Fighting Spam Through Regulation and Economics 94
Bryan29 writes ""Next door to our offices was a spam operation... One day they weren't there anymore". Apparently in the past several months some black hat SEO companies (comment spammers) closed shop. Mr. Evron explores using a couple of case studies how spam was directly impacted by the UIGEA online Casinos law, disallowing payment processing, and how the subprime mortgage collapse made many former clients of spammers "move on". The article draws its conclusions from an economic standpoint "Perhaps the next step policy makers should take is to work to change this economy, possibly by legalizing and regulating ... More to the point, they can make the act of processing funds for this type of operation illegal.""
This one is better, but no cigar (Score:5, Funny)
() technical ( ) legislative (*) market-based ( ) 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
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(*) 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
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(*) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(*) Asshats
(*) 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
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(*) Extreme profitability of spam
(*) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(*) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(*) 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
( ) 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
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) 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:
(*) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) 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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Found it [craphound.com] it's like a failed decision support system that still works because there is no viable solution.
Looks like the author is Cory Doctorow [google.com]
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I saw it ten years ago on Usenet.
http://www.boingboing.net/2004/02/25/universal-crackpot-s.html [boingboing.net]
This is a very funny checkbox-based form-letter for responding to crackpot spam solutions proposed in message-board posts:
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) 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
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) 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
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Link (Thanks, Jef!)
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Re:This one is better, but no cigar (Score:5, Insightful)
(*) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(*) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
You're not controlling the e-mail, but you're controlling the money. if they can't accept "Visa/MC/AMEX/Discover/Diners/etc." they won't make as much money. paypal is the same way.
Yes, the "mark" could still send a check, but at that point you know exactly where the check went, and you get the copy (electronic) back.
I think this plan has half a chance of working... however, then I think we'll start seeing more phishing... and I really would hate to see more laws
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Something like, draconian regulation of ecommerce is a bad solution.
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If I were writing these regulations, I'd do it in two parts. First, you wouldn't be allowed to get an account for a business selling certain things, such as V14grA. Second, if you use your account to process payments from such things, you lose you
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The only solution when you catch them would be to kill them and everyone they ever met.
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Ah yes, the Frea Speach defense.
Here's a hint: all rights have limits, and these limits are when infringing on the rights of others. Your First Amendment rights do not give you the right to stand on my lawn in the middle of the night with a megaphone to advertise your goods; you are infringing on my property rights. I can have the police haul you off for that. How is that different from you pushing shit into my inbox which I have to pay for, directly in connection charges, or indirectly through higher ISP
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Here's a hint: all rights have limits, and these limits are when infringing on the rights of others. Your First Amendment rights do not give you the right to stand on my lawn in the middle of the night with a megaphone to advertise your goods
BZZT! Wrong!
Even burning a cross on your lawn is speech that is constitutionally protected from prior restraint.
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/faclibrary/casesummary.aspx?case=RAV_v_St_Paul [firstamendmentcenter.org]
And sending commercial emails is too.
http://www.wm.edu/law/publications/jol/articles/geissler.shtml [wm.edu]
anti-spam laws act to block all speech in a manner similar to those cases, i.e. by imposing a limitation on the sending of emails over private networks, this article treats the proposed federal anti-spam statute as a p
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In the opinion of the author of that article. I'd bet that if I spent some time with Google, I'd find at least one article that directly contradicts the one you cited.
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Why don't you stick to the example I gave you? Ah right, because that would destroy your nice little theory, primarily because I was not talking about prior restraint.
In other words, you're probably a spammer. Fuck off and die. Slowly and painfully preferably.
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Don't be more stupid than you have to be. It's not sending the spam that gets their account nuked, it's using their merchant account to process payments resulting from spam. If they want to spam the world with religious or political messages, but not ask for money, that wouldn't get their account revoked. Asking for money and using that account to
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I dunno. Given that the WTO finding against the US with regard to online gambling...the US 'may' have to change its laws or get massively fined, etc. I'd think if the US had to take action on that finding, the law regarding online gambling transactions/payments would have to be repealed? I actually hope so....b
Re:This one is better, but no cigar (Score:4, Interesting)
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Gadi Evron = Hot Air (Score:3)
Just read his posts on BUGTRAQ. Any of them over the last 3 years.
Re:Gadi Evron = Hot Air (Score:4, Informative)
Gadi at his best.
First of all, the casino SPAM has not decreased. It has changed target markets. I got 10+ mails over the last month that managed to get past my antispam filters with gambling spams and scams. This is compared to under 3 for the preceding year. Mortgages - that disappeared at least one year before the credit crunch started. And so on.
The reason SPAM is decreasing is that the return on investment for spammers steadily decreases. People are responding to it less and less. As a result the vast botnets built for spamming are now geared towards phishing, identity theft (botnet ops are actually scanning computers for useable documents) and from time to time a bit of SPAM for the purposes of botnet expansion.
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It is just a little harder, and we have to do business with sketchy third parties.
Yeah, the spammers and scammers hate that. Please, don't throw me in that briar patch, sir.
The UIGIA eliminates spam and scams the way Prohibition destroyed the Mafia.
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Congratulations on that.
Interventionism isnt completely "useless" (Score:3, Insightful)
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The proper solution to it is almost certainly going to include a mix of the following elements. I just wish I could suggest a reasonable mix and a way of putting it all together.
Filtering so that fewer eyes see the spam, larger fines/longer sentences when caught, SPF/domain keys and similar to make identification of spam somewhat easier, shun servers that are known to be ope
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Would a public education campaign be worth trying? TV ads explaining to people that spam is an on-going problem partly because some people keep rewarding the spammers with sales.
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NO NO NO NO NO
You have fallen into the trap of believing that the spam game is about getting ordinary punters to buy counterfeit watches, handbags, penis enlargement pills and pirated, obsolete software.
The spam game really about persuading people that they can get rich quick, by spamming customers.
The product which is being
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I'm finding it more and more common for regular and remotely reputable businesses to buy lists and send out an announcement - none of them seem to even realise that what they're doing isn't a good thing.
I think there are even marketing laws in Australia that allow you to scrape public email addresses in a number of cases.
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There's too much spam. It needs to be regulated
Fine, email now costs a penny per message.recipient
Forget it, email needs to be free
Goto 1
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Or to put it in the form of the oft-quoted spam solution checklist:
(X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
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The junk fax law could be extended to cover spam: some US congressmen have tried, repeatedly, to do so, but been blocked by lobbyists like the Direct Marketing Association (which has both legitimate and spammer on-line members who fear such legislation). And the junk fax law has stood up well to challenges on free speech issues. But it
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Mycroft
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Does it constitute even 1% of your legitimate faxes?
Whack-a-mole (Score:2)
This oughta work well. His premise seems to be to remove the economic incentives for spammers to make money, you either trash the economy and / or make everything illegal. That's a bit hyperbolic but not a whole bunch. I, for one, haven't se
Spammers hunting for new products (Score:2)
Cleanup Wall Street (Score:2, Offtopic)
What about these unregulated Hedge Funds Too many people insist that they be given a free ride because they cater to intellect investors. The subprime mortgage basically proved that more than a few of these businesses are little better than pyramid schemes( example: bundling of crappy mortgages and selling them as AAA bonds).
When they address something that actually cost the US a couple of TRILLION dollars, then lets worry about Spammers.
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Start with the jittery oil speculators first and knock it down $30-40+.
It's not quite that simple I'm afraid. True a large part of the price of Oil is probably due to the speculation on its price you mention.
However there is also the inconvenient fact that we are not discovering new fields as fast as we are depleting mature fields beyond the point it becomes cost efficient to extract. We are also becoming a lot more adept at extracting oil from very mature fields but it still doesn't change the fact that Oil is a finite resource and it will eventually run out.
Then there is Ch
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It's not quite that simple I'm afraid. True a large part of the price of Oil is probably due to the speculation on its price you mention.
Well, giving them 3 years to work with Middle East jitters doesn't help when they were proven wrong in Iran. I'd not mind knowing how much oil wouldn't go up if there was accurate information about the reserves and intelligence.
However there is also the inconvenient fact that we are not discovering new fields as fast as we are depleting mature fields beyond the point it becomes cost efficient to extract. We are also becoming a lot more adept at extracting oil from very mature fields but it still doesn't change the fact that Oil is a finite resource and it will eventually run out.
Then there is China. The Chinese demand for oil is growing at a staggering rate, both from the peoples desire to drive their own car to work and the countries industrial growth. India is also crying our for more oil due to their economic growth. The fact is the world needs more and more oil as these countries develop but it has less and less.
That should have been accounted for when we started selling out our nation to that part of the world.
The oil that is left is becoming more concentrated in fewer and fewer countries in the middle east. It will not be long (50-100 years, I believe) before the only oil left in the world is under Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Unsurprisingly these countries are demanding top dollar for their oil. As less and less countries have oil to sell the remaining ones that do are going to charge more and more.
Then we're probably going to go to war once again should there be any problems with that country that threaten access to oil. It would also nicely deal with the issues with the Far
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I think the subprime mortgage shows that a ton of people out there are idiots and should have read the contracts they were signing, and known they weren't going to be able to afford their homes over the long run. What about personal responsibility?
Don't get me wrong, I feel bad for people getting foreclosed on, but THEY are the ones that signed on the dotten line, if they didn't rea
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If I am a dishonest lender, I offer these loans. I hawk them loud
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Big hole in simple solution: A lot of Very Big Business depends on that not being the case.
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There's been a lot of fraud exposed on the news about this lately. It's a nasty business, much like selling used cars.
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I really have a hard time blaming anyone but the borrower. Dealers/lenders are there to give you the credit that you are asking for. They aren't financial counselors. They aren't your parents that can or should tell you all the "hidden costs" of owning a home. They are there to evaluate your application and if you me
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You gents sure do put a lot of burden on the business. I am surprised I didn't hear an argument along the line of "...since this were subprime loans, the people request them were subprime humans. The business was taking advanta
Less regulation (Score:1, Insightful)
the only way to defeat spam (Score:5, Funny)
Re:the only way to defeat spam (Score:4, Funny)
I already said this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, the suggestion from this article misses the boat. Trying to price the spammers out of operation doesn't get the job done, because there's hardly a shortage of money to keep them running. We need to price the middle men out of operation.
In particular, when the spammers register new domains (which they do by the hundreds or more at a time), they give kickbacks to their favorite registrars, who in turn will turn the other way regarding the illegal operations.
If instead ICANN had some cajones, they could take the bad registrars out, clean up the registration mess that currently exists, and they could make it economically unfeasible for the spammers to continue their game as currently played. A good start would be to enforce an exponentially increasing fee structure for domains - I know of very few people who have a legitimate need for more than about 4 domains. Furthermore, if the bad registrars were to actually lose their accreditation after willingly doing business with these criminals (easy to prove), that would also help.
But as someone else already pointed out, you cannot just simply tax spam out of existence. You need real, working, economic solutions. And if ICANN was worth their own weight in bat guano, they could make it happen.
Most of the registrars are now "bad" (Score:5, Informative)
If instead ICANN had some cajones, they could take the bad registrars out...
The problme is that most of the registrars, by actual count, are now "bad". See the list of ICANN-approved registrars [icann.org]. There are several hundred, few of which have any real existence. Most are just fronts for some domaining operation. Some are obvious about it: "DropExtra.com, Inc.", "DropFall.com, Inc.", "DropHub.com. Inc", "DropJump.com, Inc.", etc., all of which are fronts for a "wholesale domain registrar". Then there's "Enom1, Inc."., "Enom2, Inc." ...
"enom469, Inc.". Most of the "registrars" are now dummies like that.Those are ICANN's constituency.
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Targeting economic and social factors are the only way that certain wars will be won. On drugs, on terro
Re:I already said this... (Score:4, Insightful)
AMEN to the first part!
ICANN needs to get rid of the AGP (grace periods) for domain name registration which allows domain tasting. This allows people to register a domain name for up to 5 days and then get a refund on the fees.
I have had this discussion with ICANN staff. The liaison claims that since there is no partial penalties for registrars that violate their agreements that the only punishment available is to terminate the registration status. Bull! They can always terminate the ability to register new domain names to get the registrar to behave. Then the domain name registrars that don't bother terminating domain names with false whois information.
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But as someone else already pointed out, you cannot just simply tax spam out of existence. You need real, working, economic solutions.
As I and others have pointed out many, many times you won't fix the problem until you fix the economics of email which places all of the costs on the receiver. Advertising that places most or all of the cost on the recipient is just too much of a carrot.
Regulation will just mean catching innocent bystanders in collateral damage. Economics is the right solution, but pricing of domain names has little to do with the real problem
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So this means I can make money by replying fewer times to my friends? They send me five and I reply once and I make money off of them?
Sweet!
qz
Regulation will never work... (Score:1)
ISP spoofing, proxies, etc make it impossible to determine the licensed spammers from the unlicensed.
No, I didn't RTFA. Why waste my time on a concept so obviously flawed.
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Most spam messages does contain advertisement for something and there is usually a site involved in the end. By tracking down the purchase channel where the money flows it's possible to do a further analysis and possibly prosecute for tax evasion, unlicensed selling of prescribed pharmacy or something else. There is always something that can be prosecuted or at least investigated in a way that requires a temporary close of business.
There are of course some s
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Also a few years in a US prison might actually be an incentive to the 419 crowd. Imagine, three square meals
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Spam is an example of "Age of Plenty" economics, and no attempt to apply "Age of Scarcity" economic theories will ever be successful in changing it.
post spammer's location (Score:2)
I find that most spammers are reasonable people when you discuss it personally with them, or call their mother and ask her to ask them to stop. It's when they hide behind internet anonymity that they do ungood things like spam. [Internet anonymity overall is a good thing, but it has costs including spam.]
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I didn't also know that one of my neighbours was a three time child murderer until a camera team came to interview my wife about them.
Spammer's location is Netanya, Israel (Score:1)
Finding real botnet based spammers in Netanya is not that difficult. Netanya Academic College has hired in the past the services of botnet-based spam to advertise its services. In 25 January 2007 a spam message advertising them was received by me. The source was a consumer dsl connection in Verizon's network in Santa Monica, California (http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/ipall.ch?ip=71.109.181.242) and it was positively identif
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No need for that (Score:1)
*sigh~* (Score:3, Insightful)
Kill the botnets and you kill spam. A technological solution to a mostly technological problem. Oh, and you'd stop DDoS attacks at the same time, along with other nasty stuff. Sometimes it pays to go for the root of the issue.
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Kill the botnets and you kill spam. A technological solution to a mostly technological problem. Oh, and you'd stop DDoS attacks at the same time
We had spam and DDoS attacks long before botnets. Killing botnets will stop the way muich of the spam is sent today but cannot stop spam
The root of this problem is people. People who buy the drugs from websites linked in spam, people who open the attachments that lead to their computers being used for spamming, and people who care more about making money by providing business to spammers. This is a people problem, not a technological one at all.
Government shouldn't be in technology (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, DUH! (Score:4, Interesting)
That is what I have been doing. I don't file lawsuits against the people pressing the send button, but the people who are advertised and making money as a result of the spam. A sex dating site I sued years ago, took a strong anti-spam policy after I sued them.
Spammers spam to make money. If people don't pay them to send the spam, they won't do. If a company will not make money from spam, they won't pay the spammer. The same thing happened with junk fax.
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It removes only one type of spam. Online payment restrictions can block legal online businesses.
Instead of viagra spam you will get more 419 and other scams.
regulated economy (Score:2)
What about the REST of the impact of this legislation? Where's the discussion of that?
This is like nuking China and then applauding ourselves for accidentally curtailing hacking.
The Nature Of The Problem... (Score:3, Interesting)
Spam is not simply a technological problem, so a technological solution will be insufficient.
Spam is in large part a social problem. It requires social solutions. If that requires legislation, so be it. Personally I enjoy tracking down spammers, and publicizing their real name and location, including a map showing where they are. To my knowledge nobody ever made use of these and tracked down a spammer, but it really fucked with their heads to be outed so thoroughly and so publicly. I had one call me and rant at me, including threats of legal action as well as threats of bodily harm. But I had a few call and apologize, claiming they weren't aware it bothered people so much. One of these, in fact, became an anti-spammer.
Are you saying (Score:1)
That spamming is reduced when they have fewer clients?! Who'da thunk? Betcha nobody expected that.
[Citation needed] (Score:2, Informative)
What actually happened is that they had to change the way they accepted online wagers. There's some gambling site (and I'm willing to admit this is a citation needed too, since I've forgotten the URL) that posts graphs of gambling transactions going back for a few years, including the coming into eff