Karsten Bander [Karsten.Baender@ivm.de] wrote:
>What to do? I recently read that the US government, pushed by the
>lobby of SPAMmers, wants to legalize SPAM. SPAM is illegal today, but
>things seem to change.
Uh, which law, exactly, makes spam illegal, and in which countries? At the moment various aspects of spam may or may not be illegal (e.g. fraudulent forgery of email addresses, denial of service, etc), but not the actual act of spamming.
>The actual plan of the European parliament shows us some more drastic
>to stop the SPAM flood from the US: If the US servers allow SPAM
>to be sent over the net, the transatlantic connection can be cut! This
>would cut the European net from the rest of the world, but it would
>also stop most of the SPAM!
Sounds about the level of intelligence of the Eurocrats; if you don't like spam, cut all Europeans off from the rest of the Net. Geez.
And even if that proposal wasn't totally absurd, much of the spam I've received in the last couple of months claims to come from Russia and China...
James D. Wilson [netsurf@sersol.com]
>2. Lobby your state senators/representatives for strong anti-spam
>legislation in your state which includes prison time for
>knowingly/intentionally transferring the cost of advertisement from
>the sender to intermediate networks and the end users. Class C felony
>would do the trick.
Boy, I'm glad to see Extropians arguing for free-market solutions to problems rather than calling in big brother every time someone annoys them.
Look, as someone who's had to deal with asshole spammers sending out literally millions of messages with a forged unicorn.com return address, I have more reasons than most to support the death penalty for spammers. But these kind of proposals are absurd authoritarian solutions to a minor problem which will destroy most of our freedom on the Net in order to potentially save a few minutes deleting garbage from our mailboxes.
Frankly, the worst problem the Net faces is not spam or web abuse, it's the dumbocratic idiots jumping in to sacrifice out freedoms to their big brother solutions to minor problems; as with the Slashdot folks arguing to ban anonymity so they don't have to read so many flames.
Mark