Here is another taste tid bit. Enjoy. SECURITY PIPELINE NEWSLETTER http://www.securitypipeline.com/ Thursday February 5
TRYING TO AVOID SARCASM; ONLY PARTIALLY SUCCEEDING We had a lot of fun thinking up sarcastic things to say about this story: "CAN-SPAM Doesn't Can Spam" http://www.securitypipeline.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=17601914 "A month after the federal CAN-SPAM Act went into effect, most anti-spam vendors say that the new legislation hasn't cut down on the glut of junk mail in users' mailboxes. "According to numbers released this week by Brightmail, Postini, and Commtouch -- three providers of message filtering and anti-spam solutions -- the amount of spam they've intercepted since the Jan. 1 debut of CAN-SPAM has increased, went unchanged, or fallen by an insignificant amount." Gee, who'd'a thunk it?! We predicted that here at Security Pipeline months ago: Do Not Bother With A Do Not Spam List http://www.securitypipeline.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=15500142 Other brilliant predictions we made: The sun would come up in the morning; slamming our hands in the car door would hurt; horseradish sauce on a baked potato would prove to be surprisingly tasty. We've been saying for several months now that CAN-SPAM is toothless at best, and at worst will actually encourage spam. But having made that prediction, we're begging someone to prove us wrong. Maybe a handful of high-visibility lawsuits with lofty pay- outs to plaintiffs might serve as a deterrent. If so, let's get cracking. The new law has been in the books for more than a month. What's taking so long? It's not like spam is hard to find. It's time for the likes of Microsoft, AOL, Comcast, Verizon, SBC, Cox, Earthlink, and other major Internet service providers to do their best to identify spammers and bring them to task. Yeah, right. Because the CAN-SPAM act makes that real easy. Shouldn't be any problem finding spammers. They're just hanging out on the bad streets, waiting for the process servers to show up. Take a look around. For spammers, it's business as usual after CAN- SPAM, which is a toothless law that will benefit only the politicians who wanted to be seen as acting positively on something. You can bet that spammers are having a real good chuckle over all this. And if we ever manage to corner any of the spammers, the rest will be off-shore faster than you can say the name of those little blue pills. Some things you can't legislate. You'd think we might have learned that lesson by now. It's going to take technology to solve this problem. More than that, it's going to take a change in thinking. It's going to take new business practices, and an entire world of companies working in concert to stamp this out. Anything less than that just won't cut it. Mitch Wagner and Scot Finnie, Co-Editors, Security Pipeline http://www.securitypipeline.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Assured Computing When you need to be sure. [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.assuredcomp.com Voice - 541-868-0331 FAX - 541-463-1627 Eugene, Oregon _______________________________________________ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
