Slashdot Mirror
Supreme Court Lets Virginia Anti-Spam Law Die
SpuriousLogic sends in a CNN report that begins "The Supreme Court has passed up a chance to examine how far states can go to restrict unsolicited e-mails in efforts to block spammers from bombarding computer users. The high court without comment Monday rejected Virginia's appeal to keep its Computer Crimes Act in place. It was one of the toughest laws of its kind in the nation, the only one to ban noncommercial — as well as commercial — spam e-mail to consumers in that state. The justices' refusal to intervene also means the conviction of prolific commercial spammer Jeremy Jaynes will not be reinstated." Jaynes remains behind bars because of a federal securities fraud conviction unrelated to the matter of spamming.
The SCOTUS does not take every case that crosses its path. These days, unless there is an important Constitutional interpretation at stake, the Court will typically pass on the case.
Since there really isn't much new in this case (the FA already forbids restriction on TFOS), it's hardly surprising that the SCROTUS decided to let precedent do its job.
No one likes spammers, but this law was clearly in violation of the civil rights of everyone it touched.
I believe in freedom. As an American and a citizen of America, a land that was birthed in the patriotic defense of freedom, freedom is important to me and my wonderful family and our church and community. That is why I believe, like millions of other Americans, and the great majority of Italians, in Freedom. But when a malicious band of radical Italians, who curse our freedom and want their countrymen to not have the freedoms that America gave them, use the blessings and liberties of our freedoms to attack Freedom, I say this means war. If these Italo-extremists attack with spams on our computer networks and internet, then I will stand shoulder to shoulder with patriotic defenders of our homeland and our freedom-loving Italian allies until the false friends of the Italian people, the freedom-haters are defeated. Sometimes we will have to sacrifice some temporary freedoms in the defense of the greater freedom and the responsibility of freedom and the responsibility to responsibly exercise that freedom, that comes with being a free American (as opposed to a Mexican or something of that sort). GOD bless you all and good morning. We will prevail.
Your post advocates a...
"Sir, the Supreme Court rejected our appeal to keep the antispam law."
"Did they state a reason for the rejection?"
"Yes, we apparently need a much larger voting base. They offered to provide us with the necessary means to enlarge our voting base in weeks."
Go look up http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt. Fill it in for yourself, please, with particular attention to the existence of botnets (which steal email services from zombied machines worldwide), non-profit spam (which will get away with it free as they do under the CAN-SPAM act), and the difficulties of micropayments (handling many thousands of small transactions is extremely expensive when you start handling real money).
In other words, it will hurt legitimate email far, far, far more than spam, which will simply steal the service from others. Or do you somehow think that you personally will magically profit from this one?
Incredible! You've solved spam.
Where thousands of security experts have failed, you alone have come up with the magic bullet.
I can't tell... are you joking or not?
What about people on mailing lists? Is your Slashdot account set to e-mail you when someone replies to a comment you made? How many Slashdotters are there? 1.5 million now or something? You expect them to dish out like $15,000 (if everyone had it enabled), and that's only per-reply, per-comment... would end up being in the hundreds of thousands a day...
But I suppose now you'd want to create a registry or something, white and blacklists, that's ok, I'm sure all these service providers would just love to do that for every damn company, organization and website, around the world, they live for that shit.
Who gets to decide who's on which list? Obviously, this needs federal regulation now, now this costs them money, that's ok... they can just raise the cost... lets say 10 cents, that seems fair... but wait, they still want more money, but they can't raise the initial price... I know, they could add an e-mail tax onto internet accounts... ...
That's exactly why the politicians don't take it seriously - the average Joe doesn't realize how vast (and expensive) a problem it is.
For awhile, my tiny little home server, only used by me and a few friends and family members, with just one domain name, was rejecting approximately one spam attempt every 45 seconds, on average. I don't know what the recent numbers are - after the McColo shutdown, there was a huge drop, and I haven't bothered to figure out the statistics recently.
But that's once every 45 seconds, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. On a tiny little home server. Now imagine how much money it costs Google to deal with spam on GMail....
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;