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Spam United States Your Rights Online

FTC Porn Spam Regulation Now in Effect 279

Posted by michael from the kmail-filter-already-added dept.
gManZboy writes "The AP (through Yahoo) is reporting that the FTC is now requiring that all sexually explicit spam carry the wholly original 'SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT:' moniker in the subject line. I don't know why the porn industry is complaining about this, it seems like now everyone who really wants porn spam (not I!) can finally create a filter that delivers it to their inbox, highlighted, and bolded!" The FTC's regulation is available, and so is Slashdot's earlier story.
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FTC Porn Spam Regulation Now in Effect More

FTC Porn Spam Regulation Now in Effect

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  • Great, but what about spam from outside? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by metlin ( 258108 ) * on Thursday May 20, 2004 @11:25AM (#9205117) Journal
    Great idea, but what about spam originating from other countries?

    First off, there is no assurance that spammers will adhere to this in the first place - if they are using trojan-ed systems and the like, there is no way you would be track them down.

    Sure, some of them may, but if there is any way they can hide behind the anonymity mask, there is no reason they have to adhere to this.

    Secondly, most of the spam I receive are not even from the US. Most of the stuff is from Asia or worse, eastern Europe. Do these regulations apply to them, too?

    From the release (emphasis mine) --

    The final rule follows the intention of the CAN-SPAM Act to protect email recipients from unwitting exposure to unwanted sexual images in spam, by requiring this mark to be included both in the subject line of any e-mail message that contains sexually oriented material, and in the electronic equivalent of a "brown paper wrapper" in the body of the message.

    What is _any_ really? Is there a way FTC can regulate spam from other countries, or is it just for intra-US spam? If it's just the latter, it isn't much use. On the other hand, if it's not, how on Earth are they going to enforce it?

    • Re:Great, but what about spam from outside? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by stephenisu ( 580105 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @11:29AM (#9205166)
      NEWS FLASH!! This just in..

      Those "Untrackable" spammers are selling a product, a product via credit card. Don't think too hard on that one.
      • ....going into a bank account in a country that doesnt care about spammers and will not cooperate with foriegn nationals enquiries......

        • unless that bank is issueing their own credit cards, and you have that credit card in your pocket, it doesnt do them a whole lot of good.

          Everyone accepts Visa and Mastercard. Eventually the buck stops there.

          That lets through people who send cash, checks and money orders, or pay via their phone bill. I bet there aren't enough of those people to keep the porn and spammers alive.
          • Perfect. Now I can get revenge on businesses I hate.

            Step 1: Find legitimate online ad for business.

            Step 2: Rejigger ad into sexually explicit pr0n ad that links to their sales site.

            Step 3:Send pr0n from ow3nD boxes running a trojan.

            Step 4: Let justice be done!

            OK, I wouldn't really do this, but someone else will which is why this law may not work.

      • Re:Great, but what about spam from outside? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by metlin ( 258108 ) * on Thursday May 20, 2004 @11:32AM (#9205216) Journal
        Sure, but the point is most porn spam is asking you to visit site foo-bar or something like that. Or maybe buy a product from some place.

        And anyway, the sites that the spammers link to can always plead ignorance. *shrug*

        Hey, I asked these spammers to help me out, but they did not stick to the rules. Don't blame us.

        And maybe this will see even spam being outsourced ;)
        • ok you guys win, the law with prolly be unenforcable, but it will be trackable. But about the pleading ignorance thing... try that in a criminal case and you don't usually get too far regardless of the crime.
          • But in a commercial setting things change. If I'm a company that makes Foo Bar, and if I say that I'd asked this marketing company to market Foo for me, and they broke the law, what can the judge do?

            When you are just a manufacturer, and your distributors/marketers make a mistake, you cannot be held liable. Not unless they are all the same corporation.

            If I hire a man to sell my product and he goes and rapes a girl (or a guy, depending upon his preference), I cannot be held responsible. Would a similar anal
            • When you are just a manufacturer, and your distributors/marketers make a mistake, you cannot be held liable. Not unless they are all the same corporation.

              I dunno about that. WalMart got held liable (unless it's been overturned on appeal and I didn't hear) for defective children's apparel when they couldn't produce the name of the manufacturer, who otherwise would have been liable. I don't see why you can't hold somebody responsible for the way they market your product. If you didn't get a complete rund
              • I don't see why you can't hold somebody responsible for the way they market your product.

                Because you know that immoral as their means of marketing are, they are quite effective (i.e. spam). You just turn a blind eye until the cops come calling.

                At which point, what's to prevent you from saying we were not entirely aware that they were not abiding by the law?

        • Sure, but the point is most porn spam is asking you to visit site foo-bar or something like that. Or maybe buy a product from some place.

          And anyway, the sites that the spammers link to can always plead ignorance. *shrug*

          Hey, I asked these spammers to help me out, but they did not stick to the rules. Don't blame us.

          "I just hired the hitman to kill my wife for cash, I didn't do it. Don't blame me!"
      • Those "Untrackable" spammers are selling a product, a product via credit card. Don't think too hard on that one.

        Yeah, but unfortunately the CAN-SPAM law only allows you to take action against the person/agency that sent the spam. It superceded better laws that let you take action against the company that hired the spammer. So it doesn't matter if you can 'track' down the product and the company/person selling the product -- as long as they hired an outside party to send the spam, they're free to do so a
    • This is the same counter given to every law that triesd to combat spam. They are always unenforcable.

      I dont think there is ANYTHING that can be done by governments that will reduce spam levels. The spammers know its wrong, but they dont care.

      If anything they will AVOID using these tags, a they know their emails will be filtered out if they include them. A spammer is after eyeballs on emails.

      The real problem, as ever, are the people who BUY services from spammers. Cut off their income.

      Same arguments for an unsolvable problem.

      RM

      • The law IS having an effect (Score:4, Interesting)

        by daves ( 23318 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @11:41AM (#9205339) Journal
        Our incoming spam rate, normally a clean, rising, exponential curve, dropped 20% the day CAN-SPAM went into effect. It happened again the day last month that it was announced that 4 had been indicted under the Act.

        Of course, spam is still up 30% over the end of last year...
      • There is no such thing is an unsolvable problem, in so far as you know something about it. If you know nothing about your problem, then you probably are in trouble, but we know a great deal about spam, who spams, why spam happens, where it comes from and so on.

        For a start, how about, getting your government, in an attempt to slow the tide of spam, to help out the eastern european, or asian nations? To help them clean up corruption, and get a working socialist infractructure(ie, public schools, roads, he
    • Um... if "ANY email message that contains sexually oriented material" requires this identifying subject, does that mean that if you want to talk dirty with your friends, you have to ID each message thusly, lest some unwitting soul intercept and view your pornographic conversation??

      • does that mean that if you want to talk dirty with your friends, you have to ID each message thusly,

        It's a Federal Trade Commission rule, and their purview is limited to commercial activities. So you don't have to label a message telling your friends how this chick sucked on your balls while stroking your dick and fingering your butt... unless you're using this story to try selling Amway® lubricants [alticor.com] to your customer-friends.

        • Heh heh... but how about paid-subscription mailing lists, aren't they technically "commercial" since money is involved?

          Anyway, point was that this is just way too broad and could have unintended consequences, most likely not to be seen until someone with a twit mentality decides to sue someone else over an honest mistake.

    • Re:Great, but what about spam from outside? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mcc ( 14761 ) <amcclure@purdue.edu> on Thursday May 20, 2004 @11:42AM (#9205356) Homepage
      This is something I mostly bring up in the debate regarding general spam, but something that is very important to keep in mind is that if we can force spam to originate from outside of the United States, this is a major win. The fact is that every existing form of technical spam prevention-- blacklists, whitelists, graylists, filtering, etc-- are made noticeably easier if one can make assumptions geographically limiting the locations of spammers. Even if by "geographically limit" we just mean "outside the U.S.".

      The thing is though I don't know how applicable my argument here is in this particular case, since as far as I'm aware (?) you don't filter porn spam any differently than the rest of it. However, spammers seem to be very loath to subscribe to any kind of law or decency if it means more work for them. Perhaps some spammers will get themselves screwed out of business because they don't follow this law and ISPs sue them.. a thinning of the herd, if you will.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • First off, there is no assurance that spammers will adhere to this in the first place - if they are using trojan-ed systems and the like, there is no way you would be track them down.

      You can try. They'll have to accept credit cards, for example. You should be able to find who they are from that.

      , or is it just for intra-US spam? If it's just the latter, it isn't much use

      Yes it is. It reduces US based spam, thus leaving a simpler problem of dealing with foreign spam.

      Why does everyone assume th

    • Secondly, most of the spam I receive are not even from the US. Most of the stuff is from Asia or worse, eastern Europe. Do these regulations apply to them, too?

      It does not apply to them...until.....

      they send the spam to servers and recipients in the USA. Jurisdiction is not only based on where they are located, but also where they conduct business and where the harm is directed.

      The FTC has filed a lawsuit against [weblogsinc.com] the scumbag spammer known as Global Web promotions. I filed a lawsuit against them last ye


    • Great idea, but what about ...


      While I personally agree that it's probably not going to be effective, until they've tried it we can't be sure.

      Once it's proven ineffective, then I'll start complaining that they've wasted my tax dollars and are interfering with things they should stay out of.

      -- this is not a .sig

  • Need we say it? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bendelo ( 737558 ) * on Thursday May 20, 2004 @11:26AM (#9205123)
    Spammers lie, cheat and break the law. I can't see this being enforced succesfully.
    • Yes, but some of them are so stupid that they do it in a way that allows them to be tracked down and prosecuted. A family in Waterloo, Ontario got caught spamming recently.

      Having laws on the books may not stop the ones who don't get caught, but the ones who do will, in all likelyhood, never do it again.

    • Lying, Cheating, etc (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ackthpt ( 218170 ) *
      Spammers lie, cheat and break the law. I can't see this being enforced succesfully.

      I don't know which aspect is more fascinating...

      That people actually expect any real help and enforcement from the government.

      Or

      That anyone who does business with spammers expects to do business with an ethical entity who won't pass along their email address, credit card numbers, etc.

    • Thats what cruise missiles are for.
    • Amazingly enough I just checked my company spam box...In it are messages with the subject "SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT" Some also have "-ADLT-" and some have "[Adult]" many more do not have any such lables. SO it would seem at least some spam companies are following these rules. I guess now it makes it easy to tell the "good" spammers from the "bad" spammers right?

      heh
      • I've been getting some form of "SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT" (hyphen, colon, space, etc.) for the last couple of weeks. But the ratio of clearly labeled porn and non clearly labeled is about 50/50 so I still have a lot that isn't automatically filtered.
      • I guess now it makes it easy to tell the "good" spammers from the "bad" spammers right?

        Good point. With this, we will be able to determine which spammers are to be slowly tortured to death and which should simply receive a bullet in the brain.
    • On the other hand, porn spam typically constitutes 40% of what hits my email address. Of 70 messages filtered so far today, I estimate around 28 of them were for pornography. About half of those were text only, and may or may not be subject to regulation (FTC site seems slashdotted). 2 were labled "Sexually Explicit". So I estimate an early compliance of about 14%. While far from perfect, even a little bit of compliance helps ease the burden and reduces false positives/negatives for me.
  • First the "evil bit", and now the "pr0n bit"???

  • My issues with this... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by garcia ( 6573 ) *
    a) Putting SEXUALLY EXPLICIT in the title only makes it more annoying when you open your email. My gf uses AOL and her inbox is full of this shit daily. I would rather not see SEXUALLY EXPLICIT 100x over and over again as I scroll down the list.

    b) Ok, so they force people to "scroll down" before seeing the image. What about people that have large monitors and email fullscreen? Do we have a set number of 100000000 lines before you see it? What about those of us that filter out white-space in emails s
    • "Putting SEXUALLY EXPLICIT in the title only makes it more annoying when you open your email."

      Assuming spammers do actually follow this requirement, you could simply set a filter to send those emails to the trash.

    • Re:My issues with this... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by JesseL ( 107722 ) * on Thursday May 20, 2004 @11:43AM (#9205361) Homepage Journal
      a) Would you rather see 100 variations of "hot sluts that dig farm animals want to meet you tonight"?

      b) So there are people who may see an explicit image before they scroll down, that goes now too. At least most people will benefit and none will suffer.

      c) Similar to point b. If 99% of people can't figure out how to use the tools they've got, so what? Why not do somthing to help the other 1% of us anyway? The people who don't want porn spam will still figure out pretty quickly not to open massages titled "SEXUALLY EXPLICIT". Right now you can't tell anything from the subject line - porn spam comes with subject lines ranging from (no subject) to "Your Mother Called".
      • Right now you can't tell anything from the subject line - porn spam comes with subject lines ranging from (no subject) to "Your Mother Called".
        Sure, automated filtering is nice, but I don't need the subject line to filter out spam - I just look at the from address. If you're getting so much spam that you need automated filtering, perhaps it's time to change your address.
    • My gf uses AOL and her inbox is full of this shit daily. I would rather not see SEXUALLY EXPLICIT 100x over and over again as I scroll down the list.

      Why are you reading your girlfriend's email???

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • "My gf uses AOL and her inbox is full of this shit daily. I would rather not see SEXUALLY EXPLICIT 100x over and over again as I scroll down the list."

      Does your girlfriend know you're reading her email? Let's hope she doesn't read slashdot, you might not have a girlfriend for much longer. :)

  • Wait a minute... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 20, 2004 @11:29AM (#9205162)
    there's porn on the Internet?

  • So does Viagra Spam count? (Score:5, Informative)

    by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @11:29AM (#9205176) Journal
    I get lots more mail about this than actual porn spam these days. Some of it's more explicit than others....

  • It's working? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tbase ( 666607 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @11:30AM (#9205184)
    I'm actually seeing some mail labeled this way in our junk repository - but all of them violate CAN-SPAM in any number of ways, primarily the fact that they have no return address. I don't know why they bother, other than the fact that they're probably better able to reach their target audience with this method /setting up filter to 'Important Stuff' directory

  • How? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Fearless Freep ( 94727 )
    I'm not sure how anyone can regulate the content of spam until hey figure out how to prevent the transmission of it in the first place

  • I guess the big question is... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by teamhasnoi ( 554944 ) <teamhasnoi@yahoo.cLIONom minus cat> on Thursday May 20, 2004 @11:31AM (#9205204) Journal
    Is offering to make my penis big enough to tear an Amazon in two sexually explicit?

    And what about if you're easily offended or get your crank turned by Norton of antivirus fame?

  • It seems (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mz6 ( 741941 ) * on Thursday May 20, 2004 @11:32AM (#9205211) Journal
    It seems that the FTC thinks that SPAM is handled.

    - We don't get any uncolicited emails anymore thanks to their CAN-SPAM act.

    - Life is great and it's easy to remove yourself from these lists if you don't want their emails.

    How about trying to come up with rules to STOP and regulate unwanted spam altogether before adopting rules to regulate sexually explicit ones? Once the rules come to completeley stop this, non of these new rules even matter!

    • Re:It seems (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Coelacanth ( 323321 )
      How about trying to come up with rules to STOP and regulate unwanted spam altogether before adopting rules to regulate sexually explicit ones? Once the rules come to completeley stop this, non of these new rules even matter!

      And what "rules" would those be? The stuff's already illegal, are you going to make a rule that grants spam-battered citizens immunity from prosecution if they successfully locate the spammer and beat him/her to a bloody pulp?

      Hey, wait...

    • It seems to me that you think that the FTC can regulate spam in the first place... It's obvious that 9 out of 10 spams are going to be originating from another country anyway.
      • I wasn't relying on the FTC at all. I think that everyone, government agencies, software companies, etc.. need to take heed that SPAM will be here to stay. Putting headings in front of the content doesn't change much in the way of it still arriving in my inbox.

  • I can see the weasling now... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by zulux ( 112259 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @11:32AM (#9205218) Homepage Journal


    Headers will come in mutiple forms that will fullfill the letter of the law, but attempt to foil basic filters:

    [SÈXUA?Y-EXPLI?IT]: More Pr0n for you.
    SeExUally-Explicit: More pr0n for you:
    More pr0n for you (Sexually-Explicit)
    [Sexually]-[Explicit]: More pr0n for you

    • Re:I can see the weasling now... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If you read the FTC press release, one of the clarifications made before the rule was finalized seems to address this:

      The final rule requires that the mark appear using elements of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange ("ASCII") character set, and a definition of the term "character" has been added as part of that change.

      So no funky Unicode workarounds, nor html character entities (well, in theory anyway).

    • Those do not fulfill the letter of the law, the regulation was quite clear on this (ie. only ASCII is allowed etc). RTFA.
    • I've already got some variations..

      Sexual:Explicit
      Sexually-Explicit
      SEXUALLY EXPLICIT:

      etc.

      You don't have to leave ASCII to generate a few thousand variations.

  • Some scammers are already compliant (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    For the unlucky few not affected by the plague I
    include some actual spam subjects:

    SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: I'm sore from too much action
    SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT:This looks like Fun
    SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: You Got lucky This Morning
    SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: There's a slut on your desk...
    SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: Sexy company while you work

    Out of a small sample set of 200 general emails,
    I would estimate that about 5% to 10% of
    applicable messages are compliant.

  • Anywhere in the subject line? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lightspawn ( 155347 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @11:36AM (#9205280) Homepage
    So if this substring can be found after 300 characters of spaces, is the spammer still complying?
    • No. See page 7, section ii - "Placement of the Mark in the Subject Line" of this PDF [ftc.gov] which is linked from the FTC page. The mark has to be in the beginning of the subject line.
    • This is why these suggestions about polluting the subject line with ADV or SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT or whatever are misguided.

      There are these other things called "headers" in email messages, which are much more suited to this. The FTC might have mandated a machine-readable header, eg:

      FTC-Content-Warning: explicit=0.9; fraudulent=0.7

      Now we'll have to deal with spammers mispelling "SEXAULLY", or replacing characters with ISO-8859-1 near equivalents, etc. etc.

      But hey, the law was made by politicians, not technic
  • All power and thanks to the FTC -- they mean well and try hard -- but they end up trying to please everyone and accomplishing nothing. The previous attempts to stop spam (not directly out of FTC offices, but believe me, due in large part to their efforts) proved ineffectual within weeks. This will fare no better.

    Of course, I may be wrong. Maybe this will work. Maybe spammers will act responsible for once. And maybe we'll get a visit from the bit fairy, after which Windows won't crash, Macs will be popular,

  • Here's why (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nanojath ( 265940 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @11:41AM (#9205331) Homepage Journal
    Here's why the porn industry doesn't like it - because porn spam is ready made for people with "impulse control problems." They don't really care if you, person with reasonable self-control, deletes their spam, as it cost them whatever ridiculous fraction of a cent to send. They really don't like it if Mr. self-recognized porno compulsive can filter their stuff out.
    • "They really don't like it if Mr. self-recognized porno compulsive can filter their stuff out" And you are assuming of course that the compulsive knows how to filter it out in the first place? And if they are so compulsive, why would they want to in the first place?

      • Re:Here's why (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Artifakt ( 700173 )
        There are plenty of people who feel they are making bad mistakes in their sex life. Some of them are actually doing things such as flashing or groping random strangers on the subway, or worse. More of them just think that porn is influencing them in a negative way, messing up their attitude towards the opposite sex, (or whatever). To them, there's a big difference between having to go through a few actions to view porn and not getting a chance, or preferably multiple chances, to exercise self control, befor

  • I really don't see (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Evets ( 629327 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @11:43AM (#9205358) Homepage Journal
    I really don't see why the US needs to force their sexual discomfort on the rest of the world. US regulations on the web (or any countries for that matter) are not welcome as far as I'm concerned. The internet for the first 10 years I used it represented a truly free society. It seems now that it is a society being pillaged by governments around the world.

    • The internet for the first 10 years...

      Do you mean from 1962 [isoc.org] to 1972. Ok, I re-read you comment and found the you did continue and say "...10 years I used it...", but it's not the governments (or at least not only) pillaging the Internet, but spammers, scammers, and other general criminals. Unfortunately, the only way that any government can deal with an issue is to legislate an answer.

      If change didn't happen (good and bad) we wouldn't be able to say in our old age: "back in the day,..."

    • The internet for the first 10 years I used it represented a truly free society.

      What, slow with blinking text?

      -Adam

    • Re:I really don't see (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Graff ( 532189 )

      I really don't see why the US needs to force their sexual discomfort on the rest of the world.

      If this was about forcing "sexual discomfort" on the rest of the world then the US would be banning and bringing charges upon the sex spammers.

      What this is really about is the right of people to ignore what they don't want to see, while others still have the right to watch it. By adding keywords what they are doing is classifying the e-mails. That way one person can filter it into their "junk" folder while an

    • Who says this is about sexual discomfort? If you WANT sexually explicit spam, good for you, route anything with the SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT tag straight to your mailbox and flag it Important.

      Me, I'd like to have a heads-up on stuff I didn't ask for and don't want, whether it's sexually explicit material, home mortgages, vacations in Thailand or mailarounds of jokes that were old ten years ago.

  • One way spam fighting. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by miffo.swe ( 547642 ) <daniel...hedblom@@@gmail...com> on Thursday May 20, 2004 @11:44AM (#9205379) Homepage Journal
    The best way possible to fight spam must be to fine the companies marketed by spam. Someone surely forks the dough to get spam invading everyones mailbox. I have a hard time imagine someone sending spam just for fun. By cutting off the money the incentive to spam is reduced and it should wither and become a much smaller problem.

    Filtering and making a new shiny mail system dont help. All it does is make the spammers invent new ways to send spam.

    What makes spam such a big industry must be the companies who pays for it, go get them!
    • What makes spam such a big industry must be the companies who pays for it, go get them!

      How do you prove that the manufacturer of a product mentioned in a spam message actually had anything to do with the spamming?

      Can you prove that Pfizer paid for the multitudes of "Viagra" ads deluging your inbox? What if the spammers aren't selling actual Viagra, but rather small bottles of breath mints? What if it was actually Bristol-Myers Squibb that paid the spammers to spam for Viagra, hoping the ensuing backlas
      • "How do you prove that the manufacturer of a product mentioned in a spam message actually had anything to do with the spamming?"

        Excellent point. If the law were to fine a company simply because spam was sent with their name on it, it would be easy for a competitor to send out spam in the name of their competition. (example: CocaCola sends "Drink Pepsi!" spams).

  • Now I'm Screwed (Score:4, Funny)

    by tds67 ( 670584 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @11:45AM (#9205390)
    When I e-mail naked pictures of myself to my friends, I usually use "SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT:" in the subject line.

    Now my friends' e-mail filters will send my e-mails directly to the trash bin. Thanks a lot FTC!

  • Why clutter the subject? (Score:5, Informative)

    by photon317 ( 208409 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @11:45AM (#9205396)

    The Subject line is for human perusal, not for machine categorization. The proper way to implement such a thing has always been an X-header in the email's headers. You could use this to categorize all types of junk spam, allowing mail clients and mail service providers to filter them at will.

    Imagine something like:

    X-UCE:

    Where type is "porn", "commercial", etc... or even use PICS-like content-rating systems in there too.

    Why the Subject field???
    • Why the Subject field???

      Because it's required in all messages, is always displayed in every mailreader, and the instant someone's relay starts messing with the subject line you know it was intentional.

      If you make Yet Another Header then you'll get all sorts of excuses (I didn't know how to use it, etc) and relay operators may well 'accidently' filter out that header, etc. Further, no email program now would recognize the new header - it wouldn't be displayed, categorized, etc. All the end user is a

  • What about the opposite problem? (Score:4, Funny)

    by mamba-mamba ( 445365 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @11:46AM (#9205406)
    It's fine, in this context, to require sexually explicit material to be labelled as such. But what about the opposite problem, where spammers label their spam as sexually explicit and then it turns out to just be a garden-variety multi-level marketing scam?

    I mean, I would imagine that lots of people would check out explicit email once and a while hoping for a thrill, but not if it most of the purportedly explicit material is bogus.

    The FCC should fine people who promise explicit material and don't deliver, too. Otherwise they might as well require the label to say "Unsolicited Junk Email".

    MM
    --
    • A thrill off 'sexually explicit' email? Boy you must have a sheltered life.... You get worse pictures in the daily newspapers these days (ok maybe not in the US where the sight of a breast caused the entire country to have heart failure, but m the rest of the world it's no big deal).

  • Does this mean... (Score:3, Funny)

    by jamonterrell ( 517500 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @11:53AM (#9205487)
    that ACs will have to flag their goatse and tubgirl posts on slashdot?

  • The porn industry is not spammers (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gad_zuki! ( 70830 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @11:57AM (#9205535)
    There's a huge difference between legitimate porn sites that keep their noses clean, have good credit, and will not sell your name or credit card to Russian bank frauders and spammers who put up fly-by-night porn sites to get your info and make a quick buck.

    Lets not confuse the two because there's overlap in the content. Its like saying "Playboy shows kiddie porn, because they share the word 'porn.'"

  • Porn Industry != Spammers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jonathan Quince ( 737041 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @11:58AM (#9205546) Homepage
    I don't know why the porn industry is complaining about this,

    I can say with some certainty that the "porn industry" isn't complaining about this. All of the best affiliate programs enforce TOS that prohibit spam. (You spam, you get shut down and lose the $$$ in your account that hasn't yet been paid out.) Don't insult the legitimate porn industry by linking them with spammers.

    Saying that the "porn industry" protests this regulation is like saying CVS or Walgreens protests regulations on Viagra spam or OfficeMax protests regulations on inkjet cartridge spam. There are legitimate players in the industry, and there are scam artists feeding at the bottom. Guess which group is responsible for the spam.

    Of course, none of this means anything about the regulation itself, which will most certainly be ineffectual at reducing spam or filtering porn spam. IME, the only tool that can produce a real impact on spam is a 2x4 applied forcefully to a spammer's skull.

  • In general, I am against the government getting too involved in anti-spam matters, especially if it's through legislation or code enforcement action. This is mostly because
    • History has shown that these measures have a tendency to backfire and, consequently, often make matters worse and not better.
    • Government, by definition, has a tendency to restrict individual freedom. Liberties seldomly are taken away by drastic measures or through major legislation, but rather step-by-step. That's why I view government

  • La la la la la (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 20, 2004 @12:00PM (#9205570)
    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

    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!

  • My Guess... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ThisIsFred ( 705426 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @12:03PM (#9205617) Journal
    ...is that the porn industry doesn't like this because filtering doesn't always happen at the terminal point. Just like if there was a requirement for, say, a ".porn" domain, righteous ISPs would probably start filtering through proxies based on that indentifying information. There could conceivably be a majority of ISP customers that ask for this. The problem here is that they really shouldn't have a say over what Joe Porn-fan wants on his PC.

    Anyway, no use worrying about it, it's not enforceable. My only regret is that they're going to try, and it will have negligible impact on society or my quality of life, while costing us all in taxes.

  • My 1/2 cent.... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jwcorder ( 776512 )
    I am not an expert on email. I am would say I am not overly smart. I may be in the top 5% in intelligence if you measure the room I am currently in, but that isn't saying much. This is painfully obvious to me that SPAM is going to be a continued problem unless the government takes over email.

    Now I realize I am asking to be flamed on this one, but before you do, let me explain.

    Imagine what a crap hole the snail mail system would be if it was unregulated from the start. This is the same problem that is f

    • Won't work.

      1. As you say, there is the privacy angle, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Add to that the massive expense, political wrangling, and "spam breaks" on the part of government to certain groups (politicians, charities, maybe some corporations) and we'd end up with a boondoggle of huge proportions. I work for the federal government and have some first-hand experience with this. Government projects do not mix well with computers, and the less regulated the Internet is, the better for all conc

    • This is a common flame, but it's depressingly true and very insightful when you are proposing solutions to spam.

      I'm not sure how the central control of e-mail is going to be implemented, either simply through legislation or through technical changes in SMTP so some of the checks may only apply to one or the other...

      --

      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 followi

  • What a great idea! (Score:4, Funny)

    by spidergoat2 ( 715962 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @12:13PM (#9205773) Journal
    Now my 17 year old son and his friends won't have to waste their time actually searching for these sites. Email will readily mark it as such for them. I think it just goes to show we're making things too easy on kids today. He should have to shoplift Playboy just like I did.

  • That's a great idea! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Parandor ( 779995 )
    And it would be so nice to enforce similar monikers to all publicity related writings:

    DUBIOUS OFFER -- SAVE 30% on a brand new TV set...
    POLITICAL PROMISE -- We will LOWER TAXES by 2% in the next 5 years...

    Hmm... Ho, just forget it.

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