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Virginia Supreme Court Strikes Down Anti-Spam Law
Skater writes "The Washington Post is reporting that the Virginia Supreme Court has struck down the anti-spam law that was used to convict spammer Jeremy James, on the grounds that the ability to be anonymous was more important than the problem of spam. Strangely, the same court only a few months ago upheld the law. 'The court noted that "were the 'Federalist Papers' just being published today via e-mail, that transmission by Publius would violate the [current Virginia] statute." The court suggested that the law does not limit its restrictions on spam to commercial or fraudulent e-mail, or to unprotected speech such as pornography or defamation. And when the state suggested that the court merely tailor a restriction to the law within its opinion, the court declined.'"
If 'Publius' spammed my inbox with the Federalist Papers I'd want the asshole's account yanked as much as the latest grow yer tool spam. Spam is unsolicited broadcast mail, period. Zero tolerance.
The correct way to publish would be for Hamilton & friends to open a blog under the Publius pseudonym.
Democrat delenda est
I like it fried in Raman pride noodles.
If Publius sent the Federalist Papers via email to hundreds of thousands of people, it would BE spam. The Federalist papers were items that people VOLUNTARILY sought out - they weren't shoved into everyones mailboxes and under their door thresholds. If they were, they would have been ignored and thrown away just like junk mail is today.
Political freedom of expression is protected; what isn't protected is having ANYTHING shoved down my throat using my own resources.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Because if you are really anonymous, nobody will know you exist and therefore they can't send you spam. Problem solved!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
No. That is wrong. You can be anonymous without spoofing IP addresses or faking domain names.
Correct your usage of "anonymous" first and then I might agree with you.
Bullshit. You still don't understand "anonymous".
And here we get to a fundamental question about what we want the Net to be. The court was entirely right to balk at deciding this for us.
We can have the right to communicate anonymously over the Net. Or we can have the right not to be contacted by anonymous people. We can't have both.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Wait - so the legal system will respect the anonymity of spammers, but not anonymity of ordinary citizens(given the numerous privacy-violating "evidence" collections by unlicensed *AA thugs/gov't agencies/etc.)?
Disheartening.
Couldn't even be bothered to read the summary, could you?
So the law just needs to be rewritten so as to tackle things which are basically not free speech because they are fraud. I think the judge missed out a little on the analogy though because if people "subscribed" to the Federalist Papers then they wouldn't be spam even though they were published anonymously.
It is illegal to sell prescription drug without a prescription. Its also illegal to offer drugs to children in most states. Everyone here needs to call their country District attorney and ask them what they are doing about peddling drugs over the internet. It almost election time and some of them are trying to get elected as a state DA so now is the time to get on their case.
The court is right about one thing: the law is too vague. Fix the law, and then there will be no problem with the courts.
but your right to spam everyone with it?!
First Ammendment in action?
Spam is the ideal litmus test for where someone stands on the rights of free speech. It's almost universally objectionable, never warranted, and offensive to just about everyone.
Yet I'm not sure if there's anyone in the ./ crowd who will stick to their free speech principles when such principles inconvenience them personally. Is there anyone here who, upon receiving spam, remarks to themselves, "Ah, yes, free speech is not dead. I'm glad that - although I personally could care less about replica watches or increasing the size of my body parts - that somewhere, someone out there is free to send such materials to my inbox. USA! USA! USA!"
Because it stands to reason that if spammers have no right to send anonymous messages, then neither do you or I. While a lot of people may not like this particular consequence of free speech, it's far more dangerous to do away with the legal protections for anonymous speech.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
What part of that concerns sending a million unsolicited \/1agr4 messages?
In your world, is it considered okay to use hire a dozen people with bullhorns to spew political rhetoric around someone's house at midnight?
No?
OMG! They're taking away FReedom of SPEech!!!111
No one said that he could not publish whatever he wants.
The problem is his DELIVERY of it to people who do NOT want it.
The rest of the posts missed this entirely. The court was right here too...
And when the state suggested that the court merely tailor a restriction to the law within its opinion, the court declined.
Courts more or less interpret laws and process law breakers. Changes in the law are supposed to come from legislation, not the bench.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
No, the check cleared. That's all.
I need to quit talking to myself...
Imagine if spammers sent you hundreds of text messages to your cell phone every day. Imagine you do not have unlimited text messaging. Lets say each message costs you $0.10 or so. People would be up in arms (hence why we don't see spammers doing this).
Your free speech ends where my money begins. Using my bandwidth and my energy costs me money, you have no freedom of speech there, it's not a public resource.
Yeah, you're telling me.
No, it's job security.
Shut up! Both of me!
Is this true? What exempts it?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Why? They just ignore it, use hidden caller id, and play you a recorded message.
If you "press 1" to ask for more information (like "who the HELL ARE YOU?" so you can file an FTC complaint) you've just opted in. If you "press 9" to "opt out", you haven't, but you still don't have either a name or a number so you can't file a complaint.
I get regular calls from "credit service" or something like that, talking about this being the last day to take advantage of some offer that will "lower my rates". (I pay in full each month, I don't really care what my rates are.) When I ask who they are, they hang up. When I press 9 to opt out, I can swear I hear chuckling in the background.
Today I got the same kind of call from Dish Network. They had a caller id number. They used the company name. I reported it faster than you can say "do not call."
As for the poster who claimed that spam doesn't physically harm him, I'll point out this tiny detail. Network access via T-Mobile 3G networks costs $15/Mb (I think it was) for US subscribers while in Germany. That spam message being downloaded costs me money, which I would have been able to spend on food. That's causing physical harm.
That or drag the motherfuckers into the streets and shoot them.
Stone. The victims ought to have a bit more fun than just one or two shots ending the pain. Maybe if you said "shoot them in the extremities, progressively moving toward the heart" I'd agree, but the next scum would get the sentence overturned because has no heart.
Spoof your domain name/IP address to send soliciting emails - ?
Fail to identify yourself in any meaningful way when sending soliciting mail - perfectly legal.
So - in terms of our ability to cope with technology - our mastery of the internet as a society is somewhere between our understanding of postal mail and the telephone.
Sorry - I know there's a joke in there somewhere, but I'm running on empty. Write your own joke.
Well apparently we are (or at least I am) trolls for distrusting our governments and wishing they'd extend us the same rights corporations seem to enjoy.
Maybe it's the part about shooting them. Anyone who thinks spammers deserve compassion is a fool, as the spammers would shoot any one of us in the face themselves if it earned them a nickel.
The court did the right thing.
I submitted an article back in May about this case.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/02/1910219
The court's decision is here in pdf:
http://www.courts.state.va.us/opinions/opnscvwp/1062388.pdf
Spam is bad - personally I use gmail and rarely see spam. But it's hard to write a statute that bans spam and doesn't ban slashdot and the internet in general.
Most of the anti-spam statutes out there are unconstitutional. Yay Va. Off to read the opinion.
above post is informative, flamebait.
Is the Court truely so clueless ("were the 'Federalist Papers' just being published today via e-mail, that transmission by Publius would violate the [current Virginia] statute.")?
The Federalist Papers were never forced upon unwanting recipients who had to pay for their receipt, they were made available to those who wanted to read them. There was choice involved.
The Federalist Papers were originally published in newspapers, so there's absolutely no parallel to spam. In modern terms, it would be a better comparison to blogs or websites. That can be done anonymously.
Big FAIL for the Court.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
So wait, I can send mail anonymously to random people that is commercial in nature. Yet I can't break DRM to play some video files in Linux or OS X, nor make backups. Not to mention that I can't download copyrighted stuff even for non profit use.
So much for Government for the people and by the people.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
doesn't mean that you can force your speech upon me. That's what spam does. Even if it's non-commercial, you have no right to send me anonymous email, unless I've specifically said or implied I want such - such as by "opting in" to a list server or publishing my email address on a website with an open invitation to send me email.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The First Amendment protects everybody--including spammers.
If I thought our republic was in danger, I'd spam everybody in an attempt to rouse them to protect it. That would be core protected First Amendment political speech. The GOVERNMENT should not be able to stop me--especially since I'd probably be rousing people to oust incumbents. To those who would authorize my government to shut such speech down, I despise what they say, but I would defend their right to say it with my life. But enough of that, I'd only be spamming such idiots out of necessity.
If spam that is core-protected First Amendment speech can be shut down by the government simply because it is shipped out anonymously and in bulk, then something is WAY wrong because the baby (important political speech) is being thrown out with the bathwater (vile spam). Political speech is too important to be trusted to the discretion of our elected officials.
This doesn't preclude laws prohibiting spamming in violation of a "do not spam" list. It doesn't preclude laws barring fraudulent or misleading spamming. It also doesn't prohibit private servers from refusing to store or deliver spam.
Telemarketers, bulk mail distributors, and spammers, suck. But deal with them lawfully--there are legal tools available.
Their First Amendment protection is YOUR First Amendment protection.
You may need a login to read this Washington Post article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/18/AR2008081802046.html
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
There's certainly nothing in the text of the First Amendment that limits commercial speech. Any "allowance for the limitation of commercial speech," pornography, or anything else, is an invention of later ("activist") courts.
However, spam is not speech. Spam is sending hordes of bums through every neighborhood in town, nailing copies of the Federalist papers to my front door at 3 o'clock in the morning. The merit of the content being nailed to my door is not the least bit germane. The fact that my property is being abused is all that should be needed to put assholes like James away.
Hah. You've got a good point there. Why waste resources getting a law repealed when it's so easy to bypass?
As for your spammer punishment, well, are you planning on running for elected office at any point in time? I would be happy to distribute literature with your message of freedom and glorious retribution.
In Scientific Journals terminology, it is called "Personal Communication" ...
Why is this not seen the same as cellphone spam(telemarketers)?
They cannot legally call, because it would incur a cost to the individual. Given bandwidth caps, each and every spam email takes a bite out of my monthly payment to my ISP.
Anonymous or not, we pay directly out of our pockets to get this crap.
And if some 'spam' caused me to go over my monthly cap (slower service or extra payments), someone gets a kneecapping. Followed by a trial.
For they are legion. And legal.
---- Liquid was a patriot ----
Ok, so if this ass gets away with spam because of this ruling, isn't he potentially still guilty of committing wire fraud? If not for the false crap he was pitching, then because he allegedly forged IP and email addresses?
Why is parent modded 'troll'? His post is on-topic, and makes a important distinction in the last line. Ok, maybe the 'OMG' line is a tad sarcastic, but he is making a point.
Someone please mod him back up.
Why do you believe that it is the only method?
You can nail it to a telephone pole.
You can print it and leave it at bus stops.
People have even nailed things to church doors.
What is it about this subject that makes people turn off their brains?
That's just wrong. Email is NOT publishing. Comparing email to publishing the Federalist Papers is the kind of argument one would expect from a high school debater.
Proverbs 21:19
I'd throw in a first post, but it would just be spam!
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
First Amendment expert Eugene Volokh has a post on this decision over at the Volokh Conspiracy.
This doesn't preclude laws prohibiting spamming in violation of a "do not spam" list. It doesn't preclude laws barring fraudulent or misleading spamming. It also doesn't prohibit private servers from refusing to store or deliver spam.
Telemarketers, bulk mail distributors, and spammers, suck. But deal with them lawfully--there are legal tools available.
Their First Amendment protection is YOUR First Amendment protection.
You have the absolute right to say anything you please. You do not have the right to force me to listen to it. Nor pay for the 'privilege'.
"Volume" as in "number of messages".
Which gets back to my other post. It's not "anonymous" when it is "fraudulent". We can protect anonymity but we should be punishing fraud.
If you're sending email to a spamtrap, it's spam.
If you're sending email to a dozen or so individuals who you have PERSONALLY selected based upon some criteria other than you have their email address, then it is probably allowable under "anonymous".
100,000 messages ... fake domains ... spoofed IP addresses ... I don't care what you're sending, it's spam.
Publius wasn't anonymous. He was only anonymous to THOSE WHO DID NOT KNOW WHO HE WAS.
Someone had to print and distribute the articles Publius wrote.
There is no innate right to be anonymous and carry out vandalism and other crimes. There is an innate right to free speech which should be sufficient to prevent someone from seeking your identity if you are not otherwise committing a crime.
It's easy to ban spam. Just define it without regard to the anonymity issue. I don't want spam from spammers I can identify any more than from anonymous spammers.
Actually, to really make your point, you should send out spam with the judges' return address, and the judges' phone number for accepting orders for the Viagra that you're selling. The decision doesn't merely uphold a right to spam; it upholds the right to spam and make it look like someone else sent it.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It was about time something like this happened. I've tried all the penis enlargement methods I've received in my email until now and nothing worked. I really can't wait to try new stuff because these guys have run out of ideas.
i thought it was 'intrapersonal communication'.
I don't understand the point of a law prohibiting forged headers. DomainKeys/DKIM is a perfectly good technological solution to the problem of forged headers. Yahoo and Gmail both sign their outgoing mail with DK, and within the last few months Yahoo has gotten very aggressive about dropping incoming mail into the bitbucket if it doesn't have a DK signature and isn't coming from a domain that's on their whitelist. People running email servers are just going to have to bite the bullet and implement DK, unless they don't mind not having their users be able to send mail to Yahoo accounts.
But even though DK is rapidly bringing us to the point where forged headers are a thing of the past, that won't do a darn thing to end spam. Spammers can just open an account on Gmail, which is rapidly becoming the world'd biggest wellspring of both internet and usenet spam. The real benefit of DK is not that it ends spam, but that it saves organizations that sign their outgoing mail with DK from being blamed for spam that claims to be from them, but isn't.
So given that forged headers aren't the main problem, and forged headers can be fixed without legislation, I think the bar should be set very high for anyone proposing a legislative attack on forged headers. (But it does seem goofy to me to strike down such a law on free speech grounds. When spammers send me spam, they're using my resources without my permission. That's like putting their soapbox on my lawn instead of on the lawn in front of city hall.)
Find free books.
And to some degree it was dangerously vague. It is not a straw man to be concerned about laws barring anonymity. Plenty of high-level computer policy people have wanted to ban anonymous posting for reasons having nothing to do with spam, or with the cost of transmitting the messages in question. If the reason anonymity were restricted were because of spurious claims anonymous posting helps terrorists, or because politicians didn't like being criticized anonymously, I doubt many here would be defending the law.
Virginia has recently tended to be the kind of place that such technocratic prescriptions, which combine right-wing goals with decidedly non-libertarian means (see also UCITA), take root in the legislature, and I'm glad the court rooted them out.
Another thing to note is that Virginia is not a "blue pencil" state. Contracts in VA cannot be modified by the courts unless there is a clear severability provision which describes what the basic bargaining units of the contract are. Part of the reason for this is that it is for the people who have made the contract, not the court, to decide how the value in the contract balances out when line items are changed. Thus the rule is "when in doubt, throw it out". Whether or not this is the right approach, many states around the country do it this way (and many also don't). This is a law, not a contract, but it is consistent with the "no blue pencil" doctrine for the court to just throw the whole law back to the legislature to fix it rather than trying to rewrite it.
By the way, I'm not a lawyer, I only play one on Slashdot.
No, it doesn't. It upholds the right to send out certain bulk emails anonymously. The legislature wrote a law which prohibited that, along with a whole bunch of other things that perhaps could be permissibly prohibited, but since the law also prohibited things which were a matter of free speech, it was found to be overbroad. The judges also decided it was not within their scope to try to strike down the law only in cases where it was in conflict with the First Amendment (in effect re-writing the law), saying that writing the law properly was the legislature's job.
personally, i think spam should be outlawed, but i think you'll have a hard time arguing that spam is any more damaging to your property than other types of unsolicited e-mails. how would you show that spam 'abuses your property'? what property is it abusing?
it seems to me that the most obvious way of to outlaw spam is to treat it the same way as auto-dialers, which are a public nuisance. though the defense may argue that e-mails do not cause a direct disruption the same way a phone call does, as it's more akin to junk mail.
but either way it's a public nuisance and businesses who employ such marketing/advertising practices should be punished. it's easier to go after businesses who hire spammers than the spammers themselves. and if there's no one left willing to hire spammers then the problem will go away on its own.
i think you'll have a hard time arguing that spam is any more damaging to your property than other types of unsolicited e-mails. how would you show that spam 'abuses your property'? what property is it abusing?
That's what spam is. Unsolicited and in large quantities.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
unsolicited can be anything that you did not solicit someone to send. i agree with you on the quantity definition. but anyone who sends you an e-mail without prior consent from you has sent you unsolicited e-mail. if all such e-mails were banned, then if someone simply contacts you even for non-commercial purposes, and you happen not to like that person, then you could accuse him of sending you "spam".
have you never contacted or been contacted by strangers over e-mail before aside from spam? i've gotten unsolicited e-mail job invitations because someone came across some work i did in a public contest. i've also been contacted by people who got my e-mail address from my online portfolio and wanted to hire me for a project. similarly, i've gotten casual e-mails from people who obtained my e-mail address one way or another. so how do these people know beforehand whether or not i'm going to consider their e-mails unsolicited, since technically all of them are?
Look, I hate spam as much as anyone else, but this conviction needed to be overturned. The law was written very poorly, and could have been interpreted to convict every "Anonymous Coward" here on /. that resides in Virginia.
This is a bad thing , just in case that's not completely obvious.
Should this guy go to jail? Yep. But first, rewrite the law to get it right. Identity theft is and should be illegal. If James sent even one e-mail that misappropriated someone else's e-mail address, then nail him on that charge. If he sent even one e-mail that advertises a business that is fraudulent, then nail him on fraud/conspiracy to commit fraud.
However, the provision in the law that prohibits sending an e-mail anonymously is not and should not be what delineates a legitimate e-mail from a bogus one. If we follow that logic, then any e-mail that doesn't include some narrow variation on first name and last name (first.last@..., firstInitialLastName@...,etc.) could be interpreted as anonymous. This is not a good thing.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Why can't email spam be modded up or down (with tags!) instead of just killfiled? Works for slashdot posts, the analogy is clear.
The point is that you ban the combination as spam; sending a handful of emails is far removed from sending millions, and there's no legitimate reason to do it.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Maybe the answer is smarter (sentient/AI?) systems that truly act as your agent.. The current filtering tools seem quite hit and miss..
They are typically 100% effective for the few hours it takes the spammers to fuzz them.
Spammers have gmail accounts, hotmail accounts, etc. etc. and whenever you put a new "sentient/AI" or any other system in place they just hammer their own accounts until something gets through, then they spam everybody with whatever technique worked.
The amount of effort required to break any anti-spam system (except a few forms of permission based, white-list style ones) will always be many orders of magnitude less than the amount of effort required to build such a system. You really can't win with a filtering strategy as long as spamming remains profitable and reasonably risk-free.
People being the way we are, we will probably continue to fail to make spamming unprofitable so we should focus on increasing the risks. I think the CEOs of corporations that harbor and enable spammer botnets should be flogged, tarred and feathered... are you listening Comcast? Rogers? Cox?
Spam requires attention and my attention is extremely valuable. I'd rather give attention to an important job offer in my inbox but first I have to sift through a dozen "legitimate looking" emails to find the right one.
Imagine if all you junk mail (the physical type) were all sent to you in envelopes from a potential employer or looked like a postcard from a friend abroad.
To me this is why spam is worse than junk mail.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
I agree with you. It's just that finer-grained tools can debilitate spammers as effectively as coarse-grained tools.
I see why the court decided as it did. But why not enact a law which applies similar penalties to unprotected commercial speech?
The problem of spam exists on the scale it does because spammers make a profit from the messages they send, and the victims pay most of the costs of processing the email. There is no US constitutional right to freedom of advertising.
So ban commercial spam, and the greater part of the problem can be tackled.
Best of all, if this slimeball carries on spamming, he can get his 9 years in jail after all.
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
Okay, how about this. Let's give the botnets out there your email addresses. Work related email addresses would be best. Then the bots can hit your email addresses with email for Viagra or penis enlargment or the good people of Nigeria can ask you for help in laundering some money for them. When the servers come crashing down from the millions of email messages then you can explain how no property is damaged.
Fine-grained tools can be thwarted. One change to the method, and it no longer applies.
The problem with spam laws is the same as the problem with drug laws - they exist because of secondary effects. Unsolicited email, itself, isn't much of a problem. When you are distributing malware to create a large botnet to send spam, that's a problem. When you are forging From: headers and someone gets a few tens of thousands of bounces from badly-configured mail servers (yes, I'm looking at you Google), then that's a problem.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The first ammendment doesn't say anything about a right to anonymous speech that invades another individual's private mailbox.
Publishing anonymous letters is VERY different.
An available venue for publishing anonymous information is a website.
Or you get someone who is willing to identify themselves as publisher to dispatch the mail without learning your identity.
As much as I detest and hate spam, I can find nothing wrong with the decision of the Virginia Supreme Court. I have actually read the decision so I do understand what is being said.
First, the statute does not ban all unauthorized use of the mail servers targeted by the defendant, thus the statute in question is not an 'anti-trespass' ordinance as the Commonwealth would claim. This point, they're correct on, and a statute written that way would essentially make ALL unsolicited e-mail sent to someone illegal unless you had prior permission, the same way you can't just cross someone's land without permission. If you post something on Slashdot or on a usenet news article, and I send you a message to ask you a question either because I liked your article or I disagreed with it, as it would stand, that sort of a message violates the statute and would conceivably be chargeable as trespass (or trespass to chattels) we made all unauthorized use of someone's mail server to either be criminal or an action which could be sued over.
Second, the statute does not differentiate between types of messages that have less (or no) protection, such as pure commercial speech, pornography or obscenity, and a message which might be offensive to others but is neither a commercial nor pornographic nor obscene.
On this point, they're correct too. While the Commonwealth is claiming it would not use the law to target non-commercial speech, there's nothing in the law that says it can't. I am thinking of the 'Jesus is Coming' spam that went out a few years ago that was sent by Clarence Thomas (no, it's someone else, not the U.S. Supreme Court Justice). I for one would go after something like that because that's also spam, however then we do have First Amendment issues.
Third, even if fixing the statute to take some e-mail out would stand muster, the court cannot rewrite the statute, that's the legislature's job. The court could conceivably strike portions of the statute to save its constitutionality, it cannot add to the statute or give it a limiting construction; that would mean the judiciary is legislating, something it isn't supposed to do.
Fourth, there's no fraud, because it didn't matter what the sender address was, the mail system would have accepted it whether it was a real address or a bogus one. Fraud requires someone to rely to their detriment on your false information
There's no way to send e-mail anonymously unless you put something false or misleading into the sender address, thus the First Amendment protection on anonymous communications is violated because it prohibits distributing mail with a false header, and that's the only way you can send anonymous mail. (If you say, 'use a remailer' then the remailer can be subpoenaed and their records checked.)
In short, the law comes up short. I don't like the idea of spam but you can't throw the (constitutional) baby out with the (spam) bathwater.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Thanks, but I plan on hiring a telemarketing firm to call up people and play recorded messages at them.
And the message will ask people to vote for my opponents.
so as long as they only send a couple thousand at a time it's alright?
i know it may sound like there's a really easy solution to this problem (well, there is, but i don't think communism would work in our current culture), but there's a lot more complexity to this issue than simply banning the sending of X number of "unsolicited" e-mails.
at the record label where i used to work, we occasionally sent out mass e-mails to various mailing lists which we managed. we run an opt-in newsletter for fans who can submit their e-mail address via a form on our homepage. we didn't actively seek out e-mail addresses or purchase e-mail lists from anyone. all newsletter subscriptions were volunteered by visitors to our site. the last time i checked, that list contained well over 10,000 e-mail addresses. and because of the size of our mailing list, we ran into problems with our web host, though we solved the problem with the web hosting support rep by sending out the e-mails in blocks of ~100 e-mails at 2-3 minute intervals.
while i can think of no reason why someone would do this, i still have to acknowledge the possibility that some of the e-mail addresses on our list could have been added by someone other than the actual owner of the e-mail address. we eventually changed the subscription system to require an e-mail confirmation to eliminate such problems, but there were still thousands of e-mail addresses dating back 5-6 years which we could not verify. in theory, anyone who doesn't want to subscribe to our newsletters can unsubscribe via the website or with a simple e-mail with "unsubscribe" in the subject line, but that still doesn't eliminate the possibility that some people still might consider our newsletters 'unsolicited'--someone may have subscribed to our newsletter originally, but then changed their mind and never bothered to unsubscribe.
beyond that, we also manage a radio list and a publicity list which we occasionally sent stuff to via e-mail or by conventional mail (things like promo CDs, press kits, touring info, etc.). these contacts are generally acquired through business contacts, other people's websites, etc. now, we assume that these people may be interested in the info we send them (and most are), but they can still be considered unsolicited e-mails nonetheless.
if you want to outlaw spam, i think you would need a clearer definition of what comprises a spam e-mail, and one which doesn't hinder legitimate business operations. unsolicited is too broad of a term, as it's just anything you don't want and didn't directly ask for. but that potentially covers the majority of legitimate e-mails as well.
they weren't shoved into everyones mailboxes and under their door thresholds. If they were, they would have been ignored and thrown away just like junk mail is today
Even if they were, they'd just be tossed on the hearth, but the cost would be largely borne by the Federalists.
You have a right to stand on the sidewalk in front of my house saying whatever you want. You don't have a right to come onto my porch, use my paper and pen, and start writing whatever you want under the guise of 'Free Speech', you're consuming my resources and causing me to incur expenses.
Just like when I get an e-mail, I pay for the bandwidth, I pay for the disk space, I pay for those electrons to excite the wires and move the drive heads. But more important than that is my time.
Mass spamming shifts the costs almost entirely to the receiver. What might cost the sender $20 can cost the receivers $200,000. That's why spam is evil.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
well, also spam usually lacks proper return addresses and is a general nuisance to e-mail servers.
i wholeheartedly agree with you that it's worst than junk mail. i mean, it's a lot easier for me to sort out junk mail from legitimate mail, partly because of their deceptive appearance as you said, but also because e-mail is cheap to send, and the internet is international. so instead of just receiving the junk mail from my local area--5 or 6 pieces a day, i'm receiving spam from all over the world--hundreds a day. so the volume is much larger.
but the problem is that judges and legislators don't see the difference between spam and junk mail. they see it as a legitimate form of commercial advertising. in reality, spam not only fills up our mailboxes, but it also pollutes search engine results and it generally makes the web/internet less useful for the public.
i think this just goes to demonstrate the huge disconnect between the people who run our government, and the information culture we live in. they have no grasp of why spam is such a big problem. and as long as it's used to promote business and fuel the economy, pro-business legislators have no problem with the headaches it causes people.
so you wouldn't mind having your inbox filled with v1agr4 and penis enlargement ads if they didn't crash mail servers?
if someone crashes a mail server with a botnet that's a DDOS attack, but that's not why spam is problematic, and that's hardly an accurate description of what constitutes spam. most spammers aren't trying to crash e-mail servers--why would they? their spam messages wouldn't get through.
There's certainly nothing in the text of the First Amendment that limits commercial speech. Any "allowance for the limitation of commercial speech," pornography, or anything else, is an invention of later ("activist") courts.
I wish people would stop saying "activist courts" or "activist judges." The first amendment has never been an absolute unassailable right there has always been exceptions for forms of speech which cause serious damage to the country at large.
The issue with spam and the reason why it's banned under law isn't the speech component, it's the other things that go along with. For instance breaking into other people's machines to use them for serving. Falsely identifying the source of the messages, refusing to stop sending them when requested. As well as the fact that most spam is also fraudulent in some fashion such as pump and dump, phishing and other forms of scamming.
The first amendment was never meant to protect all forms of communication, it does not for instance require that a paper include all letters sent it. And it doesn't guarantee the right of a person to be heard by a particular person unless that particular person wants to.
in a way that's true. i think it's also just a specific case of a more general problem, which is excessive advertising in general. but we've become so used to being bombarded with advertisements offline that legislators can't see the problem with what's basically the online extension of this problem.
the internet connects each user with millions of people from all over the world. it allows for near-instantaneous exchange/transfer of information. but the same technology that allows us to contact/reach people with ease, also allows businesses/advertisers to do the same. you can't send out a million letters or make a million telemarketing calls in a split second--and do it for pennies--off-line. so we've never had to come up with regulations to prevent such abuses.
Better yet, his home phone number. I mean if it can apply to data lines, it should apply to voice lines to, right?
Stalin would have agreed with you! Coarse-grained tools are much more effective.
Filtering spam is no problem these days, for every 500spams I might get 1 into the inbox at worse case scenario and them only false positive I have ever had as an email from Microsoft which got flagged because it was poorly coded.
The REAL problem is system resources, processing thousands and thousands of emails is expensive and if 99% of email is spam that's allot of money being spent just dealing with spam.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Voice is just a type of Data as is Text.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
yes, spam filtering allows you to ignore the problem, but the resource costs are still tremendous. spam sites are just as problematic.
the way i see it, spam e-mail, spam websites, search engine gaming (blackhat SEO), malware/botnets, and domain name squatting are all related problems arising from spammer culture.
people who lack real talents dedicate their entire lives to being internet bottom-feeders in their blind-pursuit of profit/wealth. but this parasitic mentality is a direct outgrowth of our capitalist society. if we measure the worth of an individual by the amount of money they make rather than how much they contribute to society, then there will always be these seedy opportunistic professions that, while a public nuisance, are legitimized by their commercial motivations.
our government also seems to put business interests above public good. so while security researchers are persecuted by the justice system for pointing out the weaknesses in a commercial company's product or service, businesses who hire spammers or pay malware developers are simply viewed as enterprising businesspeople. likewise, hackers who have no malicious intentions and hack into computer systems & networks purely out of curiosity and a desire for knowledge are given disproportionate jail sentences and made examples of. whereas, greed-driven spammers & malware writers that plague the internet and make the lives of everyone more difficult (and also cause significantly more harm) aren't even pursued by law-enforcement. that just encourages young hackers to become greedy spammers since you get to make money and won't get in any trouble with the law.
of course, it doesn't help that the judges & legislators in charge of forming public policy are all so out of touch with technology that they think a 'pop-up window' and 'file menus' are patentable ideas.
Well now I thought that the Virginia Court didn't really did not put much thought into this. I would be really surprised if any of the judges had an email account.
On the other hand what spam is to you or me may be acceptable to some one else (I doubt it but it is possible). While the "spam" is piling up in the bucket I truly wished that somebody would enforce the "do not call" rule breakers. I have lodged so many complaints that the FCC is getting tired of me. One of the larger abusers are the political people who disingenuously excluded themselves from the law. The politicians as usual get away with murder. Maybe it is time for a revolt and just get rid of all politicians and get in new ones.
OK, you have a low opinion of governments, I get that. However, you actually have the wrong low opinion. Politicians (y'know, the people that governments are entirely composed of) are supposed to be concerned with election prospects (and hence making sure they line their own pockets), not revenue. Why would they raise revenue when it'd get them thrown out of office?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
You can't easily filter telemarketing calls or snail mail circulars either. It's now very easy to filter 'legitimate' spam with 100% accuracy. It's only when spammers resort to committing fraud as well (spoofing headers, obfuscating the text, and so on) that it becomes difficult. Without the botnets or the spoofed headers, spam would not be a problem. Blacklists would quickly identify every subnet originating spam and block them.
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Be interesting if we could add a captcha to the SMTP conversation, server asks a mathematical formula in bc or rpn notation and client has to send an answer back. That will stop spoofed ip packets since the formula will never reach the client sending the spoofed packet and it will not be able to send the answer. Basically a simple form of IPSEC checking that humans could also use when we debug the SMTP.
Just for anti-spoofing and getting the right IP in the packet.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
Say, we all send what we think of the opinion handed out by the judges of the Virginia supreme court. Some anonymously and some not. Say, using our own words, no clickable links to russian sites. None of the spam filters used by the court would stop these emails. Now with millions of emails clogging up the inboxes of the judges, they would be finding it difficult to find legitimate emails that they need to see for their business. Do you really think they would rule the same way they did after that? I think these judges have been removed from reality and have not personally used the internet much and have a bevy of assistants and secretaries to handle their correspondence. I would not be surprised if these judges get their email printed by their assistants and submitted to them for their perusal along with regular mail. Till these old coots retire and actual people who grew up with the problem of SPAM rise to be the supreme court judges, we would get such stupid rulings.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Spam abuses my property if I'm paying for a limited amount of bandwidth per month (I.E. Australian ISPs) and it eats all of that bandwidth up.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Are you saying that you want the ISPs to monitor and filter traffic?
No, that's exactly the guaranteed-fail strategy they are pursuing.
I want them to use the Internet as designed - identify malefactors (which is trivially easy using their existing equipment) and disconnect them.
ISPs who are too retarded to figure out that this is a huge profit making opportunity (that'd be most of them) should ponder this question: How much would anti-malware vendors pay comcast to have all zombie PCs restricted to a special subnet, where the PC owners would be unable to do anything but visit designated anti-malware sites?
If comcast (for example) eliminated their malicious traffic they'd regain 80% or more of their bandwidth, and they'd have no need to filter anything else.