Interesting People mailing list archives
ITU "spam" summit concludes in Geneva
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2004 07:40:12 -0400
From: Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh () hserus net> Date: July 11, 2004 3:30:06 AM PDT To: David Farber <dave () farber net> Cc: dewayne () warpspeed com, fmaia () texas net Subject: Re: [IP] ITU "spam" summit concludes in Geneva HiI was a speaker at the ITU/WSIS thematic meeting on spam, and chaired the
session on technical solutions to spam, where one of the speakers on my panel was Dr.John Levine, chair of the IRTF's ASRG (anti spam research group - http://asrg.sp.am).What I and several others have been pointing out in various articles, and at various antispam conferences, is that there is no silver bullet for spam - and certainly, technical solutions are not the one true solution. All you
get is the classic situation of a better mousetrap being followed by theevolution of smarter mice. I am glad that the ITU meeting reached a very similar conclusion, followed by concrete steps that were proposed to deal
with this menace.There was a near universal consensus among the speakers at this meeting that
you needed a combination of solutions, including* Better antispam laws. Sensible antispam laws like the Australian law for
choice, not the loophole ridden CAN-SPAM and similar laws.* Stronger antispam policies at ISPs, and their enforcement. This is going
to be the key to eradicating spammers. Getting telecom regulators and governments involved in this means that we just might be able to apply areally effective lever on recalcitrant ISPs to develop and enforce antispam
policies.Both laws and policies are no good till they are enforced. In the case of laws, you need an enforcement authority (say the police, or the FTC or its
equivalent in different countries) who - * Understands the issue, and the tools / techniques used by spammers* Has sufficient money and human resources to assign officers to investigate
and follow up on issues brought to their attention.* Technical solutions that try to stop spam as best as they can without the "collateral damage" of blocking legitimate email at the same time. This, on
the whole, tends to be an idealized golden mean in spam filtering. Spamfilters, for various reasons, tend to get a bit broader than is ideal - no surprise there, as a spammer on a network can send out far more spam in a day than all the legit users on that network can send out in a whole month.
* Education.Awareness among the legitimate email marketers about what is and what isn't acceptable in marketing by email where the recipient pays for everything, so email marketing, if unsolicited, is the equivalent of sending postal junk
mail postage due, recipient pays.Awareness among regular users on how to react to spam in their inboxes, how
not to fall for email scams (nigerian letters, bank password theft scams etc) The deadline of 2006 set by the ITU sounds a trifle optimistic but we do need to have a deadline, in order to implement a whole set of steps thatwill lay the foundation for a global effort to mitigate the spam problem.
[note: not eradicate - spam is about as likely to be eradicated as, say, cockroaches are]I have organized antispam conferences in the asia pacific region (please see http://www.apcauce.org) every six months for the past two years, and these
have been quite productive wrt getting some policies in place, and in getting ministries, internet regulators etc from the asiapac region(particularly places like China and Korea, as well as Australia, NZ etc) to exchange ideas and coordinate efforts. The education angle is also covered
as the speakers include several people who have been involved with emailsystems for years if not decades, such as Dave Crocker, author of RFC 822
among other things.The most important takeaway from the ITU conference is that the ITU is, as an umbrella organization that maintains links and working relationships with
a whole lot of other organizations in the telecom and internet sector,suitably placed to help spread this common approach to dealing with spam,
and to formally or informally coordinate worldwide efforts to deal with spam.Otherwise, antispam efforts have tended to resemble the story of the blind men and the elephant, where each effort grabs hold of some body part of the elephant (the trunk, the leg, the tail ...) and only feels / looks at that
part of the system rather than taking a world view. That, and theseuncoordinated efforts tend to pull in several different directions so that various contradictory and mutually self canceling efforts get deployed in
various places.Personally, I wish the ITU luck, and plan to contribute to their efforts to
the best of my ability. regards --srs Coordinator, CAUCE Asia Pacific-- Suresh Ramasubramanian | suresh () hserus net | gpg EDEDEFB9 email sturmbahnfuehrer | lower middle class unix sysadmin ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
Current thread:
- ITU "spam" summit concludes in Geneva David Farber (Jul 11)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- ITU "spam" summit concludes in Geneva David Farber (Jul 12)
- ITU "spam" summit concludes in Geneva David Farber (Jul 12)