Penguinshit's Journal: More on Spam, and efforts to stop it

This is a link to a Reuters story I found on Yahoo regarding a bill going through the Senate Judiciary Committee. I think this represents the start to a fair and balanced method for combating spam while still allowing some sort of responsible commercial email.

Basically what it seems to do is to attack the four methods by which the "penis enlarger" crowd propagate their annoying garbage:

1. Hiding/obfuscation of return email addresses.
2. Sending through SMTP relays
3. Harvesting email addresses from websites, etc.
4. Sending out messages to millions of "dictionary attack" style addresses.

I believe that these "Big Four" will go a long way towards raising the level of accountability of spammers. These methods employed by spammers are what drives people the most nuts - it's like pulling teeth to track down the sender of each and every message. A few who have been tracked down and exposed have been forced to quit due to complaints/threats/etc. If a spammer were no longer able to hide behind layers of deceipt, I'm certain said spammer would think long and hard about how many people he/she were about to anger.

The Internet was never about "anonymity". It does allow use of proxy-by-avatar which is a great communication tool. But true anonymity is too tempting to control the darker side of human nature which lurks in us all.