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Senator Charles E. Schumer announced the release of a new study (The Dark Side of E-Commerce: The EMail Spam Epidemic) indicating that “New York City residents receive 8.25 million junk emails a day and spend 4.2 million hours a year eliminating spam messages.” This announcement also stated the Senator plans to introduce new legislation to …
This new report from the FTC, False Claims in Spam (16 page pdf), states that is the first extensive review of deceptive and unfair practices that appear in unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE). The study analyzed 1,000 spam e-mails drawn from a pool of 11,000 such messages, and concluded that at least one form of deception …
The Department of Homeland Security had the daunting task of implementing an e-mail system that integrates 22 separate agencies. According to Federal Computer Week, the system will be launched this weekend.
The New York Times published an extensive article on the challenges posed by the adroit and aggressive junk e-mail industry that has to date overcome all challenges preventing the delivery of their unwelcome messages to our home and work e-mail accounts.
According to this article in PC World, “the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service is currently considering a regulation that would let it ignore any public comments on its rule-making process sent to it through Web-based forms.” The agency also intends to ignore comments sent using form letters and postcards that result from lobbying/advocacy efforts. …
Rep. Henry Waxman, Ranking Member, House Committee on Government Reform, Minority Office, sent a letter to the Committee on Energy and Commerce requesting an investigation into accusations that over the course of two years, Philip Morris destroyed e-mail relevant to the DOJ case filed against the company in 1999, alleging deceptive practices. See also this …
Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) introduced the CAN-SPAM bill on April 9 (S. 877), “to regulate interstate commerce by imposing limitations and penalties on the transmission of unsolicited commercial electronic mail via the Internet.” See the Burns press release here. The two Senators also co-sponsored the CAN-SPAM Act of 2001 (S. …
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) announced on April 7 that all Enron e-mails posted on the Commission’s website would be removed temporarily (until April 24). The e-mails are part of a FERC database comprising over 85,000 Enron related documents and over 150,000 document images. This action was in response to Enron’s petition to the …
On April 2, the California Supreme Court heard oral argument in the appeal of Intel v Hamidi. Hamidi is a former Intel employee who after his termination, on six separate occasions, used the company’s internal e-mail address listing to send messages to 30,000 employees. See also these related articles: Intel e-mail issue divides court and …
The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) published a new report, Why Am I Getting All This Spam? (16 pages in PDF), which documents the volume of spam received over the course of six months by hundreds of accounts created specifically to research this issue. Although the report offers no absolute methods for beating spam, …
Discovery is hampered in an investigation into cost over-runs and project mismanagement on Boston’s Big Dig project, “the largest, most complex and technologically challenging highway project in Amerian history.” Apparently project managers instituted a policy of deleting all project related e-mail messages after thirty days, as reported during a Massachusetts State House Hearing.
A new organization, the Internet Research Task Force, comprised of 13 Research Groups, one of whose goal is to fight spam, launched their website last week. The Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG) has an email list at [email protected].
