At 4:01 PM -0600 4/7/03, Vernon Schryver wrote:
> So would you propose a law requiring that companies include that
information in the email?
*** OF COURSE NOT! ***
Why can't I communicate the simple, obvious fact that advertising
almost always identifies the advertiser?
Because that statement bears no relationship to what I see in my inbox.
The email addresses they provide go to free web mail sites.
The web addresses they go to go to IP addresses, or to free-website
sites, or to real sites that have an open-redirect, or to real domain
names that are hosted on some web server in China and have whois
information that doesn't point me to a real company. Or in those
cases were it might, it means calling some random phone number in a
country on the other side of the world.
Spam identifies its perpetrator to its targets so that they can buy
whatever is being advertised. That identification is also sufficent
in court for people with a complaint agatinst the spammer.
LOWRATEMORTGAGES.INFO
Registrant Organization:ibms computer
Registrant Street1:59 shanghai street
Registrant City:kowloon
Registrant Postal Code:10023
Registrant Country:CA
Registrant Phone:+905.34323423
Registrant Email:mortgage9007(_at_)yahoo(_dot_)com
Okay. Now what?
I know, ignore that. I should go to the web site and use that to
track them down. Right? Follow the money?
Okay. Follow that link. After all, eventually they will give us
enough information to nail them.
Hmm. First thing on that page is a form. In order to do anything I
have to fill that form out with my phone number, address and email
address. And then they will send me three mortgage offers.
Okay. So I could create a throw-away address. Put in fake address
and phone number information, and then I would receive three mortgage
leads from somewhere.
And then I'd have to track down those companies and see if they are
real, or whether they are the spammer. Maybe they are innocent
parties and they are just paying for leads. That's going to take
more tracing, more phone calls, possibly even a court order.
So. Yes. Eventually we can follow the money. That is very
different from "identification".
What good does this do to the average user on the net? We can now
tell them that if they hire a computer consultant to spend several
hours of time they might be able to find out the name of the person
who is spamming them from China.
There's identifiable, and there's *usefully* identifiable. I don't
buy the claim that this identifies the advertiser in any real sense.
And this is one of the more trackable pieces of spam in my inbox.
anonymous that any spammer. Any spam received through an SMTP server
that is not utterly broken and lame has a Received header that accurately
identifies the IP address of a computer owned by at least one party
that is at least partly responsible for the spam. Many and probably
Yup. This one was clearly identified as coming from an open proxy in Brazil.
that lack of technical pointers to the junk faxer, the TCPA is regularly
used to whack them with fines ranging from $500 to millions of dollars.
For examples, see http://www.fcc.gov/eb/tcd/ufax.html
I know. I've provided the FCC with a number of complaints for junk
faxes and phone calls. They even follow up to every report with a
letter containing a printout of several pages on their web site.
Thus, there is no non-technical need for any more identification of
spammers than we already have. The only sane and honest justification
Whoa. Backup. Those junk faxes and phone calls; they had a contact
phone number in them. I fed that number to the FCC, they look it up,
now they have a name and address. Obviously all I had to do was
write the phone number down, so it didn't take any of my time. It
takes me about 15 minutes to fill out the form on their site, it
takes them half an hour to an hour to process each complaint
(according to their web site). I assume that includes the time it
takes to map the phone number to a name and address and compare it to
other complaints in the database.
Now compare the amount of time it would take to track down the spam I
just mentioned. And add in the fact that, unlike the fax/call case,
it needs to be done by someone technical.
Phone and fax spam provides enough information for someone's
grandmother to file a complaint.
Email spam is hidden behind a maze of temporary identities. It often
isn't possible to trace if you don't respond to it immediately. I
don't see how you can argue that this bears any relationship at all
to phone and fax spam. The difficulty in tracking down a spammer is
different by several orders of magnitude.
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/ Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/ Writings on Technology and Society
I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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