CAUCE

McColo and the Difficulty of Fighting Spam

CAUCE's own Ray Everett-Church writes: It may be a truism that "little things mean a lot," but in the world of spam, flipping a single switch can have huge consequences that span the globe. We saw that concept reinforced this past week when McColo Corp., an Internet hosting firm based in San Jose, Calif., had its Internet connection shut off by its upstream connectivity providers on suspicion that McColo was serving as a command and control center for various spamming "bot net" operations as well as a base of operations for various other unsavory activities. Of course everyone, even McColo, is innocent until proven guilty. But in the days following the disconnection, global spam volumes have reportedly dropped by nearly two-thirds. I suppose it could be a coincidence... Read the rest here.

FBI and Romanian police break two phishing rings

In a press release today, the FBI said that in cooperation with the Romanian Prosecutor General they'd arrested 38 people who'd been running phishing rings. According to the FBI, the people arrested had sent out millions of phishing spam messages which tricked recipients into providing personal financial details.

Romania has for many years been a major source of criminal spam, and it is encouraging to hear that the Romanian authorities are cracking down on it.

Anti-spyware Coalition Best Common Practices document open for public commentary

N.B. CAUCE Canada and CAUCE participated in the development of these documents.

Best Practices Suggestions Document

Building upon the Definitions and Risk Model documents, the Best Practices document aims to expand past defining what behaviors and consent factors will currently make software potentially unwanted and to focus upon making the marketplace better. This document highlights the sorts of technological behaviors that limit the negative impact of potentially unwanted technologies. HTML or PDF

Comments can be made at http://www.antispywarecoalition.org/comments/ or by sending email to asc_comments@cdt.org.

Revenge spam is illegal in the UK

Reuters reports that a UK appeals court ruled that an English 18-year old who sent five million spams to a company who had fired him had indeed broken the law. The judge said that "while a computer user might consent to being sent some e-mails, that consent did not extend to receiving a barrage of such messages." This may seem obvious, but it wasn't to a lower court, which now has to reconsider the case and what penalty to assess. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060511/wr_nm/crime_britain_spam_dc

News from Australia

Australia has an excellent anti-spam law, the Spam Act 2003.

The Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Helen Coonan has called for public submissions as part of a review of the Spam Act 2003, to be completed by April 2006. "The Australian Spam Act is internationally recognized as a leading legislative model to crack down on the scourge of spam that is overloading people's in-boxes and causing great frustration," Senator Coonan said. "Since the Act came into effect, many professional spammers that had been based in Australia have either shut up shop or left the country."

Australia's Spam Act applies to commercial electronic messages which include spam sent via email, SMS, Instant Messaging and Multimedia Messaging Service.

For more info, see http://www.dcita.gov.au/ie/spam_home/spam_act_review.

CAUCE Joins the London Action Plan and the Anti-Spyware Coalition

CAUCE Canada, CAUCE U.S., and Asia-Pacific CAUCE (APCAUCE) have joined the London Action Plan (LAP). The LAP is a project started by government consumer protection agencies like the US Federal Trade Commission, the UK Office of Fair Trading, and the our governmental contingent includes both Industry Canada and the Competition Bureau. Many European and Asian governments participate as well. CAUCE looks forward to working with the various governments to help enforce the anti-spam laws that exist, to better understand how the laws do and don't work, and to learn how better laws might be written. CAUCE Chair Neil Schwartzman attended the meetings in London in October, 2005.

We've also joined the Anti-Spyware Coalition, a group of makers of anti-spyware software and public interest groups. The ASC is hoping to build consensus about definitions and best practices in the area of spyware and other unwanted technologies. The group is made up of representatives from the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, AOL, Microsoft, McAfee, Symantec and many others. While spyware isn't CAUCE's direct area of concern, the legal remedies overlap with those against spam, and the bits of the government that address spyware are the same ones that address spam. The ASC has had several private meetings to work on policy; Neil Schwartzman and John Levine attended the meetings held in Chicago and Berkeley, California in recent months. The ASC will be holding public events on February 9, 2006 in Washington D.C. and on May 16, 2006 in Ottawa.

CAUCE offers advice on Tsunami relief donations

Did you get spam asking you to contribute to Tsunami relief? Unfortunately, it was probably fraudulent.

After every natural disaster in recent years, spammers have always sent fake appeals, preying on the good intentions of generous Americans. Rather than responding to spam, CAUCE encourages its members and friends to contribute to any of these well-established organizations that have Tsunami relief projects active in Asia:

• Oxfam America
• Red Cross
• Unicef