Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

United States Sentencing Commission gets busy… The United States Sentencing Commission (USSC) — the body tasked with refining the sentencing portions of new legislation — met last month to review public comment on how to enforce the CAN-SPAM Act. The initial suggestion was to use the guidelines for fraud sentencing as a model for CAN-SPAM.…

Postini wins U.S. patent for email filtering Managed email security company Postini has been granted a U.S. patent for email filtering technology . According to the patent, any system which intercepts mail, filtering viruses and spam messages from the inbox and then sends what’s left to the intended recipient – methodology in widespread use across…

AOL raffles spammer’s Porsche Taking a new angle on hitting spammers where it hurts, AOL is offering its members the opportunity to win a luxury car seized as part of a court settlement against a spammer. The US$47,000 Boxster S belonged to an unnamed spammer, who was one of a group sued by the company…

CheckVir starts certification program At the start of this year, CheckVir became the latest independent organisation to offer certification for anti-virus products, when the CheckVir Anti-Virus Testing project became the CheckVir Anti-Virus Certification program. Like a number of other testing bodies, CheckVir offers two levels of certification: Standard and Advanced. The Standard certification is awarded…

Man. Loves. His. Spam. No really. Some choose Yoga, others choose a glass of wine and a soak in a hot bath, and some, apparently, choose reading spam as their preferred method of unwinding from the stresses of the working day. It was with some disbelief that VB read, in the Wall Street Journal (http://www.wsj.com/),…

Anti-spam code of conduct proves successful Australia’s Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman reports that a code of conduct aimed at preventing SMS spam has been highly effective – only 32 complaints about SMS spam have been filed over a three-month period. The anti-spam code, put together by the Australian Communications Industry Forum, is enforced by the Australian…

AOL and EarthLink refile suits against spammers US Internet service providers AOL and EarthLink have each refiled lawsuits against prolific spammers. A Florida man and married couple are accused by AOL of conspiring with two Americans based in Thailand to route mortgage scam solicitations to AOL customers and of developing a software program designed to…

UK watchdog fines US company for sending spam A UK watchdog has fined a US company for sending spam. The fine was imposed by the UK’s regulatory body for the premium rate telecommunications industry, the ICSTIS (Independent Committee for the Supervision of Standards of Telephone Information Services) because the spam messages sent by BW Telecom…

After re-testing, Alwil’s AVAST! product gains a VB 100% award. The results were reviewed for two products in the Windows NT comparative review (VB February 2004, p.12), with the following outcome: Alwil AVAST! After consultation with the developers a method was discovered by which the on-access function of AVAST! could be tested fully. The results…

China blacklists offending IP addresses The Internet Society of China’s Anti-Spam Coordination Team (ASCT) has published a blacklist of mail servers sending spam. The list includes 626 IP addresses of mail servers sending spam inside and outside China: 62 in mainland China, 65 in Taiwan, 6 in Hong Kong and 493 outside China. If the…