DoCoMo Takes Spammers to Court: this article just goes to show you all that SPAM is a global problem with serious reprecussions.....even in Japan! The NTT DoCoMo company is seeking a court order against 30 Japanese spammers who have sent electronic junk mail to I-mode users.
NTT DoCoMo hopes to help users of its I-mode wireless Internet service stop junk e-mail by dragging junk e-mail senders, or spammers, into court, the company announced on Monday. The company is also taking steps to reduce the cost of receiving e-mails, including spam, by offering I-mode users 400 free packets of data per month.
To date, DoCoMo has tracked down up to 30 individuals who have sent spam to I-mode users and is seeking a court order to force them to stop sending spam through the I-mode system. DoCoMo is hoping for a repeat of a legal victory by Nifty Corp., said Enoki, referring to a Japanese Internet service provider that succeeded in stopping a spammer with a court order. As I-mode charges users a fee for each e-mail that is received, users end up paying for all of this spam. In an effort to reduce the cost of spam mail, DoCoMo plans to offer I-mode users up to 400 packets of free data every month, amounting to a discount of about 97 cents (120 yen) per month for each user. "This started as a measure to prevent spam, but it is actually a new price reduction on our service. We will offer these free charges permanently," Enoki said.
Courtesy of The Standard
On My List:
For all you music lovers, tonight there is free show at harbourfront by Ninja Tune artists the Cinematic Orchestra. It should be fun so if anyone's interested you can talk to me. Remember folks, it's completely free!
Duane
Wednesday, June 13, 2001
A spam cop goes AWOL The ORBS blacklist, a cotroversial tool for stopping unsolicited email, is suddenly inaccessible.
Spam fighters all over the world have lost a controversial weapon in the battle against unsolicited e-mail, ORBS -- the Open Relay Behavior Modification System -- has been gutted. ORBS's main service was a blacklist of Internet mail servers -- computers capable of routing mail across the Net -- that the ORBS administrator, Alan Brown, had identified as potentially capable of forwarding spam.
Questions about ORBS's behavior always centered on the problem of how to handle e-mail abuse. But more generally, ORBS symbolized the ongoing struggle between the Net's tendency to encourage individual freedom and the necessity of combating anarchy.
Ever since the Net moved beyond its roots as a small, open, academic community, users have attempted to balance opposing forces. Most favor the right to speak out, along with the right to privacy; they rail against censorship, but at the same time desperately seek the ability to censor unsolicited e-mail by limiting spammers' access to their networks.
But not everyone is sorry to see the site go. ORBS has plenty of critics. ORBS wasn't just a useful technology, they say; it was also a tool used by a specific person, Alan Brown, an overzealous spam fighter who went too far.
"Alan Brown created some nice technology -- nobody faults him on that point," says Tom Geller, founder of Suespammers.org, a nonprofit group that lobbies for strict spam legislation. "But he used it in an irresponsible way, invading others' private networks and using others' resources against their stated wishes." He became a living contradiction -- a man who, says Geller, "used others' network resources to prove that it's wrong to use others' network resources."
courtesy of tomalak.org
On My Mind:
i want to rant about the sorry state of affairs, as i see it, in the world of baseball.
i went to the blue jay game last night. unfortunatly, i left with an "awful taste in my mouth" due to the sheer boredom that i experienced once the 3rd inning came around. don't get me wrong i've always enjoyed a good ballgame but last night's tilt was extraodinarily rough. it was a pitcher's duel - meaning there were no runs scored, at all! - and both teams seemed rather sluggish and disinterested with their dispositions. granted if i was making 10 million a year i might not give a hoot about anything either. but, i'm not making that much, i'm just an honest paying fan (just kidding, the tickets were free.....but they don't know that!) whose one small request is to enjoy a well played game of professional baseball. c'mon folks, pull up your beltstraps and give the fans what they want: a couple of hot dogs, beers and a home run or two to boot!
let's go jays,
duane
Spam fighters all over the world have lost a controversial weapon in the battle against unsolicited e-mail, ORBS -- the Open Relay Behavior Modification System -- has been gutted. ORBS's main service was a blacklist of Internet mail servers -- computers capable of routing mail across the Net -- that the ORBS administrator, Alan Brown, had identified as potentially capable of forwarding spam.
Questions about ORBS's behavior always centered on the problem of how to handle e-mail abuse. But more generally, ORBS symbolized the ongoing struggle between the Net's tendency to encourage individual freedom and the necessity of combating anarchy.
Ever since the Net moved beyond its roots as a small, open, academic community, users have attempted to balance opposing forces. Most favor the right to speak out, along with the right to privacy; they rail against censorship, but at the same time desperately seek the ability to censor unsolicited e-mail by limiting spammers' access to their networks.
But not everyone is sorry to see the site go. ORBS has plenty of critics. ORBS wasn't just a useful technology, they say; it was also a tool used by a specific person, Alan Brown, an overzealous spam fighter who went too far.
"Alan Brown created some nice technology -- nobody faults him on that point," says Tom Geller, founder of Suespammers.org, a nonprofit group that lobbies for strict spam legislation. "But he used it in an irresponsible way, invading others' private networks and using others' resources against their stated wishes." He became a living contradiction -- a man who, says Geller, "used others' network resources to prove that it's wrong to use others' network resources."
courtesy of tomalak.org
On My Mind:
i want to rant about the sorry state of affairs, as i see it, in the world of baseball.
i went to the blue jay game last night. unfortunatly, i left with an "awful taste in my mouth" due to the sheer boredom that i experienced once the 3rd inning came around. don't get me wrong i've always enjoyed a good ballgame but last night's tilt was extraodinarily rough. it was a pitcher's duel - meaning there were no runs scored, at all! - and both teams seemed rather sluggish and disinterested with their dispositions. granted if i was making 10 million a year i might not give a hoot about anything either. but, i'm not making that much, i'm just an honest paying fan (just kidding, the tickets were free.....but they don't know that!) whose one small request is to enjoy a well played game of professional baseball. c'mon folks, pull up your beltstraps and give the fans what they want: a couple of hot dogs, beers and a home run or two to boot!
let's go jays,
duane
Tuesday, June 05, 2001
Some notes on recent legal sanctions for spam courtesy of our friends at Tomalak.org:
........Since the start of the current session of Congress, almost every week a reader spots another anti-spam bill being introduced in the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives. Some bills have shown promise whereas others have looked dangerous from the start. It has been virtually impossible to keep track of them all as they've made their way through various committees, been broken apart and recombined with elements of other bills, and then, for the most part, stalled.
A few bills, however, still appear to be alive, most of which have a depressingly familiar look. In essence, they take an opt-out approach, giving spammers the right to have one free shot at you and then requiring the recipient to request removal from the spammer's list. Although such bills prohibit the use of forged headers and phony removal addresses, the bills' language that allows ISPs and/or individual recipients to take action against spammers violating these restrictions has been watered down or has disappeared completely, meaning that enforcement will be left to the Federal Trade Commission. In other words, these bills follow the basic outline of the infamous Section 301 that spammers still cite.
........Because of Section 301, we know exactly what spammers will do if one of these new bills happens to pass in something similar to its current form. Spammers will embrace the new law as legal sanction for their practices. Spam recipients foolish enough to ask to be removed from a spammer's list will get even more spam for their trouble because their removal request will get them on a list of addresses known to be active. Because active addresses are precious, such lists are sold to other spammers, who can then send their own opt-out spam.
........Ways to eradicate the type of spam we all dislike -- promotions for sleazy scams, porn sites, and get-rich-quick schemes -- do exist, but the danger is that the cure may be worse than the disease. How do we take away the small-time swindler's ability to broadcast his or her latest con across the Internet without risking our right to use the Web to communicate what we want to communicate?
Have a good one folks and remember: "it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all".
Cheers,
Duane
........Since the start of the current session of Congress, almost every week a reader spots another anti-spam bill being introduced in the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives. Some bills have shown promise whereas others have looked dangerous from the start. It has been virtually impossible to keep track of them all as they've made their way through various committees, been broken apart and recombined with elements of other bills, and then, for the most part, stalled.
A few bills, however, still appear to be alive, most of which have a depressingly familiar look. In essence, they take an opt-out approach, giving spammers the right to have one free shot at you and then requiring the recipient to request removal from the spammer's list. Although such bills prohibit the use of forged headers and phony removal addresses, the bills' language that allows ISPs and/or individual recipients to take action against spammers violating these restrictions has been watered down or has disappeared completely, meaning that enforcement will be left to the Federal Trade Commission. In other words, these bills follow the basic outline of the infamous Section 301 that spammers still cite.
........Because of Section 301, we know exactly what spammers will do if one of these new bills happens to pass in something similar to its current form. Spammers will embrace the new law as legal sanction for their practices. Spam recipients foolish enough to ask to be removed from a spammer's list will get even more spam for their trouble because their removal request will get them on a list of addresses known to be active. Because active addresses are precious, such lists are sold to other spammers, who can then send their own opt-out spam.
........Ways to eradicate the type of spam we all dislike -- promotions for sleazy scams, porn sites, and get-rich-quick schemes -- do exist, but the danger is that the cure may be worse than the disease. How do we take away the small-time swindler's ability to broadcast his or her latest con across the Internet without risking our right to use the Web to communicate what we want to communicate?
Have a good one folks and remember: "it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all".
Cheers,
Duane
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