Spammer Legislation - I got an Idea

[AlwaysWorkin]

I would like to live in a world where spammers are treated almost like sex offenders. A website where you could look up and see where spammers live, and they would have to have a big sign in their window or yard revealing to the world that they're an unethical POS. :-)

I'd love to start with those who run scripts on forums.

Of course, I'm just venting a little and of course, I can dream.

[KenB]

How about we treat spammers, malware creators and hackers as enemy combatants and turn them over to the CIA for a little enhanced interrogation?

[LifeinAsia]

Put them all in a sealed environment that is completely controlled (air, heat/cooling, water, food) by 1 PC. The PC does not have anti-virus or a firewall installed, nor does it have any patches or updates installed. After a certain amount of time, the PC will be connected to the Internet.

[wheel]

Define spammers.

If you mean hackers, there's already legislation in most areas to handle that.

If you have a site that accepts user generated content and are suggesting that people who provide you with user generated content that you 'don't like', well that's an annoyance not a jailable offence.

If you mean email spammers, we don't even need legislation for that. Most ISP's, carriers, and hosting companies already have TOS in place that prohibit such use.

The internet's working just fine thanks, without any more barriers and oversight. If you're having concerns over minor annoyances online, just remember the pre-internet days when there were real annoyances, like cubicles and busy loud offices and smoking in the workplace, and just coworkers in general :).

[rocknbil]

I say someone starts hiring them and putting their misguided efforts to real use. These people are largely very talented and are wasting their efforts on fast money.

How's that for dreaming? :-P

[kaled]

Follow the money and prosecute the advertisers.

Kaled.

[thecoalman]

They should be given a computer with an equal amount of emails they have sent as spam. One email contains the release papers.

[rj87uk]

thecoalman, A spammer would be able to write a program that could find said Email.

kaled is correct follow the monday and take down the advertisers which should lead to the spammers & jail them. Easier said than done.

[graeme_p]

If you have a site that accepts user generated content and are suggesting that people who provide you with user generated content that you 'don't like', well that's an annoyance not a jailable offence.

If I have a site that allows people to post comments, and they use a bot to post comments?

[wheel]

If I have a site that allows people to post comments, and they use a bot to post comments?

Then what? Jail time? For posting to your forum? Just use a capcha.

Google probably puts more automated stress on your forum than forum spammers if that's what you're asking.

it comes with the territory. We get the freedom of the internet, we have to put up with some distasteful actions of others. But let's not cross the line between people doing stuff we don't like and people doing a criminal offence. Those are two different things. We don't go to jail for being annoying.

[KenB]

Then what? Jail time? For posting to your forum? Just use a capcha.

Then spammers just create means of overcoming CAPCHAs. It has happened already.

Google probably puts more automated stress on your forum than forum spammers if that's what you're asking.

Ummm...
1) Google gives us something of value in return for hitting our sites with their bots;
2) your wrong - collectively way more of my server resources go to servicing bots than servicing Google and the other 2-3 major search engine bots combined.
3) Google doesn't try to post offensive stuff and random links on to our sites.

it comes with the territory. We get the freedom of the internet, we have to put up with some distasteful actions of others. But let's not cross the line between people doing stuff we don't like and people doing a criminal offence.

<snip> There are some things that should be criminalized. Technical means alone aren't enough to prevent spammers from overwhelming other people's servers. Quite literally if enough bad bots used by spammers hit a site at the same time they do create the equivalent of a DDoS attack. The only work around is to constantly increase the amount of resources (bandwidth and processing power) available to a site to handle the ever increasing load bad bot load.

We don't go to jail for being annoying.

Spammers aren't just annoying, they are committing a form of theft of service and they are disruptive to the proper functioning of the Internet.

Now how would any such anti-spammer/bad bot legislation work on an international level, I don't know.

As many of the bad bots used by spammers run on bot nets of infected machines, they are essentially stealing other people's computers and Internet connections to carry out their nefarious activities, which is already illegal in much of the world under existing computer crimes laws.

Spammers bring no constructive value to the Internet and they should be treated with the contempt they deserve. If you are using automated means to post various forms of advertisements (e.g. links to other websites) on other people's forums, blogs, etc. you are a spammer.

[edited by: lawman at 4:42 am (utc) on Jan. 12, 2010]

[wheel]

Pretty much all of your post can be refuted by two points:
- there's already plenty of laws in place for everything you're complaining about that's actually illegal. (DDos and infected machines are already illegal most places)
- Google, despite your assertations, isn't the benevolent entity you're claiming. Try getting your content ripped off and republished and maybe they won't be 'giving something of value'. Google's a bot scraping your content for THEIR benefit, same as the rest of them. Your liking Google's bot and not liking other bots isn't a good litmus test for whether a bot is criminal activity or not.

Forum spammers PO me as much as they do anyone else. So does your freakin' grandmother when she's driving down the road in front of me at 18 miles an hour. Both waste my time. She should go to jail too?

[wheel]

Spammers bring no constructive value to the Internet and they should be treated with the contempt they deserve.

And in a perfect illustration of why you don't want to use that argument, I know plenty of folks (my entire linux group) who believe:
- even the cleanest of white hat SEO belong in the same category you're putting forum spammers
- the internet shouldn't be used for business
- money is dirty.

Thankfully, their opinions as to what they don't like isn't law yet either.

[Leosghost]

Your group read Fravia too ;))

[kaled]

Spammers bring no constructive value to the Internet and they should be treated with the contempt they deserve.

<snip>

When you waste someone's time you steal part of their life. <snip>

Kaled.

[edited by: lawman at 4:45 am (utc) on Jan. 12, 2010]

[KenB]

- there's already plenty of laws in place for everything you're complaining about that's actually illegal. (DDos and infected machines are already illegal most places)

Which is what I tried to acknowledge in my post. It is far more efficient to apply existing laws where applicable.

- Google, despite your assertations, isn't the benevolent entity you're claiming.

I'm not claiming anything about their benevolence. All I'm saying is that by their bot crawling my site I end of in their search index and I get a lot of visitors from them as a result of my pages showing up in their search results. To me this is more than a fair trade. Also they obey my robots.txt file and other indexing instructions. The bots used by spammers on the other hand do their best to evade my detection, provide me nothing in value in exchange for consuming my server resources and ignore all my indexing instructions.

When you waste someone's time you steal part of their life.

They steal time from all of us even when we don't see their crap. The reason is that websites like mine have to deploy anti-badbot measures to protect the reliability of our servers (e.g. IP address, and UA blocks). These countermeasures consume processing power in and of themselves and as a result pages take longer to process and load then they would otherwise.

[wheel]

If the biggest problem we have as webmasters is issues with 'processing power' then life's not that hard.

really,many of us are living a dream lifestyle not even possible 20 years ago. Prior to the internet, my life prospects were work in a cubicle all my life doing statistical or software work.

Spammers haven't stolen enough of my life to counterbalance the positive contribution i get from being able to run a national business while living a rural/small town lifestyle.

[KenB]

Spammers haven't stolen enough of my life to counterbalance the positive contribution i get from being able to run a national business while living a rural/small town lifestyle.

This is akin to a store owner saying shoplifters don't steal enough to cause their businesses to lose money so they aren't going to worry about it.

Yes the Internet has changed many of our lives and given us opportunities we would not otherwise have, HOWEVER, it doesn't mean we should just accept the presence of spammers. They are a menace to the rest of us and increase our costs of doing business. They should be dealt with accordingly.