Spamming The Spammer

Vic Muisyo

12 years ago

If the new set of rules from CCK are anything to go by, you are no longer going to browse the internet anonymously. The new laws specifically target social media users with the aim of tracking down on hate speech distributors. The government has given ISPs, including mobile telephone service providers, three months to comply with the new internet spying standards. ISPs will be required to install internet monitoring gadgets that eliminate anonymity of e-mail senders and other web users. This means that the spam business community will be losing out, because it will be possible to trace those who commit cyber sins to their doorsteps.

And this may not be as bad as it sounds.

Spammers have been ripping off Kenyans for quite some time now but given this development, the number of spam massages generated within the country is set for a historic low. What is spam anyway? Spam is the use of electronic messaging email systems to send unsolicited bulk messages, especially advertising, indiscriminately. So technically, spam is fraud and fraud is criminal, immoral and a general inconvenience.

According to the report, published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in August, the costs associated with spam for the global community amounts to approximately $20 billion a year (KES 1.68 trillion), but spammers are earning only about $200 million (KES 16.8 billion). Despite the $200 million (KES 16.8 billion) figure being low when aligned with the high costs of spam for everyone else, for the spammer, this is still an attractive figure, because essentially, the spammer incurs little cost, instead passing the expenses on to their recipients.

However, internet arrived in Kenya just the other day (1995) – it’s not even old enough to drink – thus spammers still manage to snare a few gullible users here and there, making a killing in the process.

Spam is costly for both businesses and individuals. Save for spam being annoying, spam clogs up bandwidth space, wastes time for those that must sort through spam in case any important emails get caught up in spam filters, and people may find their own legitimate emails getting caught up in the filters of others. There’s also the malware aspect to consider because it creates additional costs, such as money spent on software to combat it and the time spent setting up filters and cleaning up infected machines.

These new regulations will require each ISP to install a system that assigns Internet Protocol (IP address) identity to each gadget. thgis will provide that the communication originating from such gadgets will be traceable. Currently, each network has a single IP meaning messages can be easily traced to a network but not the originating equipment. The new regulations are seeking to shift from using IPv4 to IPv6.

And if that doesn’t work we can just fill their inboxes with pointless messages and see how they like it.