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It's not a law, and it doesn't ban spam.

It bans some email. It doesn't tell you which email; you have to guess. Lots of spam is ok under the statute. It's not limited to bulk email, one is enough. Have you verified everyone on your contacts list isn't actually a michigan minor? How exactly did you verify that? It's not limited to commercial email.
http://www.isipp.com/michigan-email-child-protecti on-registry-law.php
There's the text, which was missing from the main post. Do you understand it? Does your lawyer understand it? Are you in compliance?

The statute is not a law. One of the basic rules of american law established by Marbury v Madison is that an unconstitutional statute is not law.
This statute appears to be unconstitutional for the reasons discussed in Cyberspace v Engler, which stuck down Michigan's previous attempt at banning the internet because of the kiddies.
http://www.cyberspace.org/lawsuit/

Some of the fun provisions in the act:
they can make you come to michigan with all your business records to answer questions.
They can seize your computers.
If they were serious about protecting kids, they wouldn't be charging a fee to check the list.
Oh and it's not just parents who can add names - government officials can add kids' names, probably without telling them.
For fun, check the linking policy.
http://www.michigan.gov/som/0,1607,7-192-26915-208 9--,00.html
It's a shakedown.
It's not constitutional.
It doesn't protect against spam.
It bans some email but not others.
Spam is a real problem. This isn't a real solution.
Personally, getting on the federal and state do not call lists has been great for me.
This isn't like that.
Don't be a dupe.
This is what we fought Reno v ACLU for - to keep the government from shutting down the internet.

Seems like write/talk (for us *nix people) also did the same thing. Two systems that I learned a lot of my *nix skills on back "in the day", GREX and M-Net had a version of write that was written by Jan Wolter. The link to his version can be found here

Ack, the downloads on Sourceforge page have been removed now! :\
Fortunately, I have the tarballs mirrored. :)

The current stable release (0.4) of bnetd:
http://grex.cyberspace.org/~trisk/bnetd-0.4.tar.gz
http://kainga.quasarnet.org/~trisk/files/bnetd-0.4 .tar.gz

The current development release (0.4.25) of bnetd:
http://grex.cyberspace.org/~trisk/bnetd-0.4.25.tar .gz
http://kainga.quasarnet.org/~trisk/files/bnetd-0.4 .25.tar.gz

Enjoy. :)

Ack, the downloads on Sourceforge page have been removed now! :\
Fortunately, I have the tarballs mirrored. :)

The current stable release (0.4) of bnetd:
http://grex.cyberspace.org/~trisk/bnetd-0.4.tar.gz
http://kainga.quasarnet.org/~trisk/files/bnetd-0.4 .tar.gz

The current development release (0.4.25) of bnetd:
http://grex.cyberspace.org/~trisk/bnetd-0.4.25.tar .gz
http://kainga.quasarnet.org/~trisk/files/bnetd-0.4 .25.tar.gz

Enjoy. :)

My point? A few people stopped it. "Eternal vigilance *is* the price of liberty", folks. Sometimes there's just no substitute for showing up and raising hell.(You'll be happily suprised at the amount of covert support you'll find.)

P.S. Hooray for GREX: community-built, community-supported, and community-utilized computing resources!!!

I found something interesting in the preliminary injunction. The judge is drawing his conclusions:

1. The Court concludes that Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their claims that:
...
[a--e skipped]
...
(f) The Act violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution because it prevents people from communicating and accessing information anonymously.

Wow! There's a federal judge that seems to think the Constitution says that we should all be able to surf and e-mail anonymously! I'd like the Constitution to say that, but I don't think it does.

In my local area, both Grex and M-Net provide free basic access, and e-mail. They are both run as a essentially a co-op, with all users having a say in system policy. However, they don't market themselves as ISP's, rather, online communities and BBS's.

-

Here is a thriving virtual community, democratically run, structurally almost unchanged since it hooked up to the internet in 1994. It is a 501(c)3 non-profit, does not charge users for access (although voting membership and certain resource usages require a nominal fee and id authentication), and serves nearly 30,000 users around the world from its basement closet in Ann Arbor.

Perhaps you should check it out as a potential model before you write the next installment.

Upon remand, the parties will be afforded the opportunity to argue

Some projectes like the EFF and KDE are well known and are rolling in money. There are other projectes like Arbornet.org and Cyberspace.org which are living off the day to day donations of users. I am sure these organizations would be able to utilize the donations a lot better since they have a $0 dollar overhead and no paid employees.

The part that scares me about this article isn't the charges themselves, but the fact that it's Granholm behind them. Jennifer Granholm's record with regards to the internet is not exactly spectacular. I'm thinking in particular of Michigan Public Act 33, Michigan's attempt at keeping porn away from kids. It was, of course, so ridiculously broad as to be obviously unconstitutional, and the ACLU got a preliminary injunction. (Incidentally, Arbornet was one of the plaintiffs in that case.) Granholm was, I understand, one of the proponents of that law. I'm not entirely sure this is the kind of person I want going after "hackers".

Try M-Net and Grex for computer related charity work.

That's not the end of their continued dirty tricks. It's almost as if they're stepping up every kind of nastiness to make up for lost time!

There are reports like these cropping up. Like any publisher, Micro~6 doesn't like the resale market. Unlike some, they're in a position to bully small resellers out of business.

Not that I really like it that much, but there exists cyberspace.org. Can't really do that much with it, though, so I wouldn't really recommend it.

BBSes in years past had several attractive features, such as file download sections, gaming, and chatting/e-mailing with other locals. All of these have been impacted by the Internet.

For downloading files, the Internet offers more variety than any BBSes ever did, and with web hosting that can cost less per month than a single phone line, it costs less to reach a wider audience by providing files for download over the Internet.

Modern gaming, if you like the latest in multiuser entertainment, bears too little resemblance to the "door" games in the heyday of BBSes to really compare the two.

For discussion forums, the rise of the Internet has driven people to expect more specialized communities. A few years ago, when CompuServe was essentially a huge national BBS, it offered the same advantage: there wouldn't be enough compression algorithm enthusiasts in a city to support a local BBS, but aggregated between all CompuServe users, they had a decent discussion forum for this. On the Internet, with a huge user base, Usenet and the proliferation of web-based chat boards have resulted in discussion groups defined much more by interests than geography. People did dial BBSes long-distance, but the bulk of the regular callers were generally local, except for narrowly specialized boards, or the handful of shareware and image/porn BBSes that got especially huge (100+ lines).

If you have a nostaligic longing for an active ASCII-based online community, dial Ann Arbor's Grex, +1 (734) 761-3000, N81, 14.4kbps...they have about ten phone lines. Although if you're reading this, you'll probably have an easier time telnetting to cyberspace.org...create a free shell account (they run SunOS), and you'll get the same feel through telnet as through a comm program. They've survived the transition to the Internet by promoting community interaction rather than file downloads and gaming. The Internet has introduced users from around the world, although there's still a core of Ann Arbor locals who keep things going.

M-Net and Grex are two BBS I have used for years. They are both based out of Ann Arbor, MI and have a local feel. However, both do cater to thousands of telnet (and hence, world-wide) users. If anyone is interested in more information they can be found at http://www.arbornet.org and http://www.cyberspace.org, respectively. They can also be reached at telnet://newuser@m-net.arbornet.org:23 and telnet://newuser@grex.cyberspace.org:23 .

For a little information you will not find on the website, M-Net is a little bit harder and rougher on newusers. Basically, they hate them. But if you hang on for a little bit they eventually begin to tolerate you. However, when an argument springs up it is rougher and more abusive than anywhere else on the Internet. As for Grex, they are much kinder to newusers and in general more tolerant. If anyone tries either I am "jp2" on both. Have fun.

Here is my original web site and the copy that he made. I have changed my site a lot since then (he did this a year ago). He refuses to respond to any emails I send him.