The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 35 government partners from more than 20 countries are targeting illegal spammers who take remote control of unwitting users' computers to serve as spam transmission zombies. By hijacking home and business computers, spam can be routed through them, thereby hiding the true source of the spam and making the enforcement of antispam laws more difficult.
Make Love Not Spam, regardless of it's poorly-punctuated name, is an antispam effort lead by Lycos Europe. Users who download the screensaver allow their unused processor time to go toward flooding the websites advertised in spam e-mail. Sounds good, but there are two catches, and they are both significant. First, what is flooding?
Two LA spammers were ordered to pay $2 million and received various business restrictions in Santa Clara County Superior Court, this past Friday. This is the largest judgment won by government prosecutors against senders of unsolicited e-mail. The spammers are also the object of a Federal Trade Commission suit; however, both legal cases are civil suits, so there's not much chance that the spammers will see the inside of a jail cell anytime soon.