Canada and USA Feds Unite To Fight Spammers and Telemarketers 68
Reader Freshly Exhumed writes: Telemarketers in Canada and the USA have essentially been bypassing each nation's do-not-call registry by basing their efforts from the other or from off-shore locations, while cross border spam remains rampant. Now the CRTC, Canada's telecom and broadcast regulator, has announced it signed a partnership agreement with the Federal Trade Commission of the United States to fight against spam and calls from pesky telemarketers. The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) consists of all unsolicited telecommunications, unsolicited commercial email (spam), and other "illegal electronic threats" that cover anti-spam laws in the United States and Canada.
Won't work (Score:1)
they will just move to india and restart their BS.
None of the ISPs care (Score:2)
It's all for the show, folks.
Google, Yahoo, none of them care. Spam/abuse reports go into a black hole. You can block international sources and be no worse off, like 163.com, etc. I know this is counter-intuitive, but I get actual responses from Microsoft, and occasionally, some from European ISPs.
Until you can get accounts shut off, and make it vastly tougher, it's a game of whack-a-mole.
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Once in a while, I'll get to kill an account, but gmail and yahoo seem to be the favorites among the non-UTF8 senders. We have a honeypot account that catches lots of mud. These days, I just delete it, rather than make the filters even more clogged than they already are.
The truth is: these are corporations that act in their best interest, and that means sales. Very few of them think in terms of bandwidth costing the money, because spam is so cheap to send. The day Yahoo gets sold, my spam will drop by 10%.
What would make the most difference (Score:5, Insightful)
Spam is largely a solved problem. I see little spam. However, I am receiving increasing numbers of telemarketing calls. These calls used spoofed caller-id so that the source appears to be very local. Because they are spoofing caller-id, they don't care about do-not-call lists.
What we need is for telecom companies to block spoofed caller-id.
Re:What would make the most difference (Score:4, Insightful)
What we need is to make it impossible to spoof caller ID, which I'm sure isn't very difficult technically, but the telecoms are accomplices in the business.
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Spam is largely a solved problem.
Uhhhh.. really? I still get a ton of spam emails. I'd say 98% of the email I receive is unsolicited spam. I just don't see much of it thanks to Popfile filtering.
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Spam is largely a solved problem. I see little spam. However, I am receiving increasing numbers of telemarketing calls. These calls used spoofed caller-id so that the source appears to be very local. Because they are spoofing caller-id, they don't care about do-not-call lists.
What we need is for telecom companies to block spoofed caller-id.
What a load of BS. I get about 12k spam emails a day out of usually less than half a dozen legitimate messages. Spam is out of control. Admittedly, I've had the same email address for twenty-two years and posted to Usenet using it.
The phone calls would go away if Microsoft didn't find them so profitable. Every single one of those the past year that I've received was from a phone number owned by Microsoft from when they consumed Skype. Because Microsoft doesn't give a damn about the law, they have decid
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A good household distillation system is a very good solution to fecal contamination of drinking water. But it's still a burden for businesses who manage email, and for people whose mailboxes are occasionally overwhelmed by spam, for legitimate business traffic blocked as spam, and for people whose filters are not quite as good and get overwhelmed or defrauded by spammers.
I've not gotten so much telemarketing lately. I _am_ getting a lot of recruiter calls from fools in India who've seen a few keywords on my
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I would argue that while blocking spoofing is a good start, we need to go one step further.
The reason fighting email spam has been so effective is because it's a combination of multiple factors: blacklisting known bad sources (i.e. the spoofing solution for POTS) and content analysis such as Bayesian analysis and flagging email when the same email shows up a massive number of times. Right now we do none of this, and as a result everyone in the
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Rachel from cardholder services
If I ever get my hands on that cunt, I'll wring her neck like a chicken.
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Spam is largely a solved problem.
Even if your premise were correct (which it isn't), the costs of said 'solution' are borne by the victim in the cost of increased CPU cycles, storage, et cetera. Any legitimate solution would impose these costs on the malefactor instead.
Re:won't work (Score:4, Insightful)
The biggest issue is all the exceptions they've managed to weasel in. I don't care if I have a business relationship with you, or if you're a political party, or a charity, or whatever else. I still don't want you to advertise to me, that's why I put my number on the damned registry. That should be a clue that I do not take kindly to people calling me trying to sell me things. The only time I want to hear from my ISP, or bank, is if there is a problem with my account, or some other similar threat.
Re:political party exceptions (Score:2)
I won't vote for anyone that spam calls me. Any politician that thinks that they should have special rights is no different than a bigot.
We live under 'Cartel Socialism' now - getting closer to fascism as time goes by - the Demopulicans go about dividing the people against each-other and giving themselves special rights - I suppose at some point they will have special rights for your daughters as well...
My solution (Score:2)
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I take it a step further and use a silence track as my default ring tone. Then select people on my contact list, from whom I would actually want to receive phone calls, get "white-listed "by having a ring-tone that actually makes noise.
One question ... (Score:2)
Why the h*ll wasn't this done around the turn of the century? It's not like the two phone systems have any large incompatibilities or that they're too far from each other to make cooperation possible.
Also, time to shut down services that allow you to spoof phone numbers - and cut off access from countries that don't comply.
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The US CAN-SPAM law was designed to permit "spam", unsolicited bulk communications, UBC, or "spam" as it was originally and very carefully defined. The law _protects_ spam, by setting an extremely low threshold for spam to be considered legal under US federal law, and by enforcing a US federal policy of "opt-out" rather than "opt-in" being the standard to avoid prosecution or civil suit for spam. It also prevents the publication and use of a "Do Not Spam" list for all bulk advertisers. Moreover, most commer
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Canada's anti-spam legislation, on the other hand, requires express consent in order to spam people. It's opt-in. It also allows individuals to take civil action in 2017 (i.e. after a 3-year period from the act's introduction).
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Do you really think it won't be repealed before the end of the year? Or another glaring hole opened up in it?
Hello, this is Windows technical support (Score:2)
I keep forgetting to troll these people.
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I just tell them I don't have a computer.
My wife: "You lied!"
Me: "No I didn't. I don't have a computer. I have a bunch of computers."
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"I exaggerated." - Spock.
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I managed to get one of those guys to talk to me "honestly" for a while. He started his patter and I said I knew this was a ransomware scam. I politely asked what his plans in life were.
We played a little guessing game about where they're based, since the accent is obviously Indian-subcontinent. Took me a couple of tries, but the answer is Sri Lanka. I suggested he learn to program if he wanted to have a more successful career.
The next time one of them called I asked how the weather was in Columbo that even
Who will alert me? (Score:3)
Obligatory (Score:1)
Your post advocates a
( ) technical (X) 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
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the mone
We should really escalate this one... (Score:2)
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It does make you wonder if you gave the NSA the equivalent of a blank check and said "nuke the spammers" -- if this means taking entire data centers offline, DO IT.
Could they? Between their intelligence on system flaws and no doubt mapping every shady hosting center and possible hacking source, I might expect they could, but maybe not. Maybe too much of it is compromised desktop PCs and legions of residential/business bots for even the NSA to deal with.
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The NSA has no enforcement power: they cannot prosecute or file charges against anyone.
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Gen. Michael Hayden
(Yes, technically, the NSA doesn't handle the wet-ops stuff, that gets kicked over to the CIA/JSOC/USSOCOM/whoever has won the right to take out the cool toys today; but they do do hit lists. Also, odds are good that their hacker types could, if they so desired, make quite a mess of any but the best-designed spamming infrastructures. They may or may not have the legal authority to do so; but if an anonymous electronic attack were to happen, that wo
PR (Score:2)
On the bright side, there's a recognition that there is a problem.
However, both the FTC and the CRTC are government agencies which exist to protect an industry from consumers; neither seems to know what to do when asked to protect consumers.
Cypress (Score:2)
Cypress is now where many of the telemarketers have moved their operation to.
Also India and Majorca and the Philippines and Lesotho and Egypt and Namibia and Tunisia...basically any place overseas. Because they know damn well that the FCC isn't gonna spend their time hunting down a telemarketer from Greece or the Sultanate of Oman or Romania or whatever.
Still too many exceptions (Score:2)
When I say I don't want calls I really really don't want calls.
So here is how I would like it to work. I would like to sign up for two DNC call lists. One would be the usual list, but the other would be part of a service. If someone calls me and I don't
use mod points (Score:2)
People should be given mod points to rate the calls they receive. The rating would be maintained by the various telcos, and the caller's rating would appear in a way that your phone could filter/ignore calls below some threshold, say from -1 to 5.
People who wish to spoof caller ID, or place anonymous calls, would always have a rating of zero.
People who consistently give good calls could receive a boost for spreading good karma.
Tax them! (Score:1)