25. May, 2003 - not the pink meat
- Microsoft takes spam plan to Washington, and naturally enough, their plan wouldn’t actually stop any advertisements from being sent by email. The primary thing they’ve proposed is requiring the sender to be identified, just like the direct marketing industry wants. Go figure.
- A Spammer Speaks Out at the Congressional Hearings, saying that what he does is just like what other businesses and ISPs do, but he sends a couple hundred million messages per day.
- Evan posts a good essay about why Terrible Ideas Never Die (like the idea of an email tax, which Mark Dayton has been talking about, but in order to combat spam).
- Get your Free Spam for $21.95 / month!!! from EarthLink. It’s a minor complaint, but perhaps public embarassment will encourage them to change their policy.
- Tough California Anti-Spam Bill Passes in Senate, requiring people to opt-in if they want spam, but I don’t expect it’ll have much effect.
- Massachusetts Senate Bill, No. 1911 is another state-level attempt to deal with spam. But I don’t think laws are going to help. There’s already a law against sending junk faxes, but rather than being able to find a lawyer to help me enforce it against fax.com, I’m spending an additional $15/month to make it harder for everyone to call me. So far it’s working, but I expect that Qwest will probably start selling the junk-fax people a new service that lets them get through the roadblocks I’ve got in place, and then I’ll need to pay even more money to Qwest so I can have some peace and quiet. How does anyone think that a law against spam is going to be any different? [some guy]
Copyright 2008, Dave Polaschek.
Last updated on Sun, 25 May 2003 09:35:49.