Slashdot Log In
Can-Spam Increased Spam
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Tue Feb 01, 2005 12:14 PM
from the eggs-bacon-sausage-and-sniffle dept.
from the eggs-bacon-sausage-and-sniffle dept.
andy1307 writes "According to New York Times, spam has actually gone up [Free registration required. You gave real info, right?] since the CAN-SPAM act went into effect. There is a graphic in the article that illustrates this increase. Before the CAN-SPAM act was passed, spam was about 60% of all e-mail traffic. Now it's 80%. In a we-told-you-so quote, Steve Linford, the founder of the Spamhaus Project, says CAN-SPAM legalized spam by giving bulk advertisers permission to send junk e-mail as long as they followed certain rules. Slashdot covered this story last year. For companies that offer offshore "bulk advertising" servers, business is booming. A survey from Stanford University estimates the global cost of spam in terms of lost productivity to be at 50 billion $ and 17 billion $ in the US alone. CAN-SPAM does give prosecutors some leverage to go after the merchants - but it must be proved that they knew, or should have known, that their wares were being fed into the illegal spam chain. " The BBC has a related story talking about rates of spam, viruses, and scam mail.
Related Stories
[+]
4th Circuit Court Sides With a Spammer 154 comments
bulled writes to tell us about coverage on CNet regarding a ruling a couple of weeks back that allows a spamming company to procede with their suit against a spamfighter. The 4th Circuit court ruled that the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act, much derided here, trumps the Oklahoma law under which anti-spam activist Mark Mumma sued Omega World Travel for spamming him. The ruling allows Omega World Travel's countersuit, for defamation, to go forward. From the article: "'There's been a lot of activity in the states to pass laws purportedly to protect their citizens' from spam, said Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University. 'The 4th Circuit may have laid waste to all of those efforts.'"
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Can-Spam Increased Spam
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 362 comments
(Spill at 50!) | Index Only
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
|
2
(1)
|
2
And the spammers seemed like such nice people (Score:3, Funny)
Re:And the spammers seemed like such nice people (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Duh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Then stop creating webforms that automatically check the box saying that people want your spam.
Re:Duh... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.edespot.com/~amackenz/)
Corrolation != Cause & effect
[tt]:Duh... (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://trolltalk.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 17, @09:46PM)
These are the same people who put exemptions in the law to allow them to send unsolicited bulk email to you.
Me, I'm saving ALL my spam for the next election. (I also keep it so I can train my filters, but that's another story).
Any politician who wants my vote can have it easily:
FTFA:
It's a shame too... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's a shame too... (Score:5, Funny)
What do you have against archaeologists from the future?
Re:I THOUGHT TO I UP THE FUCK SHUT YOU TOLD (Score:5, Funny)
Remember kids, Jolt Cola and HP calculators simply DO NOT mix!! Just say no.
what's to attribute specifically to CAN-SPAM? (Score:5, Interesting)
what's the fraction of spam that's sent which is CAN-SPAM compliant? how has that increased? (no i didn't RTFA since i haven't registered. does the article answer this?)
Slashdot, Jxyama. Jxyama, Slashdot. (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday February 01 2005, @02:35PM)
--LordPixie
Re:Cross your T's and dot your... (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.marotti.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday February 15 2007, @01:48PM)
Correlation != Causality (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.networkmirror.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday July 05, @04:34PM)
Re:Correlation != Causality (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Correlation != Causality (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://theravensnest.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday October 07, @07:05AM)
Mod parent up! (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only was this law SUPPOSED to reduce spam (by the charts, it hasn't)
But it was also supposed to make it easier to prosecute spammers who failed to follow it
AND it REPLACED state laws that were far stricter in their definitions and punishments.
It's a damn sight more difficult to get a FEDERAL case filed than it is to get one in your STATE courts.
We need to get rid of that stupid law and let the state courts handle it (they need the money from the judgements, anyway).
Re:Correlation != Causality (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Correlation != Causality (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.jwnyc.com/)
And I see that R'ing TFA is still lost on most Slashdotters these days...
This is not an article about how CAN-SPAM has increased spam. It is an article about how spam has increased despite CAN-SPAM. That is a very different thing. Several viewpoints are given from all sides involved on why it's happening, but at no time does the article itself suggest CAN-SPAM is the cause - only that it has not been an effective deterrent.
I think that's something we can all agree on.
Re:Correlation != Causality (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://bfelger.net/)
Including whoever named this
Correlation != Causation (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.ultranet.com/~kujawa/)
Re:Correlation != Causation (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://suso.suso.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday March 09 2004, @12:03AM)
Here's the problem (Score:3, Funny)
This is the problem. Until the business of spamming stops producing profits, spam won't stop. It's beyond my comprehension why anyone would buy anything from spam.
Re:Here's the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://money.kevingunn.org/)
Oh well... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.lazylightning.org/)
And this is exactly what we have been saying all along. No matter what laws are passed, no matter what we do to combat spam, the spammers will always find another way to make a buck.
One of the spammers quoted in the article claimed that he didn't care about the lawsuits... He was making too much money to stop.
If you're making too much money and they somehow make a law that actually works stick do you think that they are just going to go away? Yeah, I do, to other countries where those laws won't mean anything...
Keep those firewalls banning entire countries (.kr and
Some solutions to spam (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Sunday January 22 2006, @06:55AM)
1) Legislate so that merhandise sold using spam cannot legally demand payment (eg via visa/mastercard). Puts alot of pain onto these companies, but also would make it quite unattractive to sell stuff this way if you knew that the money you got could be reclaimed if it was demonstrated that you used spam as an advertising medium
2) Employ teams of people to respond to SPAM (at a government level). SPAM works because they get a low return rate, but the people who do respond actually buy stuff. Thats what keeps it all going. If we made it so that a decent percentage of the replies were time wasters, the average company would suddenly have to employ lots of resources to deal with false responses. In effect, it would spam them. Suddenly its no longer as cheap to advertise this way.
Just a couple of thoughts, but I'd love to see what the
Michael
Re:Some solutions to spam (Score:4, Interesting)
I want to hand the call off to an automated time-waster - then set up league tables to show how long a call the automated system could provide. Heck - it could even become a competitive sport! A sophisticated system may 'listen' for keywords and then use them in its responses... but I think there would be great mileage in just asking the caller to repeat what they just said because "the line is bad and I'm a bit deaf..." by feigning memory problems or introducing bizarre non-sequiturs. I know it would be a lot of work - but I think the comedy value of the pay-back would make it all worth-while.
Stats appear at least vaguely correct.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I have to wonder if you can really say that CAN-SPAM made it get worse. To me it looks like there was a brief drop off, and then it resumed the normal climb. Do we seriously believe that a significant amount of spam wasn't sent before CAN-SPAM, because the originators were worried about it being illegal? Seriously?
Coincidental Correlation (Score:5, Insightful)
Definition:
The name in Latin means "after this therefore because of this".
This describes the fallacy. An author commits the fallacy when
it is assumed that because one thing follows another that the
one thing was caused by the other.
Examples:
(i) Immigration to Alberta from Ontario increased. Soon
after, the welfare rolls increased. Therefore, the increased
immigration caused the increased welfare rolls.
(ii) I took EZ-No-Cold, and two days later, my cold
disappeared.
Proof:
Show that the correlation is coincidental by showing that: (i)
the effect would have occurred even if the cause did not
occur, or (ii) that the effect was caused by something other
than the suggested cause.
References
(Cedarblom and Paulsen: 237, Copi and Cohen: 101)
No Registration Link & Article Text (Score:3, Informative)
(http://ipodnanos.freepay.com/?r=22229907)
Article Text:
A year after a sweeping federal antispam law went into effect, there is more junk e-mail on the Internet than ever, and Levon Gillespie, according to Microsoft, is one reason.
Lawyers for the company seemed well on the way to shutting down Mr. Gillespie last September after he agreed to meet them at a Starbucks in Los Angeles near the University of Southern California. There they served him a court summons and a lawsuit accusing him, his Web site and 50 unnamed customers of violating state and federal law - including the year-old federal Can Spam Act - by flooding Microsoft's internal and customer e-mail networks with illegal spam, among other charges.
But that was the last the company saw of the young entrepreneur.
Mr. Gillespie, who operated a service that gives bulk advertisers off-shore shelter from the antispam crusade, did not show up last month for a court hearing in King County, Wash. The judge issued a default judgment against him in the amount of $1.4 million.
In a telephone interview yesterday from his home in Los Angeles, Mr. Gillespie, 21, said he was unaware of the judgment and that no one from Microsoft or the court had yet followed up. But he insisted that he had done nothing wrong and vowed that lawsuits would not stop him - nor any of the other players in the lucrative spam chain.
"There's way too much money involved," Mr. Gillespie said, noting that his service, which is currently down, provided him with a six-figure income at its peak. "And if there's money to be made, people are going to go out and get it."
Since the Can Spam Act went into effect in January 2004, unsolicited junk e-mail on the Internet has come to total perhaps 80 percent or more of all e-mail sent, according to most measures. That is up from 50 percent to 60 percent of all e-mail before the law went into effect.
To some antispam crusaders, the surge comes as no surprise. They had long argued that the law would make the spam problem worse by effectively giving bulk advertisers permission to send junk e-mail as long as they followed certain rules.
"Can Spam legalized spamming itself," said Steve Linford, the founder of the Spamhaus Project, a London organization that is one of the leading groups intent on eliminating junk e-mail. And in making spam legal, he said, the new rules also invited flouting by those intent on being outlaws.
Not everyone agrees that the Can Spam law is to blame, and lawsuits invoking the new legislation - along with other suits using state laws - have been mounted in the name of combating the problem. Besides Microsoft, other large Internet companies like AOL and Yahoo have used the federal law as the basis for suits.
Two prolific spam distributors, Jeremy D. Jaynes and Jessica DeGroot, were convicted under a Virginia antispam law in November, and a $1 billion judgment was issued in an Iowa federal court against three spam marketers in December.
The law's chief sponsor, Senator Conrad Burns, Republican of Montana, said that it was too soon to judge the law's effectiveness, although he indicated in an e-mail message that the Federal Trade Commission, which oversees its enforcement, might simply need some nudging.
"As we progress into the next legislative session," Mr. Burns said, "I'll be working to make sure the F.T.C. utilizes the tools now in place to enforce the act and effectively stem the tide of this burden."
The F.T.C. has made some recent moves that include winning a court order in January to shut down illegal advertisi
Not quite... (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/~Spy+der+Mann/journal/ | Last Journal: Thursday November 15, @12:57AM)
Ok, in plain text: It didn't accelerate SPAM. It just didn't do anything to stop it.
The problem wtih trying to outlaw spam (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Monday November 14 2005, @04:13PM)
The only way we'll actually see a reduction in spam is to put true measures in the MTAs such that there is absolutely no way to mask the sender's address or host, and completely disallow any form of relaying. Then, you have to start setting up the MTAs to not accept any mail delivered by older versions.
Yes, I realize the impact this would have on the internet and e-mail delivery... but if you want to eliminate it, or at least be able to truly identify the sender, this is about the only way to actually do it.
IPTables really helps. (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.ilikepuffynipples.com/)
I think the issue is... (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, the spammer scum (I know, don't need to add scum, spammer covers it) figure that it's a law for show, which it is..
The top 10 spammers are responsible for something like 3 quarters of the spam sent. If Only half of those spammers were locked up in jail (where you have to admit they belong, because of their tactics, never mind the UCE itself).. spam would drop noticeably.
The law needs to be improved. The law needs to have teeth.. and the law needs to chew some big time spammers.
That's the only thing that'll slow things down.
Saw this on Usenet (Score:5, Interesting)
Allow me to set forth a number of propositions:
1) Spam is now 60% or more of all email in the world, and increasing monthly.
2) The lost productivity costs to industry of dealing with spam is estimated to be from $10 billion to $20 billion yearly.
3) There are about 100 to 200 spammers behind 90% of the world's spam.
4) Thus each spammer can be estimated to cost industry globally around $100 million dollars.
5) The EPA and DOT value a human life at between $3 million and $7 million dollars.
6) Many people in the United States are underinsured medically. Some of them need expensive medical care they cannot afford, and therefore die as a result. Call the affordability threshold $100,000 to $1,000,000. If major ISPs and corporations could be ironbound to honour their word, admittedly no small task, then one could posit a regime where:
a) The leading 1000 connectivity consumers place half their antispam spending in escrow
b) Guido the Fish and Two Finger Tony get hired to smoke the top 100 spam offenders, reducing the need for antispam spending worldwide, and freeing the cash for:
c) The escrowed funds then get used to save a large number of lives who would otherwise be lost due to pricy medical care.
At this point, one must ask: What is a spammer's life worth? The economics of the situation means more people get saved than spammers blown away, therefore the sum total is that a greater good is served by the above scheme as more people survive with a higher quality of life than the status quo ante.
Correlation, not causation (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://jjjiii.livejournal.com/)
Law of Unintended Consequences (Score:3, Interesting)
Just keep that in mind when worrying about DMCA, etc.
Imagine a world where tools like PGP become more and more successful because the corporate/government oppressors are trying to get more control.
Technologists just want to be free.
resources are out there... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.ie-ap.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday March 28 2006, @05:27AM)
They say that spam accounts for so much lost productivity, but they fail to mention that spam has spawned a whole new race of products and services that keep people employed. The Anti-Spam industry is thriving and contributing to world economic growth. As with everything, spam may be a nuisance, but it does have its benefits. As usual, regular users are caught in the crossfire.
Re:resources are out there... (Score:4, Informative)
That's like saying crime is good becuase it keeps cops employed, or that terrorism is good because it keeps the military employed. The point that is missing, is that the net cost of crime, terrorism, and spam typically is greater than the economics of the industries spawned to combat them.
Yeah, I know, comparing spam to terrorism is a bit of a stretch, but I think the point is valid.
I said it once.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Spam isn't necessarily bad. It does have a use. If over-aggressive surveilance is something you fear, the camoflage that spam offers should be a comfort.
Think of all the spam you receive at work that slips past the filters- do you really think that corporate security has the time to manually filter everything else for the inappropriate emails your girlfriend keeps sending?
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to think about the implications that stegonography presents.
As Paul Vixie once said: (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://left-wing.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday December 27 2005, @03:44PM)
The internet has no government, no constitution, no laws, no
rights, no police, no courts. Don't talk about fairness or
innocence, and don't talk about what should be done. Instead,
talk about what is being done and what will be done by the
amorphous unreachable undefinable blob called "the internet
user base." -Paul Vixie
Hosting Costs (Score:3, Informative)
(http://www.fallingbullets.com/)
Running up their hosting costs is an effective means of reducing spam.