04-30-2003, 09:00 PM
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Contributing Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 8,228
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Spammers Can Go To Jail
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/30/technology/30SPAM.html
I know this is really off topic, but lately I've seen spam impact how people use their mobile devices. On more than one occassion, I've seen users remove email accounts from their mobile device because the volume of spam just costs too much over GPRS or is too slow over anything but WiFi, and even then it takes up precious RAM. :evil:
Virginia has passed a law making spam sent by fraud a felony. "The new statute adds criminal penalties for fraudulent, high-volume spammers. It outlaws practices like forging the return address line of an e-mail message or hacking a computer to send spam surreptitiously. Those found guilty of sending more than 10,000 such deceptive e-mail messages in one day would be subject to a prison term of one to five years and forfeiture of profits and assets connected with these activities."
:spam:
Nice to have the law but let's see how they enforce it. I haven't read the details yet, but I am wondering if just setting your spam-thrower to only send 9,999 messages a day will keep you out of the reach of this law? And what is one email, a message sent to one recepient or BCC'd to 50,000 users?
Note that the above site may require a free registration at the NY Times site.
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04-30-2003, 09:06 PM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Feb 2006
Posts: 147
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I find this very interested considering that it is Virginia that has passed the law - home of AOL. Should be interesting to see how many convictions they get out of this one...
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04-30-2003, 09:14 PM
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Thinker
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 333
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by RacerX
I find this very interested considering that it is Virginia that has passed the law - home of AOL. Should be interesting to see how many convictions they get out of this one...
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The bill was signed at the AOL headquarters.
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04-30-2003, 09:32 PM
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Pontificator
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 1,162
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I read about it and I also have serious questions about how this can be enforced.
I'm hoping it'll be effective - I don't get email on my PPC, but I'm definitely thinking of adding that kind of capabilities in the future.
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04-30-2003, 09:34 PM
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Ponderer
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 111
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I've got the T-Mobile PPCPE, and I'm seriously thinking about dumping an email address I've had for almost 10 years because of the spam I get - it's not a huge deal at home, but it makes it almost useless when I'm on the road. Spammers should be hung, drawn and quartered...
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04-30-2003, 10:06 PM
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Ponderer
Join Date: Apr 2004
Posts: 110
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I wonder if this bill is a tool for internet providers to recoup lost bandwidth and avoid people that want to do this through their systems.
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04-30-2003, 10:33 PM
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Ponderer
Join Date: Feb 2003
Posts: 98
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It's a start - but it's only one state in one country. Spammers could register using another ISP or use some sort of proxy. Lots of room to manipulate the law.
Never really had trouble with spam up until a year ago when the Klez worm took hold. When I closed my account in December it was getting >200 Klez variant emails an hour. 99.0% of my mail was Klez, 0.9% was spam (from harvesters and also due to klez spreading my email as a forged 'from' field), and 0.1% was genuine, important mail. The reason it was so popular? My e-mail, [email protected], appeared in at least four plain text files that ship with Counter-Strike - exactly the files that Klez scans.
My current e-mail is only accessible via a form. My university account gets about 3 or 4 spams a day - despite me never having revealed it to any third party I didn't trust. Doesn't help that such addresses are numbered sequentially...! Doesn't help either how some routers on the internet are specifically set up to harvest addresses from mail that past through them en-route across the world. </rant>
Mayhem. But this is a good start. If only it became US and European law, then we'd start getting somewhere.
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04-30-2003, 10:38 PM
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Pontificator
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 1,041
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by rubberdemon
I've got the T-Mobile PPCPE, and I'm seriously thinking about dumping an email address I've had for almost 10 years because of the spam I get - it's not a huge deal at home, but it makes it almost useless when I'm on the road. Spammers should be hung, drawn and quartered...
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Amen to that. They are all leeches who want to make an easy buck.
Anti-spam law will be tough to enforce though.. Especially since they can move to an off-shore location and screw the U.S. laws. But then again, I've been getting junk snail-mail for years and nothing has changed there.
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04-30-2003, 10:40 PM
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Pontificator
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 1,468
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It is good to see attempts being made to control spam and criminalise the spammers. EU legislation to come into force in October will make sending unsolicited commercial e-mail illegal throughout the UK with ALL companies and organisations being required to introduce 'opt-in' rather than 'opt-out' to e-mail lists.
OK - even if Europe and the US cut off the spammers they can still operate from from other countries - but if operators from elsewhere are threatened with being 'cut-off' from the EU/US - they will soon be forced to behave...
I'm lucky not to get much spam (maybe two or three out of 200+ messages a day) but the last person to spam me (some idiot in a North of England garden centre who was foolish enough to give his actaul e-mail address) - other than the mass spammers - I sent him an e-mail warning him not to do it again... when he sent me an e-mail saying he would do what he liked... well I made sure his e-mail inbox would be nice and full for several days, and also signed him up to a couple of choice lists...! Curiously I've not had another message from him!
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04-30-2003, 11:00 PM
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Philosopher
Join Date: Nov 2002
Posts: 544
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My Corporate e-mail (syncs and wirelessly downloads to PPC) does a good job of filtering spam. I have restricted my Hotmail account to a few domains (also downloads to PPC) to virtually eliminate spam.
I would never consider having my AOL account download to my device though. The battery would not last through a single session.
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