Eric Savage writes
"The IETF, through IRTF, has formed an Anti-Spam Research Group. If there is any hope for a technical solution the problem, it appears the first significant step has been taken. More info here in itworld and here in ComputerWorld." Three more exciting spam related posts inside, including news from the Nevada legislature regarding spam, Arkansas dislike of the meaty email and "when students go bad"
torklugnutz writes "The NV state assembly just voted 41-0 in favor of a bill which allows spam recipients to collect up to $500 per piece of spam. The new law also requires ADV to be added to the subject line so that recipients can more easilly identify unwanted ads. In addition, spoofing of sender's email address or having an invalid return address is made illegal. The old law imposed a $10 fine on spammers, but required prosecuters to collect it. This law will, more than likely, increase my chances of reading the spam I get so that I can try to cash in. So, maybe I CAN make an incredible amount of money from this "Amazing Offer""
And in Arkansas: A.G. Russell writes "With House Bill 1008, Subtitled "Unsolicited Commercial and Sexually Explicit Electronic Mail Fair Practices Act." Arkansas looks to join other states that have criminal and cival legislation in place to deal with spam. Can we help them craft this?"
And from academia: mansemat writes "Seems spammers are using a new tactic these days by paying students to send spam over univeristy networks. This particular student will be disciplined by losing his computing privileges, and being educated on the policy he violated. One can only hope the education includes being subscribed to every pr0n, male enhancement, mortage, etc. spam on the planet." Should have booted the miscreant.
What's the point? (Score:4, Insightful)
Techinical solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is that there is no point in a spammer sending out an email that does not contain instructions on how to obtain the product/service being advertised. And, therefore, it should always be possible to track down the person responsible for the spam. The point is that, without the promise of $500 for each violation, it was not economically viable to track down the spammer. Now, it may very well be.
I once managed to track a spammer to a town about 2 hours drive from where I live. If I had been able to collect $500 out of my efforts, it is something that I would do more often...
Re:Techinical solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Blacks Are People Too (Score:0, Insightful)
Not quite (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's the point? (Score:1, Insightful)
As for other countries being unaffected by this law, I expect those countries will implement their own anti-spam laws after seeing this initiative.
Re:Drink RagingCow!!!! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
It always about the money, or the budget.
Vicious circle I'm 'fraid.
But people will always speed
Re:Drink RagingCow!!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyway, will anyone be able to tell the difference between ad-saturated blogs and the current thing? I suppose the spelling might get better when professional copywriters get to work. And the references to "mi cat mittenz 3 3 3" might be replaced with "my cat Whiskas".
once again (Score:2, Insightful)
Great that nevada passed the law, step in the right direction. But this would only apply if the spam or the company profiting from it came from nevada, right? I dont think the male enhancement people from belarus need worry about this law...
All they need to know (Score:2, Insightful)
Spam loopholes... (Score:5, Insightful)
o unsubscription method is not feasible. I received an unsubscription method that went like this
Who is going to send a snail mail letter long distance to seemingly be unsubscribed from a spam list? Now it's starting to cost _me money to be unsubscribed. The law says to have _an unsubscription method of some sort - this falls within the law no matter how bad it is.
o unsubscription web page is non-existent - this happens to often
Spam Relies Upon Deceit (Score:5, Insightful)
A large percentage of "junk mail" depends upon some fashion of deceit. Either it's by masking the true identity of the sender, a spam-haus using domain after domain and ISP after ISP in order to avoid the blacklists or simply by lying and saying that "you really indeed did ask for this".
The answer to the spam problem is to find technical answers that start peeling away at the ways spammers use deceit.
I've said this before and I'll say it again, the first place is to rewrite RFC-821 and require valid reverse-name lookups before accepting mail. Also permit as an authentication scheme that allows the administrator of the accepting mail system to set permissable trust levels. Example, mail that's verified (through an SSL certificate might be one way) as coming from gm.com is accepted, but mail coming from slashdot.org is set to a lower trust level (because they don't want to spend the money for a certificate). Mail from getyerviagra.com is immediately tossed into a review folder, trashed or denied because they don't reverse properly and they have a forged or self-signed certificate or simply don't have one.
The LAST thing anyone here wants is ANY government telling us how to manage electronic mail. In the US, it'll be frought with hooks and back-doors so the feds can snoop your mail.
Let's get it together and fix the problem on our own.
Re:Something Smarter Is Needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Once laws start up the SPAMMERS will move offshore. Just like the guy who lives in Detroit. This SPAMMER lives in the US, but does not send the SPAM via the US.
Once again (Score:5, Insightful)
Here are three easy steps to stop spam:
Re:What's the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a little flaw in this logic: It ignores the "joe job", which is spam that is sent to get someone else in trouble by making it look like they are spamming.
What do you do when the apparent beneficiary of the spam claims they were joe-jobbed?
In addition to spam... (Score:2, Insightful)
I've come up with a name for these emails. It's full of miscellaneous stuff (indents, headers), no one knows where it originally came from, no one seems to really want it, and it gets passed around endlessly (I frequently get several copies of each - often from people who were on the same to: line as I was the first time I got it!).
I call it "fruitcake".
Now here's the question:
Would it be reasonable to write a filtering program that:
Re:What's the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
What do you do when the apparent beneficiary of the spam claims they were joe-jobbed?"
If they are a legitimate company, they are required to maintain records.
Records of payments to the spammer should be sufficient. No sane company is NOT going to record an advertising expense, as to not do so is to pay for it twice over.
Sure there will be illegitimate businesses that DONT do this, but if they are involved in "spamcains" to sell their wares, there will be MORE THAN ONE complaint. Claiming that they were "framed" may work once. Maybe twice, but over and over? Won't work.
The fact is, anti-spam laws WILL work if enforced, even if spam is originated overseas, because at SOME POINT, to make money from Americans, money and/or product has to be exchanged IN America...
How to defeat spam (Score:4, Insightful)
Just make sure as much people in your neighborhood never see spam, and after a while spamming will not be as much as a problem as it is right now.
Informing the common computer users is the first step.
Re:Techinical solution (Score:5, Insightful)
I for one would prefer to live in a country where prostitution was legal and the cops conducted nightly sweeps to round up and jail spammers.
Re:What's the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
Mostly true.
One exception I can think of off the top of my head is the pump-and-dump stock scam spam. All they're after is to get a bunch of victims to buy a worthless stock, push up the price, and allow them to sell the shares they've already bought at 1 cent for 20 cents.