You have identified the problem. It is a technological one. The email protocol designers didn't leave a spot for a no-spammer's sign.
So you are going to make spammers illegal instead of simply adding this to internet protocols in such a way that it can be securely and efficiently enforced.
Today, as much as we hate them, spammers feel perfectly justified because there is no technological "No Spammers" sign. It is irresponsible, having now identified the deficiency, to legislate instead of solving the problem technologically.
I would assume that fraud laws apply to fraud. Just because it is the internet does not mean that such laws are suspended. Forging an internet header can be a part of fraud or other crimes, such as perhaps in the case of the Nigerian get-rich-quick scheme perhaps claiming to come from an official of the Nigerian Government. But forging an internet header is not automatically fraud, nor should it be, nor did I claim that it was under existing legislation.
I think you just insinuated that the source of all messages sent should be verifiable by court order. So you would make Freenet illegal, since it exists to strongly protect the anonymity of the creaters and users of information even against a court order? Freenet and the higher-grade anonymity it provides is all about free speech, and I value this sort of anonymity greatly.
EMail was created without strong authentication. If you want it, then make another protocol that clearly supplies it and let people who value that use it. If you do it on another port and spam attempts are never successful, then spam will not happen. This is clearly a security hole because email was left unauthenticated. Fix the technological security holes with technology, not with legislation -- it applies in this case as well as many others. An email filter, which operates after the bandwidth has been consumed, is not the ideal solution, but that does not mean that a good solution eludes most experts.
Whining that the current wide-open email system is abused is about as useful as whining about your web page getting unexpectedly slashdotted. That is the nature of the protocol. If you want something different, design it and standardize it.
Only if you have an incredibly bad ISP. If I were a simple AOL or MSN user, and I experienced this problem, I would take it up with AOL and expect a solution or get a different ISP. I seriously doubt good ISPs are not able to solve this problem.
Just because we have no law protecting children's feet does not mean that children have no shoes available to protect their feet, but it gives each provider the ability to balance the restrictions against the protections as appropriate, just as ISPs or others may provide.
Nothing is forcing your computer or that of the ISP to process those packets flying past. If a more secure and authenticated email protocol is needed for certain classes of communications, then so be it. That should be up to the technologists to create, not up to the governments to legislate.
If a server never answers on a port, no significant resources are consumed. If channels are publicly open, then expect to have to consume resources filtering it, just like you filter TV commercials, door-to-door salesmen, and junk mail.
There was never a right not to receive spam, unless it was created technologically, or by contract. If you really cared deeply about the issue, you would be heading up a standards body to create this more-secure tier of email. Instead, you would trample the rights of others just because their patterns of preferred behavior do not match yours. It is a very small step between outlawing the typical spam of today and outlawing forms of free speech you may care more about but other powerful players hate.
If there is a demand for filtering, it becomes provided in an efficient way by the marketplace, either by the clumsy techniques we have today or by a whole new email format that is cryptographically secure. ISPs actually do this already using clumsy techniques, without significantly increasing the price of the email service.
Making email headers unforgeable is mostly a technological problem, not a political one, although I suspect that in true cases of significant fraud based upon header forgery, fraud laws already apply.
If the email header specifies the name of someone who does not exist, how is this different from writing anonymously or under a pseudonym, which the writers of the constitution were quick to do when it suited their purposes (Publius). Anonymity is an important political freedom, not just in the ballot box, but in other situations.
If being called by the same person 20 times in a day is a problem, I can locate the user's telco service provider and complain, or I can use easily-available options to block the call. The quality of the blocking is a technological issue, which should be determined by contract, not by government mandate. The same actions are already easily available on the web.
The web is too big to go legislating what a particular person finds offensive, such as advertising, although I would pursue death threats and similarly-illegal communications in the same way I would do it in any other medium.
Do you think we should make junk mail illegal, too? It is much harder to make the argument that you can easily filter it, and it is much more of a physical annoyance.
How much do you bet? Or were you just spamming me with your completely-false argument? Put up or shut up, as the saying goes. If you put up a sufficiently-high amount of money with reasonable rules for an uninterested jury to resolve the question, I would happily cash in on your ignorance and donate the results to the FSF.
Your argument is a little bit like responding to an editorial in a newspaper against racial bigotry by accusing the writer of being a minority, "because any non-minority would know how disgusting a minority is." Your opinion is false and based upon stupid assumptions.
The trick with free speech is permitting it when it is offensive to you, or it really isn't free speech.
I, too, would buy nothing from a spam email, and even on the rare occasion I have seen a subject line that slightly aroused my interest, I have deleted the email rather than reading it based upon the extreme rudeness of the person sending me the unsolicited email.
But putting people into jail for sending emails to lists of people seems as wrong as putting someone in jail for port scanning or other things where there are likely to be legitimate actions that will be outlawed. Perhaps a senator who is getting too many spams from slashdot readers who all copied the same DMCA protest email should start sending those of the opposite opinion to jail?
I find it odd that no one seems to be worried about free speech implications of this sort of action.
As a participant in standards forums, I get dozens of spams a day, and I plan to set up filtering. Filtering seems to be a much better answer than government legislating what email I can and cannot send.
I can think situations where this type of legislation and further logical progressions of outlawing unwanted email will come back to haunt those who valued the past freedoms of the internet. I am willing to put up with spam or create a filter in the name of freedom.
You cannot blame their inaction on this issue for a year on the lawyers.
As has been said, I will not soon forget this, and HP needs to do something major to show that they are not a big part of the problem. Thinly-worded excuses will not fly.
Slashdot Mirror
So you are going to make spammers illegal instead of simply adding this to internet protocols in such a way that it can be securely and efficiently enforced.
Today, as much as we hate them, spammers feel perfectly justified because there is no technological "No Spammers" sign. It is irresponsible, having now identified the deficiency, to legislate instead of solving the problem technologically.
I would assume that fraud laws apply to fraud. Just because it is the internet does not mean that such laws are suspended. Forging an internet header can be a part of fraud or other crimes, such as perhaps in the case of the Nigerian get-rich-quick scheme perhaps claiming to come from an official of the Nigerian Government. But forging an internet header is not automatically fraud, nor should it be, nor did I claim that it was under existing legislation.
I think you just insinuated that the source of all messages sent should be verifiable by court order. So you would make Freenet illegal, since it exists to strongly protect the anonymity of the creaters and users of information even against a court order? Freenet and the higher-grade anonymity it provides is all about free speech, and I value this sort of anonymity greatly.
EMail was created without strong authentication. If you want it, then make another protocol that clearly supplies it and let people who value that use it. If you do it on another port and spam attempts are never successful, then spam will not happen. This is clearly a security hole because email was left unauthenticated. Fix the technological security holes with technology, not with legislation -- it applies in this case as well as many others. An email filter, which operates after the bandwidth has been consumed, is not the ideal solution, but that does not mean that a good solution eludes most experts.
Whining that the current wide-open email system is abused is about as useful as whining about your web page getting unexpectedly slashdotted. That is the nature of the protocol. If you want something different, design it and standardize it.
Just because we have no law protecting children's feet does not mean that children have no shoes available to protect their feet, but it gives each provider the ability to balance the restrictions against the protections as appropriate, just as ISPs or others may provide.
If a server never answers on a port, no significant resources are consumed. If channels are publicly open, then expect to have to consume resources filtering it, just like you filter TV commercials, door-to-door salesmen, and junk mail.
There was never a right not to receive spam, unless it was created technologically, or by contract. If you really cared deeply about the issue, you would be heading up a standards body to create this more-secure tier of email. Instead, you would trample the rights of others just because their patterns of preferred behavior do not match yours. It is a very small step between outlawing the typical spam of today and outlawing forms of free speech you may care more about but other powerful players hate.
Making email headers unforgeable is mostly a technological problem, not a political one, although I suspect that in true cases of significant fraud based upon header forgery, fraud laws already apply.
If the email header specifies the name of someone who does not exist, how is this different from writing anonymously or under a pseudonym, which the writers of the constitution were quick to do when it suited their purposes (Publius). Anonymity is an important political freedom, not just in the ballot box, but in other situations.
If being called by the same person 20 times in a day is a problem, I can locate the user's telco service provider and complain, or I can use easily-available options to block the call. The quality of the blocking is a technological issue, which should be determined by contract, not by government mandate. The same actions are already easily available on the web.
The web is too big to go legislating what a particular person finds offensive, such as advertising, although I would pursue death threats and similarly-illegal communications in the same way I would do it in any other medium.
Do you think we should make junk mail illegal, too? It is much harder to make the argument that you can easily filter it, and it is much more of a physical annoyance.
Your argument is a little bit like responding to an editorial in a newspaper against racial bigotry by accusing the writer of being a minority, "because any non-minority would know how disgusting a minority is." Your opinion is false and based upon stupid assumptions.
The trick with free speech is permitting it when it is offensive to you, or it really isn't free speech.
I, too, would buy nothing from a spam email, and even on the rare occasion I have seen a subject line that slightly aroused my interest, I have deleted the email rather than reading it based upon the extreme rudeness of the person sending me the unsolicited email.
But putting people into jail for sending emails to lists of people seems as wrong as putting someone in jail for port scanning or other things where there are likely to be legitimate actions that will be outlawed. Perhaps a senator who is getting too many spams from slashdot readers who all copied the same DMCA protest email should start sending those of the opposite opinion to jail?
I find it odd that no one seems to be worried about free speech implications of this sort of action. As a participant in standards forums, I get dozens of spams a day, and I plan to set up filtering. Filtering seems to be a much better answer than government legislating what email I can and cannot send. I can think situations where this type of legislation and further logical progressions of outlawing unwanted email will come back to haunt those who valued the past freedoms of the internet. I am willing to put up with spam or create a filter in the name of freedom.
You cannot blame their inaction on this issue for a year on the lawyers. As has been said, I will not soon forget this, and HP needs to do something major to show that they are not a big part of the problem. Thinly-worded excuses will not fly.