identity theft != spam
Bill Woodcock
woody at pch.net
Fri May 16 05:10:05 UTC 2003
On Thu, 15 May 2003, Randy Bush wrote:
> what is wrong with this picture?
> this exemplifies the corporate and legislative attempt to confuse
> spam == uce with forgery. if they can make the latter the issue,
> this leaves the way completely clear for unsolicited commercial
> email from the corporate sector which now fills our post boxes with
> ground trees.
Well, the issues are perhaps a little more complex than you're portraying
them. J.I. and I spent the better part of two years working on the
California law, which has a similar provision.
>From a customer's point of view, spam is anything they didn't want to
receive.
>From an ISP's point of view, spam is anything that was sent or
received without having been paid for.
>From a politician's point of view, spam is non-political UCE.
These are almost wholly incompatible views.
One thing that everybody can get together on is that if someone sends spam
(for _any_ of those values of "spam") using a forged source address,
that's bad.
Thus, it's easy to get a provision through which puts heavy penalties on
source-address forgery, even if nobody can agree on what spam itself is.
-Bill
More information about the NANOG
mailing list