UN Takes Aim At Spam Epidemic 363
clester writes "CNN reports 'The United Nations is aiming to bring a "modern day epidemic" of junk e-mail under control within the next two years by standardizing legislation around the world to make it easier to prosecute spammers, a leading expert said Tuesday.' The full story reports that as much as 85 percent of all e-mail may be categorized as spam and that the problem is rapidly spreading to cell phones in the form of text messages..."
Legislations Effect (Score:5, Insightful)
Until a method is found that kills or significantly makes spam nearly impossible to send or makes the profits significantly less than the costs of operating, all legislation will do is drive the spammers further and further underground...
Shouldn't they... (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately... (Score:3, Insightful)
The war against spam will be won by smart filters!!
oh yea (Score:4, Insightful)
If I know the UN... (Score:4, Insightful)
bleh. (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not a hardcore libertarian, but I just don't think we need a new set of laws to deal with every little annoyance, and I'd rather see the Internet be as unregulated as possible. Instead of pushing our leaders to pass more unenforcable laws that will expand government regulatory power, let's go after ISPs (and entire national networks, if need be) that tolerate spammers. If the Internet can't be self-regulating, it's ultimately doomed to failure or Balkanization.
Re:Legislations Effect (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with you but the article did mention that there are known major spammers that they are unable to prosecute. So maybe we do need a few more laws. I think the key here is to get these anti-spam laws passed in (nearly) all countries so that spammers have fewer places to hide geographically.
Re:Shouldn't they... (Score:5, Insightful)
That would require courage. Don't hold your breath. They are too busy trying to block investigations into abuse from the "oil for food" program.
Mod it down or whatever, I don't care, but the UN is working very hard to fulfill GW's statement, that they are irrelevent. They COULD be very powerful and effective, but the individual players (and yes, often us as well) are too busy with their own little power trips and rip offs.
BIG BROTHER (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The UN?!? (Score:2, Insightful)
Once the last resisting country (USA) adheres to the UN resolutions as well I think there's a good chance for this to work as well.
10 bucks says ... (Score:2, Insightful)
B) The spammers themselves will be on this panel (ie: Sudan being on the Human Rights board)
C) The few non-spammers on this panel will have no idea what spam is. They'll be more interested in joining the mindless anti-Isreal propaganda the UN loves to engage in (Somehow anti-Isreali spam will be allowed by the UN, just watch it)
D) This panel will report to another panel, which in turn will report to some other panel, and thereby getting nothing done (their website has an amusing pic about just this)
E) Even if this panel wanted to get something done, there would be much infighting and mindless bickering between a bunch of guys who continue to treat the UN as the mindless boys-club it has grown to be
Sunny Dubey
Re:bleh. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:If I know the UN... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not quite. First there will be at least one innocent person who has his life ruined because of some far reaching interpretation of the policy. However, blatant spam with procede uninterupted.
Re:If I know the UN... (Score:1, Insightful)
Cheers!
=-=GuestFox=-=
Re:The UN?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The UN?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't mean that nothing can be done... I and everyone else with a firewall in front of a mailserver can blackhole those nations that choose to tolerate spam.
I can't wait for IPv6... It should be even easier to throw away traffic from entire nations than it is now.
Re:bleh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Go after ISP's using what? New laws? No laws? Vigilante teams? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Just what do you mean by "go after" if it does not involve passing new laws to prosecute violating ISPs with? You do realize that no law prohibits an ISP having a spammer as a customer, don't you?
So how shall we "go after" ISP's with no new laws?
Re:Legislations Effect (Score:2, Insightful)
Besides, the spammers don't care how much work the machines do - they're not their machines. The price could be storing data on the local hard drive, or having a bounty taken out on the IP, and the spammer could care less what happens to the zombie.
Only way to stop spam... (Score:4, Insightful)
Everybody can read who's advert it is and where the owner of the advert resides.
Re:The UN?!? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'll assume not because you've jumped on the mass-media hyped lack of huge stockpiles of WMD and come to the conclusion that Iraq was in compliance with all 18 or 19 UN resolutions.
Saddam's Iraq was chock full of illegal rockets, weapons research programs, and had never stopped shooting at UN forces enforcing the no-fly zones.
And if Saddam didn't have stockpiles of WMD when the US and about 20 or 30 other countries invaded, that meant he failed to comply with the UN resolutions that required him to account for the stockpiles he certainly had during the Iran war and the first Gulf War - when we did find them.
The fact that Saddam used the Money for Food program to subvert and corrupt the UN (and other countries...) is just evidence to stay far, far away from them when importand things are on the line. Just like Bill Clinton did when he opted to stop the genocide in Bosnia - another non-UN invasion by the US.
Re:Spam Vs. S/Mime (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Shouldn't they... (Score:3, Insightful)
be stopping real travesties like war and disease?
They can work with more than one thing at once.
The UN should be disolved... (Score:1, Insightful)
one country from invading another or enforce the 1945 Geneva Convention. If they try to control spam instead of 80 percent of all email being spam, it will be 99.9 percent.
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not good news... (Score:4, Insightful)
I imagine the great minds who make up the UN will support the idea that generates the most money for the lobbists of thier supporting country. So it looks like we are going to get a sender-pays-Microsoft or sender-pays-Verisign antispam solution.
Before the ignorant flame fest begins (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The UN?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
That is not due to the UN but to the arsenal of nukes which backed up the Cold War. It was only the threat of total annihilation that prevented WWIII.
Re:Meseems... (Score:3, Insightful)
The goals are great, but quite frankly I'm very concerned about where this could take us. It's scary enough when the U.S. Congress tries to make things better by deciding what can and can't be sent via email--having this decided by an international organization just makes me shudder. Today it's just spam, but what happens when that international organization decides that discussion of terrorist planning can't be conducted via email... and what happens when the definition of "terrorist" starts expanding.
I'm all for getting rid of spam, but we need to watch this very carefully.
Right on target (Score:4, Insightful)
standardizing legislation around the world to make it easier to prosecute spammers
Must have been asleep, but I didn't realize that it was within the power of the UN to 'standardize legislation' in any given juristiction upon the planet.
Bitter sarcasm: This should come as a great relief to the countless vitims of murder, genocide, torture, displacement, starvation, disease, opression and the myriad other insults, which more than half of humanity fears on a regular basis.
What was the mission of the UN? Ladies and gentlemen, get a real job..
3.141 (Score:1, Insightful)
Why should my Grandma not be able to send email because she doesn't know that her computer is infected? (Not that it is. I'm a good grandson.)
Re:The UN?!? (Score:2, Insightful)
There's more than one. I can think of Israel off the top of my head.
Re:The UN?!? (Score:1, Insightful)
That "etc" stands for "The USA" and "Israel", right?
Fair & Balanced(tm)!
Re:Legislations Effect (Score:3, Insightful)
Standardizing legislation (Score:2, Insightful)
But doesn't a large portion of spam come from compromised Windows machines with broadband? Although lots of spam comes from Russian and Chinese servers I don't see how the UN's approach will be able to handle desktop computers in the US. If Grandma gets a worm that turn her computer into a spam machine are we going to prosecute her in The Hague?
Re:The UN?!? (Score:3, Insightful)
The UN was to decide if Iraq complied, and according to the inspectors, Iraq was. The US decided Iraq failed and took matters into its own hands, defying the UN and even threatening to endager the UN workers who were still there.
Also, weapons deteriorate. The Iran conflict was when? 1980?
If you were asked to prove you did not possess something, how could you comply? By allowing me to search your property. That is the only way. You cannot prove a negative, but you can prove something cannot be found with reasonable means and time. The UN workers were busy proving that. Sure they were taking a while. It's a big country. Bush was simply eager to get his war on. (A video of him before his solemn announcement demonstrated this.)
So who defied the UN?
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:1, Insightful)
I think this is a step in the right direction. If all the spammers move to country X, I will block all communication with country X until it sorts out it's own laws. More importantly, I'm sure a lot of large ISPs and mail providers would do the same.
Hard-hitting issues... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The UN?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
In stead of ostracising countries from communication with email, they should be helped with stopping SPAM traffic from their network and helped back onto the internation email sending stage. If nothing else the UN could at least help with that. Not just punishing a whole country of innocent users with the few bad apples in them.
Again and again we see examples of the thought process that maintaining a blockade against a country will force that country to comply with international demands, and again and again we see years and sometime decades of suffering by citizens before a resolution is actually reached.
I may be sounding like I'm taking this a little out of perspective, but how quickly citizens from the so called developed countries with this attitude would cry out that their freedoms are being stepped upon if someone dared to blacklist them.
It starts with SPAM... (Score:3, Insightful)
its great that the un wants to help... (Score:4, Insightful)
Bush: Hey UN, can we go to Iraq?
UN: No
Bush: Duly noted *promptly invades*
Even if the UN passes this, the US (which originates a good amount of the world's spam, probably won't want to do this, for lots of reasons, one being that the US likes to be unilateral now, and lots of people in congress and the like don't really like the UN, but this might spur the US to do its own plan which actually does stuff
Re:The UN?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:2, Insightful)
If you make it illegal for them to operate in most of the wealthy countries which buy their services, and prosecute organisations which commission spam in those conuntries, you will be reducing the money available to them and reduce the incentive to spam.
Two possabilitys (Score:3, Insightful)
1. 13 years from now someone other than the UN will get feed up and actually address the problem pissing off the rest of the world who apparently started taking kick backs from spammers.
Slashdotters seam to think this is the outcome however it appears this only happens when the UN takes on it's ACTUAL mission of world peace and not more trivial matters.
(I know spam is a big deal but compaired to world hunger (ignore the obveous joke here) disease and war I'd say spam is kinda the same as a cop ignoring a murder to chase after a speeder)
2. Draconian laws that permit the UN to deside what is or isn't acceptable in e-mail.
With some lobbying and bribes spammers get to continue to operate BUT other things don't.
Spam hunter efforts, Linux dev e-mail lists, Slashdot (all of it), Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern.
The merrits and diffrences between the cenesorship of Limbaugh and censorship of Stern aside the United Nations was founded to premote world peace (hunger and disease intersect this as nations will go to war over the resorces needed to resolve thies issues).
However as of late the United Nations has abandoned it's cause of world peace in favor of it's own form of world domnation.
Take a look at the issues the UN has taken on as of late:
IP law, Hate Speach and now Spam.
Each of thies issues can be used to craft laws that control what people can say.
IP law: Copyright law is itself a big buggabo. It's not so much the control of what is said but WHO may say it. Copyright law has already been used to control political speach.
The "I have a dream" speach should be public domain. It was a public speach and shapes public policy to this very day. However the famaly of the man who originally uttered those words now clame ownership over all his words making political debate on those issues cumbersom or in some cases impossable. IMAO that is the only value to a copyright on public speach.
Hate Speach: Today political organsiations clame all opposing ideology as "hate speach" (much as Microsoft clames Linux is unamerican) as a means of sillencing opponents.
Spam: Spam isn't very well defined and it's pritty easy to use the terminology to pick and chouse what is or isn't spam. This could easly be used to sillence political speach.
I also believe the UN is picking this one up becouse certen political parties are using spam for fundrasing. Obveously even lagit antiSpam laws would have some effect on the political front however thats not really anybodys fault but the spammer politicians themselfs.
for the same reason (Score:2, Insightful)
I like what we said in the 60's, it's still relevant today:
"you are part of the problem, or part of the solution"
Re:*sigh* (Score:2, Insightful)
This will help (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In typical UN fashion... (Score:2, Insightful)
The joke was not facile US-bashing. As far as disarmament, your country's policies, more than those of any other country, suck. Star Wars... More weapons of mass destruction than any other country and the only country that has used all three... reponsible for proliferation, supporting repressive regimes (remember, Saddam, just like Osama, was YOUR man)...
Feel free to assume I'm just an ill-informed idiot. In the meantime, I'll just assume you're uncomfortable with the fact that your country's policies are despicable, invoking god and forgetting to spell when someone tries to point it out with humour*
*Canadian/Brit spelling. So sue me.
Re:Before the ignorant flame fest begins (Score:2, Insightful)
I'll even go two: The Solomon Islands - still underway, but again an ANZAC initiative, with no US involvement.
Some solution ... (Score:3, Insightful)
As long as people buy the crap that is advertised and as long as some company can make some decent profit from spamming it will continue.
Destroy the economical basis of spam - then most companies won't use it.
Re:Meseems... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This was just on the James mailing list (Score:3, Insightful)
Only within the context of your worldview.
One man's porn is another man's everyday activity. Did you know that there is just about a sexual fetish (and thus a porn market) for just about anything? A well known example are images (and video) of a woman wearing high heels stepping on wine glasses. No nudity, just the act alone.
Some people find this highly erotic, to them images of the act could be considered "pornographic". To the rest of society, it is just "odd". In a similar vein, you have the whole "furry" fetish...
The fact is, one can only tell what porn is based on their world view - in some cultures, the sight of a woman's breasts would arouse little or nothing. Other cultures drape curtains on their statues.
Re:Before the ignorant flame fest begins (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Legislations Effect (Score:3, Insightful)
Excellent guess. I used your post as a springboard from which to launch my diatribe. If you believe all those silly fables then it's directed at you - but I hope you don't believe them.
I've had good success against spammers using anti-abuse methods and others (Micheal Tokarev, Ron Guilmette, to name two) have had superb success. The methods are horribly neglected and terribly under-appreciated. The way to stop almost any abuse isn't to make everyone immune to it, it's to go after the abusers. It's smart to protect your wallet in various ways against pickpockets - but methods that target pickpockets work against them. Telling everyone to "secure your wallet" but never watching for, never arresting and trying pickpockets would mean that the pickpockets were being given a free ride and could pick pockets safely as long as there were pockets to be picked. That would be terrible - but change the discussion to spam and you have ASTA advising everyone to do the equivalent of "secure your wallet" and saying everyone should simply not watch for any signs of pickpockets - it's the fault of the victims when they get robbed. There's a slight difference - but it doesn't destroy the value of the example.
Re:The UN?!? (Score:2, Insightful)
No country is going to defy the UN to protect spammers. Some might be too corrupt or inept to regulate them effectively, but with laws on the books there is a mechanism to harass them, or institute Internet "sanctions" to make business hard for theose who support them. how, ahem, "effective" the paper tiger that is the UN has been...
The UN's overriding aim was to prevent another World War. It has done so, despite recent actions by a rogue nation which has ignored its processes. It's also done a few other things, like wiping out smallpox (except for those viruses held back by the USA and USSR that now threaten us again).
Re:Now we know nothing will ever be done about spa (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Shouldn't they... (Score:5, Insightful)
1) respect their people.
2) have a binding constitution.
3) have a system of government that is subservient to the people.
4) have an media system which is private.
5) ensures that non-democratic nations do not have the same standing as democratic nations.
People can call the US a dictatorship and all the rest, I like calling Canada a dictatorship. God knows Darth Jean treated the country like his own piggy bank. The point is this, each of the G8 countries fall under those first 4 points. Each of the G8 countries fall under the 3 fundamental points of which lead to personal freedom.
1) Common Law (Upholds Property Rights)
2) Free Society (Liberty)
3) Market Economy (Wealth Generation)
Without those, and without the people having those rights...the countries in that organization are meaningless. It gives dictatorships the ability to be 'as powerful' as the EU, or the US. It gives butchering Syria or N.Korea as much 'moral' right as Canada or Japan.
You can not have a 'moral' organization which places corrupt, immoral, and terrorist entities at the same levels as those who are not. Our governments are accountable to US(the people)...me...you...the guy down the street.
Their governments are accountable the the guy holding the gun to his head, saying protest or die...then raping his wife and daughter for fun. Or killing someone to ensure 'loyalty'...
Bah...I don't care...mod me down, up. Kiss my ass...whatever. The UN is failing, because it puts the 'bad guys' on the same footing as the 'good guys'. If you are having a moral clarity problem trying to figure out the difference between the two...I'd suggest an actual trip to one of those 'socialist paradises'.
Sit in front of your computers, decry 'international law' but you fail to see the reasons as to 'why' it fails, bah. The same reason as to why the League of Nations failed, the same reason as to why the "Arab Leauge" are nothing but dictators who control hate filled media but are willing not only to condem us(the west) for 'evil' acts, but were unwilling to stop them from happening in their own backyard. The same reason as to why a war broke out a few hours from Paris...and it took NATO and the US to stop it. The same reason as to why Kofi is afraid of what the oil for food program will really show, and how 'deep' the corruption really is. You think the US is profiteering? Not even close. If you didn't hear...the UN head inspector for the "Oil for Food" program was killed by a bomb the other day. Very strange. Not to mention the governments who have the most 'vested' interest, want to turn this from a 'legal' to 'political' investigation. Ask why Kofi and the General council reprimanded and censured a couple of workers who wrote about what really happened in Africa. It goes on and on and on.
It's so damn corrupt that even ex-stalinists would be rolling with glee at the kick-backs.
If you want to reply, I may or may not read it.
Spelling and Grammar Nazi's can pike off.
Re:The UN?!? (Score:3, Insightful)
UN usurping sovereign power? (Score:3, Insightful)
What happens when a country is in non-compliance? After sanctions, embargos, and brow-beating don't work, the UN turns to it's muscle, basically the U.S. and European nations military, to drop the hammer. Do we really want to send UN "peacekeepers" into a foreign country to stop someone from sending you e-mail? Anyone here want their nation's military to be a) under command of another nation's general, b) shipped to some far away land, and c) used into battles to protect your right to not have to look at naked breasts when you don't want to? Hell, I don't even want my military in Iraq fighting for someone else's freedom.
Remember, folks, the UN is just a meeting place for nations to come together to talk through their differences. UN resolutions have no more weight of law than any other verbal or written contract, and since those contracts are between nations, I posit they carry less enforcement power than contracts between natural persons. The power they have is in PR - non-complying nations get some real bad press from major news organizations, which brings out the bleeding heart in all of us, I'm sure. If these agreements had any real power, Americans wouldn't be getting killed to free Iraq - and it's oil.