Can Spam is five
Winner of chocolate teapot of the decade award
THE CANSPAM law which strikes terror into the heart of spammers everywhere and has totally eliminated unwanted email from our inbox is about to turn five.
Just think. Five years ago 45 per cent of all e-mails were unwanted pitches for such products as Viagra, penny stocks or porn sites.
The Internet was clogged with 15 billion spam messages and 74 per cent of online adults wanted a law that would make mass spamming illegal.
Congress passed the antispam bill known as the CAN-SPAM Act in December 2003 and over night the number of spam messages… er continued to increase.
The number has grown more than 10-fold, topping 164 billion worldwide in August 2008. Now more than 97 per cent of all e-mails are spam and it costs US ISPs and corporations an estimated $42 billion a year to remove it from their system.
These days most of the spam comes with poisoned payloads trying to get your PC to send out unwanted email.
It is not that the CAN-SPAM act has been totally useless. It has put a few spammers behind bars including the pharmacy spam king "Rizler" who is doing 30 years time. However the thought of doing time has deterred as many spammers as the death penalty has stopped American’s killing each other. CAN-SPAM is all about revenge after the fact, rather than any real deterrent.
Jaime de Guerre, CTO of antispam vendor Cloudmark told Network World that CAN-SPAM is mostly a flop and making laws was rather futile anyway because the attackers are so advanced in their threats and it’s so hard to detect where they are coming from. µ
L’Inq
Network
World
Comments
Get it right
"it costs US ISPs and corporations an estimated $42 billion a year to remove it from their system."So if I create a software filter on my system that costs me a million somehow eh, fascinating, I must be loaded.
I think that in fact it costs billions to transfer it, not to block it, it's all the wasted bandwidth you see.
Of course many companies/ISP's actually MAKE money from spam, by asking people money for filtering, so perhaps you meant to say they make $42 billion a year?
Need executions
There need to be some public executions of these spammers, and perhaps some cruise-missile attacks on their houses. At the very least their deaths will make us feel better.Hmm...
Most spam contains poisoned payloads? Nope.If the US could get its renegade ISP's like Comcast (aka Spamcast) to deal with their spam-spewing bots it'd help.
Ditto if ICANN would get off its fat bureaucratic arse and deal with the dozen or so "Accredited" Registrars that continue to register spammer domains by the millions. ICANN receives complaints by the many thousands daily, and does sweet FA, except appoint another committee to develop a working party to investigate assigning an independent.... BS.
Re:Need executions
Bring back the People's Justice I say !With a rope for some good hangin'.
Or put them in an arena and feed them to the lions for viewing pleasure.
Spammers are the other category of people I could really get medieval on.