From owner-freebsd-chat Tue May 11 6:45: 1 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from hostigos.otherwhen.com (mavery-gw.pernet.net [205.229.2.17]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DDE5B14FC0 for ; Tue, 11 May 1999 06:44:56 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mavery@mail.otherwhen.com) Received: from mail.otherwhen.com (mail.2.229.205.in-addr.arpa [205.229.2.19] (may be forged)) by hostigos.otherwhen.com (8.8.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id IAA15943 for ; Tue, 11 May 1999 08:55:17 -0500 (CDT) Message-Id: <199905111355.IAA15943@hostigos.otherwhen.com> Received: from PORKY/SpoolDir by mail.otherwhen.com (Mercury 1.44); 11 May 99 08:44:51 -0600 Received: from SpoolDir by PORKY (Mercury 1.44); 11 May 99 08:44:37 -0600 From: "Mike Avery" To: FreeBSD Chat Date: Tue, 11 May 1999 08:44:31 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: Europe says yes to spam Reply-To: mavery@mail.otherwhen.com In-reply-to: <3737F24F.70BE6FCA@uk.radan.com> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.10) Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On 11 May 99, at 10:03, Mark Ovens wrote: > Greg Lehey wrote: > > > > Just saw this on the aussie-isp list. > > > The European Parliament has voted to legalise spam. The European > > > Internet Service Providers Association (EuroISPA) campaigned against > > > the idea, a UK MEP made a passionate speech to ban junk email and > > > nobody spoke in favour of it. Despite this, it was passed 266 votes to > > > 137. A clause to ban the harvesting of email addresses from newsgroups > > > and web sites was removed before the bill was passed. > :-(. Mind you, about 90% of the spam I receive comes from the USA so > I'm not sure what good it would have done had they voted the other > way. Many (most?) of this junk e-mail includes a statement that under some > Bill or other it is not classed as spam. Obviously the US legislators use > a different definition of spam/junk e-mail to those of us in the real > world. Not really. The law that is referred to hasn't been passed, so it isn't a law. At least not yet. Also, the law, if passed, prohibits forging addresses and requires that the spam has a *WORKING* opt- out mechanism. All the ones I've seen have neither. Their comment about being in compliance with the law are as specious as those made by many anti-spam people who threaten to charge spammers service fees. In the end, neither has a firm connection to reality. > There is also another law being proposed by the EU which would make > the local caching of Web pages by ISP's effectively illegal (something > related to copyright IIRC). *sigh* We may need to have a "stupid politician" contest. Of course, if we notify the honorees, they might consider it a compliment. However, based on my limited knowledge of copyright laws, I would think that if the material provider approved caching of their material, it would become a "fair use". As I recall, there is a HTML flag that indicates whether a page may be cached. So the furor may be a "non-issue". The only big issue here is that copyright laws are often enforceable by international treaty.... so some poor net-admin on the other side of the planet could be hassled for no good reason. > > > Net users are required to register with national opt-out lists if they > > > do not wish to receive junk email. If it worked, I'd sign up in a heartbeat. Mike ====================================================================== Mike Avery MAvery@mail.otherwhen.com (409)-842-2942 (work) ICQ: 16241692 * Spam is for lusers who can't get business any other way * A Randomly Selected Thought For The Day: Karaoke is a Japanese word meaning "tone deaf". To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message