E.U. Employers To Be Held Liable For Porn Spam?

Cowards Anonymous writes "Yahoo News has a story about a study of Europe's new anti-spam legislation. The overly broad wording of the legislation, according to the study, could allow employees to sue employers for not doing enough to stop porn spam. Businesses could be sued by their workers for allowing a hostile work environment. The author of the study advises companies running email servers to use filtering technology, and warn employees about the sometimes sleazy content of spam."

Comments

I support this

[rokzy]

my uni is pathetic and refuses to implement any kind of anti-spam at all just so they can't be held accountable for anything.

force them to sort it out. and if they can't fix it then get rid of it. something will fill the void and either way the problem is solved.

actually...

[tuxette]

...in most cases, mail sent to you at your place of employement is considered business mail (i.e. the secretary or your boss can open it) unless it is specifically marked private or confidential.

Re:SMTP must die!

[cperciva]

Anyone see a downside to this besides the annoying move to such a system?

Yes. It wouldn't work.

I send mail from several different places, with several different return addresses. The mail server for foo.com doesn't know anything about most of the email which I (legitimately) send with my @foo.com return address.

Also, there's a huge amount of mangling which happens to email messages. Headers are added, removed, or modified; line breaks are changed; some characters or strings are escaped... you'll have trouble finding something you can rely upon for your hashing.

Re:It's not just a good idea, it's the law!

[Tackhead]

> [...Windows 98 based computers] There's a running process that resets it whenever the user attempts to change the home page by any way, but it's using rootkit tactics to shield itself from being uninstalled by anything. The OS is hosed, it needs to be reinstalled.

Rant: WTF d00d?

If we were talking NT, 2K, or XP, I'd agree.

Win95/98? Set BootGui=0 in MSDOS.SYS. Reboot the pig. Look, Ma, no running processes on boot! Type DELETE WHATEV~1.EXE (whateverthefucktheproblemis.exe) and type WIN.

I'm not saying 9x belongs in an office environment full of clueless lusers who don't know how to secure their machines. It's got no security model, blah blah blah. But compared to the useless "recovery console" (where XP's security model "protects" you from fixing anything), when a 9x box gets fucked up, it's amazingly easy to pop the hood and unfuck it.

Re:You've obviously never encountered the nasties.

[nathan s]

"...you can delete them once, they hide in some other start-up file reinfecting the machine. Trust me, some of these are near totally uninstallable by anything else but a clean reinstall."

That's why you check autoexec.bat, config.sys, system.ini, win.ini and the registry */Software/Microsoft/CurrentVersion/Run* keys.

I love 98SE for this - it's extremely easy to un-fuck-up provided that no important system files were replaced with trojans, and even then a date check and extract /a from the CD usually fixes it.

Absolute worst case, an install of 98 OVER the existing install usually fixes any problems, while retaining your files and a lot of Windows settings.