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.
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.
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
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!
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
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.
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
Thanks for the new sig. Superb!!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
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
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
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!
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
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
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!
I am a Scotsman, you insensitive clod!
:)
(kilts are better than trousers, clearly)
Game dev and music blog
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.
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!
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?
thats CAUSALITY. you left an 'i' out of your .sg :)
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:
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.
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.
don't put your email address on public sites or give in to un-trusted sources. trust me it works.
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.
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.
...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
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).
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.
The repentant ones could, instead of actually filling potholes, be permitted to shovel asphalt into them.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
"No one is more miserable than the person who wills everything and can do nothing." -Emperor Claudius 10 BC - AD 54
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.
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.
Can- as in "is able to".
:)
Now they can...
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