In the information security field, we often encounter an ethical dilemma. Should information become public, so that people can protect themselves, or better decide how to do so. Or should it remain secret so that larger harm is prevented? The world of Vaccines shows us an image of how medical professionals deal with the issue.
I recently wrote a blog post on an unrelated subject, vaccines and their risks. I have been gathering information on whether they are safe for some time now.
While they are in fact, in the vast majority of cases, safe, there is no easily available information online as to the risks associated with vaccination. Most of this data, therefore, can be found in scare-monger websites, spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt.
Whatever reason vaccine professionals have to take the party-line, we can assume one reason they do not wish public debate to avoid risk of more people not vaccinating, potentially increasing the death-toll and causing epidemics.
The similarities don't end there, and it truly is fascinating. For example the World Health Organization (WHO) monitors disease globally, detects new epidemics and responds accordingly, and thus monitoring the success of vaccines as well.
An interesting anecdote is on global risk analysis. How regulation trumps personal liberties world-wide in vaccination programs for new-born babies, as the risk of epidemics outweighs the infringement. Some people claim that this is no longer the case, and that these programs need to be reexamined. They seem to be wrong, but information is not easily available online. It is interesting to note, as once successful, even if it was no longer helpful I very much doubt society would easily change in this regard, much like I am sure it was difficult to initiate this program to begin with.
I doubt such regulation will happen in information security, but a common stance such as vaccine developers and medical doctors have on emerging threats could be highly beneficial to our field, when approaching the public.
Many interesting strategic and psychological lessons can be learned by examining this field, when compared to information security.
Gadi Evron,
ge@linuxbox.org.
Follow me on twitter! http://twitter.com/gadievron
Showing posts with label regulation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label regulation. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Monday, April 20, 2009
Proposal: This House Will Legalize Spam
I sent this today to the newly formed debate mailing list. While this is not necessarily my opinion, I am picking a side and running with it.
In other words, the opinions presented in this debate are not necessarily my own. People will either support this proposition, or tear it apart.
Proposal: This House Will Legalize Spam
Spam is a service answering a demand. Making the product legal will will inject our suffering economy with much needed currency and allow our government to tax this billions of dollars industry.
We have seen this happening with alcohol during the prohibition. Alcohol is no longer illegal, and great benefits resulted from that decision with a booming world-wide industry and disappearance of the black market economy.
Spam is a black market economy. Medicine is sold for high prices in the US, so black market spam operations answered the demand and sell drugs from Canada for a lower price. Many of these are fake and result in poor care in the best of scenarios.
Economically, the pharmaceutical industry is suffering and the government is losing potential taxation revenue. More importantly, if spam was regulated controls could be put in place to protect public health.
We have been waging a "war on spam" for two decades now with no victory in sight. More than that, the email system is under continued threat of no longer being usable.
Similar misuses have been addressed by legalization in the past. This includes post spam and fax spam, which today have clear regulation.
Most of the email traffic on the Internet today is spam, resulting in:
Our respected opposition may claim that legalizing spam will open the door for other sorts of legalization. We believe this claim is a logical fallacy, falsely claiming a slippery slope to muddy the waters.
We believe that taking this route on spam is positive, other directions with other "products" should be considered on their own merit. It is a fact that the end of prohibition did not result in legalization of drug usage.
In support of my case I bring before you a case study (below), written by me two years ago for a zdnet blog. I demonstrate how an unrelated legalization caused a large percentage of spam to stop and spam operations to collapse, when the demand ceased.
Gadi Evron,
ge@linuxbox.org.
---
Taking down spammers: Successful spam fighting via legalization, regulation and economics
Original URL:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=720
By Gadi Evron
Working in the Israeli city of Netanya, next door to our offices was a spam operation with roughly 30 employees. One day they weren’t there anymore.
They were blog comment spammers, but officially were doing Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Instead of optimizing content, they posted illicit comments on many blogs with commercial or misleading messages leading to their clients’ web sites, mainly for the purpose of increasing their clients’ web sites visibility in search engines such as Google. They would do this using an illegal tool such as botnets, and make quite a bit of money.
The reason for their disappearance soon became clear; nearly all their clients were gone. A law was passed in the United States which addressed online gambling operations (”Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act” - UIGEA). As a result, the public gaming industry ceased accepting online wagers. More than that, UIGEA addressed processing payments to and from Internet gambling sites. In a day, most of US-based gambling web sites ceased to exist (others moved over-seas, although quite a bit of the world’s credit processing is done by US firms). This effectively caused
the death of numerous black hat SEO companies–comment spammers. Perhaps the UIGEA measure against processing of payments proved too difficult to overcome. Not being a lawyer I can’t say exactly how UIGEA caused this death. No matter, US online gambling operations were effectively destroyed.
Spam decreased. The underlying cause for that was that the clients weren’t there due to the inability to process payments because of the online Casinos law.
....
More...
Follow me on twitter! http://twitter.com/gadievron
In other words, the opinions presented in this debate are not necessarily my own. People will either support this proposition, or tear it apart.
Proposal: This House Will Legalize Spam
Spam is a service answering a demand. Making the product legal will will inject our suffering economy with much needed currency and allow our government to tax this billions of dollars industry.
We have seen this happening with alcohol during the prohibition. Alcohol is no longer illegal, and great benefits resulted from that decision with a booming world-wide industry and disappearance of the black market economy.
Spam is a black market economy. Medicine is sold for high prices in the US, so black market spam operations answered the demand and sell drugs from Canada for a lower price. Many of these are fake and result in poor care in the best of scenarios.
Economically, the pharmaceutical industry is suffering and the government is losing potential taxation revenue. More importantly, if spam was regulated controls could be put in place to protect public health.
We have been waging a "war on spam" for two decades now with no victory in sight. More than that, the email system is under continued threat of no longer being usable.
Similar misuses have been addressed by legalization in the past. This includes post spam and fax spam, which today have clear regulation.
Most of the email traffic on the Internet today is spam, resulting in:
1. Increased operational costs for networks and service providers.
2. Clogged mail boxes, user annoyance and legitimate email being lost, resulting in loss of productivity.
3. A support infrastructure for other criminal activity ranging from phishing to child pornography.
Our respected opposition may claim that legalizing spam will open the door for other sorts of legalization. We believe this claim is a logical fallacy, falsely claiming a slippery slope to muddy the waters.
We believe that taking this route on spam is positive, other directions with other "products" should be considered on their own merit. It is a fact that the end of prohibition did not result in legalization of drug usage.
In support of my case I bring before you a case study (below), written by me two years ago for a zdnet blog. I demonstrate how an unrelated legalization caused a large percentage of spam to stop and spam operations to collapse, when the demand ceased.
Gadi Evron,
ge@linuxbox.org.
---
Taking down spammers: Successful spam fighting via legalization, regulation and economics
Original URL:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=720
By Gadi Evron
Working in the Israeli city of Netanya, next door to our offices was a spam operation with roughly 30 employees. One day they weren’t there anymore.
They were blog comment spammers, but officially were doing Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Instead of optimizing content, they posted illicit comments on many blogs with commercial or misleading messages leading to their clients’ web sites, mainly for the purpose of increasing their clients’ web sites visibility in search engines such as Google. They would do this using an illegal tool such as botnets, and make quite a bit of money.
The reason for their disappearance soon became clear; nearly all their clients were gone. A law was passed in the United States which addressed online gambling operations (”Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act” - UIGEA). As a result, the public gaming industry ceased accepting online wagers. More than that, UIGEA addressed processing payments to and from Internet gambling sites. In a day, most of US-based gambling web sites ceased to exist (others moved over-seas, although quite a bit of the world’s credit processing is done by US firms). This effectively caused
the death of numerous black hat SEO companies–comment spammers. Perhaps the UIGEA measure against processing of payments proved too difficult to overcome. Not being a lawyer I can’t say exactly how UIGEA caused this death. No matter, US online gambling operations were effectively destroyed.
Spam decreased. The underlying cause for that was that the clients weren’t there due to the inability to process payments because of the online Casinos law.
....
More...
Follow me on twitter! http://twitter.com/gadievron
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