BILL S-235 introduced by the Honourable Senator Goldstein was given first reading May 07, 2008.

the text of the bill is available here

Posted on behalf of: Neil Schwartzman, Executive Director CAUCE

A friend of mine just wrote to me about a new service called NotchUp.com so I looked them up on DomainTools.

Now, why would a company obfuscate their domain registration? I can’t think of a good reason why. That isn’t to say that NotchUp.com is not a fine upstanding company, I don’t know, but having correct and open information in your domain registration means you are taking responsibility for your online conduct.

Unemployed folks, and others looking to change jobs should be very careful when joining a job recruitment site; they can be real hornet's nest. For one, job applicants are giving out a tremendous amount of personal data that can be misused to the ends of personal identity theft. As well, many of them are not worth the bother, or can be out-and-out malicious.

Another friend was the victim of a drive-by virus-infected when someone ostensibly reached out to him about a VP-level job, one for which he was suitable (he's a sales guy, so it might not have been entirely targeted).

The CAUCE advice?

• Stick with the biggies - to name a few; Linkedin, Monster, Workopolis, Craigslist
• Check out new companies and new job sites from the comfort of your own browser!
• Run the domain through DomainTools
• Get yourself a copy of the great tool from McAfee Site Advisor, a plug-in that works for both Internet Explorer and Firefox, and check out their reviews.
• Use the Alexa Firefox plug-in to check out if the site has a reasonable amount of traffic.
• Use your favourite search engine on the name and the domain name of any potential job site or employer. Then search again and add the qualifier + spam. Or + scam
• Never respond to Unsolicited email
• If the job seems too good to be true, (especially if you are desperate!), stay away!

For example, LinkedIn currently has many 'work at home' jobs touted, money-laundering for 419 and phish-stolen money. Getting involved in those schemes helps sustain spamming, and you can be arrested. (LinkedIn are doing a fine job of deleting these as fast as they come in, but the bad guys slip through, nevertheless)

Good luck with your job search, don’t let the bad guys swindle you!

The scuttlebutt around Ottawa these days is the Harper government is seriously considering tabling a spam law in the House of Commons possibly before the summer break. More on this as it develops!

John Levine is quoted in this recient article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, discussing recient spikes in fake drug spam being sent from hijacked computers.  

Read the full story here: Two major spam cases end up in Seattle.

I've always maintained that spam does not make one great, but Al Ralsky kept a relatively high profile for long enough that his unwelcome intrusions into our inboxes – and our friends' inboxes, and our parents' inboxes, and our children's inboxes – will be long remembered.

Today the entire email industry is cheering the arrest and indictment of Ralsky and his gang, which was reported in the Detroit Free Press this morning. It’s obviously good news for anti-spammers, who have been clamoring for prosecutions of illegal spamming activity for more than a decade. But it’s also wonderful news for the email marketing industry, which has been trying to show the world that they aren’t spammers. Now, the marketers can point to Ralsky’s illegal activities and state with one voice: “we do not do these awful things.”

But I think the marketers have to ask themselves: is there anything Ralsky was doing which isn’t illegal per se, but might still be considered spam-like in the eyes of your subscribers? Perhaps a subject line which is only slightly misleading – not enough to violate CAN-SPAM, but enough to violate the trust your subscribers have in your brand. Perhaps treating opt-in as a license to blast them over and over, until your message falls on deaf ears. If a sender acts like a spammer, even if they aren’t bad enough to get arrested, how different are they from Al Ralsky and his ilk?

And likewise, I think the anti-spammers have to consider whether following “big name” spammers is worth the effort. It seems certain that for every high-profile blowhard like Ralsky, there’s another dozen who are just as prolific – but, like most other criminals, never seek attention.

This is a great triumph for all who want to preserve email as a viable communications medium. We congratulate the United States Department of Justice and the FBI for their impressive work, and the Spamhaus Project for keeping a close eye on Ralsky’s activities for so long. But this is not the end of spam; far from it.

This article was also published by Return Path.