SPAM and the great state of California

Interesting piece of news came down the pike yesterday...

California as of Janurary 1st, will make it illegal to send UNSOLICITED email (SPAM). I am having a hard time finding information about this new law, and am curious if anyone else has/had followed this.

Information on how this will be regulated, is it inside California TO California addresses?, or will this effect ALL email coming from anywhere INTO California?

Certainly curious, being a network admin, I am wondering how much easier this is going to make it for me to deal with an Enterprise-wide spam solution......

thanks in advance for any info regarding this that you all have or find.

-java

I'd like to see how they are going to enforce this one and who will enforce it. Previous attempts at this have flopped.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/interne....ap/index.html
http://www.forbes.com/markets/newswi...tr1090938.html

Quote:

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from Forbes Article
Spam can be sent from anywhere in the world or any computer," said J.P. Gownder, a senior analyst at the Yankee Group. "Legislation of this sort will have relatively minimal impact on the problem of spam. But it certainly does make the politician who brings it about look good."

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Google Link to More articles

What I find most interesting is that Mr. Davis is endorsing it.

Personally, I think (Javadog) that it is going to make your job harder because spammers are going to have to come up with (again) more creative ways to step around the laws.

If I were a dishonest sort of person, I would target California with my competitor's spam ;)

The only people that will benifit are the lawyers.

But that's just my opinion... :)

The UK recently passed such a law too, much like that of California, except the one in the UK allows the spamming of businesses. In AU they have much more strict laws concerning spam. Instead of me rambling on about it check out the link:

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,60589,00.html

Also, there were three sites that kept spam blocking lists that have recently been dosed. (by spammers most likely) These lists contained IP adresses of comps or servers that are known to for spam. This way, ISP's or network admins could consult these lists and incorporate them into however they choose to filter spam. Unfortunately, two of them decided to close down after the DOS attacks.

I'm not so sure why you would shut a site down because of a silly dos attack, no matter how long it lasted, get underneath it, learn about the attack, trace it back, file charges :) Anyway, one of the many *newsworthy* things lately in the tech world.

If anyone is being spammed more (as one of my friends said he was), make sure if you're on win 2k or xp that you get to a DOS prompt and type:
net stop messenger
This was originally a way for a sysadmin to send a messages to all the users on his network, which is fine and dandy to have the option, but don't enable it by default. People have made thousands of dollars selling software that performs that simple command. (they would spam them with *Do you not like getting popups?* etc...how ironic...and then ask $29.95 to download something that would 'stop the spam')

Star****ers|Inc