World Spam News

Newslab of Siberia reports that Spam is now prohibited in Kyrgyzstan.

Thanhniem News of Viet Nam reports that cell phone spam is now banned by the Vietnamese government. Actually, it's a bit weaker than that — cellphone users are given the option to refuse a message, and if they do, the advertiser must not send them more spam for at least five days. Of course, the spammers will simply create a number of shell companies and have the spam come from a different one each day. Or each hour.

TechDirt reports that VOIP has made international calling cheap enough that phone spammers are using internation calls to circumvent the do-not-call list.

Infotech reports that the National Telecommunications Commission has created a team to deal with SMS spam.

WhatPC magazine reports that British Telecom is taking proactive steps to fight spam. This includes probing the mail systems of other sites to check their security. Not surprisingly, the article goes on to say that over 50 percent of spam comes from about 20 ISPs, and that one expert estimates that 80 percent of spam comes from compromised computers.

I'm starting to notice a pattern here. It seems that everybody is doing something to stop spam except the U.S..