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Canadian Spam Levels - Up? Down? You Be the Judge
spamfighter writes "Survey firm Ipsos-Reid has taken the interesting stance that spam to Canadians has been attenuated by 20% because of the federal privacy law PIPEDA which is so fearsome in nature that is scares off even the biggest- baddest spammers in other countries. CAUCE Canada has their doubts."
While numbers can be deceiving, I do believe tougher law will prevent crimes.
I remember reading a Chinese story about an emperor visiting a village with a very deep well. He asked one of the villagers if anyone had fallen into the well. The answer was no, because the well is so deep and everybody knows that, so no one has ever been careless enough to fall into it.
And back to the reality, one of the games that I'm involved in has recently introduced a "crime in the city" feature, and many players have been attacked as a result. However, as soon as the first criminal was arrested and mourned about the harsh punishment of being caught (lost points, jail time and whatnot), crime rate drops almost instantly.
Having said all these, sometimes I think the law is not tough enough because we do not yet know how to effectively identify and prosecute the offenders.
By the way, the easter egg that I mentioned here few weeks ago still has not been discovered...
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
As news reached their frozen ears that for the first time, someone somewhere was afraid of something Canadian. "Eh?" said one Canadian.
A free iPod in the US is actually $15.43 in Canada at the current exchange rate.
I am an American living in Canada and I need to deal with some US ISPs. For example, my father uses AOL for email. I use Shaw -- I am not sure there actually is another cable service provider in Canada -- and when I first moved here I was unable to send or recieve email from or to my father.
I later found out that some of my Japanese friends that use AOL accounts couldnt get my email and I couldnt get theirs.
This has since changed, and I can now get email from them and they can recieve mine. I found this to be really annoying at the time, but I did get much less spam on my canadian email accounts than on my US accounts.
A final note is that there is a difference between the amount of spam I get on University accounts in the US and Canada. I have 3 accounts at US univeristies and 1 in Canada. The accounts in the US get more than 50 spams a day. The Canadian one has never even recieved 1!!! This seems impressive, however, I think that someone is just stealing the outlook domain listings at US universities and selling them, this doesnt seem to be a problem yet here. Either that or they have the best spam filter I have ever seen. Cant figure it out.