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Australian Rules to Crackdown on Spam
siffty writes "Internet service providers could face huge fines if they do not provide spam filtering or impose email sending limits under new rules set down by a communications watchdog.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority ( ACMA Media Release ) today registered the world's first legislative code of practice for internet and email service providers.
Dealing with unsolicited email or spam costs business and home internet users millions of dollars each year in wasted time and upgrading security systems.
But under the new code, ISPs will have to offer spam filtering options to subscribers and provide a system of handling complaints.
They will also have to impose reasonable limits on the rate at which subscribers can send email."
How do they know the percentage of Australian spam if they don't know the total amount of spam?
Is it just me or is Australia's internet regulation the most inadvertently fucked up system in place? Sure, you have China doing their regulation, but that's pretty overt and to be expected. But it seems that by hook or crook, Australia's government is trying to regulate the market into conformance.
They will eventually get the ISPs under the government's thumb. Whether it be through direct laws requiring certain filtering features or through oversight-free regulation via governmental agencies, they will succumb.
Dumbass Australians.
The AU government will get spammed with products on how to crack down on spam.
Life is not for the lazy.
This is stupid. It won't do anything against spam sent by spamming criminals who use arrays of trojaned zombies, which are the most prominent source of spam.
I thought Australian's iconic sports is forcing players to cut down on fatty food.
Got Game/Music/Movie? In NZ? Swap Them Here
It's a pity one can't tag something a dupe twice. 'Cause that would be teh funny.
But here in the US, we need to have something which actually works. The DMA (Direct Marketing Association) wrote the law - in order to guarantee opt-in wasn't a premise because they didn't believe it to be "financially viable option" translated: if we can't ensure our ability to make money, it's its a bad thing. Those who have been interviewed about the issue and have been willing to discuss it have admitted it left a long skid mark.
I can pull up the cite if someone wants it.
If spam legislation is supposed to work, why do we get more? It can't be because we don't click on the opt-out list. Those are a crock. I've seen some which do nothing more than display text files which say, "Thanks!" and an error is produced because they didn't know what they were doing with VBScript under ASP.
And for Australia everything else *is* an overseas source, so the answer is 99%. Pretty simple math.
(also...1% is a percent...not a rate...a rate would be like 1000 / spam an hour...silly news people)
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
That the description read like this:
"Internet news providers could face huge fines if they do not provide dupe filtering or impose editor quality limits under new rules set down by a community watchdog"
I wonder if we can rally the government to ban /. from exporting duplicate posts here...
... and then there were none
Shhhh... Wait..hear that? Yup, its the sound of tiered internet marching forward.
"Everything worth innovating today will go to court tomorrow."
I'm wondering if this would have gone ahead if Telstra was still owned by the Government. They're our biggest ISP.
The quote only really makes sense if it means that 1% of all email sent in Australia is spam, not that 1% of spam is Australian.
It's so badly worded it could mean anything though...
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
(I previously posted this on zdnet.com.au)
What I don't understand is section 8.1: "ISPs directly responsible for the allocation of IP addresses to their subscribers (eg, all of them) will use all reasonable efforts to retain information pertaining to those allocations for a minimum period of seven days."
Can someone tell me what this has got to do with spam? Isn't this just a case of our privacy being thrown out the window but disguising it within a "spam act"?
7 days is a bit of a joke.. what this means in reality is that ISP's will now have to store your account name, IP address and logon-logoff times in a db. Sounds to me like law enforcement want more evidence available for either prosecution or spying.
Now, 1,000 messages a day should far exceed the needs of 99% of the legitimate home users out there.
The problem with rate limits is that there are a few people who will have a legitimate need to send more than 1,000 messages a day, every day.
And the ISP costs go up once any of their tech support people have to answer a phone because your joke of the day list is being blocked after 1,000 sendings.
There's no easy way around this. Somewhere, someone is going to have to pay money to start solving this problem.
can manage to mangle even the best of intentions. I fail to see how this can stop someone from sending scads of spam through an ISP based outside .au. I do, however, see how this places a burden on ISPs and on legitimate mailing list managers.
My feeling is that until some agency, like the WTO, can arbitrate spam investigation and fine enforcement on an international level, there will be no significant progress. If, however, my ISP can track a batch of spam back to an ISP in, say, Singapore and can file a complaint with the WTO and actually get enforcement within a year, then there will be progress.
In the current climate of lip service to international obligations, without any real committment from any nation, I do not feel hopeful. Instead, this patchwork of half-baked laws will just make international network management more expensive and less functional.
WARNING: Smoking this sig may cause lowered IQ, insanity or short term memory loss. It is also really bad for your monit
I don't know about you, but here's what I want:
#1. No one sending me ads if I haven't, personally, given you my email address.
#2. When I opt out, you drop me from all further ads and "informational" mailings. You only send me my invoice and my shipping notification.
#3. You send me, once a month/quarter/year, a notification that I am on your list so that I may change my address or opt out at that point. This is very helpful if I am an email admin and I'm trying to be nice and opt-out people who are no longer at the company.
Now, what the advertisers want is:
A. A list of people that they can send ads to, cheaper than snail mail.
B. See A.
So, looking at it in that fashion, you can see why there is a problem.
If the legitimate retailers would just start behaving like legitimate retailers, a big chunk of the spam problem would vanish. But they won't.
I'm really beginning to dislike Australia. I keep hearing about more and more laws that restrict the behavior of individuals and businesses--even more so than I hear about here in the US.
Not trolling. Honest! I even left out a potentially inflaming sentence.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
The Prime Minister, John Howard, used spam provided by his son's company in the last election campaign. Unsoliticated email was sent containing Liberal Party election material to voters.
3 89.htm
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200408/s1186
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0x00
Can they recover in time for 2010?
e risk_on_popup_moguls_gold.html
http://spamkings.oreilly.com/archives/2006/02/ast
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
Telstra already has spam filtering and so do most of the big Australian ISP's AFAIK.
This is just more pointless legislation and if it's going to hurt any ISP's it won't be Telstra, it'll be the small regional ones that will now face additional costs in order to comply.
Which countries are not crazy like Amercia, Australia, China, etc.?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
just sayin'
I thought it was called Vegemite in Australia.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
All this does is shift the cost onto the ISPs who are at the receiving end. This is exactly what the spammers do, and why spam is theft.
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling
Bad subject title. For a moment I thought the Australian footy league had, er, taken a stand (heheh) against junk email for some reason.
"But under the new code, ISPs will have to offer spam filtering options to subscribers and provide a system of handling complaints. They will also have to impose reasonable limits on the rate at which subscribers can send email."
Can't the market work out the first part? If people want SPAM blocking, then ISPs will provide it, possibly for a fee if it's expensive to provide or only some customers want it. The only need for government-imposed features is when ISPs aren't working to prevent outgoing SPAM (and even then, other peers could just cut them out of the network).
Spam filtering Server side. Moving to a junk folder is verry effective.
Reason Bot spaming is not that smart. I really do mean not that smart.
I have 3 email accounts I use as spam scanners. If the email contents matchs exactly to all 3 emails accounts 100 percent of the time is SPAM.
If 2 accounts match its over 90 percent. Only thing that really need to be allowed is mailing lists that people list themselfs on. These also don't change there email addresses for sending.
Simple set of rules. Same contents different source email address SPAM. That is 80 percent of current dead in water. Home user cannot do this why not enough email address to create the filter.
People forwarding a funny email is the only thing that could be caught but a humans can work around it.
Hmm a Funny email register?? Yep that would kill it. Recieve a funny email wish to forward it send to to the register on the forward. Comerical could try doing it to but if spoted all email not recieved yet will not make it.
Cheers,
Ian
Spam thats a funny name mate, I would have called it a chazwazza!
"I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google"
owning my own domain allows me an infinite number of email addresses, i use a unique one for every company i contact
:-(
I'm emigrating from UK to Oz in october
I recently contacted the http://www.immigration.com.au/ with the online form for details about meet and greet, the contact email addy I used was immigration@mydomain
less than two weeks later i'm being hammered with spam to that email address
worryingly though, at least one of the spams has addressed me by name, I can only assume that they could have all my postal details, and contact phone numbers, potentially worse.
so far, no response from the government
tis all and well fining ISP's, but if their own depts can't even make secure websites.
the http://www.immigration.com.au/ wit
.gov.au in it. For example: http://www.immi.gov.au/
That doesn't sound like it is a government site: it should have
bash$
Come on guys. It was only 24 hours ago that the story was on the front page!
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
you're right, sorry, thats what i get for posting in work it was http://www.immi.gov.au/ that i'd contacted, i'd quickly looked up the URL and it 'seemed' right
How about a law that requires up to date anti-virus software on everyone's computer. Granted, enforcement would be a bitch, but hear me out on this one..
:)
Judging from the customers that come through the door and the complaints, a good.. 75-80% of spam seems to originate not from one person sending out massive emails.. but rather trojan zombie computers. 300 compromised computers on a high speed connection of any kind, sending a small volume of spam mail make a significantly bigger impact than one uncompromised machine at a spammer's house sending out email.
Ok.. now you may shred this idea up
{} ------ When I think of a good sig, I'll put it here
I once saw a standard reply form for idiotic anti-spam solutions but can't find it anywhere, would somebody be so kind as to post one?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The purpose of this legislation (like most regulations) is to create monopoly protections for existing ISP's. Large existing providers will have no trouble complying, but startups will suddenly have to face new costs. I have a feeling that small competitors will end up being "reported" by "customers" and put out of business by the legal and compliance costs. Even the threat of a $10m fine and legal costs to ensure compliance will discourage potential competitors. Consumers will not only end up paying higher prices, but will come to rely on the protected ISP's (and the government) to block spam, thus slowing innovations for consumer-run spam blocking.
I'll probably get trolled for this one but.. Couldn't the government crack down on MS for security? Most of this SPAM is coming from MS zombied machines. I'm sure there is nothing they can do (nothing the US gov has done has made any difference..) Instead of forcing ISPs to try to block this, go back to the source.
I live in Australia, and 100% (I am not exaggerating) of the spam I get originates from the US. So much for the usefulness of stats.
Windows is an operating system, not a SMTP server, or a product designed to send spam.
Extrapolating from your idea: we can blame it on the manufacturers who provide the hardware that makes networks possible - that will definitely eliminate spam and all the evil things Internet 'offers' us.
But the most important thing is that even is [by a miracle] Microsoft and Windows vanish from the face of the planet - spam will stay. In other words, your solution will not solve the problem.
The saddest poem
Spam is a way to advertise a product. This means that there is some information which allows me to establish a connection to the physical entity that actually sells the thing being advertised.
Why not thoroughly read the spam-email and use the information they provide against them? For instance - if they leave their phone number, address or provide a URL, one can [actions] call that number or visit that place and fine them, press charges, 'politely ask them not to do that', and so on. In the case of the web-site, find who hosts them, ask the hosting service where payments come from, find who the payer is, goto [actions].
In other words, since we cannot eliminate the senders of the spam, we can eliminate those who pay those who send it [or create zombie networks to do the job, etc]
It might be expensive to pay these visits or fund the investigations, but in the long run it will save a lot more money [than the amount of money LOST because of spam, either for bandwidth, blocked networks, etc].
Eventually, the spammers will probably host their sites in countries that have no laws against spam, but in that case it will be much easier to ban those networks; which will lead to those states adopting the necessary laws to fight such businesses.
My question is - what makes this model not a good one? [certainly I'm not the only one with this idea; why hasn't it been tried?]
The saddest poem
I hope it's a lot better than Australian Rules Football
Don't ping my cheese with your bandwidth!
Sounds like a profitable opportunity to sell Australian ISPs drop-in servers which allow customers to choose which of a list of standard antispam options (and programs) they want run on their mailboxes. That way, the ISPs can say they've implemented antispam measures, the burden of configuration will be put on users, the spam will still not be completely stopped and the goverment can continue to ignore the problem. Everyone wins. Except the ISPs who have to buy these things. And the users whose fees will increase. But the government can pretend it's addressed the problem, and government mates can make a huge profit off selling legally-mandated, technically useless servers.
I wonder what they actually mean by "providing spam filtering"? Does that mean that they MUST provide me a workable SPAM filter? or even a non-workable one (ie: Windows software - since I don't use Windows)...
please legislate for crackup, crackhouse and crack round the ear.
How many beans make five, anyhow ?