National spam news

IT Backbones reports that there were 125 Million Pharmaceutical Spam Emails Sent Using Botnets. This may be a record, and as such is very troubling. Raise your hand if you didn't get one. I probably got 50 to 100 myself.

Cisco claims to have a solution to cell phone text messaging spam. The article "Cisco Promotes SMS Spam and Fraud Prevention Solution", in Telecommunications Industry News was fairly thin on details. Let's hope they're on to something.

Technology Evangelist has a couple of good articles on blog comment spam: How to Combat Blog Comment Spam and Our Comment Spam Prevention Keyword List.

Florida Senator Gwen Margolis is sponsoring a bill that would block the public from seeing government email addresses, nominally in an attempt to protect government workers from spam. However, this would violate the Florida constitution which protects access to public records. To quote Barbara Peterson, president of the not-for-profit First Amendment Foundation: "She wants to change the constitution to prevent spam?". Full article at the Tallahassee Democrat: Government e-mail: How private? Hey, here's an idea: why not outlaw spamming in Florida and protect the rest of us too?