Japan passes law to crack down on spam email from a broad

[Doctor Stop]

[floatl][/floatl]Mainichi Dairy News

The Diet passed into law a bill to crack down on junk e-mail sent from abroad by seeking the assistance of foreign governments.

The plenary session of the House of Councillors on Friday unanimously approved a bill to revise the Law on the Regulation of Transmission of Specified Electronic Mail.

Under the revised law, spam e-mails will be basically prohibited unless the recipients agreed to receive them in advance. The amendment also raised the upper limit of fines imposed on offenders to 30 million yen from the previous 1 million yen.

It had been unclear whether spam e-mail from abroad can be recognized as illegal, but it will be subject to regulations under the revised law.

The amendment empowers the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications to ask foreign governments to crack down on spammers in their territories by providing them with the e-mail addresses of the spammers and other relevant information.

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/national/news/20080530p2a00m0na016000c.html

[Midwinter]

Yeah, good luck with that.

[FG Lurker]

Yeah, that should work really well because no spammer would ever forge headers, use random "from" addresses, or use botnets to spam...

[Gilligan]

Under the revised law, spam e-mails will be basically prohibited unless the recipients agreed to receive them in advance. The amendment also raised the upper limit of fines imposed on offenders to 30 million yen from the previous 1 million yen.

Which would mean that it wasn't spam (AKA unsolicited bulk e-mail).

[nottu]

[amdg]

And are they going to do anything about spam from Japan? One legal-topics message board I'm often at has nothing but Japanese spam messages.

If you think I'm exaggerating, have a look for yourself,

http://lists.inta.org/tmtopics/archives/

Im not very technical-minded when it come to this stuff but I have been told that it's because the filters can't deal with Japanese language?

[Charles]

And are they going to do anything about spam from Japan? One legal-topics message board I'm often at has nothing but Japanese spam messages.

If you think I'm exaggerating, have a look for yourself,

http://lists.inta.org/tmtopics/archives/

Im not very technical-minded when it come to this stuff but I have been told that it's because the filters can't deal with Japanese language?

Welcome to teh internets. Any niche that can be spammed, will be spammed. There is a built in incentive to spam any unsecured site. The only way to stop it is to make it unprofitable, by forcing the spammers to expend so much effort defeating spam measures and captchas that it costs more to spam than it gets in return. Alas, most spammers will continue despite it being a losing proposition. For a good techy essay about the spammer/antispammer war, check out this story by Coding Horror, Designing for Evil.
Welcome to Web 2.0. One pundit wrote a definition, "Web 2.0 is stuff that gets spammed."

[amdg]

Interesting article. I didn't really understand a lot of it though. Will have to get more tech-savvy.

But one question remains - why would Al Gore leave such a huge flaw in the overall internet design? He must have had his reasons...

[Iraira]

[quote="amdg"]But one question remains - why would Al Gore leave such a huge flaw in the overall internet design? He must have had his reasons... ]

[SIZE="6"]INFIDEL! [/SIZE]:flame:
Bow your head in shame before the MIGHTY GORE. For he hath, from his loins, given unto us, the most unworthy of savages, the tool with which to collect vast quantities of porn. Without the MIGHTY GORE, all your eyes could be cast upon is pixellated girl flesh from which the true nourishment of the soul cannot be realized.

[Gilligan]

[SIZE="6"]INFIDEL! [/SIZE]:flame:
Bow your head in shame before the MIGHTY GORE. For he hath, from his loins, given unto us, the most unworthy of savages, the tool with which to collect vast quantities of porn. Without the MIGHTY GORE, all your eyes could be cast upon is pixellated girl flesh from which the true nourishment of the soul cannot be realized.

[SIZE="6"]MIGHTY GORE[/SIZE]

[Gilligan]

Speaking of Gore, remember it ain't over until Fat Al sings:

The legendary La Scala opera house in Milan has commissioned a full-length work to be based on his book, An Inconvenient Truth, and the Oscar-winning documentary of the same title.