Slashdot Mirror
Court Rules WHOIS Privacy Illegal For Spammers
Unequivocal writes "Spammers hiding behind a WHOIS privacy service have been found in violation of CAN-SPAM. It probably won't stop other spammers from hiding (what can?), but at least it adds another arrow in the legal quiver for skewering the bottom feeders. Quoting from the article: 'A recent decision by the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has determined that using WHOIS privacy on domains may be considered "material falsification" under federal law... Although the ruling does not make use of WHOIS privacy illegal, it does serve as a clear message from the court that coupling the use of privacy services with intentional spamming will likely result in a violation of the CAN-SPAM act. This is an important decision that members of the domain community should refer to prior to utilizing a privacy shield.'"
Ingredients for SPAM still can legally remain hidden
Who is? What can?
Indeed. These questions have been around since time immemorial.
But when will?
A spammer's entire business plan can be summed up a "material falsification", can't it?
Spam is ultimately an economic problem. As long as spam remains highly profitiable spamming will continue. To deal with the spam problem we need to take a multi-faceted approach that includes a variety of both economic and other attacks. Stricter punishments for spamming, punishment for ISPs that are particularly bad, better education of people who answer spam, better use of whitelists, blacklists and greylists are all techniques that can help. Every technique has problems. Hence the standard Slashdot response with the checkboxes. However, although each has flaws, together they can be very effective. In that regard, this is sort of like cancer. Cancer is a very complicated diseases. However, by careful application of multiple medical techniques (radiation, surgery and chemotherapy being big ones) we've substantially cut down on cancer deaths. Sure, cancer still kills. But many forms are far less deadly. Childhood leukemia was a death sentence 40 years ago and now has a high survival rate. We need the same sort of combined approach to spam. This won't eradicate spam. But it will reduce it to more manageable levels.
WHOIS privacy was created in the first place to protect us from spammers (the WHOIS database being ripe for email address scraping). Then the spammers took advantage of it to protect themselves from justice.
It seems like there's some kind of insightful point to be made here, but I'm not sure what it is.
So is Tim Burd breaking the law? (warning: credit card scam site)
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The Natural Right to Freedom of Speech is needed precisely for unpopular speech such as "spam" and even "kiddy porn" - a canary in the coal mine for more egregious government assaults on your freedoms!
It is your responsibility to decide what means you use to communicate with other people, and if you choose to use a ridiculously poorly designed protocol like e-mail then it is your (or your e-mail hosting provider's) responsibility to control who connects to your mail servers and how messages are to be accepted or rejected. There are many better technological solutions out there, and the CAN SPAM bull will only help proliferate the bad technologies at the expense of the good, while also hurting legitimate communication needs, and resulting in a corrupt and inefficient bureaucratic cesspool that will cost tax-victims billions!
Getting the government involved is the very worst thing you can do, and it has horrifying consequences down the road - spam today, other unpopular speech tomorrow, total tyrannical thought control the day after that!
Couldn't the WHOIS service, by hosting spammers, be held liable for criminal conspiracy or aiding and abetting?
Or at least investigated to determine if they were knowingly protecting spammers under one or both of those charges?
Question everything
I don't think the 9th circuit will ever take spam back, if the only penalty is loss of money. Now, add the death penalty to SPAMming and maybe they'll think twice.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
Ain't it like anoder false flag?
I mean what new civil rights are getting sucked up?
Do I get this right? Forced WHOIS exposure?
What if you paid for privacy, and got hacked?
Could it be to shut down good people also?
my official opinion: I hate spam too, I think blacklists are the way but anyway...heh we're on the road to hell now..
So what we're doing is eschewing personal privacy in exchange for... corporate privacy? It used to be years ago, I could setup a web server on a xDSL line from home and run a small business off of that. Of course, few people want to post their cell phone number (often their only number) online, or any other method of direct contact. Amongst other things, that would invite spam. So along come these anonymization services so we can have an online presence without giving up our privacy -- and now that's been declared illegal? So domains owned by individuals or sole-proprietorships are screwed, but corporations have little to worry about: They can just assign some random techie to be the contact for their domain.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
But my understanding is that this is being set up as a violation of the CANSPAM act, not as a new law.
So privatized whois is still perfectly legal, unless you are using it to hide the owner of a spamming operation.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
The court proposes a
( ) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. The idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to this particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, the plan fails to account for:
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to this are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about them:
(X) Sorry dudes, but I don't think this will work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and they're a stupid people for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0les! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your houses down!
I am officially gone from
The court's decision:
The cited part of the law:
I'm afraid, some day this may be applied to people, who have nothing to do with actual spam...
Does not anybody see parallels with terrorism here?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Spam is ultimately an economic problem. As long as spam remains highly profitiable spamming will continue.
I won't assume this to mean a 'silent approval' for spamming, but it does sound you take this as a given. IMHO that is not true. There are other reasons why spam remains a problem:
Basically, a combination of technical, political and legal reasons, beside the economic ones. Spam continues because the parties profiting from it aren't held accountable.
Whats the point? - spammers use fake names and addresses anyway
I swear that whenever I take the time to back track any SPAM messages I get, and I don't mean all the Viagra ads, but the ones that I get from a subject that I might have interest in but I know I never did business with them or requested anything from them. They are hiding out at GoDaddy. Most don't have the unsubcribe link, most just don't work. I have only come across ONE company that did anything about an emailing I got and that was Google. Typical online marketing email saying you can make tens of thousands of dollars doing nothing per month. Just buy their $97 advertising "secrets" and you will have a mansion and a Ferrari in months. I complained to Google since the email didn't have an unsubsribe link or removal link. They must have done something or sent them something because I got another email asking me why I turned them in and that they weren't SPAM. I politely told them they were whack and have since blocked their domains and emails at my web hosting level. When I try this with GoDaddy. I either get nothing in reply or a canned email from GoDaddy stating they don't get inbetween a business and it's customers about money owed or services not renedered. WHAT? I tell them they have a violation of their own User Agreement and they spew back nonsense. Why would they want to do anything or cut off anything that is making them money? We need to have more control given back to the normal person, and heck I have a small company and even going through that I can't get ISP or Registrars to do anything worth while. If you aren't making THEM a lot of money, you just simply don't matter.
This is US vs. Kilbride, decided last October. It apparently took Sedo a few months to notice.
It's actually a porno spam case left over from the Bush Administration. It's not like the Justice Department was doing anything effective about spam in general.
from the evolution of animals and plants to the evolution of laws and ideologies and technologies governing modern societies, is:
life is an arms race
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Take away their ability to use credit cards - problem goes away. Am I the only one who sees this?
Stay tuned for new sig...
In libertarian la-la land, there is one freedom: to do whatever the hell I want without interference. But freedom isn't that cut and dried. My right to swing my fist ends at your face. Even on my property, I don't have the right to scream at the top of my lungs at 4 in the morning, because that impacts your freedoms.
Freedom isn't a simple thing. It isn't defined by imaginary and arbitrary natural rights. It is agreed upon and upheld by civilized people. For every freedom gained, there is a corresponding freedom lost, and so it is up to the group to decide what freedoms they are willing to trade for other more important freedoms. I, for instance, am willing to trade the freedom to scream at the top of my lungs at 4am, for the freedom to get a peaceful nights sleep.
And I don't give a rat's ass what YOU think your 'natural rights' entitle you to. Come into my neighborhood and start bellowing at 4am, and you will get a visit from the police, who will force you to stop, to protect my freedom. And THAT is as it should be, amongst civilized people.
Libertarians are akin to preschoolers, in that their idea of freedom is 'yer not the boss of me!' Well, the fact is that if you want to live in civilization, you have to let other people be the boss of you. If you don't like it, there is plenty of desolate wilderness where you can go be as free as you like, by yourself. But you DO NOT get to insert yourself into other people's lives and impose on them, claiming that if they try to stop you they are limiting your freedom. No, YOU are limiting THEIR freedom, and there are more of them than of you, so what they say goes. If you don't like it, well, there's always that lovely wilderness where you can be as free as you like without imposing on others.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Thanks to this court's ruling, use of a Whois privacy cloak will now be classified as "Material Falsification" when it suits them. So, when they come for you and your conspiracy theorist website that they deem too liberal/conservative they'll now have one more charge to throw onto the litany of drummed up offenses that you have perpetrated.
Well, he must be guilty, look at all the charges that they brought against him.
I don't like it at all. According to CAN-SPAM sending spam is illegal, why is this needed? It's just piling on and opening up more opportunities for abuse.
I've never understood why people think that making something illegal, somehow more illegal will have any effect on the crime. The act is already classified. There is no need for additional classification. Once it has been classified, only enforcement is necessary.
You argue that spamming is free expression. It is not. It is using my equipment in a way I do not condone. Your argument is akin to saying that wearing revealing clothing excuses rape, or having a faulty lock exonerates the thief. It is nonsensical.
No, natural rights do not exist like the laws of physics. They are, firstly, emergent phenomenon, dependent on SOCIETY, not the individual. This is because an individual has no rights. Individuals have what are known as abilities or capacities. Without society, and social contracts, there are no rights, only power.
It has not been demonstrated that fail to punish arbitrary murder fail. Citation definitely needed! The same applies to all other rights. You are simply making assertions that are not backed up by fact.
You have the power to kill others, but government limits that right in order to protect a right that people agree is more important. The ability to live is not inherently more or less natural than the ability to kill. It is only because people agree that being killed is rather more pleasant than the freedom to kill that we have the right to life.
You seem to want some kind of moral certainty. Some kind of solid ground on which to build the foundation of your morality. Sorry, there is no such thing. Or rather, even if there is we can not prove or disprove it, and even if we could, we could not get everyone to agree, and THAT is what rights are about: we all agree to uphold them, or they are worthless verbiage.
What you call government force, I call freedom of association and contract. You seem to be arguing that people can not come together and form agreements, then uphold those agreements through force if necessary. That is ALL that government is. Limiting what government can do is exactly the same thing as limiting what groups of people can do, and limiting groups of people is exactly the same as limiting individuals. Now, I've already stated that it is okay to limit what individuals can do, but it is then nonsensical to claim that limiting groups of freely associating individuals is any different than limiting individual freedoms.
And thus, we arrive at the logical contradiction inherent in libertarianism. Maybe you should educate yourself a little more about other, more viable and realistic forms of Anarchism. Libertarianism is preschool anarchy.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
My toilet runs GNU/Turd, you insensitive clod!
... many spamvertised, spamvertising, and spamming-affiliated domains are registered through registrars overseas. And those overseas registrars (those who actually put something into the WHOIS fields) will either provide WHOIS obfuscation services to their customers, or it will be provided through another overseas company. In the end, we can legislate this all we want, it won't mean squat to the spammers in other countries.
That said, there are likely other reasons why this is useless; this was just the first one that came to mind for me about 1x10^-3 seconds after I read the headline. It is a shame that the judge who passed down this judgement was not knowledgeable enough to know the same.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Let me make an analogy that I hope is a bit more clear, and illustrate that, under your definition of natural rights, spam presents a conflict.
You believe in the freedom to own property, yes? And the freedom of speech. Well, what if I were to scratch 'screw you!' into your car? Which freedom wins out, my freedom of expression, our your freedom to control your own property? Spam is a form of property vandalism, even if it is a form of free expression. And my right to control my property trumps your right to express yourself.
You seem to be arguing the opposite, so, please let us know where you park your car so we can come exercise our freedom of expression on it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
That's unlikely. There's no such thing as unlimited free speech. You can't lie in a courtroom and claim free speech. That's perjury. You can't yell fire in a movie theater when there is no fire. That puts people's lives in danger. The speech of spammers is not covered by free speech laws because it is harrassment (constantly bombing someone with unsolicited messages they can't opt out of would be considered harrassment by probably any jury of the spammers peers) and fraud, because spam is almost always for fake viagra or something of the like. Both of those are not protected forms of speech.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Spam is ultimately an economic problem
Have you been reading my journal articles? Not to mock you for being late to the party, but I've been discussing that for a while; I brought it up a few months ago as well.
Unfortunately I think you miss the boat:
Stricter punishments for spamming, punishment for ISPs that are particularly bad, better education of people who answer spam, better use of whitelists, blacklists and greylists are all techniques that can help. Every technique has problems. Hence the standard Slashdot response with the checkboxes. However, although each has flaws, together they can be very effective
Because ultimately none of those approaches actually address the economic issue that you and I both acknowledge. Simply inconveniencing the spammer won't accomplish much of anything; they will just send more spam. You'd be just as well off to advocate for their execution.
As I've said before, if you want to stop spam you need to stop the money from flowing. Cut off the spammers from the companies that they pay money to. Crack down on the registrars with some meaningful ICANN policies and watch the spam whither. If they can't do business, they won't make money and they'll find something else to do. Spammers are reliant on networks of DNS servers, registrars, ISPs, etc... Throw a wrench into that machinery and you could accomplish something towards brining it down.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
If I see a domain with an anonymous whois record and a recent registration, it's almost always a spammer. Doubly so if it's an obviously idiotic domain name like mx3.golfmoreholiday.info. Seriously, these things are impossible to miss, like a crushed thumb. It must be hard work coming up with dumb domain names to mechanically register, nonstop, day in and day out.
Of course a gmail address in the whois record is just as good an indicator as an anonymous whois record, so this court decision doesn't bother me.
You claim there is a clear difference between sending an email and damaging someone's property. Okay, but that's beside the point, This is about control over your property. Do you believe you should have it, by right?
If I put up a sign saying, 'no solicitation, no trespassing' and you come into my yard, you are breaking the law, yes? You will face prosecution, because you have usurped my right to control my property.
Now, If my policy on my mail server is 'no commercial emails,' and you send me a commercial email, you are abusing my property and breaking the law. You face prosecution.
Yet you seem to think that you should not face prosecution for using my property against my wishes. Sorry, but this case is cut and dried. Your right to free speech does not trump my right to control my own property.
As for karma, yours will not drop through the floor for having a deep philosophical discussion. It might if you keep advocating for spammers' rights, but it shouldn't. Slashdot moderation seems to be a refuge of reactionaries of all stripes. It was not always this way...
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I wonder, how long until spam joins communism, terrorism and drugs as The Enemy that must be stopped no matter the cost. I've got nothing against stopping spam per se, but if somebody starts putting together anti-privacy laws on the basis that "only spammers have something to hide", it's really going to suck on so many fronts. Think about it; how many perfectly reasonable anti-terrorism measures are dismissed as superfluous and ridiculous by association with such measures as confiscating of water bottles, knitting needles, and T-shirts with the word "Terrorist" on them?
A decade or more ago, "Libertarianism vs. Socialism" was the default discussion sink that all internet discussions eventually fell into.
But "Spam" has now replaced that - stick with the program.
Unless, of course, you were just coming here for abuse, in which case we can dredge up plenty of it for you :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The original purpose of whois was to provide contact info so that you can reach a domain administrator if their DNS is broken or there was a problem with their bill. The ICANN folks have tried to make it much more than that, because the "IP" that they care about is "Intellectual Property", in particular protecting trademark owners from people who might infringe on them. Providing a contact service that's more reliable (or less reliable) than "Admin Contact, example-dot-com-admin@hotmail.com" doesn't assert anything in particular about ownership or liability.
Of course, if the registrar's ripping off their customers by providing administrative access for a domain that the registrar rented instead of providing the domain that the buyer thought they were buying, that can be a problem and using the registrar's privacy service makes it harder to prove that your side of the story is the correct one, but you knew the job was dangerous when you took it.
And of course, even complete correct ICBM-capable subpoena-capable True Names And Addresses, which is what the ICANN/WIPO types wanted whois information to be, doesn't always guarantee anything useful. I once tracked a spammer's registration info and found that they were a basic Delaware Corporation, so their assets may be no more than a couple sheets of paper in a file drawer in Greenville and the domain name, and that doesn't let you find or punish the miscreants behind the spamming.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
How come you are so fucking stupid?
How come you are SO fucking stupid?
How come YOU are so fucking stupid?
How much faster would my internet access get if all spam were to cease?