Thanks to everyone who wrote back regarding my spam question. Anecdotally, almost everyone who wrote back indicated that they had in fact noticed a rise in porn spam (should we coin a new term: pornspam?) Anyway, one of our graduate students here, Mark Stewart, suggested that perhaps this rise is a last-ditch effort of pornspammers to get their message out before the California court heard this case. See below, excerpted from the January 7 Edupage (for fair use purposes, of course). Others of you suggested that the general rise in spam around the holiday season (thanks to my colleage Dr. Andrew Odlyzko, director of our Digital Technology Center, for his information on this) might be to blame. Still others noted that perhaps there has been a rise in "adult content" since 9/11. Anyway, all of this is anecdotal. Anyone out there in the Internet research world interested in doing something more scientific?? LG --------------------- APPEALS COURT UPHOLDS ANTI-SPAM LAW Commercial e-mails, or spam, must contain valid return addresses and other identifiers that make it easier for consumers to remove themselves from mailing lists, according to a ruling upheld recently by a California appeals court. The defendants in that case, two Palo Alto-based companies, had argued that the previous ruling violated the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution. Because Congress has yet to settle on any comprehensive anti-spam law, consumers must rely on state law. But that could result in a hodgepodge of restrictions on legitimate Web-based businesses. The California ruling requires that commercial e-mailers also mark their messages with an "ADV:" in the subject heading, and a special "ADV:ADLT" for messages linked to adult content. The Supreme Court in October refused to hear a challenge to a Washington state law that stringently regulates spam in that state. (Cnet, 7 January 2002) ---------------- Laura J. Gurak, Ph.D. Associate Professor Rhetoric Department, University of Minnesota 1994 Buford Ave., St. Paul, MN 55108 v 612-624-3773 also--Director, Internet Studies Center -- www.isc.umn.edu Faculty Fellow, Law School gurakL@tc.umn.edu http://www.rhetoric.umn.edu/faculty/LGurak/