Subject: [Asrg] Spam vs. fax laws

From: "Alan DeKok" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2003 09:06:18 -0500

The presentation on the legal aspects of spam asked why junk fax
laws worked, and why anti-spam ones haven't worked so far.

  The simplest answer is that junk faxers won't pay long distance
charges to send faxes, so going off-shore where the laws don't apply
isn't an option.

  In contrast, there are no long distance charges on the internet.
Going offshore to avoid local laws and to acheive plausible
deniability is a viable option.

  Alan DeKok.
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From: wayne <[email-masked]>
Date: 20 Mar 2003 14:37:29 -0600

> charges to send faxes, so going off-shore where the laws don't apply

Add to that:

* Even when the phone call is local, faxing costs a lot more money than
  email.

  * This eliminates a lot of the very marginal sales.

  * It also means that is very important that there is a way of
    contacting the seller (a surprising percentage have no valid
    contact info).

  * It is too expensive to use junk faxes as a DoS attack.

* Faxes are more public.  You aren't going to be able to advertise
  things like porn or viagra.

* Phones have never, by default, allowed you to dial into them and
  silently dial back out to any number of your choosing the way the
  early versions of WinSocks was an open proxy.

* Fax machines have never, by default, allowed you to automatically
  relay faxes to another fax machine the way early versions of
  sendmail was an open relay.

* Faxes are point to point rather than regularly sent through (closed)
  relays.

* It is also harder to "forge" the caller-id, or prevent the phone
  company to trace the call.  Hard core junk faxers could be caught
  much easier.

* By the time email spam started up, there were vastly more email
  mailboxes than fax machines.  This gap has only increased.

-wayne

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From: Kee Hinckley <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2003 15:49:18 -0500

>deniability is a viable option.

One does occasionally get overseas junk faxes.  But I agree that the 
cost barriers are high.  The one consistent junk fax that I used to 
get from overseas was, not surprisingly, the Nigerian scam.
-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.puremessaging.com/        Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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