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MONDAY February 23, 2004 - Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card Valley&State Backpage O&E Sports Archives Classifieds Faith&Beliefs Obituaries Revels December 10, 2003 So much for spam bill Peter Hahnloser When giving unsolicited e-mail a nickname, it's surprising that "spam" caught on. "Fruitcake" seems a better choice. When's the last time a distant acquaintance sent you a can of ultra-processed meat? In the season of fruitcake-giving, the U.S. Congress has decided it has found the answer to stanching the flood of spam flowing into inboxes across the country: require that people are able to opt out of receiving future messages from the same sender. Oh yes, and require such senders to use their real return e-mail address instead of something fake. Sounds good Problem is, as with almost all attempts to legislate the Internet, the bill headed toward President Bush's stamp of approval fails to take into account the fact that spammers, almost by definition, don't work within the law. The most flagrant spammers use programs that send out millions of messages at a time, complete with false routing information that makes it difficult to find the actual sender. It can be done, but the amount of time and trouble dwarfs the comparative ease of simply deleting the messages. And requiring that senders include a way to get off the mailing list plays right into a classic spammer technique: using an "opt-out" e-mail address to confirm that the victim's address is valid. Getting real Comparisons are being made to the recent do-not call list, which has proved wildly popular with people wishing to avoid interruptions at home from telemarketers. Unfortunately, the parallels fail to hold up to scrunity. It's fairly expensive to call U.S. residents from foreign countries; it's free to e-mail U.S. residents from abroad. And U.S. law holds no standing anywhere else. Attempts by the music industry to shut down the now-ubiquitous file-sharing networks proved effective at first, but companies realized they could incorporate in other countries and avoid prosecution. A similar scenario played out in the early, rambunctious days of Internet pornography, and no one would say that presence has disappeared. Two steps forward The spam issue simply highlights the double-edged sword the Internet has become. As each technological advance allows us to more easily communicate, people find ways to exploit that ability. And then technology is created to stop the exploitation, so people find ways around that. And so on. I hate deleting 50 messages a day in order to find the two from people I know, but it's a small price to pay for the access to information the Internet provides. The only way to stop spam would be a system that filters absolutely everything sent from everyone. That sounds too close to censorship for my taste. In its rush to do something everyone will approve of, Congress has ignored the realities of technology by creating legislation that simply won't work. There is an upside, however. No one is going to file a lawsuit. Pete Hahnloser can be reached at [email protected] DailyTidings.com Home Page Valley&State | Backpage | O&E | Sports | Archives | Weather | Classifieds Columnists | Faith&Beliefs | Obituaries | Revels | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2004 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Site Search: A new improved archive search is coming! Look for it in mid-February! .:Advertisements:. RESOURCES - ODOT Road Cams