guilty of is a mixed metaphor.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
Well, if you take a look at the graph they have in the article it looks like the percentage of spam rised at a constant rate right up a diagonal line. The only difference between Pre-CANSPAM and Post is they changed the color to indecate the different time frames, the rise in percentage stayed the same.
In fact, it hurts your karma since (+1: Funny) mods don't give you karma and all the humorless moderators modding (-1: Overrated) chip away at your karma. You've got to be a machocist to post anything resembling comedy on Slashdot - it's downright karmakazi.
You can make money by spamming people? Where do I sign up?!
thanks for your fresh and insightful root level posting
for your lucky red shirt?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Just because the number of spam messages increased after the law was passed, it is faulty logic to assume that the cause of the increase _was_ the law. It's called the Post Hoc fallacy. Just because B happens after A, it doesn't prove that A caused B.
The real reason could be that spam grows with time, just like the population of a species. Sure, the act could have affected it, but it doesn't prove that the growth was 100% attributed to it.
The seller can always claim ignorance but would any semi-sane person send out 10^7 mails pointing to your web-shop if You didn't pay them to do it ?
TCAP-Abort
If he hadn't posted AC, would he have been more right and you more wrong? How come you believe content becomes more correct when it has a pseudonym attached to it?
Among other things, one huge red flag was the idiotic name.
The "Can Spam" act... As in... I can spam, you can spam, we all can spam with spammedy smam.
Microsoft pushed this legislation, as opposed to another bill that was opt-in, and potentially a real detterrent.
Is it a coincidence that they impemented an "open source" (hah!) mailer ID technology to fight spam within months of the passage of this law? The paranoid in me says they pushed for CAN SPAM cuz they knew it'd fail, giving them an opportunity to gain control of one aspect of the e-mail protocol...
-Pie
Spam has increased since the introduction of the can spam act.. well murder in america has gone up since the space program started too...
The question is, what is the diference between the prediced trend before and after the introduction of the bill... most likely it will demonstrate that it has had no effect one way or the other.
I'm not sure that there's necessarily any correlation between can-spam and spam levels.
Certainly the spam I'm receiving isn't conforming to can-spam, which would be expected if there was a correlation.
Most of what I see is either fake viagra, hosting services, free rolexes, or Nigerians that just want me to take their money. None of which complies with can-spam.
Just because spam has increased in the period since can-spam was passed doesn't mean that can-spam's responsible for it.
My spam inflow is increasing each and every month:
Jul 2004: between 22000 and 23000
Nov 2004: between 38000 and 39000
Dec 2004: 45663
Jan 2005: 59097
I may be a lowly AC here, but these are real numbers. (I'm not in front of my email right now and I don't remember the numbers for other months.) I wonder what Feb 2005 has in store...
Needless to say, it gets annoying to delete ~2000 unsolicited commercial emails each and every day.
Mod this up so people can see it in action...
5 348
Ever wandered how/where spammers buy and sell the databases of e-mail addresses with home address too?
http://www.gofuckyourself.com/showthread.php?t=42
My blood is boiling.....
For several weeks I was receiving only a few junk emails per day, or maybe about 50-80 in any given week. This past Sunday, I received a total of 82 junk emails within 24 hours. And I've already received 80 more since clearing my junk mail at midnight Sunday night.
So, yes, I am receiving more. Apparently CAN-SPAM just gave the spammers clearer guidelines.
Damn straight.
...
...
Not only was this law SUPPOSED to reduce spam (by the charts, it hasn't)
But it was also supposed to make it easier to prosecute spammers who failed to follow it
AND it REPLACED state laws that were far stricter in their definitions and punishments.
It's a damn sight more difficult to get a FEDERAL case filed than it is to get one in your STATE courts.
We need to get rid of that stupid law and let the state courts handle it (they need the money from the judgements, anyway).
The title of the slashdot summary claims the bill in question is the cause of the increase. I don't see how it can make that claim. The rate of spam is rising, but it has always been rising. The most the article can claim is that the bill failed to slow the rate of spam. It cannot make the claim that the bill caused the rate to go up.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Junk Email Stats for my 52 user WISP:
Total Emails / Seven Days: 9688
Total Blocked Attempts: 3117
Total Filtered(SA) Junk Email: 1555
48.2% of email detected as junk
Estimated 19,000 junk emails per month.
This is for like 60 email addresses.
The above is not worth reading.
One of my recent spams was:
Subject: [Bulk] Message subject
To: notme@myisp.com
%CHILL
%DICK
%CONTACT http://%URL/d/1.php
%BYE
%ASSHOLE y
--
How would I even attempt to buy the product (if I wanted to) or flood the spammer?
SpamAssassin always catches them though, simply because of all the RBL's.
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
No, it only proves that slashdot includes three intelligent non-zealots. Okay, and the 12 people that modded them to 5. So I'll give you 15.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
This was on the NANOG list some time ago:
The internet has no government, no constitution, no laws, no
rights, no police, no courts. Don't talk about fairness or
innocence, and don't talk about what should be done. Instead,
talk about what is being done and what will be done by the
amorphous unreachable undefinable blob called "the internet
user base." -Paul Vixie
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
we always here about estimated money lost due to spam, but what about all the money made from the spam industry? Ofcourse there is the money that spammers make, but besides that how much money is made by companies creating Anti-spam software?
Sure you can say people are wasting time trying to find clever ways to fight off spam from their servers and that time is lost money, but if your company is being paid to find ways to fight spam, then that time spent is actually profit, not expenditure.
First the CAN-Spam act does stop spam. The problem is it stops spam from people who follow the law. That usally means though they are a legal bulk email provider (like when you sign up to a news letter from a stie). The people who could care less for the law aren't following the CAN-SPAM act and thats why SPAM is going up. So before we throw the baby out with the bath water, we really need to understand that just a law won't stop spam.
just because your a schizophrenic doesn't mean people arn't really out to get you
What if you just make it illegal to respond spam? You could start setting up sting ops to catch those people who find spam actually interesting.
Are the solutions to the problem really any better than the problem? More beaurocracy, more laws. Why not just try to breed smarter people?
Every company will claim it's a joe-job, purely meant to give them a bad name.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job
If I would collect door-to-door advertising stuff for a year, till I had a load of over 100 kilo's, and then dump it all at once in your mailbox: who would you blaim? The companies? They'd claim they didn't do it. And you wouldn't know I did it because you would think the companies did it. Same goes for email, but then easier.
The solution is legislature. Reverse verification, eliminate zombies, that sort of stuff. And keep your emailaddress hidden.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
As we all know, SPAM exists because it makes money. Therefore it is not a big leap to say that if you eliminate the profits then you eliminate SPAM. Another fact is the the only reason people buy products advertized with SPAM is they are either a) idiots or b)old people (no offence, I am sure there are many old slashdotters here that are quite informed, but on the whole...come on). Anywho, you start off by fighting SPAM with SPAM. No I do not mean something childish like SPAMMING the SPAMMERS, what would that accomplish? No what I refer to is you set up a great deal (doesn't matter what. Its fake anyway), and SPAM away. Then you just wait for all the orders to come in. After you have been saturated with orders, you then take that address list you just built (which contains the addresses of all the idiots and old people), and you prodeed to hire our 'contracts' to 'deal with' the problem. This will solve the SPAM problem once and for all, or your money back!
Just in case you have no sense of humor, this is a joke...
DarthVain
[Parent]No, it only proves that slashdot includes three intelligent non-zealots. Okay, and the 12 people that modded them to 5. So I'll give you 15.
:-).
Hey now, I've got excellent Karma. So it only took three people to mod me to +5. Now all we need is Mary McDonnell to decrement the whiteboard to 14...
[Grand Parent]This may not have been true when you posted your comment - but at the moment, I see three separate, top-level, +5 comments reminding us that correlation does not imply causation, one of which invokes the Latin term for the fallacy involved.
So it seems that the pessimism is unwarranted
Indeed, there are several such people. However, they all did it after my post. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. They only posted as much because *I* convinced them !*
In all seriousness, this was obviously a bad example, and I jumped the gun. My bad. However, I think the overall point still stands. The general spirit of Slashdot ("Slashgeist" ?) often applies different rules of logic depending on who the players are. There's just a very strong disposition with regards to Microsoft/Linux/Apple/Real Player/etc that seems to overwhelm objectivity.
--LordPixie
* Yes, it's a joke.
Oh, I dunno about that. We've had trade disputes with Canada over lumber, Italy over shoes, France over wine, etc. for ages. It's just a natural extension of the idea into commerce by wire, so to speak.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It makes it easier to block those specific ISP's.You don't have to block entire countries. Just the specific bulletproof ISP's in those countries.
The problem right now is that spammers are decentralized. If you get 1,000 spam messages, they could have come from 1,000 different addresses in 1,000 different ISP's across a dozen different countries.Hardly. This is a problem and it can be addressed the same as any other problem.
#1. Identify the avenues used to distribute spam.
1a: Zombies
1b: Open relays
1c: Spammer purchased site
#2. Identify and implement counter-measures for each avenue identified.
2a: ISP's block outgoing port 25 on their home services.
2b: ORDB
2c: Block the ISP's that allow spammers to operate on them.
#3. Allow the various states to write their own anti-spam laws and to pursue the companies that spam and advertise via spam.
It's a multi-prong approach. But spam is solvable.
not in the message. It's like if your friend sends you an e-mail with an Amazon affiliate link on the bottom. Unusual, maybe, but not ironic.
Is it possible that this increased trend is more related to the seemingly decreased number of emails being sent? With BLOGS, IM, etc, there seems to be less emails flying around than in the past. At least this is the case for me. I tend to get just as much SPAM as I did over the last few years, but I get less legitamite email. I have no quantitative evidence to support this, so I may be full of *something*.
It's getting a bit ridiculous. Maybe it's time to re-think e-mail protocols--or implement the current ones properly: mandatory authenticated SMTP, proper registration of MTAs, etc. The problem is that it's simply too easy to bombard the current setup and the rules shouldn't be political they should be technical. The big players need to lead the way--Hotmail, GMail, .Mac, AOL, (insert other here) etc. (They're also the ones who will benefit the most!). Everyone else would follow suit. If all the rogue or spoofed MTAs out there are left in the cold and the properly registered sources of abuse are uniquely identifiable for blacklisting, SPAM as we know it will become manageable. Of course, like roaches, the bastards would find another way in, but the raging river could be cut to a trickling stream.
Until then, I think this is a great investment opportunity. [Not a plug--just making a point]
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
I'm lucky. With an account my former school hosts, I have user-mode access to Linux, Spamassassin and Squirrel-mail. With some tweaking now and then, it's almost perfected.
.spam folder are spam. A cron-job will start the learning program on them.
With Spamassassin I made a rule that said:
1) Mails in
2) All else is ham, even Trash (I must be pendantic where I trash my mail). The same cron will teach Spamassassin on all my other folders and also purge the spam-folder.
Besides that, I have one folder where spamassassin puts "maybe spam" based on points. It contains only spam now, unless some company sends me something spammy I need for registration.
Combined with a procmail-filter I grabbed from the net filtering out viruses, a custom filter to block all suspicious attachments, all delivery failures/returns, antivirus warnings, but never filter out mails with my true mail address + a special name I use for identification of my own mail (so my own returns I will see).
I'm now surprised to see spam in my inbox. Maybe 1-2 new ones per month, and the same type never shows up again.
I'm so confident in this, I delete all spam permanently except the virus, possible spam, delivery failure folders, which might contain something interesting someday.
With 100 spam mails per day, it's pretty freaky it works so good. Kudos to SpamAssassin and people working out scripts for procmail etc.
Funny, looking at the graph, it seems like the law has had no effect on spam. It was on an upward trend before the law took effect, and it has continued at more or less the same rate since.
Even if there were a change, I'd hesitate to assign causality until I was reasonably sure there weren't other factors that might have caused the change.
Read my keyboard review.
This has been on slashdot before, where it got terribly trashed with all kinds of greed and DRM conspiracy theories (I don't think anyone really understood what it is about), but nonetheless I bit the bullet and signed up for an i-name (yes, I actually plunked down real money, $25, for a 50-year i-name and 2 years of broker service). So far after almost 2 months, I've had zero spam from it (i.e. no spam whatsoever) even though I have it posted publicly. I decided I'm tired of wasting time training spam filters and now pretty much just ignore everything not on my whitelist, to which I add people automatically when they make it through the i-name service. Life is so much simpler, especially after returning from a week's vacation away from email. I know there are some free alternatives but they tend to have annoying, ad-ridden sites unlike the simple, clean i-name service.
You're kidding? These are the same people who introduced non-native species to counteract native pests, and that turned out good (he says, slapping away a Japanes ladybug-looking beetle). Ok... So maybe that's not a good example.
But what about how efficient our government is with paperwork and such? Surely that must have helped them in this case (he types, remembering that Nasa spent $12 billion dollars developing a pen that would work in space, rather than using a pencil as the Russians did)
But... But...
Well, at least they're consistent.
Seriously... Anyone who thinks government involvement in our personal life is a good thing is frickin' nuts! Watch the Republicans and Democrats fight with each other next election, and then think about whether or not you want these buffoons inserting themselves in our daily lives. You'll probably have time to ponder this as you're sweeping your (now legal) Spam from your inbox.
well i for one was not surprised... it is after all called the "can" spam act, not the can't spam act
You can't link just anything. There might have been more spam anyways, regardless of CAN-SPAM or not. I can't say "Internet grows after CAN-SPAM" CC
CKSCIII
"Can-Spam Increased Spam"!?
Too bad no one has shown a causal relationship, simply posited a correlation between two pieces of data. There is no evidence here that CAN-SPAM increased spam, only that after the law was passed, eventually spam inreased (although immediately after, for the first time in a long time, spam actually decreased).
In fact, the graphic shows that spam increased at approximately the same rate that it was increasing before the act. So, the act apparently *did nothing*. It did *not* "increase spam" as far as I can tell.
The only noticeable difference in relation to the passage of the act is a temporary decrease in spam. Needless to say, the act seems to have been useless, but perhaps the enforcement of it will accomplish something, eventually.
To blame this increase on "CAN-SPAM", however, is ridiculous. Based on previous trends, it would have occurred regardless.
-Dan
All the chart shows is an increase in spam traffic, not in spam impact. I suppose spam traffic is a bother to ISP's and carriers, but I suspect that the bandwidth consumed by spam emails is small in comparison to other traffic such as html and images.
AlpineR
[This space intentionally left blank]
Spam level over 80% --- this is good news. Spam
can only grow to 100%, at which point we will stop using email and start to use the phone again.
I know that and you know that. But many people don't. Besides that you have these congress-scum and these spokes-holes, saying that it is to reduce spam -- not line their pockets.
Fight Spammers!
I have an office door to close so my fellow workers don't think I've gone nuts laughing my ass off all of a sudden.
God, that was funny.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
This past election certainly showed how well THAT worked. :|
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
OK, spammers evade laws by doing things in other countries where laws don't affect them. So, how can we also take advantage of this? Are there countries where hiring an assassin is not illegal? Could a group of people simply not hire somebody to hunt down and kill the top 100 spammers?
I'm sure that would put a dent in the spam.
Is it the case that the can-spam act caused this increase? What was the mechanism for doing so? Is a percentage change as good an indicator as the source numbers (part of the increase could be caused by non-spam decreasing over the cited period due to increased use of another channel for communications like mobile phones/txt messaging)?
Mad is Yoda, think I.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Taking a random spam email from the bulk folder of my rarely-used Yahoo account:
4 kB html
28 kB image (via http, not attached; so it's only transmitted if I read it, which I don't)
Versus the front page of Slashdot:
14 kB html
40 kB images
Or my comments page for this article at a threshold of 3:
23 kB html
So reloading Slashdot ten times a day (or playing World of Warcraft for an hour) swamps out the spam traffic I receive.
AlpineR
It should be obvious to everybody from since about the time of the dotcom crash that Republicrat conservatives (and their equivalents in all other countries) absolutely detest the internet, because it empowers ordinary people to organize themselves into power blocs, disturbs the status quo and therefore threatens their stranglehold on power.
What easier way could there be to eliminate this menace than to clog it up with sewage and drown out the voice of the people in the noise? No - spam, and the website equivalents of spam, are surely the ruling elite's friend.
Hey there Cmdr,
You wrote:
"Stanford University estimates the global cost of spam in terms of lost productivity to be at 50 billion $ and 17 billion $ in the US alone."
In my country we would have written that something like this:
"Stanford University estimates the global cost of spam in terms of lost productivity to be at $50 billion with $17 billion of the loss in the US alone."
Reads better, doesn't it?
Insert witty sig here.
"No one is more miserable than the person who wills everything and can do nothing." -Emperor Claudius 10 BC - AD 54
I estimate that by late next month 99% of all Internet traffic will be either spam or p2p traffic.
Insert witty sig here.
Ban all commercial E-mail to consumers, period! Make it totally, completely illegal.
Imagine that, the only e-mail in your inbox would be from your boss, your friends and relatives.
Customers or potential customers could still E-mail businesses, but businesses would be restricted to snail-mail and telephone to contact customers, just like they did until the mid-eighties or so.
(Of course internal e-mail, between offices, branches, subsidiaries, and employees would still be permitted.)
But of course, no one wants to wait for a letter, or hang by the phone waiting to hear about the latest Hello Kitty (TM) waffle iron brush that they just have to have 'RIGHT NOW!'
And certainly too many companies out there can't wait two to three business days to get their hands on the customer's cash to permit such a ban, so... spam it is.
The U.S. really needs an English to Wisdom dictionary.
Make sense, when you open the internet pipes to Canada, you get the added spam from vendors up there! Duh! ;)
In 2004 - I noticed two very sharp dips in that graph that was linked from this article. each of those dips coincided exactly the times we had launched a massive spam reporting campaign, reporting an average about 15,000 spams a day to the ISP's responsible for sending them.
I'm sure spamcop has me beat by a factor of 10, but our very highly directed spam reports to participating ISP's has in effect caused an average of about 500,000 proxy shutdowns a month (assuming the ISP's are telling the truth they HAVE acted on our complaints.
This massive spam reporting campaign took place early april, stopped in June, and started up about mid July continuing up through the month of Sept and stopped at the end of that month.
This was the testing of our automated spam reporting system which for the most part ran by itself, other then the manual inspection if each spam submitted (we don't trust any spam filters).
We honed down our spam by re-assigning new Email addresses for our Email customers, but keeping their old Emails active until gradually ONLY SPAM was arriving in the 80 or so emails, mostly obtained from Dictionary attacks on our server - which for a time, brought our mail system to a halt until we replaced our mail servers with OpenBSD boxes, and re-wrote Sendmail to hold up the socket connection once it was determined a non-existant mail address was "tried". This brought the Dictionary attacks to a complete halt.
After that - I wrote an automated spam reporting "engine" and over the past 2 - 3 years have built a huge database of every IP block on the internet, and who really "owns" them.
In June of last year, we ran small scale field tests with participating ISP's who were very appreciative in getting these reports.
Once our Email users were weened off their OLD Email addresses, and it was evident that ONLY SPAM was getting to them, I re-directed them to our Auto-reporting system. our Users were most cooperative and provided us with "white lists" of people they expected mail from, which we used to pick out legit ones from the spam.
Eventually - 100% of all of the 80 mailboxes were getting pure spam. Now we had a HUGE supply of PURE spam with NO possibility of any non-spam being sent into them. This generating a daily diet of about 15,000 to 20,000 messages of pure spam.
Each and everyday, a huge spam pot was collected, and a daily cronjob was activated which ran through each of the spams, picking out IP addresses NOT in our ISP database (only about 3 - 5%), and rejecting them.
The rest went into well formed spam reports, giving the ISP's all the details they need to locate and shut down the customer's infected PC's. As all of the expected "Auto-replies" started pouring in, We kept track of ALL of them, and automatically entered them into a database, correlating and tabulating large lists of the most Spammy ISP's which at one time we started posting in the mail.abuse mailing lists.
As these auto-responses came in, the ISP's would write follow ups into our special Auto_response mailbox, which went into a database (again - automatically).
Tallies were kept, and the numbers indicated we were able to shut down approx 500,000 infrected machines.
June - 50,000 were shut down
July - 150,000 were shut down
Aug - 500,000 were shut down
Sept - 350,000 were shut down.
We stopped the test at end of Sept.
We obtained this data from our Auto-responses we get back from participating ISP's.
Due to other opportunities that has arisen since then, we were forced to stop our efforts, and instead, I may make these tools available to others - but they (the tools) DO need care and feeding... but this is why I think these DIPS in the amount of spam were indicated in that graph...
I've had two other indications of the effectiveness of our reporting efforts, and hope I have time again to start this effort, or find some entity that might (ahem!) even pay me for the
If your server gets spammed like mine does and you get unsolicited spam like I do, set up a SpamVampire. Check out the one on my site. (Mad props to this guy for writing it.)
Running up their hosting costs is an effective means of reducing spam.
Welcome to Slashdot, where you can put words in someone's mouth for the purpose of calling them a hypocrite.
The statement that CAN-SPAM has caused spam to increase was clearly attributed to a guy named Linford and the statistic showing correlation was attributed to the New York Times.
I guess it's easier to accuse all of slashdot of hypocrisy than to notice that one submitter and one editor are passing along a NYT story with attribution.
Or maybe it just gets you more mod points.
-- . . ramblin' . . .
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/01/1 627201
Can- as in "is able to".
:)
Now they can...
surely if the penalties provided under law do not provide a sufficient deterrent, the only thing to do is impose a custodial sentence, right?
Oh wait, these guys are rich...
Yet, I have not had one spam messege reach my inbox. My email is published in the open in many places, at the bottom of certain popular articles that any spam bot can pick up easily, spam is not my problem anymore. :D
If you want an invite, ask and I will send you one.
I offer proof that the CAN SPAM act caused more SPAM. Here is a graph of SPAM volume, starting when the CAN SPAM act was passed. Note how it increases after the act was passed. I think this should persuade anyone that the CAN SPAM act was the cause of this increase.
/
/
/
/
/ /
More
Less
- - - -
CAN SPAM Present
I don't know if the CAN-SPAM act is directly responsible for the overall increase of spam (there isn't really any data that shows a good correlation), but the general amount of spam has definately been going up. I run a small email server that serves a handful of users, and also has an extremely aggressive spam filtering system that I designed (a 5-stage filter, including Spamassassin, Spamhaus, realitime blacklists based on number of spams from machines, etc) and the amount of spam is still going up. A while back when I added the 5th stage to the filtering system, there seemed to be a noticable increase in spam, even though the machine was filtering much more accurately. It's just insane
I have a webpage on the machine with all the stats, graphs, etc of the spam, and even the spam itself archives in gzipped mbox files (used for graph generation and other analysis) at: http://www.tliquest.net/spam
-eventhorizon
#Secret Windows Source Code, in MS C% - if (uptime >= "24 hours") then bsod() else print "Windows License Violation!"
This could be another causal fallacy by those twin titans of journalism, Slashdot and the NYT. One would have to have a much longer trend line to even discern if the amount of the increase in SPAM is abnormal or not. Even then, you'd have to run a regressive analysis to figure out what the liklihood that the SPAM increase was related to the CAN-SPAM Act was or not. Techies are supposed to have logical, reason and statistical skills. Slashdot isn't for techies anymore, and hasn't been in years.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
but what is rediculous is that taxpayers money (who knows how much) was used to create legislation that had the exact opposite effect it was meant to have... write your member of congress, tell them to go home, less will "get done" and more will be achieved...
Get your torrents...
use bookmarklet/webform at New York Times Link Generator. pass it on.
Face it. We all filter our email with Spamassassin or something similar so we don't see any of the SPAM anyway! All SPAM could then be considered wasting bandwidth. Is there a law against creating useless traffic on a server? You could probably somehow call SPAM a sort of low-level DDOS attack particularly on small mail servers like mine as precious bandwidth and CPU cycles(when the SPAM filter kicks in) are used up just in dealing with it. What if you are on a limited bandwidth ADSL plan and the SPAM actually puts you over the limit and costs money. Could you then sue the Spammers?
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Actually, I was quite surprised by the change where the spam is delivered (last hop before "good" mail server). Earlier US has had significant proportion (ATT and C&W), but now it looks that Korea and China have taken their lead in Information Age :-(
The list entries above are AS numbers, count of spam messages received to my private email address from that AS and country where it is located (by whois). Figures are from this year.
No wonder that many people in China and Korea has to use webmail services to be able to send their messages.
The article does address going after the advertisers themselves (those selling the products), but says it is difficult to prove they knew the advertising was via spam, and that this is required under CAN-SPAM in order to find wrongdoing.
One thing that could help, either by setting a precedent in court, or via modification of the law, is to say that unless their advertising contract has a clause saying something like "if we discover that any of this advertising went out via illegal spam, no fee or commission will be paid", then by default they are considered to have potentially opened themselves up to participating in spam advertising. In that case it would be much easier to go after the companies advertising the products, who would then have to shy away from the spammers to keep from getting sued. Of course, they could insert such clauses in their contracts then ignore them (saying "we didn't know they were spamming, and now that we do we'll stop paying them"), but then a lawsuit could perhaps force them to open their books to prove they didn't pay the spammers any fees or commissions.
Since the spamming operations themselves are so slippery, I think going after the original advertisers may be the more productive legislative avenue, in conjunction with the various technical approaches to verifying the source of emails.
If you don't think this contributed to an increase in spam, you're not informed.
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"It's beyond my comprehension why anyone would buy anything from spam."
How many guys are so desperate for a larger penis that they would try anything - even spam!! Maybe 2 in 100? Yes, that includes those who tweak their spam filters every day to keep the stuff out!! They know its a fraud, but they just can't resist.
As Robert DeNiro said, "Don't let the little head think for the big one."