Slashdot Mirror
Do-Not-Email Registries?
prgrmr writes "Wired has an article about Colorodo and Missouri's latest legislative proposals to deal with spam and with spammers. There appears to be actual consumer-protective teeth in these bills which mirror the telephone 'do not call' lists. A nice example of a government perpetuating a working concept instead of trying inventing new ways to break things."
It may be easy for the actual sender of the email to hide his identity, but if the spam is offerring goods or services it is not so easy to hide the identity of the privider.
The type of spam which will probably be decreased by this type of law is that from businesses which put you on their mailing list because you purchase something from them (or download software)
It may simply end up that countries that are unwilling or unable to stop SPAM find themselves banned form the internet at large. I work for a university and we find that a particular country (that I will not name) and a particuar ISP in another country are a large problem for little script kiddies. They refuse to respond to our requests for action so we are slowly banning all the IP blocks that belong to them. At some point, they will no long have any access to our network.
This is not something that will happen overnight but I do believe that some day there will be a sort of Internet law that you will have to obey and if you don't, you'll find yourself banned from most of it.
Also most of the SPAM I recieve on my various addresses is form US companies. After all, it's not real useful to SPAM someone for a product or service that they can't buy since you are from a different country. The spammers may use foriegn relays, but they are working for US companies, and those companies can be held accountable.
Much more fun is to use the counterscript. I've had a few telemarketing people sounding so worried when I did it that I almost felt sorry for them.