? the Platypus {aka David Formosa} said:
The best soultion given so far is Cause's suggestion of modifying the fax law so that we can sue the spammers.
Thus giving gubmints the toe in the door they are so desperately looking for to regulate/license/control the online world. The first thing you would see after passing such a law (if indeed the original legislation itself didn't contain the provision) would be a requirement for identification of all accounts and account holders. Anonymous email and anonymous remailers would be the first victims. Then there would be a license fee introduced to cover the costs of such a system (internet drivers license?), followed by calls for censorship which would now have much greater pseudo legitimacy. This would be only the crest of a very big wave. Spam is conveniently dealt with using procmail and other filtering tools. Admins generally will deal swiftly with denial of service attacks. I'm having a problem with leaves from the neighbours trees blowing onto my front lawn. I think the government should DO SOMETHING.