Eyeing the costs of the tech boom

Eyeing the costs of the tech boom (excerpt)
Laurent Belsie, The Christian Science Monitor, December 23, 2002

...Spam isn't merely unwanted; it's often pornographic or illegal.

"The technology ... has opened up yet another avenue for Americans to fleece each other," says Dan Birchall, executive director of SpamCon Foundation, an antispam group based in San Francisco.

Fortunately, society lies on the verge of controlling the phenomenon. For example, computer users are using filtering software that automatically identifies and throws out junk e-mail. More important, authorities are beginning to crack down on perpetrators. Just over half the states in America have enacted some kind of spam regulation.

Simply sending out an unsolicited message nationwide almost certainly will break the law in two or three states, Mr. Birchall says. "As the big-time players continue to operate the way they're operating, they're in increasing danger of legal action."

Spam Wars

Spam Wars (excerpt)
Charles Bermant, The Seattle Times, July 27 2002

"It is better to have a server-based system, because then you don't waste your bandwidth downloading the spam to your machine," says Dan Birchall, executive director of the SpamCon Foundation.

'Supergeek' fights spam

 'Supergeek' fights spam (excerpt)
Luis Cabrera, Associated Press, June 3, 2002

...Dan Birchall, executive director of the anti-spam SpamCon Foundation, said Haselton has become one of the three or four most prominent spammer-suers in the country.

"What he's doing definitely has an effect. It raises awareness of the laws that are available," Birchall said.

Spammers don a friendly mask

Spammers don a friendly mask (excerpt)
Stefanie Olsen, ZDNet.com, April 12 2002

...Dan Birchall, executive director of advocacy group the SpamCon Foundation, suggests that recipients contact their Internet service provider to see if it is using proper filters to help stop the forgeries.

"You have to be a little bit skeptical," Birchall said.

(Addendum: I was referring to being skeptical of forgeries, not of service providers.)

No Subscription for Spam Relief

No Subscription for Spam Relief (excerpt)
Joanna Glasner, Wired News, April 5 2002

...In many cases, replies to spam end up going nowhere because the address from which the message was sent has already been shut down, said Dan Birchall, executive director of SpamCon Foundation.

"The odds are very good that at the beginning of their spam run, it'll get reported by someone who doesn't like spam," Birchall said.

He added it typically takes few complaints for an ISP to suspend or cancel an e-mail account.

Intelligence Risks of E-mail Auto-Responses

 (As published in Risks Digest Volume 21, Issue 16)

For some time, I have been associated with organizations that maintained e-mail lists for communication with customers. Each customer mailing generates some quantity of e-mail responses to the mailing address or a specified reply-to address. Heuristic filters handle the most frequent types of responses, generating automatic replies or redirecting mail to appropriate addresses. There are, though, always some messages which the filters can't adequately handle, so my involvement tends to involve eyeballing them.

The workload is by no means immense - for every 6,000 outbound messages sent, I manually handle one response. Some are questions the filters didn't catch, which I pipe to various scripts. Some are bounce messages. Some are chain letters - I grep those for From: headers and bounce them to the appropriate administrators; nothing to spread holiday cheer like a corporate policy smackdown. A good many are auto-responses.

Risks of using HTML Mail and HTTP proxy "censorware" together

(As published in Risks Digest Volume 21: Issue 5)

Summary: Unseen things in HTML mail may trigger HTTP censorware.

First, the data points:

1. Many workplaces, including mine, have HTML-"enabled" mail software on the desktop.
2. Many workplaces (though not as many), including mine, make use of HTTP proxy "censorware" to catch employees trying to access "bad" sites (porn, hate sites, hacking sites, etc).
3. Those sites, like many others, tend to use 1x1 GIFs for spacing and the like.
4. Users who read HTML mail rarely view the source.

Now, the risk: