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Dana Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
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Moore’s Law defines the history of technology. It held that the number of circuits etched on a given piece of silicon could double every 18 months as far as its author, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, could see. Moore’s Law has spawned constant revolutions since then, not just in computing but in communications, in science, in a host of areas. Moore’s Law applies to radios, and to optical fiber, but there are some areas where it doesn’t apply. In this blog we’ll take a daily look at new implications of Moore’s Law in real time, as it rolls forward to create our future.
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July 16, 2005

America's Shame: Spam War Heats Up Again

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Posted by Dana Blankenhorn

us flag.gifThat's the title of the most "popular" spam in my inbox right now, and maybe in your inbox as well.

It represents a new form of brazenness by U.S. spammers against the Net, because when you input the phone number in the message into Google you find the same message, as comment spam, attached to a host of different topics.

When you publicize a phone number like that, and get away with it, it's pretty obvious that the authorities are simply not interested in pursuing you. The CAN-SPAM act has gone from sick joke to tissue paper, a dead letter, and the entire Internet is now under attack from American spammers.

So am I.

spam.gifI wrote the other day about how my address is under a major Joe Job attack. At the time I thought the spams were originating with some hoser in South Carolina.

I can now reveal that, following a deeper investigation, they actually come from one of the largest spam gangs around, the iMedia empire of one Michael Lindsay.

Lindsay does his business completely in the open, from an office-warehouse park just minutes from the San Jose Airport, and he has been in the business of illegally selling prescription drugs (or spamming for someone who does) since at least 2003.

Why he has chosen to try and drive me out of my e-mail box I can't say. Thanks to Mailwasher from Firetrust, he won't succeed. That program is able to pre-wash all incoming e-mail so his spams never hit Outlook Express. (Although when I see 400 bounces come in overnight, in under 10 hours, all accusing me of being a spammer, it's starting to get ridiculous.)

The fact that these spammers are able to act with such impunity, publishing their phone numbers, Joe-Jobbing at will, and selling drugs illegally, puts all defenders of U.S. Internet control on the defensive.

Let me ask my conservative and nationalistic friends this question. Why should the UN or ITU buy into continued U.S. Commerce Department control, through ICANN, of the DNS root systems, when they are under continued systemic attack from spammers that the same U.S. government refuses to rein-in?

Is the U.S. an outlaw nation?

On the Internet, we are.

As an American, I'm ashamed to write those words. If you're an American, you should be ashamed to read them. If you're a patriot, you need to start working to disprove them. And if your government won't cooperate, get to work on getting another government that will. Because I don't know how long the rest of the world will wait for the U.S. to get its spam act together.

Comments (2) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: Internet | Journalism | Politics | law | spam


COMMENTS

1. Dirk Schmidt on July 16, 2005 07:46 PM writes...

You made the link about the US commerce department's decision about the control of ICANN and spam. Treating spam is a problem of politics in a world of globalization. The hegemon US causes problems, too. Here in the EU the first question about spam is: Where does he have the email from? Due to data protection being a civil right granted by the national constitutions or at least the European Convention on Human Right the storing of email addresses of natural persons without permission is prohibited. If I got spam I might know who stores my email without permission, without my opt-in. I can sue him because he did not respect my civil right but who sues an american spammer who is allowed to spam until an opt-out?

Even if we get rid of alle the worms, viruses, trojan horses and hoaxes there will be still a problem. A german court decided a few weeks ago that even a single commercial email might be forbidden spam. I can sent spam until an opt-out from the US to European users (who would sue?) but it's illegal to sent spam from Europe to Europeans. Something's wrong here. How can email authentification help if in some countries different things are allowed than in otherones? I might know where the email is initiated but do I know the policy of the server about what to send and what not?

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2. Roy Troxel on July 29, 2005 06:24 PM writes...

As an American, I'm ashamed to write those words.
Why? It's not your fault.

In any case, did you know that in Russia, spamming is not illegal? Russia's most famous spammer was recently murdered. You can read about it here:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/26/russian_spammer_killed/

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