Washed Up Or Not, Porn Spammers Are Ignoring New Rules
from the gee,-what-a-surprise dept
When the FTC first announced that all porn spam would need to be labeled with "sexually explicit" in the subject line, we noted that they were now legalizing porn spam and that we should expect plenty of it. A new study shows that not only has the amount of porn spam increased since that rule went into effect, most porn spammers are ignoring the law in one way or another. It looks like many did try to put "sexually explicit" or some related misspelling in the subject line, but then ignored just about every other part of the law (such as no spoofing of the from address). Of course, it was just Monday that we pointed out that porn spam was fading as an overall percentage of spam. However, that should give you an idea of how much overall spam is increasing. While the absolute number of porn spam messages has jumped, the relative percentage in relation to financial and other spam messages is decreasing. And, to think, our politicians told us that by now we'd be living in a post-spam world thanks to CAN SPAM.
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Porn Spam
The fact the porn spammers are now breaking the law means they can be arrested, even jailed. Do not blame Congress that people break the law. Compress did a good job.
If Congress banned porn spam the law would be struck down. This is a good law. It does exactly what the people want. Block porn spam from their inbox. As a bonus a few porn spammers will go to jail. What else do you want?
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Re: Porn Spam
1) Porn spammers largely will(and do) ignore this law complete, this only is in effet in the US. It has no teeth. In that sense, it did NOT do a good job.
2) Even *IF* a US spammer doesn't want to run afoul of the law, he can (and MANY do) simply alter the spelling of "sexually explicit" by any number of means:
S E X V A L L Y 3XPL1C1T
or
s 3 X U A 7 7 Y E X PLI CIT
or any of thousands of other options
And while its easily read, and complies with the law...it can't easily be filtered out (unless you spend time making a ruleset which handles all the combos AND the special characters possible). In THAT sense, it also did not do a good job.
This is simply a useless piece of legislation to make people feel that they are doing something but with very little actual effect on the problem.
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