Spam Under Legislative Attack in Europe

Anonymous Coward writes: "CNN has an article in their Science and Technology section detailing how the European telecommunication ministers have agreed that unsolicited e-mail and wireless text messages should be prohibited under a new data protection law. They also are agreeing to allow leeway for law enforcement to access logs of e-mail and telephone traffic.

Comments

Asia

[Detritus]

Most of the spam that I receive is coming from China and South Korea. I don't think legislation will help much. I would rather see them BGP'd to /dev/null.

Re:fax spammers suck

[jsmthng]

I'm 76% sure there's a U.S. law against fax spam, because it gets the bonus of specifically causing real-life monetary damage (in this case, waste of paper and ink, especially when fax paper was a big deal Back in the Day; email really is just electronic bits with the occasional per-minute cost).

Ha, google gets me a random attorney's page on the subject: http://www.markwelch.com/faxlaw.htm

You get $500 per violation. Woo.

Apples, oranges.

[McDutchie]

The Great Firewall of China is intended to prohibit people from actively seeking out information they want.

Anti-spam legislation is intended to allow people to stop receiving information (?) they don't want.

This is not about control of the Internet. This is about control of my e-mail inbox, the one I pay for.

Re:Apples, oranges.

[sweetooth]

With a Radio you only tune into the station you want, and then "recieve" the information that they send, even if you don't want it all.

With email you don't have an option to tune everyone but the station you want out. You can do this somewhat with mail filters etc, but not to the same magnitude.

Also, radio is regulated quite heavily when compared with email.

Re:Real problem targeting spam

[ShaunC]

>Therefore, shutting down the "spammer" isn't going to do anything.

You're right - in those cases, to hell with the spammer, you have to go after the spamvertised product. Spammers spam because people are paying them to spam. People are paying spammers to spam because those people are making money off the spam. To borrow a Bush tactic, follow the money. If you're getting spam from Asia, Russia etc. advertising a website in the US (as I frequently do), forget tracking down the spammer unless you really want to spend the time doing so. Instead, forward the spam to the webhost of the target site, and the host of any email dropboxes contained within the spam.

It costs money to open webhosting accounts, so hit the real spammers (those who benefit from the advertising, not necessarily those who send the mail) in the pocketbook.

Shaun