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Futile attempts to stop spam and phishing

It's almost a decade late and far too weak, but at least now we have anti-spam laws in NZ.

But I'm sure we could have done a whole lot better, don't you?

Missing is a mandatory double-opt-in requirement, meaning that you, I or even your neighbour's very talented dog can sign anyone up to receive commercial solicitations without their permission or control.

Of course, under the provisions of this new law, those who did find themselves unwilling members of such a mailing list could opt-out, but why should they have to bother.

If I weren't totally opposed to spam, I would almost be tempted to suggest that, on the invocation of the law (expected to be 1 Sept 2007) all MPs email addresses be signed up to as many of these single-opt-in lists as possible -- just to show how important this omission to the law really is.

But for goodness sake, don't be tempted to stoop that low.

Instead, make sure that you report each and every instance of spam that originates from NZ sources and follow-up to discover the outcome.

Although I'm not too enthusiastic about some of the provisions (or lack thereof) in this new Act, I see that InternetNZ have published a press release gushing over the bills passage into law.

According to the PR, "The law will give the enforcement agency, within the Department of Internet Affairs, the power to tackle spammers located in New Zealand."

Since when do we have a Department of Internet Affairs?

I checked the government website and did a search for "Department of Internet Affairs"

Here's what I got

Nope, I guess not. Looks like a Freudian slip of the fingers or some wishful thinking on the part of InternetNZ -- or the government is rather lax in keeping their website up to date.

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I thought I'd try to find some more information on "The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007", or at least the bill from which it was created -- so I searched for that too.

Nothing on the govt.nz website, so I went to the legislation.govt.nz website.

Not a trace of the bill/act there either.

I finally managed to track down some references to this bill over at the Ministry of Economic Development's website -- but the most recent of these was about a year old.

Of course Google is our friend and I finally tracked down the (former) Bill here.

Why can't the government's own website find this when a search is made from it?

What are your thoughts on our new anti-spam laws?

A waste of time?

A necessary legislative move but ultimately one that will have little effect on the ever-increasing tide of spam?

A law that will ultimately fail due to lack of enforcement resource?

A significant step forwards (at last)?

And while on the subject of combating evil little sods -- I see the banks are lobbying to have a new second-level domain set up in NZ.

They figure that if they have exclusive access to domains under the .bank.nz 2LD, this will help reduce their losses from successful phishing runs.

Well they may be right -- but I strongly suspect that they'll be disappointed at just how little effect this might have in practice.

Let's face it -- most phishing websites aren't even secure (using https) but people don't notice.

Also, if people don't spot that URLs such as www.igrabyourwesterndollars.ru/WestPac/LogIn.htm are fake, why should they notice that the website they've just clicked through to is www.igrabyourwesterndollars.ru/Westpac.bank.nz rather than www.westpac.bank.nz/LogIn ?

Giving banks their own 2LD won't hurt, but I don't think it will help much either.

What do you reckon?

Have your say on this...

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