Senate Passes Anti-Spam Bill

Zendar writes "Yahoo! is reporting that the 'U.S. Senate passed the first national anti-spam bill on Wednesday, giving momentum to an issue that has riled consumers almost as much as dinnertime phone calls.' However, the bill, referred to as the 'Can Spam' bill, is unlikely to pass the House and be signed by the President. Senator John McCain sums it up: 'The odds of defeating spam by legislation alone is extremely low, but that does not mean we should stand idly by and do nothing about it.' CNN also has the story."

Comments

Politicians for Ya

[jazman_777]

Senator John McCain sums it up: 'The odds of defeating spam by legislation alone is extremely low, but that does not mean we should stand idly by and do nothing about it.'

Meaning, 'What we do has no effect, but we need to look like we're doing something useful.' And of course there _shall_ be unintended consequences, which will require yet another government "fix".

Re:Politicians for Ya

[stanmann]

The battle on spam must be fought on all available fronts, and providing penalties which can be levied against the company that hired the spammers is an important front. Granted, at this point there is no provision for a regulatory/investigative body to investigate and punish it... but one step at a time...

Re:Politicians for Ya

[arthurs_sidekick]

The key to the post at the top of this thread is the mention of unintended consequences. We've already seen how laws dealing with technical subjects get misinterpreted by the courts; what exactly is going to count as spam under this law? What forms of communication will it affect, and how? Damn straight, I don't want to go to jail for making a programming or configuration mistake that sends out a bunch of unsolicited email and somehow falls under the legal definition, or judge's interpretation thereof, of "spam." { I don't want to make that sort of mistake at all, but if I do, there are other ways of dealing with me }.

Stuck with Outlook?

[rjamestaylor]

If you're one of the many who doesn't really have a choice but to use Outlook on Windows, there is anti-spam help available in the form of an open source SourceForge project called SpamBayes.

I downloaded and installed the latest version last night and am very impressed with this seemlessly integrated Bayesian Spam Filter (make sure anti-virus software is disabled before installing -- which can be difficult with McAfee as I discovered).

Very much recomeeded.

What they really need to do

[andih8u]

Is go after the companies that sell ("rent") your information to the spammers. I know I didn't register for the national do-spam-me list, and I only gave my email out to "reputable" sights, so someone gave it away somewhere despite their privacy policy. You'd think there'd be a way to backtrack how these companies get this stuff.

Funny how that works

[Otter]

It goes to show you -- when it's clear that there's a real consensus, legislators don't hesitate to act, cynical sneering about "buying votes" notwithstanding. As soon as it became clear that the popularity of telemarketers with Americans was somewhere above Osama bin Laden and below Saddam, you've never seen any legislation move so fast. And now that it's dawning on them that spamers are about as popular (true, they don't bother you during dinner, but then telemarketers don't send bestiality pictures to your kids) they figure there are additional points to be scored.

Problem with a do-not-spam registry

[SeanTobin]

The major problem with a do-not-spam registry is not that it would only affect domestic spam.. The major problem is that there will be a huge list of validated e-mail addresses that spamhauses can buy, send overseas, and spam all day and all night from offshore.

The only reason this isn't happening with the telephone do-not-call list is that the cost of international calls is still prohibitave... but I think VoIP might make this option attractive at some point. I'd just love to get a sales call from some guy in India trying to sell me a new car windshield. Also, phone numbers are published anyway, so there is no real need to harvest the do-not-call list.

I think the way this should be implimented is a national list of MD5's of the addresses. Make it illegal to email any address whose md5 matches one on the list (converted to lowercase so that capitalization is not a loophole). This would prevent address farming, and have the same integrity as the proposed do-not-spam list.

(BTW, consider this prior art in case anyone goes patenting md5's of email addresses... /me smacks the US patent system)