SPAM is more than an inconvenience

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Rating: 3.8/5 with 4 votes

Published Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at 12:07
by Duncan Anderson Join PES activists in EU in the world (281 views and 2 comments)

Almost everybody with an e-mail address gets SPAM and most of us treat it as one of modern day life's inconveniences.

But it must be remembered that there is a lot of pain, anguish and suffering caused through SPAM.
  • How many people have lost life savings through "boiler houses"?
  • How many people have been made ill by counterfeit medicines?
  • How many children and adults have suffered because of the POpcoRN that gets SPAMMED nowadays?
  • How much money is being laundered behind SPAMMING?
  • How much of this activity goes to sponsoring criminal and terrorist activities?
  • How many businesses have lost trade because anti-spam software has whacked their legitimate E-mails ?
  • How many business have suffered from hacking and other cyber-terrorists activities?
SPAM is a pan-global problem and no one country can resolve it. It needs and pan-global approach, starting with an international body raising it on the global stage.

If the PES manifesto is going to be relevant to average Europeans is must address the problems of average Europeans and there is nothing that affects average Europeans more than SPAM.

Considering the affect SPAM has on trade and the amount of Internet bandwidth it is abusing it would be more than possible for the EU to argue that trade sanctions are a legitimate tool against countries that do little or nothing to prevent SPAM.

Tags: consumer, globalization

Comments

1. Protecting our personal sphere... by pattheact Join PES activists on Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at 13:44

Hi Duncan,
thanks for your interesting post. I agree with your analysis and can only support your request. Only yesterday I have been in the situation where I found out that due to always more performing firewalls and other types of anti-spam softwares a whole bunch of e-mails, whereunder some quite important and urgent ones, have been blocked as spam and made our company loose half day in a very urgent file. And as you know time is money and money is...
I do also think that in a broader picture this raises also the question of the accessibility of our private coordinates, with name listings sold to the best offering marketing companies, lists to which you might have subscribed whilst participating to a public contest or when having answered some kind of questionnary without knowing that this information would be recorded somewhere and then used to agress and drown you with targeted marketing mails...
the protection of our personal sphere and of our private coordinates is also an important subject I would like to see the PES take care of by issuing some adapted proposal for legislating on these subjects. For the sake of the good health of our businesses and for the sake of the protection of our private sphere...

2. Cyber Security by Duncan Anderson Join PES activists on Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at 15:50

One spam I received many years ago was for several million E-mail addresses that all worked. One of the ways they are collected is via web-bot, SWEN (NEWS backward)harvested E-mail addresses from NNTP sites, since then I have munged my E-mail address so that it is still legible to the human eye.

Some firms put their E-mail addresses on their web site, rather than using server side scripting or similar.

But some of the worst offenders are private users who don't keep their anti-virus software up to date.

The solutions: -

Countries who take no action should have trade sanctions taken against them.

National Governments within the EU should tests and check the security of companies and web sites holding E-mail information. This includes the ISPs who should be required to help combat SPAM. ISP often have strong suspicions about who and how spam is being sent. even sites like this one should be checked to see if the data is held securely.

Computer companies (both hardware and software) should be required to be far more proactive in combating spam. There is an architectural problem within ALL IBM compatible computers that means they are all susceptible to hacking, even with software firewalls.

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