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Canadian Spam Levels - Up? Down? You Be the Judge
spamfighter writes "Survey firm Ipsos-Reid has taken the interesting stance that spam to Canadians has been attenuated by 20% because of the federal privacy law PIPEDA which is so fearsome in nature that is scares off even the biggest- baddest spammers in other countries. CAUCE Canada has their doubts."
While numbers can be deceiving, I do believe tougher law will prevent crimes.
I remember reading a Chinese story about an emperor visiting a village with a very deep well. He asked one of the villagers if anyone had fallen into the well. The answer was no, because the well is so deep and everybody knows that, so no one has ever been careless enough to fall into it.
And back to the reality, one of the games that I'm involved in has recently introduced a "crime in the city" feature, and many players have been attacked as a result. However, as soon as the first criminal was arrested and mourned about the harsh punishment of being caught (lost points, jail time and whatnot), crime rate drops almost instantly.
Having said all these, sometimes I think the law is not tough enough because we do not yet know how to effectively identify and prosecute the offenders.
By the way, the easter egg that I mentioned here few weeks ago still has not been discovered...
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
As news reached their frozen ears that for the first time, someone somewhere was afraid of something Canadian. "Eh?" said one Canadian.
The old russian model springs to mind, where certain kinds of criminals where rewarded with extended action-oriented vacations in beautiful Siberia. Canada has large expanses of very simular real estate.
What keeps me going is my inertia.
They also contribute the decrease to an increased use of spam filters by individuals and businesses: "New privacy laws and the use of spam filters by individuals and Internet providers helped lower the amount of unsolicited e-mail to 49 per cent of all electronic mail, down from 68 per cent in 2003." So, there might be just as much spam being sent...Canadians just aren't seeing as much because they are using filters.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Speaking solely as a Canadian citizen, I get more spam today than I ever have in the past. This has nothing to do with the propagation (or lack thereof) of any law, but more the fact that my email address (or one of my email addresses, many of which forward) has been out on the Internet in lists and such for years now.
While the lists propagate, so will the spam. One of these days, whatever list(s) I am on may stop circulating, but I'm not holding my breath.
Green's Law of Debate: Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.
I have found a grammatical error in your not-so-excellent post.
A spelling error on Slashdot? How could this have happened? Besides the fact that all Slashdot editors have at minimum a Masters degree in English, Slashdot stories are quadruple checked for spelling and grammar mistakes. This is unthinkable. I can only assume that this is some sort of hacker trying to ruin Slashdot's good name by making chages to their story database.
Please keep in mind that Canadian privacy laws are very different than those in both US and EU, so I recommend reding PrivacyInfo.ca by Professor Michael Geist (University of Ottawa's Faculty of Law). Knowing the most important differences is essential to fully understand the issues in question so you will save a lot of time if you read about both Federal Privacy Legislation and Provincial Privacy Legislation first. The article linked in this story makes much less sense without appropriate background.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Uhm, pardon, that is hillarious, eh?
Spam will only go down once the majority of ISPs have deep packet scanning routers, so the crud won't propagate. Yes, I know, that is censorship, but it is inevitable.
Relax ya Hosers, it's Last Call!
I work in the IT field for a large Canadian company. The amount of spam we get is slowly but steady increasing. Currently somewhere around 98% of all the mail we get is "Junk" (spam, invalid recipients, improper smtp protocol, etc). Looking at our mail server graphs shows a definite upward trend in both overall "Junk" and confirmed spam.
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
A free iPod in the US is actually $15.43 in Canada at the current exchange rate.
Considering that Canadians, like anybody else, can have e-mail addresses that don't end in .ca, there's no way for spammers to know that they're not spamming Canadians. If Canadian laws were having an impact on spam, it would seem that the rest of us would experience a decrease in spam as well.
Filtering to allow only those e-mails which come from desired senders eliminates all spam. I would rather have that than legislation which requires my tax dollars to enforce. Let those who are ignorant pay for their ignorance in the form of spam deletion. The end-user solution is the best response to spammers.
"this is the gloaming"
radiohead
I'm not ready to attribute it to PIPEDA, but my spam proportion has levelled off.
For the last year I've consistently received about 81% spam. This is in contrast to the previous 4 years, which saw a continuous increase.
"Are Canadians winning the war against Spam?" should be "Are Canadians winning the war against Spam, eh?" :)
I am an American living in Canada and I need to deal with some US ISPs. For example, my father uses AOL for email. I use Shaw -- I am not sure there actually is another cable service provider in Canada -- and when I first moved here I was unable to send or recieve email from or to my father.
I later found out that some of my Japanese friends that use AOL accounts couldnt get my email and I couldnt get theirs.
This has since changed, and I can now get email from them and they can recieve mine. I found this to be really annoying at the time, but I did get much less spam on my canadian email accounts than on my US accounts.
A final note is that there is a difference between the amount of spam I get on University accounts in the US and Canada. I have 3 accounts at US univeristies and 1 in Canada. The accounts in the US get more than 50 spams a day. The Canadian one has never even recieved 1!!! This seems impressive, however, I think that someone is just stealing the outlook domain listings at US universities and selling them, this doesnt seem to be a problem yet here. Either that or they have the best spam filter I have ever seen. Cant figure it out.
I Am Canadian, and I can report that my spam at work has decreased significantly. The amount of spam I received peaked at about 200 per day a couple months ago, and then over a period of about 4 weeks dropped to to less than 100 per day.
I don't know why. It's not being blocked by our servers because the spam filter at work only tags spam, it doesn't block it.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
Slow news day, eh?
I think it was last week or two weeks ago, I opened one of the many emails in my inbox at work, which was about the spam problem.
Long story short, from what I read, I think that when spam reaches the point where it's impossible for the government to effectively use the current email infrastructure, someone somewhere is going to call in the Mounties, no doot aboot it, eh.
I have an e-mail address that ends in .ac.uk (UK academic), and still most of my spam is for offers that only apply to the US (pills from Canadian pharmacies being the most popular at the moment, it seems). That, and a lot of offers of a degree, which I really wouldn't expect if these were targetted (nearly everyone with a .ac.uk address either has a degree, or is working on getting a real degree).
As such, I find it very hard to believe they're avoiding spamming Canadians.
Duuuuude... thats just wrong.
Canada is our last dumping groun to the north... I mean come on what else could they be good for?
IANAE at international spam regulation laws, but if someone is just sending out random spam to hotmail and/or Yahoo! email addresses, are they really going to bother weeding out where each individual email owner lives and decide from there if they should spam it or not?
I live in London, Ontario. I can tell you at least this: I use my hotmail address more often than I do my ISP provided one (Rogers High-Speed), and the Hotmail one seems to get nearly no spam despite being the most exposed of the two (barely use ISP one). Hotmal is around 3 - 10 bulk messages a day that go straight to the trashbox. Whereas my ISP mail gets about 60 bulk messages a day. Although it does filter them out, it seems my U.S.-based email address gets less spam than my local Canadian one.
So, does it really even matter?
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
A law is due soon, and given the number of zombies, it should make ISPs liable if they do not disconnect trojaned customers in due time.
There is no excuse for letting a trojaned computer on the Internet, it is a major nuisance. Punitive disconnection ought to be a good way of clueing-in john Q. Bozo in properly running a computer.
Vidéoétron is notoriously clueless when it comes to zombie, making it's networks one of the filthiest cesspools. By contrast, Stupidico blocked port 25 a long time ago, so almost no spam emanates from their network.
I run several servers with a few businesses etc hosting their email across the board I probably have 400 users give or take 20. In recent months the spam problem was getting worse and worse. I have had spamassassin and other software running on the system to mark the messages as spam but the over all problem wasnt resolved and it kept getting worse. I have since changed the way that our servers operate by using RBL firewalls across the board with several different RBLs including spamhaus, sorbs, spamcop and dsbl. Since taking that action the spam has dropped from just under a million emails marked as spam a month to around 34000. That is a huge drop in spam. I also log all connections that are refused because of RBLs so that I can see if there are any bad entries if anyone complains about failed email delivery. All in all the amount of emails being rejected has also been falling as the "spammers" and other "bulk email" providers that are listed on the RBLs and have users emails remove the emails from the lists they are using.
Its not a perfect solution but it has reduced it to such an extent that the servers are now performing much better. Customers are more happy, spammers get screwed and everyone lives happily ever after.
if-convicted-you-must-wear-this-moose-attractant dept. Wow, Canada is a stranger place then I thought. Troubles with mooses up there?
From an Aussie...
;-)
Canada? Hmmmm... Ah I remember, the ice block to the north of the USA, a minor part of the Commonwealth. We beat them at sport every 4 years or so at the commonwealth games.
Looking forward to Melbourne!!
You want a signature? You can't handle a signature!!
$20 says my pet beaver can take your kangaroo any day of the motherfuckin week. I call her Nina, and she eats crocodiles for brunch. Phear.
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
Must suck how no one ever talks/gives a rats ass about you.Now get back to marching to the beat of Chimpy McFlightsuit's drum.
Is that there would be far fewer car accidents if, instead of air bags, cars and a pointy spike mounted on the steering wheel.
I think a strong factor is the degree to which the "danger" is immediate though. I'd expect that with spamming, similar to peer to peer copyright infringement and maybe drugs as another poster mentioned there is a strong tendancy for a "I'll never be the one who gets caught" mentality.
The law will certainly deter some people but I think a lot of people can quite easily convince themselves it won't effect them.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
These laws pertain to the distribution of email lists, not spamming itself.
Time travel is possible. We are quickly heading for 1984.
Well, I certainly have seen less spam about hockey and Tim Hortons... so yeah, I guess there has been a decrease. :P
Disclaimer: I am Canadian.
Disclaimer's Disclaimer: I am not advocating that crappy beer.
How about let's say "reduced" or something that a normal human being would say?
when global warming takes over, all you people will come crawling to Canada, begging for shade and fresh water, hehe :P
What keeps me going is my inertia.
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/13/2 327252
No , Your an Etats-Unians , Canadian are American and the real american.
What is a real American ?
- Real Americans Rediscovered the Americans continent and named them America.
- Real Americans have never lost a war !
- Real Americans live in a democratic country !
- Real Americans fight for freedom, to the death !
- Real Americans liberated Europe from the Nazi by fighting the war from start to finish, both times!
- Real Americans are noble.
- Real Americans are defenders of the Americas.
- Real Americans live in America.
- Real Americans earned their country.
- Real Americans are not afraid of terrorists.
C ourageous
A mericans
N oble
A mericans
D efender of
A mericas
Where not "OF america" where it.
When we installed brightmail the Spam rate according to its graphs was about 66%. Currently the rate looks to be hovering around 70%. FSCK'ing unbelieveable that 70% of all mail we receive is spam - bastages! Company of 8500 employees in Western Canada.
PS.
Noticed the other day that some spammer has taken to using ACSII art to get past filters now. Trust them to corrupt something as nobel as ASCII art.
Only about 5-10 a week make it to my inbox. Ignore the SpamAssassin filter that catches about 3,400 a week. Or the fact that this time last year it was only getting about 2,000 a week. Ipsos-Reid is infallible, I tell you!
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
I don't claim to be an expert on this, but I'd have to say there's a few good reasons for this.
.com, .net, .org. Instead they use .ca and I would guess the .de (Germans) folks get comparable amounts of spam when compared to the US for the same reason.
1. Canadians Internet users, on average, are probably a bit more tech-savvy than USians, meaning they have a lower response rate than Americans. (See NOTE, below)
2. Canadians with email addresses don't always use
3. Canadians probably don't report spam as often. Basically, they may receive the same amounts, but they aren't surveyed as often as USians on how much they hate spam.
NOTE: I don't want to offend anyone by saying Canadians are smarter on average (esp. since I'm not Canadian myself!), but you have to keep in mind the sheer number of USians that have email addresses compared to those in Canada.
In the US, everyone and their dog has an email address and webpage. In Canada, I find it hard to believe that Ma and Pa Smith have email addresses, or, if they do, at no higher a rate than Ma and Pa Smith in the US Midwest.
Maybe "average" isn't as good a word as "median", too.
Your guess is as good as mine whether this data is worth anything, but daily mail volume for these stats is about 1,000 emails daily. The spam "level" is an index computed by our mail server.
July, 2004....21.7
Aug, 2004.....24.5
Sept, 2004....23.2
Oct, 2004.....27.1
Nov, 2004.....24.2
Dec, 2004.....29.6
Jan, 2005.....26.1
Feb, 2005.....29.6
FIrst of all, Candian universities run Solaris exclusively, thus no Exchange server to crack ;)
Secondly, my university's mail server is configured to reject the first attempt to deliver. Since most spam is mass mailed, 95% of the automated tools will not bother with retransmission, while Outlook, Mail.app, etc will re-send, which will be accepted on the second try.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
For awhile, I noticed that SPAM in general seemed to be down on my various accounts. Then suddenly I've had a major surge of spam. The odd thing is that I'm getting it with on three different addresses from a particular sender.
To: A LUG email, and one I've used to post on slashdot (obfuscated)
CC: My primary email
Obviously somebody's got my number, so it's probably one main spammer... I'd love to figure out who that is any how he/she got my addresses.
I dun want to get up and say that anybody should be denied the right to bitch about what I think was one of the worst atrocities ever exacted against a race or group of people, but I don't like it when people try and bring up the past on stuff like this.
...
The situation in Australia is probably much better than how it used to be, though there's still much room for improvement. I don't know about American Indians, but subcontinental Indians have their fair share of blood on our hands (just to cite one example), and we are pretty bad at stepping up and admiting to our mistakes.
What's the answer? I don't know, but ending up in an international slapfest is probably not the best way to go about it
No-12 Eglinton Ave. West
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Dear Ms. Betty Rubble,
I wish this my proposal will not come to you as a surprise.I am Mr.Harvey Wellstone a Regional Director with a North Canadian Security Sarl with Regional Office in Toronto.We had a foreign client (named MR LEVY SHIMONY) who deposited a huge sum of money (US$30.5million) with our Company.
Eventually,MR LEVY SHIMONY and his entire family were involved in a fatal accident at a hockey game,which unfortunately claimed their lives, upon a frozen Toronto sewage spillway, sparing none of the occupants of the vehicle in Toronto.
But,since then we have not had any body coming for the claims as the Next of Kin.
A sitaution I have monitored closely with my position in the Company.Now, having monitored this deposit for years now, and hence nobody has showed up as the Next of Kin for the past one year plus, I have removed the file to my private vault.I now solicit for your assistance to present you as the Next of Kin as every other arrangement has being concluded by me and I am only waiting for a foreigner to enable me move the fund to his account.
This does not have any risk attached to it as all the internal documentations will be handled by me. I therefore request you to confirm your interest by are turn message and I will furnish you with details.Your interest will be negotiable before we commence the operation.
God bless you and your family.
Best Regards
Mr.Harvey Wellstone
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
Please choke on a pretzel and die.
I suppose this is what happens when you and your peer group were born in the early 1970s.
I happened to take a look at the ISP numbers link contained in the CAUCE article; I'm kind-of doubting how well the research was done on that front.
AT&T Canada hasn't been AT&T Canada for a few years; they're now knwon as Allstream, and IIRC, they jettisoned their consumer ISP division quite some time ago to Netcom, which got swallowed up in the mists of time itself....
"I don't get it." -- ObviousGuy
Dude, I realize it was a totally lame 2 in the morning post, but I'm not some Dumb Ass Right-Wing Republican Religious Freak, so I don't think I can pull off the pretzel thing...
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
Here at a small Canadian company that ends in dotCOM my stats show spam dropped a bit in Feb but has increased to highest ever in March.
The plural of "elk" is "elk". I put it to you that you have never even seen an elk, let alone danced habitually with more than one such animal.
I thought they were just getting electricity up there.
Perhaps I'm just unlucky, but living in Ontario I've been getting as many spam emails as ever. Laws or no laws. The only difference I've noticed is that the porn spam is now often marked 'Sexually Explicit'. For the past year I've been getting 30 to 60 spam messages a day. My provider tags many of them and this allows me to filter them directly into the delete folder. Then scan them before deleting so the counts provided are fairly accurate. To be fair a sample of one. Maybe other Canadians have indeed seen improvements.
...is the usual bad data from polling companies. What jokers, to think that they could get information on spam from telephone polls. My family never picks up the phone if we don't recognize the caller. Just who are these people who talk with pollsters? Apparently, the very small subset of the population whose spam decreased 19% last year. Bad polling methodologies is the deep dark secret of the industry.
I'm Canadian and I recieve more spam today than I have ever in the past. I used to look up the senders on AAIN for the worst offenders (ie. mail with virus, bank info phishing)and forward it to the ISP's abuse address, but they never seem to do anything. The worst offending ISP I have seen is Comcast. I repeatedly get multiple spams from the same IP's on their network, have complained multiple times, and yet these same IP's remain active. Personally I think the only real solution is to hold the ISP legally liable for any spam originating on their network. They have been given plenty of opportunities to clean up their acts and they are the only ones who actually have the ability to identify spammers and close their accounts. I think that what is needed is a large class action suit against a well know ISP. Once one ISP is driven to bankruptcy by lawsuits the rest of them will start behaving reposnsibly. Since this is unlikely to accur any time soon I suggest we launch a DOS attack on comcast's network and see how they like it!
Lol, you're right. It requires a certain expertise. Sorry, it appears I've asked for too much ;-)
And back to the reality, one of the games that I'm involved in has recently introduced a "crime in the city" feature, and many players have been attacked as a result. However, as soon as the first criminal was arrested and mourned about the harsh punishment of being caught (lost points, jail time and whatnot), crime rate drops almost instantly.
A lot of studies have shown that what deters non-impulse crime is the certainty of being caught, the probability of being prosecuted, and the likelihood of being punished. If a crime like spam happens and they only get you 0.1 percent of the time, then it is highly likely that most spamsters will continue to operate without worries. Some myths about real prosecutions will scare off a few, but the system will react to the actual capture rate over time.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Well, of course, when I'm being a troll.... :-p
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.