p2pnet - rss feed: Can Spam Act:
US President George W. Bush has signed the Can Spam law - Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act - designed to make SPAM a thing of the past.
[Is there a team of hacks working in a dungeon dreaming these names up? Shades of Orrin Hatch’s EnFORCE - Ed].
But it isn’t likely to do much stop the flood of garbage being pumped into the American junction of the Net every second of every hour of every day by practitioners who not only disguise themselves and their whereabouts, but who aren’t even based in the US.
In fact, United States set to Legalize Spamming on January 1, 2004 says Spamhaus, one of the main sites dedicated to eliminating SPAM and SPAMMERs.
"Against the advice of all anti-spam organizations, the U.S. House of Representatives has passed the CAN-SPAM Act, a bill backed overwhelmingly by spammers and dubbed the ‘YOU-CAN-SPAM’ Act because it legalizes spamming instead of banning it," its says.
"Spam King Alan Ralsky told reporters the passage of the House bill ‘made my day’. Spammers say they will now pour money into installations of new spam servers to heavily ramp up their outgoing spam volumes ‘all legally’."
The act in theory gives recipients the option of, well, opting out by telling sender(s) they don’t want any ejunk. But that can have the opposite effect, as anti-SPAM sites such as Spamhaus have been saying for years.
That’s because ‘unsubscribing’ or ‘opting out’ only lets the spammer know you actually eye-balled the message instead of dumping it. So your name goes on yet another list.
An opt-in where only those who actually ask for SPAM get it would have been or more use, Can Spam critics say.
Moreover, "What this will do for relations between Europe and the United States, is easy to predict with millions of European Internet users already angry at being deluged in American ‘make-penis-fast’ spam," SPamhaus points out.
"From December 11, spamming will be illegal in the UK, but with 90% of the UK’s spam problem originating in the United States, British users will continue to be flooded, now with ‘legal’ spam from the U.S."
