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Lawmakers Try to Protect Kids From Spam
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Some states have moved to shield children from email peddling porn, alcohol and other adults-only products, the Wall Street Journal reports. Critics say the laws, which establish a registry of kids' email addresses, are unfair to marketers and could create security risks. The debate echoes earlier discussion about a proposed do-not-spam national registry that the Can-Spam Law urged, but which the FTC nixed. This time, though, the registries are moving forward on a state-by-state basis, and facing court challenges from the adult entertainment industry." From the article: "Few email addresses have been placed on the state registries so far. Earlier this week, Utah's registry had 1,992 addresses, and 62 schools had registered their domain names to block emails to student accounts. About 160 companies had submitted their email lists for screening. In Michigan, 3,658 email addresses have been registered, along with 41 school domains. About 170 marketers had applied for screening."
More laws.
I wonder how many sex offenders work for government.
Actually, I find this really overreaching legislation unacceptable for a free society. When you become a parent, you must accept the priviledge of parenting -- don't push it off on me.
When you tax me, regulate me and force me to monitor what your children are doing, you are putting the brunt of parenting on me. I don't want it. I'm responsible and have no had kids before I was ready. Don't ask me to help you, I don't want to.
I want to run my business utilizing every right I was born with -- including speech. If you don't want my e-mails, you can run a white list and bounce everything not in it. Problem solved, by the free market.
I want to run my life without paying for the legal system required to enforce these tyrannical laws. I have no desire to put another lawyer in the district attorney's office. I have no desire to put another cop in a nice office in order to do a parent's job. I have no desire to put another judge on the bench to take away the freedoms of the citizens put in from of them.
Here's a guide to life:
1. Don't have kids until you can support them yourself (including paying for school, food, clothing and shelter).
2. Join a church or community group focused on family. Help your neighbors with kids and they'll help you.
3. Understand that raising a child means having one parent at home. If you have a child, stop spending money on toys and vacations and new cars and new clothes. Focus your money on your child's present and future.
4. Understand that raising a child means constant care. Don't let your child go anywhere without knowing where and with whom. If one parent is home, this is much easier.
If you can't understand these simple procedures (learned over millenia), don't have kids. I don't want to pay for them, I don't want to raise them, and I don't want to provide free daycare for them. It isn't my kid.
Is this an abuse of the service? Probably. But it would bring me great joy to watch some spammer take a $1K-$5K hit for each e-mail sent to me promising the enlargement of my genitals and/or mammaries. From the article: Now that's satisfying!
If you're wondering what adult products qualify for you to file a complaint: Under the law, marketers are prohibited from sending messages containing or linking to any products or services that are illegal under Michigan law for children to purchase, obtain, view or participate in. These include, but are not necessarily limited to: Alcohol, Tobacco, Pornography or Obscene Material, Gambling, Illegal Drugs, & Firearms
On the converse, I'm guessing that if I did get on the list my Spongebob spam would probably increase.
My work here is dung.
Those poor innocent spammers trying to make a living sitting there in a makeshift shack shivering in front of an empty table with nothing but a meek candle for warmth..
WHO I say! Who will think of the spammers?!
Another email list for spammers to harvest? Or maybe even more questionable people currently spending their time talking to the FBI in chatrooms?
:)
Sounds silly and ineffective. Bet some legislator got good press from it though.
It will only work for senders in the US, and that's assuming it would work at all. For the rest of the world, it's a free list of valid email accounts.
...will be for the list to get into the hands of one child molestor.
Then the whole affair will be killed faster than you can say "Don't touch me there, Father Geoghan".
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
I like. That could work politically. I also wonder how easy it would be to get myself put on the children list. :-)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I can also see the point of the people opposed to this scheme.
As it says in TFA, the people who are most likely to send unsolicited spam are outwith the boundaries of the US legislators, or are already ignoring the laws that are in place.
It would be nice to have a way of shielding childrens mailboxes that didn't involve their parents actively looking through their mails first, but when they're being targetted at school email addresses isn't that the responsibility of whoever is the mail administrator at that school?
I'm not blaming anyone - bar the spammers - but that's my two cents worth.
--
silas
An email registry of kid's email addresses? You mean there will be one-stop shopping for addresses of the people MOST LIKELY to be interested in my porn-site?
After all, as a foreign porn spammer, I'm VERY concerned about abiding by US law.
The people are idiots! The only thing saving the kids is that they often don't have easy access to daddy's credit card so there is less incentive to market to them.
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
With this, how are the kids expected to learn how to please each other properly? They sure don't teach it in middle school.
rellix
It's already illegal to try and hock this stuff to kids, is it not? Then just start prosecuting the people who do it. No need for special handling just because email is used as the medium.
How are spammers expected to defend against this? Well if you are selling an adult-only product, and you don't know how old the person you are emailing is, then you don't have a business relationship with them and therefore shouldn't be contacting them in the first place.
This seems like the ideal solution, because mass-emailers who act ethically and don't spam don't have a problem with this, and mass-emailers who act unethically and do spam get punished - thus protecting kids and benefiting adults at the same time.
Why is the government not taking this approach?
So think twice before "death to all marketers".
While protecting children from spam is a noble goal, Utahs method of forcing companies to have a third party check their address databases against blacklists (and having to pay a lot for that) will only catch a small part of the spam, while resulting in a giant overhead.
What worries me most is the definition of "inappropriate sales pitches", which can be heavily fined. What is inappropriate? I run a website for free language training, aimed at adults and kids. What happens if a kid requests the newsletter, but the kids school or parents have put its email address on the blacklist? If some right wing christian decides that teaching children the french names of bodyparts is indecent, will I be fined for making an "inappropriate sales pitches"? Smells like CDA.
Chriss
--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
I think the list systems are backwards. It would seem to me that no one wants spam and that everyone would would want to be on a do-not-spam list. To maintain a list of almost everyone would be unwieldly and expensive. The same idea applies for the do-not-call lists for telemarketing. Why not reverse the purpose of the lists and make them "OK-to-spam" list and "OK-to-Call" lists? All twelve people that like that stuff can voluntarily submit their info.
Oh wait, that would make sense.
I don't know why you would bother creating a registry of kid's names & schools that is most likely to be unsecure, infringing on privacy rights, burdening the innocent individual, and is impossible to verify.
How about just stopping the spam with huge fines for the offenders and/or putting them out of business permanently?
I would like to know one person here who thinks that spam emails are a legitimate way to do business.
It is like the electronic equivalent of harassment and email vandalism.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Come on, speak up. Do we really need to trample everybody's rights to save children from porn spam? Has any child actually been harmed by spam? If so, I'd like to know about it, 'cause it sounds like some virulent spam!
And do we really need a database of childrens' email addresses? That sounds like a pot of gold for all the pedophiles out there...
Electric Monkey Pants
I'm always against legislatures sticking their noses in places where they have no knowledge just to pass some knee-jerk legislation, but I have to wonder, a legitmiate marketer would have an opt-in list. Therefore, there wouldn't be any problem if this law was passed.
On another note, most of the spam I receive is of the v1a*gr*4 type: no porn or alcohol.
FYI, Adblock will block the article - in case any of you can't see it.
1. Don't have kids until you can support them yourself (including paying for school, food, clothing and shelter). - Don't drink alcohol at parties with cute girls.
2. Join a church or community group focused on family. Help your neighbors with kids and they'll help you. - Don't drink alcohol at church.
3. Understand that raising a child means having one parent at home. If you have a child, stop spending money on toys and vacations and new cars and new clothes. Focus your money on your child's present and future. - Don't spend your entire paycheck on alcohol.
4. Understand that raising a child means constant care. Don't let your child go anywhere without knowing where and with whom. If one parent is home, this is much easier. - Don't share alcohol with children.
Prove it.
what about spammers who aren't from this country. wouldn't such lists just be providing them with the email lists that they so desperately crave?
does putting your child on the no adult spam list instantly result in them getting ads for hasbro and toys-r-us?
Just some short points:
1. Don't have kids until you can support them yourself (including paying for school, food, clothing and shelter).
The average cost of raising a child is $250,000.
2. Join a church or community group focused on family. Help your neighbors with kids and they'll help you.
The church essentially does what you advocate against the government doing. namely, raising peoples children for them.
3. Understand that raising a child means having one parent at home. If you have a child, stop spending money on toys and vacations and new cars and new clothes. Focus your money on your child's present and future.
Raising children has always entailed both parents working. The single working parent was a concept largely confined to 1950's america. Across the globe and throughout time, both parents have usually needed to work to support a family.
4. Understand that raising a child means constant care. Don't let your child go anywhere without knowing where and with whom. If one parent is home, this is much easier.
See previous point. Also along these lines, in the past, children often worked from quite a young age, usually alongside their parents. The modern school system is in essence an alternative to this, enabling parents to work, without simultaniously supervising their children.
May the Maths Be with you!
Utah's registry had 14 years old email addresses? In 1992 the Internet was a fraction of what it is today, most email addresses have changed, and kids of the time are now adults. There is a dire need to update the registry with more current info.
After all, having an available registry of confirmed emails of children is a god send for many marketers. Nice of the government to subsidize the market research so that advertising agencies can be 100% sure that their spam for toys, or candy, or xbox games is going to the target market!
Sure, the list is only supposed to be available to "authorized third party auditors" or translation: a bunch of minimum wage data entry people. Which means that it will be available to just about anyone willing to pay a few bucks! And don't expect this info not to be given to military recruiters, or anyone the government WANTS to market to your children.
And marketers are not the worst type of people who could have this information!
Like a driver's license. You can apply for it when you are 18, so your being on the 'Net means de facto you are an adult (at least legally/mathematically). All the chatroom entrapment theatrics drop to zero. Signal-to-Noise in places like, well, Slashdot increases dramatically. Would-a-been script kiddies spend their formative years in the high school Drama Club, where they not only have an aptitude but may actually pick up some social skills as well. L33t Sp33k is killed before it can grow. People with any predilection to dress in Goth 'fashion' or smoke clove cigarettes receive no encouragement via Usenet, and so Light returns to The Land. Music ceases to be marketed like jujubes. Instant Messaging, the electronic equivalent of the juvenile pinging of small stones at one's bedroom window, loses traction in business and people start picking up phones again. No metallic object is ever again manufactured in 'Hot Magenta.' The list of benefits go on and on...
Note to moderators: I am kidding. Mostly.
If the gov really wanted to do something useful, then there should be an opt-in system. By default, marketers should not be able to spam anyone who wasn't on the list.
I never thought I'd find more spam preferable to less spam, but seems like it's happening. The stupid ageist government should give me back my spam!
America can solve this serious problem of kids receiving inappropriate emails the same way they solve other problems: long, long prison sentences!
If anyone is caught sending a child an "adult-related" email, they should be sentenced to 40 years to life in federal prison.
For the safety of the children everyone should be imprisoned!
Is there no one technical on the staff of lawmakers these days? Or is it just that the lawmakers are so un-technical that it's impossible for the staff member to explain the concept of a hash? There is no need to keep a database of email addresses (or phone numbers, etc.) that can then be used for nefarious purposes. Just put the HASHES in there and make that law require marketers to check the hash of a possible victim against the hash db. It's just so simple...
This is absurd, if a school decided to implement an email system, then they should have looked into investing in a filtering system to go along with it.
It isn't the governments job to refine the processes and products of the private industry, which is essentially what they are doing. (more and more every day)
They have essentially said "This email thing would be alot better tool/product if we modified it like *this*". But wait! Email was never their technology in the first place! Why would we need them to aid/fix it?
We have all these politicians that are so devoted to their capitalism, yet they can't seem to understand the basic premise of it. If there is a wide demand for a product or change, somebody will supply it. The only thing that can stop the process from working is outside intervention such as this. Assuming this government solution works, they have just effectively halted research into new technologies and solutions to the problem in the private sector.
Common politicians, if you are going to be capitalist, then for FSM's sake could you allow capitalism to do it's thing!
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
Yet another wonderful way to desensitize our children to the tools of a police state.
You say you want a revolution....
The EFF has a long history of being on the wrong side of the spam problem. They showed their true colors when they joined spammers in their suit to overturn the laws designed to help stop spam.
When people ask me why I refuse to join the EFF, I just point at their spam policies.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
As for keeping it secure. Gee, what would pedo do with a list of email adresses when during the same breakin or electronic theft he can get the complete details of every kid? The state already keeps full listing of every kid in the state, adding a list of emails is not going to be any big deal.
Discuss wether you want or do not want a do no spam list but do not make stupid alarmist posts about things wich are clearly explained in the fucking article. Why does slashdot not have a mod option "RTFA".
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
White or black lists are far too simplistic and prone to abuse. Naive Bayes classifiers are better, but still a hack. An asymmetric encryption system would be a far more complete solution to the problem of unsolicited mail.
Why doesn't everyone just use mail clients that only accept incoming mail encrypted with the user's public key? No authentic mail would get labeled as spam, and real spamming would become too resource intensive. It would not be too difficult to make the whole encryption process totally transparent to the user. The problem is that adoption would be subject to the network effect (the service only gains value when there are many users). Since most people have little knowledge of crypto systems and wouldn't see why this would eliminate spam and protect their privacy, why not have a law the forces ISPs to provide such a service? You could even word such legislation to appear to be intended to "protect the children". We need to lobby the makers of popular mail programs (or implement this system ourselves in the OSS area), but in the end we might need to have corporations and congress force change from above.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Look! We pay for, or someone pays for, our email service. It is NOT for "marketters" to exploit. It would be a different story if email wasn't a "pay for" service. Internet access and ultimately email 99% of the time falls neatly into that category and should be EXEMPT from marketters demanding "fairness." The fact that email marketting ever got established as "common" is unfair to those who pay for their email service.
I submitted my email since I was a kid, and after say 5 years I am legally adult. Will they also maintain the ages, so that I could receive the hidden treasure then ;)
They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me. -Nathaniel Lee
No one has parenting skills anymore.
A kid plays violent games and then brings a gun to school to even some scores, and they blame the video games. They don'tblame the parents how did not monitor the child's habits, see the warning signs, take preventative measures. Parents howl they need a rating system, then blatantly ignore it, letting their kids do pretty much whatever they want.
My wife see it time and again -- children who are running their homes. Their parents are afraid to punish them for fear of being turned in to the authorities or being ridiculed. No one spanks their children anymore. Punishments are weak. Let's face it, sending a kid to their room means sending them to their Internet connection, their IM, their TV and video games.
Kids walk around dressed in mismatched, mis-sized clothes. Where di they get them? Most of them don't have jobs, so it must be dear-old-mom-and-dad who are letting them dress like hoodlums, tramps, and reprobates.
Does anybody seriously think this will work, When kids can get new email addresses easily? Last I knew, Hotmail and Yahoo wasn't asking for id when you signed up. This is just another case of government being forced to do the job of parents who are too lazy or stupid to do it themselves.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
I believe that this is officially called the "Encourage Pedophiles to Start Marketing Companies Act of 2006"
Pfff...
As long as we use so old technology, we will not able to really deal with spam. This is why I have developped a revolutionnar technology. Really, give it a try, you will see : The ultimate way to fight spam
Ploum.net.
"The states let parents and schools register any email address accessible to a child, at no cost. Each month, companies must pay to have a designated third party examine their marketing lists for addresses that appear on the registries. The cost for a business can total thousands of dollars, and violators face stiff fines."
That is unfair. I propose that instead of these monetary obligations to sanitize their email lists, marketers be allowed to police themselves. Then, if caught sending adult-oriented spam to kids, the marketing firm in question would have to line up all their executives to be shot in the face by the parents. I think this is more than fair, and would not place undue costs on marketing companies. Vote today.
Shoot spammers on sight. Everybody wins.
Just ban spam totally.. THAT is the solution.
No 'do not email list' or other nonsence. Until they pay me for my time and resources, spam should be 100% illegal.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Well, lets see. You have the email addresses of millions of kids in a single location (well, a single location for each state at least). Anyone can get the list, otherwise small legit companies won't know who to exclude. Then my friend in Nigeria gets them, and cons kids into giving out mommy and daddy's credit card info. What a great idea.
Lighten up. Its only a post.
I work in schools, and I have had complaints from various staff who receive explicit emails ranging in topic from enlarging various body parts to men/woman copulating with animals. If staff can get such emails, I'm sure students could too. And try and have Mrs Crabapple explain to little Jill what that lady on the email is doing to the pretty horsie.
.edu, and simply have sending explicit-content spam to such domains barred.
Adding school domain names to a global blocklist doesn't sound like a bad legislation to me. It's easier to check than a DNE (Do-not-email) registry and not send to school domains. Heck, and even easier way would be to slowly transition all school domains to
Legislation isn't always the best solution, and not the only one either, but it's not always a bad idea. This sounds more useful than a DNC-style registry to me.
There are not as many as you would think, as most goverments DO screen people that have conact with chilren.
Is the process perfect? No of course not, but it is being done and does help.
Btw, in this day and age our #3 is not all that practical. it may have worked for generations past and is a nice idea, but today it just doesnt work for the average middle class citizen.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Arrgh.. what more needs to be said ..
2006 resolution - start proofreading.. and slow down...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's not just about spam - it's about all kinds of speech, and about the technical competence of the lawmakers, who don't understand the implications of the laws they're writing.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I know 'kids' in their 20s who still feel the need to hide their lifestyles from their parents. Sheltering children sets up for a lifetime of dishonesty between parents and children.
I pay for my bandwidth. The vast majority of e-mail traffic on that domain is spam. In other words, *I* am paying for them to send unsolicited advertisements to me. Since they refuse to stop spamming my servers, I have no choice but to ask the government to force them to stop.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Where does the majority of spam start off from? Aren't the majority of spammers outside of the US? Would US companies be held responsbile for the action that spammers take to spread said company's name?
If this comes to court, how successful would the arguement "I said to advertise me, I did not indicate how, and I was not aware of this man's actions. We wanted people to come in and we paid him based on how many people came in. He was solely responsible for the unsolicited emails, as we did not explicitly authorize it."
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Product marketers know kids are impressionable. Companies like McDonald's aggressively target kids to get them to see McDonald's as a fun place to visit and thus consume their products. Toy makers and other companies use gorilla like tactics to aggressively market to children.
Create a registry of children's email addresses and suddenly you provide fuel for lots of child-direct marketing involving these corporate preditors.
There are also huge security concerns. If this email list gets leaked or hacked and suddenly sexual preditors have a long list of children to try and prey on.
This all boils down to parents and their need to be more actively involved in their childs life. In ALL honestly, CHILDREN SHOULD NOT HAVE THEIR OWN EMAIL ADDRESS, PERIOD!
I mean, perhaps by the time they hit high school, most children are well aware of what Viagra and have probaly seen porn anyways, so lets not throw them in the same category. High school age kids are not innocent these days.
But handing a 6 year old an email account is just opening them to the kind of things parents dread. Porn and sexual preditors and other questionable content. Children under the age of 12 simply shouldn't have their own email address. Let emails go to their parents and let the parent's filter out the emails and let their kids know if they have one written to them personally. Thats the most common sense thing to do.
I don't understand how a law can prevent children from being emailed porn or sexually related content. US is so hyped about making laws to protect kids or people from this or that, its turning their society into a group of people that can't act on their own behalf or take responsibility for their actions. Some one because of a victim of something, and suddenly they need to point fingers and use others a scapegoats for their own lack of judgement.
Perhaps the law should charge parents with negligence for allowing 6 year olds to browse the internet and send and receive emails unattended. As much as it must be a parents worst nightmare for a child to meet a stranger through the internet, a parent should be slapped with a fine in that case for not being more pro-actively involved in their childs internet access. Don't put a computer in a child's room, and don't let them access the internet unattended or supervised. It IS as easy as that, period! You don't need to waste millions in tax payer's money to create a superficial law that won't protect children in the long run.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Law makers should protect everyone from spam.
if you like spam, please raise your hand.
1001100 1100101 1100001 1110110 1100101 1001101 1111001 1000010 1101001 1110100 1110011 1000001 1101100 1101111 110111
As a rule of tumb, your rent should be 1/3 of your monthly income, tops. I do, however, life in Switzerland where the generel "living" style is different, because all people with a normal (below 10000US$/month) live in an appartment.
THANK YOU.
Direct mail works because *THEY PAY FOR IT*.
Spam costs *me* bandwidth, disk space, time/cost to implement filters, etc. It's profitable for them because they only pay a small amount to pump millions of messages out, then even a tiny fraction of one percent responding nets them profit.
If we can make it more costly for these slime to do business, it will hopefully thin the ranks.
we got capone on tax evasion, and it worked out great. if all we can get spammers on is corruption of minors, i'll go for it too. just put them all in the clink for a good long visit with bubba.
For every single real address listed, the FBI should put at least 2 fake addresses.
That way, there is a 2/3 chance that the pervs will be emailing an FBI agent. Why spend time lurking in chat rooms when they'll just email you?
Do it in secret to begin with. Then let it become public when you've busted a ring or three.
At that point, the pervs won't risk emailing anyone on that list.
"Oh please, like some parent stands a chance against all those marketers sloshing their emails, and their kids email boxes full of porn and other adult-only products. Come on let us be realistic..."
Ok, no unsupervised email access or television.
I've just eliminated 90% (it's a guess, fuck you if you don't like it) of the undesired marketing.
YOU need to be more realistic, and stop foisting the EASY part of parenting onto others.
I will not raise your kid, and I will not pay for others to do so. If you make me, I will sabotage the effort at every turn, and campaign as vigorously as I can against it at every opportunity.
The point is, if you genuinely think you can't control what your kid sees well enough, DON'T BE A FUCKING PARENT.
You just made excuses (lame ones) for all the shitty parents out there. Why would you want to help them like that?
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
While the law does attack spammers, it also attacks confirmed opt-in subscriptions - if you RTFA, you'll see that the beverage sellers were complaining that they have to pay Utah 5 cents to certify every name on their list, even though they don't sell products in Utah, just in case some kid from Utah tries to subscribe to their newsletter.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You have the right to free speech in a public place.
You do NOT have the right to free speech in MY home unless I invite you in first. Your rights stop at my front door, and the point where the telephone line enters my house. If I decide I don't want you and your filth in my inbox, on my computer, in MY HOME then laws should exist for me to prosecute you if you trespass (and I can prove who you are).
Something tells me that a blacklist of e-mail addresses isn't going to make much of a difference for spammers, and thus the children's inboxes. And in case I'm mistaken, where can I sign myself up for this superior spam filter?
"That's funny... I must have missed the part where your right to say anything you want includes a guarantee of an audience."
Sure, as soon as you explain how what you said makes any sense.
You're free to take whatever measure you like, or none at all, to include or exclude yourself from spam lists. My measure took about 20 minutes, and the occasional maintenance. No one is forcing you to be an audience for anything.
See, what you want is convenience, and that is certainly NOT guaranteed in the Constitution.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
Subscribe to an e-mail service provider that requires one of two confirmation methods, before delivering e-mails to it's subscribers.
Method #1 - A return e-mail is sent, requiring a person to reply with the word seen in the *picture*, before being authorized to mail the user.
Method #2 - The subscriber adds the e-mail address to it's authorized senders list.
Overriding all of this - the return address domain used in the e-mail must match up with the reverse name lookup of the IP address of the originating sender.
I know I would certainly use something like that if it was available to me.
If you're not on the list, the e-mail is dropped. No response, aside from the authentication request.
I somehow doubt that the spammers are going to hire people to click the response to get authentication to send e-mails - and even if they do, the user can blacklist them permanently.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Answer: The parents. It's their fucking job!
I'm getting so ill hearing all the "We gotta protect the children!" crap. When will people take responsability for their own godamn lives and stop trying to foist bad laws on the rest of us?
Yeah, I know. Wishful thinking.
US legal system: By Lawyers for Lawyers.
A few years later, congress discovers that "adult-related" == "SEX" and passes laws requiring all evil sex practioners be jailed. At last the children will be safe as the country is run by the priests... Uhh... hmm... that doesn't seem to work.
Kid: *recieves penis enlargement spam*
Gasp! What??!! All my beliefs have been shattered! WHY! WHY?! OH THE PAIN!
Seriously.
Same applies to many other areas that have recieved a zomfg from parenting groups.
It depends on how you measure it, but according to the ROSKO list, of the 200 spam operations responsible for 80% of spam in Europe and North America, 120 are from the USA, 13 from Canada, 9 from Russia, 2 from Taiwan, and 4 from China. They just use foreign relays (and increasingly "zombied" Windows PCs with broadband connections). This week's top ten is: USA 5, Russia 4, Brazil 1.
Would US companies be held responsbile for the action that spammers take to spread said company's name?
I don't know - but if they got the spammer's details from an unsolicited email, it would be hard to argue that they didn't know spam was going to be involved.
Whether or not those who commission spam could be prosecuted (for conspiracy, or for aiding and abetting, counselling, or procuring illegal spam) these figures show that a major legal clampdown on spammers purely inside the USA could have a dramatic direct effect.
The indirect effect on other countries would be considerable - especially if similar legislation allowed the worst offenders to be extradited. Preferably to the country with the least pleasant Jails. That might even be the USA, if half of the tales are true...
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
I saw a bunch of people posting about how this is a list for the nefarious to mine for data. I've helped build an integration with these registries, and there's some reasons it's infeasible to do so.
The registries aren't the actual email address, they're md5s of a salted version of the lower case email address. On an unspecified interval the salt changes, so if a particular salt ever becomes compromised, I'd assume they can switch to the next salt. Also, when you send your list in, you generate the salted md5 first, so the email addresses are never transmitted. Even the md5s are sent ssl.
Now I suppose if you were willing to set up a list that contained a bazillion automatically generated email addresses, that you could make an attempt to brute force their list, however that's somewhat financially infeasible, since every single email address costs you money which is billed to a credit card at the time of the transaction.
Also, I'm told that when you sign up for the usage of the service, that they do a background check to make sure you're a valid company with legitimate reasons to use their services.
So I suppose if you had unlimited financial resources, as checking a millions of email addresses isn't cheap, and a company that could hold up to a background check for ligitimate purposes, you could use the list in nefarious ways. Of course, you'd be a company in the states, with trackable owners, and the laws for using the list illegally are rather serious.
The biggest concern I have is someone compromising their system, gaining access to the current list of md5's, and then brute forcing email addresses against the md5 list. Of course, if you were going to go to that much effort, I'm sure there's easier solutions to send spam.
'when all you've got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.'
Any laws that restrict marketers are a plus in my book. Helping marketing usually is at the inconvenience of the consumer.
Anti spam laws are useless since nearly all of the spam that I get originates in China where there is no consideration for the rest of the world.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Why in the world do you need a centralized registry anyway? Can't we just mandate that any adult-content spam needs to be marked with a certain header flag, and do the filtering at the client level?
This will solve the issue of "I didn't know it was a child who signed up for my mailing list"; the punishable offense would simply be sending such an email unflagged, rather than worrying about who you're sending it to.
As far as I can tell the technical details from the WSJ article, it's not a simple list - there's some contractor that receives the data in encrypted form and manages the list, and if you want to validate against the list you need to pay them about $5 per 1000 addresses, and you get feedback about whether they are or are not on the Utah list, and there's a similar deal for $7/1000 for the Michigan list. So if you're selling politically incorrect material, whether it's porn and gambling spam or whether it's a subscription-only wine newsletter, and you don't want to risk becoming a criminal, you have to pay to validate *all* the names on your lists, just in case some kid from Utah or Michigan might be on them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Hey, the spammers can get PCs using [fill in your favorite chip maker] CPUs, and they'll stay toasty warm. I used to heat one of my labs with a couple of Sun-4s, and another one with a VAX 11/780. (Actually, I'd happily recommend that they get a VAX to do their spamming from - it's much more efficient, though a lot slower, and some of them will get electrocuted trying to install 208-volt 3-phase power....)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I think this is unrealistic. An e-mail address is all but anonymous. joeschmoe@hotmail.com could be my great grandfather, or it could be an 8-year-old. Short of having the e-mail addresses of every child in the world (which leaves even more room for child abuse, and yet seems to be the plan), it's not really possible to avoid sending spam to children.
If you're going to give kids an e-mail account, you should probably make it whitelist-only anyway, both send and receive. (Until they're old enough to "talk to strangers.")
As seems to be my answer to more and more things... Maybe more parents should know their children, rather than letting the government do it for them.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Children's Email Address Registry and had a rough time. It's buried a few layers deep from the main michigan.gov site. It's no wonder there are so few email addresses registered when it's not well-publicized or noticeably posted and easy to find.
They should set it up just like the do-not-call registry, but they just need to SHA-256 all the addresses before they put them in the database, so that they can be checked, but they would be unless if a spammer attempted to use a list to fill up there database. They could use it to verify if an address is valid, but they have piles of ways to do that already. Then make it a list for everyone to use, so that we can finally turn down the sensitivity of my spam filter.
and a whole bunch of other countries couldn't care less about this law.
Geez, a couple of comments that suggests pedo's create a very long list of adresses, pay several thousand dollars to the state all to get a handfull of email adress of kids.
God jezus christ almighty. Exactly how many seconds do you think the police needs to make a link to a pedo sending emails to kids on the do not spam list? The police ain't stupid.
I stand confirmed. Slashdot is filled with morons and you and the other idiots that came up the scheme are the kings.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You been watching to much TV. Real criminals ain't that stupid. Do you know how real pedo's get their kids? They kidnap one, use them and kill them and dump them and never ever leave details like paying for the kids email adress.
I am afraid you need a reality check. Pedo's are paranoid about keeping themselves hidden. Because pedo's that do not are in jail getting a lesson that even the worst criminals in the world who murder granny's for 10 bucks still hate pedo's.
What you suggest is far to complex and risk prone. Only the terminally stupid IT geek pedo would do this. I suggest that anyone smart enough to do this would be smart enough to realize that the police would have an easy clue. Although considering there are about 5 replies like you I may be wrong. Perhaps IT geeks are not so smart after all.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
if not doing something won't solve the problem, we should go ahead and do it.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
It's all in the numbers When you look at a close-by country with a population of 30 million: in the '02 census, there were a total of 23 children kidnapped by non-family members. This includes all kidnappings, not just sexual predation In the '02 breakdown by the Insurance companies, there were a total of between 370-430 children who were injured to the point of hospitalization and/or killed by non-famalial drunk drivers. (The paper cited a range of numbers, the lowest being reported, and the higher being the suspected numbers because of under-reporting) Your kid is 20 times more likely to be put in the hospital by a drunk driver than they are to have some predator kidnap them. Predators work geographically, Of the 23 kidnapped, I'd guess that maybe 3 of those were done by someone who didn't live within the same city. I think the chance that the list would EVER be used as a trolling source by a predator is somewhere in the realm of winning the lottery three times in a row. Especially when you can simply drive around and look for brightly coloured plastic things lying around in the front lawn and see who has kids.
Just say it's illegal to send SPAM at all, and the sending porn spam will equate to corruption of minors. (i.e. 20 years of jail or something).
That'll do it.
Just make a database of hashes (i.e. SHA256) of e-mail addresses. Everyone can check if your particular e-mail is listed there, but nobody can find out your particular e-mail from the list.
Personally I think this is a great idea. Anything that slims down the 20MB of spam I get per day is great. Thankfully I use Gmail, ahh, 2.5GB of space, more than enough to buffer my spam 'till I delete it.
It's never just a game when you're winning. - George Carlin
Your post is logical, well-reasoned, and invokes Canada. Nevertheless, I still stand by my statements; American politics don't generally make sense.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
OK. I agree that the law is a bit silly in the face of PROPER parenting, but who does that any more?? The TV as a babysitter has been replaced by the internet. On the other hand, how about our elders? Lucky for me, my grandmother doesn't do email. Snail-mail spam is bad enough as she keeps donating to this, that, and the other, while saying she isn't. If your grandparents or other family and friends have problems saying NO, then what happens when you're not there to protect them? Yes, this topic is about whether or not to protect children, but I think it's about protecting those who truly cannot protect themselves. I generally go against making a bunch of new laws, especially at the cost of freedom or just to protect stupid people from themselves, but I am all for protecting the innocent.
It's historically unclear where the Ladies' Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society meme and logo originated - seems to be the 1970s or before, and you're probably not allowed to wear the T-Shirt in airports any more. But you can apparently carry knitting needles on airplanes again, or at least somebody sitting next to me last week had done so. Maybe you just need to use plastic or wooden ones?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
My primary email address has been wandering around the net in mailing list archives and Usenet for over a decade, and even though I'd never use it to sign up for stuff I don't want, it's been extensively hit by harvesters. One email address from a cryptographic mail server I stopped running in ~1997 still gets spam, even though I never even sent email from it except as a response to email it received - it was mentioned on a web page about the project, so harvesters got it, and they kept selling the address to each other for a couple of years after I took it off the web page. (That was back when lots of the spam was for Millionsss of Fresssh New Email Addressess, so advertising it to an old stale address seemed appropriate.)
Besides, if you want to give an email address to somebody you expect will spam you, that used to be what Hotmail was for, and still is what Yahoo and other free email services are good for, or for other kinds of services, bugmenot/dodgeit/mailinator/etc. do even more disposable address types. It's also useful to do tagged email addresses (username+tag@example.com, or tag@username.example.com.) The latter format has the advantage that it can increase the numbers of addresses a spammer has to try by several orders of magnitude, depending on whether the spammer can find the subdomain names easily, though it does occasionally mean that your subdomain will get dictionary-spammed.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
A hash list could work in a more convenient manner, though it's susceptible to dictionary attacks. For instance, you can figure out the domain names, especially because potential customers for spam products usually use big email services instead of small clueful ones, so you can just start hashing likely usernames at each of the top 100 mail systems. Finding specific addresses is fast, but as long as you're just trying to find lots of addresses, and not trying to find _all_ of them, it's also easy to do that. But it is a good start.
The fun part for the people running the list is to seed it with lots of trap addresses, and see who bites. But you don't actually have to be running the list to seed it - anybody who's jurisdictionally eligible to put their email addresses on the list can include bait as well as addresses they actually use.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yes, it'd be nice if spammers couldn't afford to send email to Utahns, or to Californians like me. It'd be extremely annoying if California wineries couldn't send information to people who ask for it, or small beer brewers anywhere, or if private websites that provide free correct information about politically incorrect drugs couldn't provide it (or even if lying scum like the Partnership for a Drug-Free America couldn't do that).
Much of the information they're censoring is covered by the Commerce Clause of the US constitution as interstate commerce, which states aren't allowed to regulate. Alcohol's a special leftover from Prohibition, and the Feds have their own laws about gambling which several scummy Congresscritters are in favor of, and while I wouldn't mind if I stopped getting told how to collect my winnings in the Nigerian Lottery, that's also out of their jurisdictions.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Why does everyone just think that they own the internet and start making all these laws restricting people from doing things on the internet and so forth? The internet was made with nobody specifically owning it, and I feel that's how it should stay. If anything, let the UN 'own' the internet.
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
Personally, I think it is a good idea to try and protect children from undesirable spam that promote things like alcohol, tobacco and pornography. Society often takes on the responsibility of protecting children when supervision is not available from parents. This is why we have crossing guards when children walk to school, security guards on high school campuses and programs like Head Start and Foster Care. The guiding principle of such programs is that you don't penalize the child when a parent isn't fulfilling an important or critical need. The real issue here seems to be that these programs are designed by lawmakers who don't necessarily understand the technology they are legislating and, therefore, have a difficult time striking a balance between protecting children and infriging upon the rights of adults.
The problem with spam is not that it's costing you money - it's that it's wasting your time. Your email provider is probably spending a lot of resources trashing spam, but except for the largest providers, it's personnel time that's costing them money, not equipment, and they're doing it because they want to keep your business.
That doesn't mean that spammers aren't scum, because of course they are. But these laws don't just affect spammers - they also attack *anybody* who's emailing politically-incorrect-by-Utah-standards information that might be received by a minor in Utah, forcing them to pay the state's subcontractor an unreasonable price to listwash their entire mailing lists unless they have other ways to prove that none of their subscribers are Utah teenagers - and they're not able to defend themselves merely by having a 'Check this box to indicate that you're not a Utah teenager', because teenagers are presumed to lie about that sort of thing, especially if they want pr0n or cigarettes. One of the affected parties was a wine seller who doesn't even ship products to Utah, but they're forced to deal with the law. And after all, it would be horrible if teenagers were exposed to *gambling* by email, as opposed to having to go to a website that was advertised on TV, or to learn poker in Boy Scouts or sports betting at the high-school lunchtable like I did (our group of geeks then used the school's computer lab to adapt the football coach's winner-prediction program to predict winners of professional games as opposed to strategies for high school games :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Critics say the laws... are unfair to marketers...
Restricting my ability to send advertisements for Viagra to 11 year old girls is an infringement of my inalienable human rights! This is a war crime! Next thing you know they'll be restricting our right to cover people's screens with pop-ups!
If you submit your address, then you'd get all your old viagra mail coming from China/Korea/Brazil/wherever or just the zombie PC next door, and in addition you will get "legitimate" marketing email that is "fully CAN-SPAM compliant" advertising all sorts of things that "you might want your parents to buy you".
But you know that this kind of spam is OK because they CAN-SPAM you! (so say both state and federal governments)
I see a whole bunch of posts here where people are bringing up the first amendment. They don't understand the issue at all. Yes, it is absolutely true that even SPAMmers have the right to freedom of speech. But *NOBODY* has the right to speak from someone else's computer room without being invited in to give the speech. If you don't believe me, enter someone's house uninvited and start talking. When the cops come to arrest you, tell them you are just exercising your right to freedom of speech as guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Any guesses as to what the Cops, the Judge, and your Lawyer will tell you???
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Myself, I go to http://www.websudoku.com/ which has four levels of difficulty, you can set the options to allow "pencil markings" (up to 5 characters per square), you can do as many as you like, keep track of your completion times, and compare them with the average...
If Sudokuist /is/ your site, good luck to you!
Wikileaks, no DNS