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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.
I was truly hoping Can Spam meant sealing spammers up in airtight containers, preserving them for study by future generations.
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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.
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.
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
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'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.
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.
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
They should have called it CAN'T-SPAM....What do they expect from people when you tell them they can spam..
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.
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.