January 10, 2007 at 11:37 am
As I mentioned, I'm not talking about spam. Spam isn't illegal, and for the most part, it really doesn't hurt anyone. If you take over someone's computer, steal their identity and empty their bank account, then you have clearly committed a crime and deserve to be punished for it, and I don't care where you happen to live. The international community should send a clear message to these folks that we will not tolerate this. Sending in the SEALs to kill everybody is probably not right, but at the very least they should be arrested and tried for their crimes. The way it is now, they are stealing our money and living the high life without too much concern that they will be caught. That is just plain wrong.
The way that you deal with criminals is by dismantling their operations, by force if necessary. We do it every day here in the US. Every time we raid a meth lab or some other criminal operation, we are sending a clear message that if you do this crime, we are going to shoot first and ask questions later.
I may be a little extreme, but nobody's going to say Jasmine is "soft on crime"
January 10, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Spam does hurt, it takes up huge resources (both human resources to keep it out and physical resources as in server/bandwith) and is costing companies a lot of money. Last I read I believe spam counted for 82% of all emails. That is insane. From working with the mail filters here at work I can see with my own eyes how much spam we receive, and it takes us quite a bit of time to make sure no valid emails are lost to the filters.
Spam is more costly than you might think.
January 10, 2007 at 1:05 pm
Jasmine,
Again, most countries do NOT have laws that concern computers. You cannot arrest/prosecute someone from another country for something that country doesnot have laws for.
Yes, we may be affected here...but the 'so called crime' was committed in another country where it's not a crime. If I can find the information I will post it here...but some time ago a virus was unleashed and was tracked to the Philippines. The originator could not be prosecuted for creating or sending the virus because at the time the Philippines did not have a law against that.
I'm finding out a whole lot of interesting information lately as I have taken college classes on CyberCrime and am currently taking one on CyberWarfare. It's amazing what is legal in other countries.
-SQLBill
January 10, 2007 at 2:21 pm
There are countries where it's legal to steal other's property? I'm no expert in international law, but somehow that seems unlikely.
January 10, 2007 at 4:58 pm
Maybe it is time to have a "CyberCrime Treaty" between all countries. If your country does not stop spammers, hackers, phishers and the like then your country is cut off the net from all the other treaty countries. Don't want to sign the treaty? Then you are cut off as well. Can't handle the problem, then the treaty signers will offer to help by electronically nuking the problem for you.
January 10, 2007 at 5:56 pm
Yes, that is an excellent idea. There is some diagreement over whether spamming is illegal or not though. Companies have a responsibility to market their goods, and email is one way to do it. The problem is that a majority of the spam is coming from scammers. Spam and scam are not the same thing. Scammers clearly belong in jail. Spammers that aren't ripping people off and are selling a legitimate product are a different kind of thing altogether. I get messages from Victoria's Secret all the time. I'm not sure how I got on their list, but I prefer the emails to the tree-killin catalogs. I didn't ask them to market to me, but it's a real company with a real product and they do deserve to be able to market that product. I'm not sure what to do about those situations, but if the scams were eliminated from the pile, maybe the legitimate marketing messages wouldn't be such a problem. I have some ideas about this... fight fire with fire kind of things. If they are going to mail-bomb us and hack our machines, we should do the same thing right back, and there's a lot more of us than them. Anyone up for a DDoS attack? Class action suit? Botnet of our own? Anything?
This discussion is changing my mind about spam... it's a bigger problem that I thought. I guess I never considered the network cost and the cost of filtering. I just don't see that part of the operation on a daily basis. I set up our spam filter here and then just forgot about it. I just figure, whatever gets through, well it's a lot less than what got through before.
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