Proposed anti-spam bill

henbane · 04-09-2003 9:45am #1

It looks like Fine Gael are taking spam seriously. According to an article in the Times today they have a draft Bill in the works. I can't find a wording on the Bill anywhere though.

According to the article the onus would fall on ISPs to filter emails and would also make spam text messages an offence.

They quote Simon Coveney TD as follows:

"Spam is a cause of considerable irritation for computer users, but perhaps more importantly it costs Irish business almost €200 million every year.

"Spam is the main factor assisting the spread of computer viruses that force Irish business to spend a fortune constantly upgrading their anti-virus software."

"The top 1,100 companies in Ireland employ 574,679 people, or an average of 509 people in each company," Mr Coveney said. "A recent UK study estimated the cost of spam to businesses at €57,000 per year for those employing more than 500 people.

"If the same costs were to reasonably apply in Ireland, then the top 1,100 companies would face a cost of €62.7 million per year. With twice this number of people employed in the economy in smaller companies, the cost to business across the economy comes to a total of €188 million."

The URL is here but subscription is required.

bonkey · 04-09-2003 11:01am

Before I start, let me say that I am 100% supportive of the idea of doing something about spam.

However, I do feel that the figures are being spun somewhat out of proportion....

Allow me to explain......

Originally posted by henbane

"The top 1,100 companies in Ireland employ 574,679 people, or an average of 509 people in each company," Mr Coveney said. "A recent UK study estimated the cost of spam to businesses at €57,000 per year for those employing more than 500 people.

Lets be generous and assume that €57,000 applies to exactly 500 people. The wording here makes it seem like its an average across all companies who employ 500 or more...so its fair to assume that I'm taking the worst case scenario.

€57,000 per year is just over €100 (€114 to be exact). Taking that figure and applying it across 230 days per year works out at 50c, per employee, per day. Allowing for slight increases in holidays isn't going to move that by more than a few cents.

Is that so serious a cost? If you went to your boss today and offered to cut running costs by 50c, per employee, per day, how far do you think you'd get? You could probably make those cutbacks by using duplex printers, or re-using printed pages for "scrap printouts". Hell, a cheaper brand of coffee in the coffee machines, or a cheaper supplier would probably make that amount of money....but for companies of that size, such "tiny" increments are generally not considered worth the effort!

Going a step further, if you want to estimate how long it would take to offset this cost, in terms of time.....lets take the Irish minimum wage of €4.70 per hour. So that 50c is equivalent to 1/9 of that (rounding down) or almost 7 minutes (again, rounding up, to make my costs as bad as possible).

So, if everyone in the company worked at minimum wage....you're talking about the "expense" of spam being equivalent to less than 7 minutes of your time each day.

7 minutes per day. Thats what spam is estimated to cost. If you're reading this in work, then its probably less time then you've spent on "personal internet time" today.....but its spam which is the problem that needs to be dealt with (!)

Now, don't get me wrong. I agree spam should be dealt with, but not because of the cost to the receiver, because quite frankly I am still unconvinced that this cost is significant (yet). Its a nuisance, yes, but thats about it.

The reason I oppose it is simple....

If someone went around every house in your neighbourhood and put flyers through the letter-box for a mail-order pornography service, and listed all the greatness of <insert your choice of porn here>, what do you think the local reaction would be? Why should internet spamming be any different?

I applaud FG for taking this initiative. Unfortunately, I seriously doubt they'll be able to do anything...especially since the EU is introducing its own spam legislation if memory serves, and its no doubt going to take precedence.

jc

dahamsta · 04-09-2003 11:30am

Justin Mason is already taking the mick out of it, that isn't going to help Simon one bit. The UTV typo didn't help. If it wasn't a typo, kudos to the author.

Simon's PR handler should be taken outside and shot.

adam

MingiMan · 04-09-2003 11:33am

How can the ISP's filter spam out of a mailbox without first reading all the mail?

henbane · 04-09-2003 11:36am

Originally posted by bonkey
Before I start, let me say that I am 100% supportive of the idea of doing something about spam.

50c, per employee, per day

Is that so serious a cost? If you went to your boss today and offered to cut running costs by 50c, per employee, per day, how far do you think you'd get? ... such "tiny" increments are generally not considered worth the effort!

Now, don't get me wrong. I agree spam should be dealt with, but not because of the cost to the receiver, because quite frankly I am still unconvinced that this cost is significant (yet). Its a nuisance, yes, but thats about it.

I have to say that if I said that to my boss in the current economic climate he would listen. In both the jobs I have worked in recently changes were made to cheaper stationary which translate to less than 50c per employee per day as far as the figures I saw said but these changes were considered to be very important. Lately business trips from this place have, where possible, been booked well in advance in the economy seats rather than a week beforehand in business class which used to be the practice; short-term it may seem like a significant saving but I would be surprised if it translated to more than 50c per employee per day.

Given than the ratio of spam to real email is currently 1 in 2 the cost on the ISPs for transport is also significant as is the costs for companies paying for bandwidth to collect this rubbish.

If half the email sent is spam surely overall the cost of spam is half the cost of the email infrastructure and usage which does cost all of us money. Simplistic reasoning, I agree, but no more simplistic than your reasoning.

If someone went around every house in your neighbourhood and put flyers through the letter-box for a mail-order pornography service, and listed all the greatness of <insert your choice of porn here>, what do you think the local reaction would be? Why should internet spamming be any different?

I think spam is actually more offensive than traditional junk mail as they have found a business model which foists most of their costs on to the person receiving the advertisement. At least the marketers are paying the costs of sending information via the postal network.

I applaud FG for taking this initiative. Unfortunately, I seriously doubt they'll be able to do anything...especially since the EU is introducing its own spam legislation if memory serves, and its no doubt going to take precedence.

Admittedly the EU are doing something about it. I believe it forces all email advertising to be specifically "opt-in" from November. I still believe that until every state has an enforced spam policy the spam problem will never stop. Even this law and the EU's will not stop spam from Florida, Australia or the far East where most of mine comes from. I still think it is a very necessary and important measure in the fight against spam.

The fact that it will ban spam to mobiles is definitely a plus.

gandalf · 04-09-2003 11:38am

Hmmm it all reads very nice and all but you cannot sort out this spam problem without international co-operation to go after the small group of people responsible for a majority of spam.

I remember reading somewhere that around 6 people generate the majority of spam in the world (well the US, and sorry I don't have a link off the top of my head. I'll do a search later on).

Gandalf.

henbane · 04-09-2003 11:42am

Originally posted by MingiMan
How can the ISP's filter spam out of a mailbox without first reading all the mail?

Any ISP could read all your email if they were interested unless it's encrypted.

Spam will certainly never be encrypted with any key you would want to use to decrypt it.

Email is plain text and filtering techniques mean that mail is analyzed for keywords (herbal viagra, penis, horsefscking, or whatever) and structures. Also Bayesian filtering does a very good job if you make the effort to teach it correctly.

One thing I have to say is any spam filter that stops 1 legitimate email coming through is not acceptable. At the moment I deal with about 3 a day in my inbox but my spam folder (50+ a day) never has a false positive which is as good as can be expected without me putting in an awful lot of effort.

henbane · 04-09-2003 11:44am

Originally posted by gandalf
Hmmm it all reads very nice and all but you cannot sort out this spam problem without international co-operation to go after the small group of people responsible for a majority of spam.

I remember reading somewhere that around 6 people generate the majority of spam in the world (well the US, and sorry I don't have a link off the top of my head. I'll do a search later on).

Gandalf.

I do agree about the necessity for enforceable internation agreements/treaties about this problem. For a good resource on all those fsckers sending most of the world's spam see here

bonkey · 04-09-2003 12:50pm

Originally posted by henbane
If half the email sent is spam surely overall the cost of spam is half the cost of the email infrastructure and usage which does cost all of us money.

There is no such thing as "the e-mail infrastructure".

What you're talking about is purely and solely internet traffic. Yes, reducing/eliminating spam would drop the receiver's usage of bandwidth, but not by that significant an amount (except when virii hit, and lets face it - they are a seperate issue) in my estimation.

I haven't worked for a large company for some years now, but I remember working in a 20-employee IT company who could run e-mail off a 64K ISDN line not so long ago. Scale that up by a factor of 25, and you're talking a 2MB line, max to handle external mail for a company of 500 ppl.

Double the volume by adding in spam, and you're talking about a saving of a 2MB line per 500 empoyees.

Now go work out how much is spent on supplying those employees with internet access, access to personal email, etc. etc. etc. Again....the cost of spam pales into relative insignificance.

Simplistic reasoning, I agree, but no more simplistic than your reasoning.

As I said...my reasoning is simply illustrating that the actual cost, when applied to a company of > 500 employees, is relatively trivial....and not this massive expense that its being portrayed as.

Thats not to say the companies would be better off not losing that money, nor that spam should be kept. I just think that the media telling us that something is a problem "because it costs big business so much money" is a load of cobblers.

It costs small businesses more per capita than large ones. I costs the home user on dial-up more than the businesses, per capita. It is disruptive and often offensive - which cannot be priced.

All I am saying is that there are a myriad of what I would perceive as "good reasons" to do something about spam. I just don't see the costs to big business as a significant factor.......other than that its about the only thing which would ever make the govt get off its ar5e and do something about the problem. Half the population could shout themselves deaf before the govt would do something....but let a few big businesses say "lads, you should really be seen to sort this out...you'd be on to a winner"....and off you go.

jc

MingiMan · 04-09-2003 12:59pm

Any ISP could read all your email if they were interested unless it's encrypted.

I know the can read your mail, my point is that currently they don't. Would they not have to go through all mail sent, not just the subject headers, in order to determine what is spam? Is that not an invasion of privacy?

Stark · 04-09-2003 1:19pm

They could use automated tools like Spamassassin. Your mail doesn't have to be read by a human.

I like that bit about making spam text messages an offence. I get quite a lot of the little bastards. Sometimes they give an url where you can go to unsubscribe to the spam, but on the url there's nowhere to unsubscribe. There's a link to register alright (technically you should have had to have had an account previously to get the spam in the first place) in the hope of getting access to a page with an unsubscribe link, but of course registering would probably make things a whole lot worse. It would be like clicking on the unsubscribe link in a spam e-mail.

henbane · 04-09-2003 1:19pm

Originally posted by bonkey
It costs small businesses more per capita than large ones. I costs the home user on dial-up more than the businesses, per capita. It is disruptive and often offensive - which cannot be priced.

I agree with this and my earlier "simplistic reasoning" is actually a lot more relevant to small businesses and the home user as all their access is generally metered by time spent or bandwidth used. One cost I think you do neglect in the >500 head company is the cost already being incurred to filter spam before the users see it.

All I am saying is that there are a myriad of what I would perceive as "good reasons" to do something about spam. I just don't see the costs to big business as a significant factor.......other than that its about the only thing which would ever make the govt get off its ar5e and do something about the problem. Half the population could shout themselves deaf before the govt would do something....but let a few big businesses say "lads, you should really be seen to sort this out...you'd be on to a winner"....and off you go.

He's a TD - of course he is using big numbers (and big business) to make something look like a significantly bad problem to justify legislation. I don't really care what kind of specious reasoning is used to propose the bill as long as a good bill is passed to aid in the fight against spam.

I would be interested to hear what people think would be good legislation in this matter.

Capt'n Midnight · 04-09-2003 1:46pm

If it is not worth their while then they will go away.

[2] Currently the lowest rate seems to be about $200 to send a million spams. That's very cheap, 1/50th of a cent per spam. But filtering out 95% of spam, for example, would increase the spammers' cost to reach a given audience by a factor of 20. Few can have margins big enough to absorb that.

The other way of spamming is by viruses or open-relay both activities should be treated as indentity theft / personation not just pure fraud. - If gov't are saying it costs Bn's then they should spend a fraction of that into it's cure. (esp. the US Govt)

The problem with ISP's filtering email/traffic (it would be done by a program so no privicy concerns - just ammend the AUP) is the cost to them for the licenses (another reason to use open source)

It would also be nice to see an ISP offer to block all executable code in emails whilst allowing all encrypted files through.

bloggs · 04-09-2003 1:51pm

I think people caught sending spam, should be tied to chair in a basement, and everyone who was affected by their spam should be brought in and given a baseball bat to use on them

Ahhhhhh.......:D

Spam is one of my pet hates, and why people feel they have the right to send me such crap really pi**es me off!

RainyDay · 04-09-2003 5:50pm

Slightly off-topic, but if you want to reduce the amount of junk mail you recieve at home, check out details of the Mail Preference Service which I posted on Askaboutmoney.com

joemomma · 05-09-2003 2:42pm

"Spam is the main factor assisting the spread of computer viruses that force Irish business to spend a fortune constantly upgrading their anti-virus software."

Sorry, but hasn't anybody else noticed that this statement is nonsense? This doesn't give me much confidence that he's well-informed on the issue.

Does anybody know where we can read the text of this bill?

bonkey · 05-09-2003 3:04pm

Originally posted by joemomma
Sorry, but hasn't anybody else noticed that this statement is nonsense?

Definitely.

User-stupidity is by far the biggest contributor to the spread of virii.

jc

Stark · 05-09-2003 3:30pm

Don't really care that he's not well-informed, once he can memorize the words "spam is bad".

sovtek · 05-09-2003 8:05pm

It's useless legislation from the begining unless it is based upon a "opt-in" strategy.
Unfortunetly my whore of a President or more over the whores in Congress are only considering legislation based on the "opt-out" strategy.
As I understand it, the proposed EU leg. is "opt-in". Hopefull the Irish version will reflect that as well.
Of course, the question then is how will it be enforced when the source is beyond EU/Irish duristiction.

I propose a "war on spam". If a country is found to be sponsoring spammers, then a pre-emptive strike on said country should be organized...with or without UN Security Council resolutions.

karlin · 05-09-2003 8:28pm

Hi folks:

I've just posted the full text of Simon Coveney TD's spam bill on my weblog, for anyone interested.

This is the item link: http://weblog.techno-culture.com/2003/09/05.html#a2759

I'd be interested in any informed feedback in my blog comments, so feel free to add yours!

Karlin Lillington
Irish Times

bonkey · 05-09-2003 11:44pm

Originally posted by sovtek
It's useless legislation from the begining unless it is based upon a "opt-in" strategy.

Absolutely.

Unfortunately, all of the actual workable solutions for solving spam (e.g. opt-in, micro-payments for sending mail which the receiver can optionally waive, etc. etc. etc.) all boil down to one basic idea :

The solution to spam is to re-invent e-mail (or at least SMTP) as we know it - to completely abandon our existing system and move to a new architecture.

And I can really see that happening......any day now. Honest

jc

sceptre · 06-09-2003 12:30am

Thanks for that Karlin. I'll make time to read it tomorrow.

Before I even get around to reading it though, we've got to remember that this is an opposition Bill. FF and the PDs will be extremely unlikely to let it go anywhere. It is bringing the notion that spam is bad into the Oireachtas though - the best FF will probably be willing to do is swear blind that they've got their own Bill on the way. We'll have two opportunities to attempt to get something useful passed, firstly by contacting Simon Coveney with comments and then doing the same with Dermot Ahern some time in the next decade.

Duffman · 06-09-2003 2:33am

Prohibition on e-mail spam.
4. – It is an offence to -

(a) send an unsolicited e-mail to an addressee;
(b) use a computer or an internet service provider to send, transmit, or route an unsolicited e-mail;
(c) to collect, retain, store or retrieve e-mail addresses for the purpose of sending an unsolicited e-mail.

Is it possible that people who own machines infected by viruses that collect email addresses/spam without their knowledge could be prosecuted under the proposed bill?

Perhaps it needs to address the idea that computer users are responsible to a certain extent for the activities of their machines. I still receive email viruses from people who know that their PCs are infected and have been reminded of this repeatedly but fail to do anything about it, maybe it's just pure laziness.

If you are aware that your PC could be sending such emails and cleaning the system is reasonably easy and costless (AVG is an excellent antivirus program that's completely free for example), should you not be obliged to do so if you have the necessary computer skills?

And now for my nice but completely unrealistic suggestion:

Require that Micro$oft includes anti-virus/spam software with its O/Ss before it has permission to sell these products in the State.

Or, even better, take steps to promote the use of Linux by Irish businesses saving millions every year by eliminating the damage done by script-kiddies' Micro$oft viruses.