taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Why Spam Can’t Be Stopped – Emailappenders And Others Sell Bogus Lists Marketing company buys list of addresses, 85% of the 100k addresses bounce, marketer gets booted by ISP for spamming, marketer issues complaining press release. Let’s say it again: opt-in permission can’t be sold, and address list vendors are spammers

Tags: address-lists, e-pending, marketing, spam, via:spamnation

Marketing: It appears that MATRIX (the Multistate Anti-TeRrorism Information EXchange) at one stage did – and may still — include a ‘terrorism quotient’ field, representing ‘a statistical likelihood of (people) being terrorists’.

Seisint, the company providing the system, is a Boca Raton, FL company founded by Hank Asher, previously of Database Technologies, the company that ’stripped thousands of African Americans from the Florida voter rolls before the 2000 election, erroneously contending that they were felons’. Lovely.

Boca Raton, eh? Yep, there’s a spam connection — Hank Asher also, apparently, bought eDirect.com from noted Boca-based spammer Steve Hardigree (ROKSO record).

The email in the linked article goes on to note that Asher and Hardigree had ‘disagreements’ regarding ‘how eDirect should position itself in the Direct Marketing Community’, so I doubt Asher might have necessarily approved of spamming — but it does appear he had interests in Direct Marketing.

Given that, I suggest a new spin-off strategy for Seisint’s ‘terrorism quotient’ field, courtesy of my mate Luke: terrorist-targeted direct marketing!

Those turrists are in the market for lots of high-profit-margin goods:

• AK-47s (OK, not a very big margin there)
• chemical weapons instructions (just download from the internet! but don’t tell them that)
• weapons-of-mass-destruction-related-program-like-activities

All Seisint have to do is SELECT Name,EmailAddress FROM MATRIX WHERE TQ > 120, do a mail run, then watch those non-consecutively-numbered US dollars roll in. Easy!

Tags: boca, company, direct, edirect, marketing, matrix, quotient, raton, seisint, terrorism

Spam: Let me take this moment to welcome our UK friends to the ’spam now illegal’ club; unlike the US, the European and Australian anti-spam laws seem to be shaping up nicely, requiring opt-in before ‘email marketing’ can be sent.

This actually happened in Ireland a couple of weeks ago, but I think I forgot to mention it here, so here’s the details:

Announcement, full text, full text as HTML. (It’s section 13 you want to read. Note that OpenOffice seems to have miscounted the bullet points in the HTML version ;)

The good stuff:

• it’s opt-in, not opt-out like the cruddy CAN-SPAM act in the US. so that’s a fundamentally anti-spam position. Thanks EU!
• each spam counts as a separate offence = lots of damages, I’d guess.

• forging/disguising of originating header info is prohibited.

The bad:

• if you run a mailing list, and you’re not sure that you got everyone’s permission to receive your mails (and if not, why not?), you’d better do a reconfirmation run quick ;)
• no private right of action; but that’s pretty much std for Europe. we’re reliant on the Regulator to take action against spammers.
• spamming to mailing lists is not prohibited — but then, I haven’t seen that blocked by any other law.
• it’s unclear if spamming to role addresses (e.g. ‘foo-admin’, ‘info@company‘, etc.) is prohibited. I would guess that if they wind up in the mailbox of a ‘natural person’ it would be. But this may have to be worked out in court.
• talks about ‘direct marketing’. Does this mean that faked-up ‘newsletters’ will be a loophole? Also, means that religious and political spam is permitted. But I haven’t seen much of that in Ireland… yet…

• won’t be any good against US-based spammers. No surprise there. HOWEVER it may be useful against large multinational companies taking advantage of CAN-SPAM’s relaxed regime to indulge in a little spamming, if they have an Irish office.

  And, of course, it’ll mean that Ireland won’t develop Florida’s reputation any time soon, which is a good thing.

• Will it be useful against spammers in other parts of the EU? That’s another question. Anyone know? I know of a bunch in France I’d really like to deal with.

  Brian Nisbet reckons it may.

I was reminded by this letter from the Department of Communications received by UCC , which notes:

But the Minister has announced that he intends using Ireland’s Presidency of the EU to initiate global partnership in clamping down on ’spam.’

Global? Just don’t ask for any help from the Florida state government. ;)

Spam: Other (big) spam news: ‘Gaven Stubberfield’ arrested for ‘falsifying his identity so that his e-mails could not be traced’. SBL say that Jeremy Jaynes, aka ‘Gaven Stubberfield’ is the eight-most prolific spammer in the world, and is ‘notorious for ‘horsey porn’ spam’.

Irish: Irish WWW pioneer Peter Flynn now has a weblog, it seems. As far as I can tell, Peter was responsible for much of the good stuff at celt.ucc.ie, which reminds me to post this link to Pangur Bán I’ve been meaning to post.

Messe ocus Pangur Bán,
cechtar nathar fria saindan:
bíth a menmasam fri seilgg,
mu memna céin im saincheirdd.

In my case, it’s mise agus Bubba Liath, otherwise pretty close despite the intervening 11 centuries…

Tags: action, can-spam, club, html, info, mailing, marketing, moment, spam, text

Heads up for all the businesses out there sending mail to European customers — the EU E-Privacy Directive is now coming into force. Italy is the latest country to implement it; so businesses mailing Italian customers or prospects may wish to make sure that they abide by these rules:

• Companies may send direct marketing email only to customers and subscribers who have given their prior consent to receiving such, either by subscribing explicitly or by providing their details during a prior transaction, such as a purchase.

• Forged headers and other means of disguising or concealing the sender’s identity is illegal.

• All messages must bear opt-out details as well.

• Apparently, in the Italian rendition, senders may also ‘collect’ addresses but must immediately give the user a clear opportunity to opt-out at that point — but as far as I know this isn’t in the core EU directive.

Similar laws will be coming in all over Europe, so USian senders should really pay attention: opt-in — it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law (in Europe at least ;).

Malware: It sounds like SoBig.F is about to call home for new code (scroll down to ‘Downloading Functionality’). This is not good. :( Block port 8998/udp.

SoBig.F, the assorted bounce messages from forged SoBig.F mails, the assorted replies from autoresponders and list admin software from forged SoBig.F mails, and (of all things) user complaints about the forged mails (argh! surely they know they’re forgeries by now!) are really driving me up the wall. As I check my mail, there’s at least 400 of these messages this morning alone.

IP: Lessig lays into USPTO director: ‘If Lois Boland said this, then she should be asked to resign.’ … ‘That someone who doesn’t understand them is at a high level of this government just shows how extreme IP policy in America has become.’

Tags: country, directive, email, force, heads, mail, marketing, rivacy, sobig, user

So I caught Frontline on PBS last night. At last, some leftie TV that isn’t The Daily Show! ;)

It covered — in excruciating detail — something I’d been wondering about; the massive cost (to end users) of healthcare and prescription medication in the US. The program nicely demolished the ‘but all that money is needed for R&D’ line.

Bottom line: the US drug companies are making 18-22% profit, and they’re not letting go of that. (The median for the Fortune 500 is 3.3%.)

That’s pure profit — not going back into R&D or similar. The breakdown of the biggest revenue sinks averaged across the sector, at the end of the program was: 22% profit, 18% advertising and marketing (one conglomerate in particular spent more on marketing than Pepsi), a couple more aspects of the process, and then, 4th or 5th on the list, 11% of that revenue makes it to research and development.

This should be a huge issue here, but isn’t. I can’t figure it out.

Patents: Kuro5hin has a nice wrap-up of the GIF patent story, now that the patent has finally expired (excerpt: ‘Unisys does nothing’). But what’s this? It’s still extant in Europe, not expiring until a year from now? Great example of the EPO allowing software patents to be registered, even though they’re not legal in Europe.

Mind you, it’s irrelevant now, as (thankfully) Jean-Loup Gailly and Mark Adler wrote the gzip compression algorithm, and gave it to the GNU project. Since then, gzip has now spread into every tool and virtually every platform that might possibly need compression.

Tags: compression, frontline, gzip, line, marketing, patent, pbs, profit, program, revenue

A great insight into marketing software at the “enterprise” level. This explains a lot, IMHO:

“price it high enough and the decision making process is taken out of the hands who know enough to make a sensible decision”.

Forwarded from Cam and Phil Suh’s cms-list.

Date: Tue, 08 May 2001 06:51:07 -0700
From: Julian Harris (spam-protected)
To: “Huston, Virgil H.” (spam-protected) (spam-protected)
Subject: RE: Why Vignette?

Exactly why Vignette’s strategy works — price it high enough and the decision making process is taken out of the hands who know enough to make a sensible decision.

Lowering the price would be a fatal move.

— “Huston, Virgil H.” (spam-protected) wrote:
> My experience says that corporate IT people are not
> baffled by BS.
> Problem is, they do not make the final decisions, at
> least in middle sized
> companies that I am familiar with. For example, I am
> basically a nongeek
> (maybe semigeek) and I run a company external
> website & ecommerce system. IT
> supports the backend and helps me out when I get in
> over my head (like
> trying to make changes to asp pages that appear to
> be intentionally written
> to be very difficult to decode - even the
> programmers have problems). We
> went with a fairly high priced (but not the highest)
> ecommerce vendor. The
> brass made the decisions and we implemented it along
> with vendor
> “consultants.” We provided input, which is sometimes
> taken and often
> ignored. The in-house costs (mainly labor, but also
> hardware) were still
> very high even with the consultants, which is
> typical. But, don’t blame the
> IT guys/gals. In my case, the IT folks and I are on
> the same sheet of music
> and we both understand how and why things should be
> run (at least we think
> we do). The powers that be, however, have us doing
> other things. They are
> the boss, right or wrong. As when I was in the Army
> years ago, we have an
> obligation to tell the brass what we think, but when
> the decision is made,
> we have to salute the flagpole and charge the hill,
> no matter how many
> machine gun nests are on it.
>
> Virgil
>
> > Are
> > corporate IT people really that baffled by BS? Or
> do they see something I
> > cannot? That’s what’s troubling me here.
> >
> >
>
> ————————–
> Subscribe: http://www.camworld.com/cms/
> More Info: http://cms.filsa.net/
> Post: (spam-protected)
>

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Tags: decision, ecommerce, huston, insight, marketing, price, process, software, vendor, vignette