Our four-year old oft maligned anti-spam legislation in this country, the CAN-SPAM act, has seen an uptick of activity this past week. Melinda Krueger sums up the sentiments of many in the anti-spam community in her Email Insider column today when she says, “there is no provision in the act against sending unsolicited email as long as you comply with the rest of the act. The motivation of the act was more to make voters feel politicians were doing something about this annoying problem.” More…

Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back

Large scale spammer Robert Soloway, whose criminal trial was scheduled to start in a week and a half pled guilty to most of the charges against him. The indictment made three categories of charges. Counts 1-10 were mail fraud, due to Soloway delivering his spamware through the mail, and the product egregiously failing to be what he said it was, notably including 30 million addresses purported to be opt-in. Counts 11-17 seven were wire fraud, sending spam making false claims about the product, support, guarantee… More…

Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back

Back in January, bulk mailer E360 filed a suit against giant cable ISP Comcast. This week Comcast responded with a withering response… Their memorandum of law wastes no time getting down to business: “Plaintiff is a spammer who refers to itself as a “internet marketing company,” and is in the business of sending email solicitations and advertisements to millions of Internet users, including many of Comcast’s subscribers.” Comcast’s analysis is similar to but even stronger than the one I made in January… More…

Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back

Last week Sen. Snowe filed bill S.2661, the Anti-Phishing Consumer Protection Act of 2008, or APCPA. While its goals are laudable, I have my doubts about some of the details. The first substantive section of the bill, Section 3, makes various phishy activities more illegal than they are now in its first two subsections. It makes it specifically illegal to solicit identifying information from a computer under false pretenses, and to use a domain name that is deceptively similar to someone else’s brand or name on the web in e-mail or IM to mislead people… More…

Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back

Thanks to Prof. Goldman I see that the Virginia Supreme Court issued its opinion in Jaynes, the state-law criminal spam case that has wound its way through the courts there. It affirms the conviction and rejects the various challenges to Virginia’s spam statute… As a side note I should say that it’s not often one is actually excited to read an order in a case you’re not involved with. This is definitely one of those instances where the excitement is palpable… The news reports billed the case as the first felony conviction for sending spam. More…

Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back

I don’t normally cheer for Google when I don’t own shares in the company, but this time I will make an exception. Alma Whitten, Software Engineer at Google, today posted to their Public Policy Blog that IP addresses shouldn’t be considered Personally Identifiable Information (PII). This is not a problem in the United States but it is in the EU, and if the EU actually were to legislate this it would most definitely affect Microsoft and Google’s business functionality in the EU… More…

Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back

A couple of weeks ago, I read an article on Yahoo that some outfit in Russia claimed to have broken Yahoo’s CAPTCHA for creation of new email accounts. Another blogger wrote that it was unlikely that the spamming outfit had achieved 100% success at breaking the CAPTCHA. Yet, in the past couple of weeks, I have noticed something that would seem to confirm the theory… More…

Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back

Russia might be a country trying to regain superpower status, but it has already reached it in one less welcome area — the amount of spam it sends to the world. According to Sophos’s Q4 2007 spam report, the country now deserves the moniker of ’spam superpower’ having seen its share of total volumes rise dramatically over the last year, to put it in firmly in second place behind arch-rival, the US. More…

Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back

European spam networks have pumped out more unsolicited email than those in the U.S. for the third month in a row, according to security vendor Symantec. This movement is called a “significant shift” in spam trends as, historically, compromised U.S. computers have been used to send spam, and many spammers have been U.S.-based. Security experts suspect gangs are taking advantage of the increasing European broadband market. More…

Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back

Last Friday, Microsoft made an unsolicited offer to buy Yahoo for $31 per share, representing over a 50% premium from Yahoo’s then-share price. As an employee working for Microsoft in Exchange Hosted Services (i.e. spam filtering), I’d like to comment on this buyout offer. Leaving aside the question of whether or not this is a good deal for shareholders and what Microsoft’s true motivations are for buying Yahoo (namely, to become the number 2 player in the search market), I’d like to look at it from an anti-spam point of view. More…

Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back