Slashdot Mirror
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.
A fact that seems lost on most journalists these days.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
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.
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
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
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 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?
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
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
"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.
It's hard to know what to believe, really. Personally, I tend to lean towards the notion that spam is simply too large a problem, and the money involved is so great, that combating it with laws alone is simply futile.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
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!
They're not making money by making sales. They're making money by being paid to advertise (spam).
Response rate for junk-mail in the real world is something like 2%, maybe less. Yet advertisers throw piles of money into doing it, because the income that 2% brings them is worth it. To them.
Spam is even easier.. there's no material cost involved to print up paper. Assuming spammers charge normal advertising rates, their profits are up a considerable amount.
There is something deeply ironic about a post stating incredulity that people would buy anything from spam... ... in a post with a sig to a "offerprizes.com" -- "free" iPod stuff.
Life is short: void the warranty.
We have to deal with this on an infrequent basis, where people actually do sign up for things, and then whine and snivel when mail comes.
Then stop creating webforms that automatically check the box saying that people want your spam.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
If you believe that, then I have a scary statistic for you. Since that legislation passed more people have died of gunshots in the US! And my lucky red shirt prevents bear attacks with a 100% success rate!
Corrolation != Cause & effect
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Some spammers that offer an opt-out option have a huge number of mailing lists. Sure, you can opt out of one mailing list but that's not going to help much. You'll still be on all the other lists. Yes, you could keep opting out every time you get spam but you'll end up spending a lot of time on that and the spammer can always create new lists. In fact it seems that they every list typically gets used once so you're not accomplishing much.
Spam is **** NEVER **** sollicited.
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.
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.
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).
"here's that wonderously horrible grey area between unsolicited and solicited spam"
Not really. Spam is, by definition, unsolicited. The fact that somebody has your email address doesn't give them the right to flood you inbox, and bandwidth. You have to give them permission to do so.
The question is how are you sure you didn't give them permission (playing devil's advocate here).... just click once on a form with a checked checkbox that says "I allow whoever.com to give my email to business partners and for them to email me here" and you can ever say again for sure you didn't give them permission to mail you... the hard thing there is to define what does "giving permission" mean.
"No one is more miserable than the person who wills everything and can do nothing." -Emperor Claudius 10 BC - AD 54