CAUCE NEWS
Volume 3, Number 3
July, 1999
In this issue:
* New, better, anti-spam bill in Congress
* Other anti-spam bills in Congress
* Canadian judge whacks a spammer
* Europe: Austria, Italy outlaw spam
* Spam study says we all hate spam
* State laws and actions
* Spam Recycling Center delivers 150,000 spams to the FTC on Jul
22
* CAUCE T-shirts
* New mailing list software
- --------------------------------------------------------------
* New, better, anti-spam bill in Congress
On June 10th, Rep. Gary Miller introduced the "Can Spam
Act",
H.R. 2162, with language similar to the California law that he
introduced last year before he moved from Sacramento to
Washington.
It makes it illegal to send UCE in violation of a system's stated
policy, and makes a server banner of "NO UCE" or "UCE
POLICY AT <url>"
a binding statement of the policy.
The bill is currently before both the Judiciary committee and Rep
Tauzin's Telecommunications subcommittee of the Commerce
committee.
Representatives Holt (D-NJ), Metcalf (R-WA), English (R-PA),
Underwood
(D-GU), Collin Peterson (D-MN), Morella (R-MD), Baker (R-LA), and
Calvert (R-CA) are all original cosponsors of the bill and reps
John Peterson (R-PA) and Ose (R-CA) signed on in July.
Write or call your representative and urge him or her to
cosponsor
this well-crafted, broadly supported bill.
- --------------------------------------------------------------
* Other anti-spam bills in Congress
Rep. Gene Green's "E-Mail User Protection Act" , H.R.
1910, makes it
illegal to send UCE to anyone who's told you not to, and outlaws
header forgery. It's not an awful bill, but we believe that
its
"opt-out" approach won't work. It's also before
the the Judiciary
committee and the Tauzin's Telecommunications subcommittee.
- --------------------------------------------------------------
* Canadian judge whacks a spammer
In a surprising decision, an Ontario superior court judge ruled
that
UCE is "contrary to the emerging principles of
'Netiquette'" and as
such represents a threat that could "undermine the integrity
and
utility of the Internet system." Web hosting company
Nexx Online
<http://www.nexx.ca>
cancelled service to BeaverHome.Com, because the
latter had been spamming through a third-party ISP in the U.S.
BeaverHome sued to get their web site reinstated, but the judge
refused to do so, on the basis that spamming is bad for the net.
The decision cites a lot of well-researched on-line material,
including a long quote from material at <http://spam.abuse.net>
written by CAUCE board member John Levine. The decision is
on-line at
<http://www.digitaldesk.com/stuff/netiquette.htm>.
- --------------------------------------------------------------
* Europe: Austria, Italy outlaw spam
The Austrian parliament has passed an amendment to the
telecommunications law that makes it illegal to send
bulk/broadcast or
advertising e-mail to anyone without the receipient's prior
consent.
The provision was endorsed by all major parties, and will take
effect
as soon as it's published in the official register.
Legislation in Italy entered into force 21 June. The use of
fax,
robot telephone systems, and email require prior consent of the
recipient.
Legislation before the Bundestag in Germany confirms the
principle of
"opt-in" for advertising email.
Elsewhere in the European Union, responses to spam have in
general
involved opt-out and message subject tagging, so the Austrian and
Italian laws are a welcome move toward a more effective policy.
- --------------------------------------------------------------
* New survey says we all hate spam
A study by the Gartner Group, commissioned by Bright Light
Technologies, confirms that spam is a growing problem and that
Internet users all hate it. Of over 10,000 users polled,
83% said
they dislike spam, 14% were neutral, and only 3% liked it.
The longer
users had been with their ISPs, the more spam they got.
The study's available on-line at Bright Light's web site:
<http://www.brightlight.com/gartner/>
- --------------------------------------------------------------
* State law and actions
In North Carolina, Wake County Senator Eric Reeves introduced
Senate
Bill 288, that makes it illegal to send junk e-mail, with
recipients
having the right to sue senders for $10/message, using language
similar to last year's Miller bill in California. The NC
legislature
approved the bill and the governor signed it into law on June
28th.
This is the strongest state anti-spam law to date.
In New York, one of a group of privacy-related bills makes it
illegal
to sell mailing lists for spamming.
- --------------------------------------------------------------
* Spam Recycling Center delivers 150,000 spams to the FTC on Jul
22
The Spam Recycling Center is a project run by the Choose Your
Mail
opt-in e-mail advertising service with support from CAUCE and
other
organizations. You can forward your spam to them at
spamrecycle@ChooseYourMail.com
where it will be collected and analyzed
to compile statistics about the current state of spam.
On July 22 at 11:00 AM, the SRC will sponsor a press conference
in
Washington DC to deliver 150,000 spams they've collected so far,
to
release an analysis of the collected spam, and to raise support
for
Rep. Gary Miller's "Can Spam Act" discussed above.
Rep. Miller will
be there along with representatives from CAUCE and other SRC
supporters.
For more info on the press conference, visit
http://www.chooseyourmail.com/spamstats.cfm
For more info on the SRC and some freebies for SRC participants
ranging from spam filtering software to meat (frozen steaks, not
canned pork), see http://www.spamrecycle.com.
- --------------------------------------------------------------
* CAUCE T-shirts
You can now get an attractive CAUCE T-shirt.
http://www.libertees.com/stopspam.htm
for a picture and ordering
information. Since CAUCE neither solicits nor accepts
financial
contributions, the maker will give a $1 contribution to ofcn.org,
the coordinating organization for Freenets, for each shirt sold.
- --------------------------------------------------------------
* New mailing list software
As of this past April, CAUCE-announce is running on the new GNU
MailMan
Mailing List Manager (http://list.org/
.) So, now you can subscribe, un-
subscribe, or put your subscription on hold for a while over the
web at
http://lists.cauce.org/mailman/listinfo/cauce-announce
One possibly confusing aspect of this change is that all
subscribers
now have to use a password to change their subscriptions.
If you were
added using the old software, you didn't set a password -- so
MailMan
will have generated a random one for you.
To find out what your password is, go to the URL above, enter
your
subscribed e-mail address into the text field at the bottom of
the page,
and select the "Edit Options" button next to that
field. This'll bring
you to a page with an "Email My Password To Me" button.
If you don't have web access, you can still send basic
"subscribe" or
"unsubscribe" commands to <cauce-announce-request@lists.cauce.org>.
If
neither of those options work or you have futher problems, feel
free to
contact CAUCE postmaster J.D. Falk <jdfalk@cauce.org>.
- --------------------------------------------------------------
About This Message:
This message was written and broadcast by the Coalition Against
Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail. It is copyrighted (c) 1999 by the
Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail.
We encourage redistribution of this message or items from it, as
long
as they are not spammed anywhere, are on-topic for any forum to
which
you send them, and include our copyright notice. When in
doubt, post
the URL of our site (http://www.cauce.org)
instead, or put it in your
signature. Press, broadcast, and Internet media may treat
this
material as they would a press release. For other commercial
reproduction rights, contact John Levine <johnl@cauce.org>.
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