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Thread ID: 46183	2004-06-16 01:07:00	OT - Submision on antispam legislation - comments please	aronking (2294)	Press F1

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
245008	2004-07-12 23:31:00	Yes, but the spam police would look at the email and decide whether it is actually spam before they take any action. And the $5 pays for your personal email account to be on the blacklist, not the email you wish to avoid. So for an example, I have two email accounts, I would pay $10 to be on the blacklist, so spammers can not send emails to my two accounts. Those who do will be punished. Its like those "no circulars" on the letterboxes. Mister Harbies	mister harbies (5607)
245009	2004-07-12 23:44:00	But that opens up the whole privacy debate. Why don't the spam police screen everyone's emails to see if they're spam, instead of waiting for you to complain? Why shouldn't your ISP have a panel of people reading all the emails you send and receive to make sure that it isn't spam? While they're doing that, why don't they also filter out any anti-Government emails? As far as putting yourself on the blacklist, how will you stop a spammer in Europe, America, Africa or Asia from sending you spam? They couldn't care less about what blacklist exists, because they have the technology to spoof all the addresses etc. to make them invisible, and they know that they're untouchable by NZ officials. My neighbour has a "Strictly No Junk Mail" sign on his letterbox - yet he still gets junkmail (a lot of it), and the people distributing the junkmail don't get punished - because it's impractical, and they couldn't care less. Enforcing the blacklist will be so intensive on human resources, it would cost $billions to run every year, as well as a huge capital investment in equipment to keep one step ahead of the spammers. And even so, it would only catch a few NZ spammers, and not address the huge issue of overseas spammers, where the list of them will just build up and build up, as the NZ police has no permission to arrest and prosecute in other countries.	somebody (208)
245010	2004-07-13 07:08:00	Since our retired politicians get a tax-payer funded world trip every year, how about we send them off to pay visits to spammers from overseas country each year. Except they won't be taking part in any sort of political debate, it'll more be scare tactics on behalf of the half-dozen accompanying ex-bouncers, who'll deliver a firm message that "people in New Zealand don't like receiving your spam, if you know what I mean", with a wink, a nudge, and a wallop for good measure. ;)	agent (30)
245011	2004-07-13 08:22:00	Or the spammers could be tied down and forced to listen to one of our politicians for half an hour - oh the agony! But insofar as defeating spammers goes, we can all write effective legislation but the bigger issue will be enforcment. As identified previously, how can this be done? I don't have the answer but I like the idea of massive disincentives - i.e. fines in the orders of multi-million dollars to hit the spammers where is hurts. But then you don't want to catch the wrong people through identity theft and there should be some allowances for instances such as companies sending out regular e-mail circulars to clients etc. I recently used a tactic on the first piece of spam (I got 5 or 6 in one hour) that hit my personal e-mail address - I used online tcp/ip tools to id the spammer and which ISP it came through. I then sent an appropriately worded legalese e-letter to both the company and ISP warning them that I am self-employed, my time was my constraint and if they chose to use it up by my reading their spam mail then I would invoice each of them US$500 per letter (being my supposed minimum charge), any further spam would be acceptance of my conditions and invoices would flow. It took them less than 8 hours to turn off the spam tap and I haven't been hit since.	andrew93 (249)
245012	2004-07-13 09:10:00	May I ask just how you knew that the IP address it resolved to wasn't a zombified PC belonging to an innocent, if not somewhat ignorant and precarious, individual?	agent (30)
245013	2004-07-13 13:16:00	A good point but the name of the tcp/ip owner was a pretty close match to name of the business (some Californian internet marketing company) that was peddling rubbish via e-mail spam so I took a punt, didn't get flamed, the spam stopped, maybe the company was reputable, and I guess they weren't using another identity. I'll never know if I did get it right but the symptoms say I got it right cos the spam stopped just like turning off a tap - although it is still a good point and I shall be a little more circumspect if it ever happens again.	andrew93 (249)
245014	2004-07-14 00:51:00	Oh, right, I didn't think about that sort of instance :8} I should probably do a few traces on the next few items of spam that I get though; I used to do it occaisonally, but never ended up anywhere useful. To me, it sounds like you stumbled across a company that didn't do spamming very well, as in using public proxies, hijacked servers, etc.	agent (30)
245015	2004-07-14 01:40:00	$5 from each person would create lots of revenue. Say there are 2 million email addresses in New Zealand and half of them will want to be on the blacklist. That is $5 million dollars every year. Of course there will also be other sources of income. And spam has to be traceable. Afterall, they are advertising something. If it can not be traced, how the help do I buy what they are advertising. I am aware that advertisers may be employing spammers to do this work and the advertiser would be traced rather than the actual spammer. There has to be a link between the advertiser and the spammer. And about the international problem, well.... make a submission to UN or whatever and make it INTERNATIONAL LAW. I actually like Bill Gates' idea about the computer having to do a mathmatical calculation for each email sent. This would drag down spammers' computers considering they email by the thousands or millions. This would have no effect or very little effect on the home users, but might affect those businesses who have mailing lists and electronic newsletters. Mister Harbies	mister harbies (5607)
245016	2004-07-14 04:38:00	I personally don't like any of Bill Gate's ideas for stopping spam. I haven't freshly read up on them, but my initial thought on hearing them was that they were ridiculous and absolutely unnecessary. It is unlikely that a small mathematical calculation will have a major effect on spammers - it will mean that they are more likely to make use of zombie computers that have been taken over by trojan horses. All the spammer would need to do is send one email to a zombie, which then uses a list of email addresses (or randomly creates them) and sends off heaps of emails. Another major downside to his plans is that it would require additions to either the standards used to send email, or every single email program. Honestly, will the mathematical calculation be initiated on the client side, or the server side? Either way, you'll most likely end up with many "rogue" applications that do not conform to what Bill Gates wants. I came up with this idea last night, and I haven't thought it through at all, but I believe it is better than anything Bill Gates has turned out. Why don't we just make it so that every email address has a GPG key. There are a number of things you could do after this, one of them being that emails without a valid GPG signature (checked by servers from a global database of public keys) are discarded, or all emails that aren't from people on your contact list are discarded, with the added bonus that this would also mean spam appearing to be from people on your contact list could be discarded - it would contain neither a valid GPG signature nor encryption. Sure, the ideas that could stem from everyone having a GPG key are just as susceptible to corruption, insecurity, and privacy concerns as any other, but we'd probably all be a little better off.	agent (30)
245017	2004-07-14 05:19:00	> I personally don't like any of Bill Gate's > ideas for stopping spam. :D > I came up with this idea last night, and I haven't > thought it through at all, but I believe it is better > than anything Bill Gates has turned out. Why don't we > just make it so that every email address has a GPG > key. There are a number of things you could do after > this, one of them being that emails without a valid > GPG signature (checked by servers from a global > database of public keys) are discarded, or all emails > that aren't from people on your contact list are > discarded, with the added bonus that this would also > mean spam appearing to be from people on your contact > list could be discarded - it would contain neither a > valid GPG signature nor encryption. > > Sure, the ideas that could stem from everyone having > a GPG key are just as susceptible to corruption, > insecurity, and privacy concerns as any other, but > we'd probably all be a little better off. As I was reading one of your earlier posts just now, I also thought of the PGP key (I think it is PGP rather than GPG) and then I read your last post and you may be on to something here. Not only do they need a valid key for themselves (reported spammers lose their key and have to reapply), but they also need your public key which wouldn't be available as part of a list any spammer could just download - not sure how that would work for mere mortals but maybe you could retrieve one key at a time (as mere mortals would).	andrew93 (249)
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