Slashdot Mirror
Tweaking the CAN-SPAM Act
rbochan writes "The Register is reporting that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is consulting on proposed changes to the CAN-SPAM Act. Changes would include clarifying the definitions of the terms person and sender, and altering the time allowed for a sender to to honor an opt-out request. The FTC proposal is available as a PDF on the official FTC site." From the article: "Critics have accused the Act of being narrow and weak, accusations that may be hard to deny given that the US sends more spam than any other, according to a recent report by anti-virus firm Sophos."
What we really need is a federal CAN CONGRESS act. Please, as though this is a problem that legislation can fix. If Congress really, truly wanted to end spam, why not allocate some grant money to improving anti-spam technology?
"There's companies that are just so cool that you just can't even deal with it," - Bill Gates, about Google
The purpose of the CAN-SPAM act wasn't to stop spam, it was to legitimize spam sent by the DMA and its members. ...but make it easier to filter out.
I don't know whether the DMA mebers are complying or not. Most spam is still sent from outside the DMA's members. So we sure can't turn off our bayesian spam filters.
The theory was that the US would crack down on those people, who according to TFA are right here in the US, leaving us with just the easily-filterable DMA-approved ads.
That hasn't happened yet, perhaps because the FBI has more important things on its mind (i.e. terrorism). I can't imagine that the DMA is happy, because their actual sales pitches are getting lost among the scams, phishes, and frauds.
I'll worry about how evil the DMA is once I stop getting 92 spams a day for C$ALIS.