What effect has the new Federal Anti-spam Laws had on spam?
Fortune: We were hoping that the CAN-SPAM ACT was going to provide legal recourse, but it makes spamming legal as “free speech”, as long as it’s labelled as an “Advertisement” and there is an “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom. Well we all know what happens when you click on that link, they send you another 500 legally sanctioned advertisements (laughs). Where it really helps alot is that it makes it illegal to falsify identity and to use other people’s computers to deliver spam without their consent. This is a good tool for taking down the really big spam gangs who produce the most number of mails per second. They have deep pockets, and they hire advanced programmers to hack into servers, write zombie viruses, rape relays and all that. These are the real criminals and it’s not hard to prove what they are doing in a court of law, so lawyers will have a lot of cash incentive to go after them for damages. The problem is that they can still do all of these things in other countries where CA
