If we could get the UN to help here could we get the righties

to admit it's useful?

link

Since the Can Spam Act went into effect in January 2004, unsolicited junk e-mail on the Internet has come to total perhaps 80 percent or more of all e-mail sent, according to most measures. That is up from 50 percent to 60 percent of all e-mail before the law went into effect.

To some antispam crusaders, the surge comes as no surprise. They had long argued that the law would make the spam problem worse by effectively giving bulk advertisers permission to send junk e-mail as long as they followed certain rules.

Can Spam legalized spamming itself," said Steve Linford, the founder of the Spamhaus Project, a London organization that is one of the leading groups intent on eliminating junk e-mail. And in making spam legal, he said, the new rules also invited flouting by those intent on being outlaws.

The law's chief sponsor, Senator Conrad Burns, Republican of Montana, said that it was too soon to judge the law's effectiveness, although he indicated in an e-mail message...

that before he'd continue, he'd have to tell you that you were approved for that mortgage...



A growing number of so-called bulletproof Web host services ...offer spam-friendly merchants access to stable offshore computer servers - most of them in China - where they can park their Web sites, with the promise that they will not be shut down because of spam complaints.

Some bulk e-mailers have also teamed with writers of viruses to steal lists of working e-mail addresses and quietly hijack the personal computers of millions of unwitting Internet users, creating the "zombie networks" that now serve, according to some specialists, as the de facto circulatory system for spam.

Ah, yes, the promise of the internet...