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War on spam gains 2 allies<br />
MICROSOFT, SYMANTEC GO TO WASHINGTON TO PUSH NEW PRODUCTS<br />
By Caron Carlson IN WASHINGTON<br />
The anti-spam crusade is<br />
gaining momentum as<br />
industry players, including<br />
Microsoft Corp. and<br />
Symantec Corp., counter<br />
pending bills on Capitol Hill<br />
with legislative proposals of<br />
their own.<br />
To date, proposed ideas<br />
have covered a wide range<br />
of measures, from jail time<br />
for repeat spammers to a tiny<br />
charge on every piece of spam<br />
sent. The Senate is slated to<br />
sort through all the options<br />
and vote on one proposal<br />
before summer’s end.<br />
Microsoft, of Redmond,<br />
Wash., got into the act last<br />
week when company Chairman<br />
and Chief Software Architect<br />
Bill Gates called for Congress<br />
to create incentives for<br />
e-mail marketers to adopt best<br />
practices and become certified<br />
trusted senders. As part of<br />
the proposal, the Federal Trade<br />
Commission would provide<br />
a safe harbor for companies<br />
that join an FTC-approved selfregulating<br />
group. Legislation<br />
would require marketers to<br />
properly label their e-mail and<br />
would give ISPs the right to<br />
take spammers to court.<br />
Symantec suggested to lawmakers<br />
last week that legislation<br />
should focus on false<br />
labeling and require a physical<br />
address in commercial bulk<br />
e-mail. The Cupertino, Calif.,<br />
company, whose brand and<br />
products have been fraudulently<br />
peddled by e-mail, also<br />
asked Congress to give the<br />
FTC more resources to prosecute<br />
electronic fraud.<br />
For America Online Inc.,<br />
spam is the most important<br />
issue today, Ted Leonsis, AOL<br />
vice chairman, told the Sen-<br />
ate Commerce Committee<br />
last week. “There is raw anger<br />
that spam generates,” Leonsis<br />
said, adding that the government<br />
needs<br />
stronger tools to<br />
track down the<br />
most fraudulent<br />
offenders.<br />
Others maintain,<br />
however, that<br />
anger stems not<br />
only from fraudulent<br />
e-mail but<br />
also from the<br />
growing volume<br />
of unsolicited<br />
messages, to which ISPs contribute.<br />
Charging that AOL,<br />
of New York, operates its<br />
“own personal spam com-<br />
Schumer’s bill would give<br />
repeat spammers jail time.<br />
pany,” Ronald Scelson,<br />
owner of Scelson Online<br />
Marketing Inc., in Slidell,<br />
La., told lawmakers that<br />
some ISPs are<br />
filtering out<br />
legal messages<br />
if they receive<br />
one complaint,<br />
driving bulk<br />
e-mailers to<br />
forge addresses.<br />
Calling himself<br />
“the most<br />
hated person” at<br />
the hearing,<br />
Scelson said he<br />
sends as many as 180 million<br />
e-mail messages every day<br />
and that it takes him less<br />
than 24 hours to thwart an<br />
NEWS&ANALYSIS<br />
ISP’s spam filters.<br />
The industry approaches,<br />
which urge Congress to preempt<br />
state anti-spam laws, are<br />
largely consistent with the<br />
longest-standing anti-spam<br />
bill, the CAN-SPAM initiative<br />
sponsored by Sens. Conrad<br />
Burns, R-Mont., and Ron<br />
Wyden, D-Ore. CAN-SPAM<br />
would ban the use of false or<br />
deceptive headers or subject<br />
lines, require senders to provide<br />
users with an opt-out feature,<br />
and prohibit private<br />
rights of action.<br />
Consumer groups, and<br />
many state attorneys general,<br />
are calling on Congress<br />
to take a tougher approach.<br />
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.,<br />
is sponsoring a bill that would<br />
establish jail time as a penalty<br />
for serious, repeat spammers<br />
and create a national<br />
“Do not spam” list. Sen. Mark<br />
Dayton, D-Minn., last week<br />
suggested that a small tax on<br />
e-mail would deter spam. ´<br />
Smarter storage on horizon?<br />
By Evan Koblentz<br />
For several years, users have clamored<br />
for more management features to be added<br />
to existing hardware. Now, a number of<br />
vendors are suggesting it’s better to build<br />
smarter hardware in the first place.<br />
In fact, technologies are under development,<br />
according to industry experts, that improve<br />
the way low-end RAID controllers communicate<br />
with drive clusters and that enable highend<br />
array intelligence to reside as objects in<br />
central servers.<br />
“The future of the storage industry looks<br />
just like the future of the rest of computing,”<br />
said John Webster, an analyst at Data<br />
Mobility Group Inc., in Nashua, N.H. “People<br />
build functions, express it in hardware or software,<br />
and [eventually] express it in more efficient<br />
ways of doing things.”<br />
On the low-end storage front, users in the<br />
future will be able to consolidate storage,<br />
move drives among controller units, replace<br />
failed parts and upgrade to new features—all<br />
among different vendors and without having to<br />
use backup data sets or remap every drive and<br />
volume, said Wayne Rickard, chairman of the<br />
Storage Networking Industry Association’s Technical<br />
Council and vice president of advanced<br />
technology at Seagate Technology LLC.<br />
Such interoperability will be facilitated by the<br />
Disk Data Format Provisional Working Group<br />
proposed this month by Adaptec Inc., Dell Computer<br />
Corp. and LSI Logic Corp., Rickard<br />
said. Creating the standards could take two years,<br />
said Rickard, in Scotts Valley, Calif.<br />
In high-end storage, object-based storage is<br />
also on its way to becoming a context-aware,<br />
native technology. For evidence, users can look<br />
to hardware such as EMC Corp.’s Centera and<br />
software such as IBM’s StorageTank.<br />
Instead of mapping logical units, numbers<br />
and zones directly between servers and<br />
storage, “with object-based storage, the devices<br />
are doing all this themselves,” said Mike<br />
Mesnier, co-chair of SNIA’s object storage<br />
devices working group and storage architect<br />
at Intel Corp.<br />
By this fall, the working group will complete<br />
its security and data sharing documents,<br />
said Mesnier, in Pittsburgh. ´<br />
MAY 26, 2003 n eWEEK 15