Slashdot Mirror
Thai Premier Spams Nation, Prompts Consumer Outcry
patiwat writes "Newly installed Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva's first act was to send a spam SMS to tens of millions of Thai cell phone subscribers. The message, signed 'Your PM,' urged people to help him solve the Thai political crisis and respond with their postal code at a charge of 3 baht (10 US cents). The new premier was criticized for violating privacy regulations."
Maybe we could view electoral commission letters and tax office demands as junk mail. We may not have given our details personally and they also sent mail to thousands of other people!
sudo mount --milk --sugar
I may be misremembering, but I'm pretty sure that Thaksin (the deposed PM from two years ago) sold all his stock in the telecom and moved the money to Singapore in the weeks before the coup.
Also, the new PM is from a coalition of minor Thai parties and has nothing to do with Thaksin.
This story also appears to be a non-starter in Thailand. I went back to the 18th at thairath.co.th (a Thai language newspaper) and found no mention of this story in the political section.
Anyway, I'm not sure I would consider it spam if Obama had a message stating something like "I, the new President, invite you, the people of the U.S., to join together and help us rise out of our current situation. I welcome your comments." (The picture in the Bangkok Post is too blurry for me to make out every word the Thai PM wrote, but that's the gist of it.) In fact, I fully expect Obama to do something very similar in his first week, though it will be an announcement on TV pre-empting your favorite show. I doubt it will be quite as short or too the point, either.
Put identity in the browser.