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Strict New Anti-Spam Regulations In Canada
An anonymous reader writes "David Reese provides an interesting analysis of just how far Canada's new anti-spam legislation goes, and its implications for business. This may provide a valuable template for citizens of other countries, and may also encourage Canadians to prepare for the inevitable push-back from spammers. It is not clear from this analysis whether the legislation would affect telemarketing, but even if it does not it provides a useful precedent for future regulation in that area."
About time, these companies that deem you to want to know about their "special offers" are a horrible blight on people who want relevant information. Too bad the U.S. government hates non-corporation people.
I live in Canada, and we still get tons of spam, telemarketing phones calls on home line and cel phone. They simply come from the USA now. Country laws are useless when crime has no more frontier.
seems they have been doing alot more right than wrong recently.
You know. The ones for political campaigning, well connected people, etc.
Every single one of these Anti-Spam laws come with them.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Any reply to this comment will be treated as unwanted spam.
Being Canadian, however, I feel the need to say that I'm sorry if my comment offended anyone.
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There are tons of regulations etc against spam in many countries. Guess what? The people running the spam/scan email systems simply do not care. There is zero enforcement of these rules, so why should adding more regulations make any difference?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Oh wait, that's happening already. Thanks for a useless law.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I expect that this will probably be about as frequently enforced at the USA's National Do Not Call List.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
About time, these companies that deem you to want to know about their "special offers" are a horrible blight on people who want relevant information. Too bad the U.S. government hates non-corporation people.
Or the U.S. government doesn't want to put the final nail in the U.S. Post Office's coffin.
They don't think that maybe email should be retired and replaced with a secure technology? Maybe they can get started legislature that will mandate more memory for the Atari 2600.
I think opt-in is the only way it should be done. Germany also has this i think, double opt-in via email is the method implemented, so you even have to confirm your opt-in. I dont think it will harm businesses as much as stated in the article as it is working elsewhere. What is interesting is the penalties. I think they should be percentage of gross earnings instead of a flat rate penalty. The biggest issue which is not addressed is not spam from canadian firms but spam coming from other countries where the canadian law does not apply.
No, I'm pretty sure there's a faction that has been actively trying to do exactly that for decades, irrespective of the existence of the internet.
Many businesses spam customers. Banks are especially bad about this. No I would not like a balance transfer.
I get so much dead tree junk mail that I'm surprised there aren't laws trying to stop it.
I used to just delete spam but one day I went through a whole bunch of them and clicked on unsubscribe. The amount of spam went down to almost nothing. Totally worth the 15 min of effort. Legitimate companies (who make up most of the spam I get these days) honor unsubscribe requests, the illegitimate ones will not care about any anti-spam laws anyway.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
victory is ours
Strict as in Canada's Do Not Call list, which only means once every 30 days you get telemarketers calling you, and you ask to be removed for the next 30 days. Also Strict in the sense that you still get hounded by charities and politicians calling you because they are exempt. And strict as in the sense that it's useless because I now get telemarketing from randomly generated phone numbers from foreign countries.
So yes, Canada implemented a useless regulation, again, yay.
The solution to spam is a good email client connected to a great email server. Running your own email server does not count. Creating a law does not work.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I would think opt-in would help the post office, by pushing unsolicited mail back from email to paper. Or were you assuming an opt-in approach to the post office as well?
Hi. I'm in the anti-spam business. You got lucky.
A lot of spammers use fake unsubscribe links as a way of verifying your address and the fact that you read the message. Some questionable businesses have verification elements to their unsubscribe links that will note the fact that you visited the site but then due to a bug fail to process your unsubscribe attempt (thus netting the same effect).
I will sometimes unsubscribe from things, but that's because I want to see how successful it was (and I can deal with the trouble caused by attracting more spam). I do not suggest this for others. Use sites like myWOT to research the link before trusting it enough to follow it and perform the request. Use sites like SpamCop and KnujOn (and, if you're in France, Signal Spam, which has legal enforcement power) to report anything else as spam. All of those reporting agencies are tied to actual enforcement (in some way; KnujOn busts registrars, SpamCop informs network operators (and builds its blocklist), Signal Spam prosecutes if in France).
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It's usually better to go with non-nebulous terms like Unsolicited Commercial Email. Annoying emails from banks and organizations which I have a connection with ARE Unsolicited Commercial Email if they are a) unsolicited, b) commercial and c) sent electronically. It doesn't matter if I have a bank account with them; I never told them I was interested in their other offerings. If we had any other conversations over their other offerings, it was me telling them I never wanted to hear about their credit card offerings. Interestingly, if *I* try to contact THEM about such things, they tell me that the credit card stuff comes from a different company held by their parent corporation. Which goes full circle to the fact that I don't have a relationship with that company, and so should not be receiving offers from them.
Hopefully this law will close that loophole.
Any bad companies sending spam will be off-shore and/or untraceable. The legitimate companies sending out emails that people subscribed to will be nailed for not following the exacting letter of the law. Just one more nail in the coffin of non mining businesses in Canada.
A simple predictive test for how effective laws of this type are in Canada would be the 3-5 calls I get per week where I have won a trip, can lower my CC rates, or have a problem with my "Windows" that I must immediately fix. Since the DNC came into effect I receive more, not less. This sucks because I am now answering zero long distance calls where I don't recognize the number.
Sounds very similar to the telemarketing Do Not Call List.
Same problems likely. Too many loopholes. No enforcement.
However it is a step in the right direction. Seems every now and again they might try and make an example of the very worst to make it look like they are actually doing anything about it.
Anyway got to start somewhere I suppose, even if useless and toothless. Typically this kind of legislation is setup to get at the worst offenders, while allowing a lot a pass for economic reasons mostly. Even if it isn't initially enforced, the law is in place that will allow it to be should the public make a big enough fuss about it politically.
No they don't. Spam is unsolicited and from criminals 100% of the time.
Annoying emails from banks and organizations which you have a connection with are NOT spam. Annoying, yes, but spam they are not.
Oh, and those ones from Citibank aren't actually from Citibank. They're spam from criminals.
Actually, it is
I get monthly mailings separately from Rogers Wireless (I haven't had a Roger's cell in years), Rogers Cable TV, and Rogers Hi-Speed Internet, offering their latest/greatest bundle. I did not opt-in to marketing-spam, and this new law covers that, meaning that if I get letters from them now offering services I repeatedly tell them I don't want, then I can sue them (or at least rat them out and get them a huge fine).
Similarly I get monthly mailings separately from Bell for Wireless "As an existing customer" (I've never had Bell for wireless) and Bell Satellite TV (again, never had dealings with them). Both of these mailings come from a door-to-door marketing firm running through the neighborhood, for whom I opened the door and confirmed I'm the resident (they subsequently signed me up for all of their BS)
The only correspondence I might care about from Rogers is a notice of increase in my existing Cable TV rates (they are legally obligated to send those notifications, so I have time to cancel my service before it goes into effect), or default on payment (which I've never done, but I'd still like to know if I ever do), and I want no correspondence from Bell, ever.
Part of this new law is "Opt-In" is mandatory, instead of "Opt-Out".
I, for one, look forward to our new lack of unsolicited snail-mail.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your 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
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) 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
(X) 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 yours 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
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
meaning that if I get letters from them now offering services I repeatedly tell them I don't want, then I can sue them (or at least rat them out and get them a huge fine).
The web page linked in TFA that talks about this law says nothing about letters, only electronic communications like email.
I, for one, look forward to our new lack of unsolicited snail-mail.
Citation required.
Christ on a crutch. Just today, I got an e-mail from OnLive because some bot or idiot used one of my addresses to sign up with. I went to their opt-out page, and among other things was given the option to reroute their fucking newsletter to someone else's inbox without verification. In retrospect, I should have looked one of their executive e-mail addresses up and given it that.
Correct.
Ant that is why TFA itself says
Will individuals see an effect once the new law is in force? Probably not.
All this means is that Canadians won't spam (if the law is enforced).
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
...Is the mantra of the Harper government. This bill can be seen in the same light: Get real tough (millions of $'s) to punish the few, while still leaving it open for other non-intentional or honest people to get taken to court. If I had a business, I would not like having to ask people to send them emails, I would rather have an "opt-out" system where an initial contact was made with an easy way to say, no thanks. A simple link or button would do, which is less effort than it takes now to opt-out from most spammers and seems to be a more sensible approach.
Society use your Sciences
If you're using SpamCop you might have noticed that more and more ISPs just bounce such reports... Contacting such ISPs via Facebook just gets you list washed (in my experience). The real problem, IMO, are the ISPs that just care more about paying customers than a whining geek bitching about spam.
I don't dispute any of that. SpamCop does not listwash and does not condone listwashing. (I can't speak for Facebook, but they do have a good presence at the last remaining anti-spam conference and they do care.) SpamCop is not really an enforcement mechanism because it has no legal weight. Responsible network admins will be notified, those who ignore or otherwise don't play fair won't. That's merely the first pass; there's also the blocklist. Not perfect, but at least there can be some repercussion (so keep on reporting! Even if it seems like it's not doing anything, we may just not be getting critical mass for action, which can change over time).
We're basically set up to plug right into a legal body for real enforcement. Hint hint.
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ooh, the nutorious APK spammer, this time spamming us about anti-spam. hi. would you like me to rip you to shreds?
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What on-topic points have you made? What citations of efficacy? You can't just say "you're protected" and leave it at that. That's no argument.
I understand how hosts files work. You appear to have a clever system to work around the size limits and make it work efficiently. Great. How performant is your data against live threats? What's your miss rate? How does it compare to URIBLs? How do you deal with non-link threats delivered via email (e.g. 419, attached virus)?
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