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France Launches Anti-Spam Platform
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Sun May 13, 2007 09:19 AM
from the more-blacklists dept.
from the more-blacklists dept.
njondet writes "French-law.net reports that the French government has just launched 'Signal Spam', an anti-spam platform created in association with public entities and private companies, such as Microsoft. Internet users will be able to report spam messages by mailing them to this platform which will act as a centralised monitor of spamming activities. The platform will generate a blacklist and help initiate prosecutions against spammers."
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Trust French cullinary experts to destroy all SPAM (Score:2, Funny)
Better as a Private Service? (Score:4, Interesting)
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more like ENABLE-SPAM Act .. (Score:5, Informative)
CAN-SPAM doesn't ban SPAM, what it does do is legitimise the sending of unsolicited commercial e-mail and specifically forbids e-mail recipients from suing the spammers. It's one of those Acts that do the exact opposite of what the name means. As such it should really be called the ENABLE-SPAM Act of 2003.
was Re:Better as a Private Service?
Parent
Re:more like YOU CAN-SPAM Act .. (Score:2, Funny)
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Or it does exactly what it says, if you read it like a verb. Hopefully a few spammers died of laughter thinking about it, how they got Congress to pass a "We CAN SPAM" act.
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The same goes for lobbying groups. Any advertisement paid for by "The Group To Preserve Habitat For Cute Little Critters" has oil fingerprints all over the check.
Re:more like ENABLE-SPAM Act .. (Score:4, Informative)
To reiterate: while CAN-SPAM does define certain types of spam as legitimate, that's OK because none of the spam being sent is that kind of spam. If this changes, the law can be fixed later.
However, you are correct that CAN-SPAM also prohibits individuals from suing spammers. If the government were doing its job and aggressively prosecuting them, then private lawsuits would be redundant and unnecessary, and I'm sure that was the original thinking. However, that's not happening. That's a problem.
Parent
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Rule #1: Spammers lie.
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The private sector are the spammers, why would you give them control? Stupid libertots.
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Yes, there are certainly private sector spammers, but there are also plenty of private sector spam detectors. The reason that I would suggest leaving it to the private sector is that they have strong motivation to improve and evolve their detection methods.
On a side note, you need to spare the ad-hominem attacks. I never said I was libertarian (I am not). I simply stated that my belief in this area might be comparable with a libertarians beliefs. Insults do no one any good.
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It is not in the interests of the malware detection companies to eliminate the problem, because then they would eliminate their own business.
I wonder how long before... (Score:3, Interesting)
Reinventing the wheel? (Score:5, Informative)
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In France their wages, hours, holiday, etc would be protected. So for them, perhaps, the state provides a friendly, helpful barrier against the raw unfettered capitalism that you think is something you can just opt out of when you want.
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So the answer to b is bad, c is no and d is yes.
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* Why is it the only job they can get?
Who knows, who cares (they don't, neither does Walmart)
* So then is it good or bad that they can work at WalMart?
Neither. It's many things, none of which are simple enough to reduce to a good/ bad or moral argument
* If WalMart disappeared these people would never work again?
What, disappeared like something from a child's story book? Please explain how Walmart could 'disappear'
* Would people be better off if WalMart had,
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I know that and I'm neither American nor German.
That said, this hasn't disappeared - the stores have been bought, and Walmart won't be doing some of this again:
'....management had threatened to close certain stores if staff did not agree to work to working longer hours than their contracts fore
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- because their town is too small to sustain a globally competitive cost-cutting store & the collection of mom and pot stores (which tend to keep money in the area btw).
So then is it good or bad that they can work at WalMart?
Bad - Noone who works at Wal-mart should be trying to live off their income. Wal-mart, goodwill and lower positions at fast-food franchises are only good for sustaining kids who live at home and are trying to save up for the next step (more educat
Yes this'll work (Score:5, Interesting)
1: We all know how quickly the law works... Talk about a bottleneck.
2: Most spammers operate outwith the control of any single government.
3: Many spammers operate through compromised proxy systems.
Still, at least they're being seen to be doing something and this is the important bit for the politicians.
It may help. (Score:4, Interesting)
But it seems to be the only way to actually get the spammers. Filtering doesn't affect them. Their bandwidth is essentially free.
Not really. Each individual spammer lives in a country and is governed by the laws of that country. No single set of laws govern ALL spammers, but you can target some of them.
The technology should just be one aspect of this.
The spammers usually don't send out crap on their own (unless it is to advertise their services). This is one of the classic "follow the money" issues.
The Register ran an article that I cannot find right now. It was about how Company A hired Company B to send out ads to certain addresses. Company B hired Company C to send the ads. Company C needed more names so it bought a list of email addresses off of eBay from Person D.
It's easy for a government to handle research like that. Companies respond a LOT quicker when the request for information comes from their government.
And companies don't like having the government digging through their paperwork.
Sure, you risk "Joe Jobs", but overall, it should get the legitimate companies to be a LOT more careful before they outsource their next "email advertising campaign".
And that means that some of the money in spamming will dry up.
Parent
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And since I've read several stories on /. so far about some or other citizen of another country being extradited to the USA after breaking an American law in his own country, maybe the US could start prosecuting spammers all over the world and finally do something useful with their "Global Policeman" policy.
Country-wide blacklists (Score:2)
Yes, but if countries actually prosecuted spammers to any real extent we could blacklist the rest. France has just taken the first step towards getting on a whitelist.
If the proposal for tax-free overtime goes through I expect France to become something of an IT powerhouse.
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2: Most spammers operate outwith the control of any single government.
3: Many spammers operate through compromised proxy systems.
4: ???
5: Profit!
Internaut? (Score:2)
Seriously, how long until the zombie networks retaliate? I'd like to have some marshmallows ready for the server fire that follows.
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How much input to the citizens have? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm thinking this is a good idea, get a serious organization behind fighting spam, not just one with serious goals and effort but one with serious authority. I wonder if the citizens (who are ultimately paying for it of course) have much control over how it is set up? I can envision a conflict between our marketing department and the government going something like this:
....Fast forward two years...
Marketing: "No, it's not spam, we put in opt out links and only send it to people we have a relationship with."
Gov: "But 200 people called it spam, you're now listed as a spammer. Sorry."
Marketing: "That's no fair! How do we change our status?"
Gov: "The will of the people has spoken, but I don't have lunch plans, maybe the people could buy....?"
Marketing: "Do you like steak?"
Gov: "I realize our office receives a lot of criticism for not allowing the public to mark mail as spam, but in reality many of the emails we receive are legitimate businesses using legal means to advertise. We will not allow the public to slur the good name of reputable companies."
Your post advocates a... (Score:3, Funny)
(x) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based (x) 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
(x) 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
( ) 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, 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
( ) 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
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) 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
(x) 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
(x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) 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.
(x) 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!
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Spam is international (Score:3, Insightful)
Better idea (Score:4, Funny)
Duplicate the platform onto a series of servers and put them into reinforced bunkers strung along the border [wikipedia.org]. That ought to stop spam from entering the country.
Oh, and be sure not to leave a gap in the Ardennes...
Some decent advice on the site (Score:2)
"Every time you send a message, check that the email addresses contained in the recipient's field and cc can be clearly transmitted. If you want to send a copy to certain recipients, choose the field bcc or cci . Ensure you do not use the tool "forward to a friend" presented in some sites allowing giving an email to a third party without his consent."
http://www.signal-spam.fr/en/index. [signal-spam.fr]
Why not rather attack the source... (Score:2)
And of course, (l)users and mail server sysadmins should start to secure there machines, so there would not be those huge botnets
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menu change (Score:2, Funny)
Space-based anti-spam? (Score:2)
I wrote Signal Spam (Score:5, Interesting)
John.
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Re:Centralized Service? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, it's terrible how the DNS root server farm is constantly hacked. Or how the google server farm gets hacked every day to redirect to the goatse guy. What? That doesn't happen? What's happnened in the past with a few is that they've managed to DDoS them out of business, or sue them out of business. The government can throw hardware and bandwidth at it. If people come to rely on it, call it "critical infrastructure". Prosecute anyone trying to hack it as cyberterrorists (sic). Let the spammers threaten to sue it, and laugh at them. And if they do it, pass special laws to protect it from liability. Link it up so whenever there's a penny stock scam, start a SEC (or whatever the French version is) investigation. If there's a drug scam, start a FDA (or similar) investigation.
I'm sure this scares the hell out of spammers - someone with more power than to simply blacklist the servers after the fact, which honestly is running around putting out fires instead of catching those starting them. And even if they turn out to be completely incompetent, nothing stops the current blacklists from running...
Parent
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I'm sorry, were we talking about France or the US?
Now they found a "anti spam" organization as if anti spam organizations do not exist. In at most 2 years i assure you they will be proposing laws to eu that every eu member should mandatorily use their anti spam
Re:Its SO French.... (Score:4, Insightful)
That sounds an awful lot like the US to me. The US/France relationship reminds me of two brothers who "hate" each other for no other reason that they are so similar. The French are a proud, strong and patriotic nation and so are the citizens of the United States.
On top of this, the French are also more internationally minded than the US. They did start the European Union after all and relinquished control of interest rates to Brussels to adopt the single currency.
Simon.
Parent
no (Score:2)
french did not start eu. thats so 'french' again. more than one country started eu as an economic society for coal trade, after ww2. French has been trying to monopolize everything about eu since.
its not united states either. united states does not try to impose its standards on every nation in the world. french, do. start from metric system and go up to trying to make their language official language of eu despite there are hordes of people in eu that have no idea what french sounds l
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"spam" is a correct term in idiomatic langage. The parent cites a word very few French speaking people. It Switzerland, Quebec, and other French-speaking places, the email is known as "spam" or "undesirable mail" to common people.
Please see this thread (if you can read French) for more info [wordreference.com]