House taunts Senate with anti-spyware bill

The US House of Representatives has passed an anti-spyware bill, but the measure must be passed by the Senate before it becomes law. The Senate does not currently have anti-spyware legislation in front of it. The bill passed by a voice vote in the House this week is a less radical law than some of the alternative proposals …

[Del Merritt]

The bill is H.R. 1525

Just so the rest of us on this side of the pond can pester our sen-eh-tahs accordingly.

[Morely Dotes]

Possible correction

"A competing bill which recently received the endorsement of the House Energy and Commerce Committee was more stringent. It required the distributors of programs to notify users and obtain their consent before a piece of software was downloaded. The software industry opposed that element of the proposed bill."

I believe that you will find that publishers of spyware were the opponents of the more-stringent bill. the *legitimate* software industry has always required user consent before installing packages. Even Microsoft requires user consent. It is adware/spyware pushers like 180solutions who want to be able to infect your computer without your consent.

[amanfromMars]

Phishers of men.

"The bill creates a penalty of up to five years in jail for people using spyware to commit fraud.

Spyware is a collective term for software that gathers information about computer users. "

Is that not what Microsoft Windows does for the NSA?

[Remy Redert]

Re: Phishers of men.

Ofcourse not, Windows would never gather information about computer users for the NSA, how DARE you consider that?

They only gather intelligence, and only that which is directly relevant to national security, they wouldn't steep so long as to gather information on someone, it's intelligence.

Ofcourse when other people do it, it's gathering information, bad them.

[Tom]

About as effective as SPAM legislation

This will most likely do NO good. We tried to get something like this for SPAM. We got a "CAN SPAM" act. Has SPAM stopped, no, it increased. Not worth the bother.

We get junk Faxes as well, and they outlawed that too. Doesn't help!

Our legislators don't have the (insert expletive here) to get tough!

[Steven]

My thoughts exactly.

This bill will likely be as affective as t-ts on a bull. What they should enact is a bill that punishes the government agengies that allow personal information to get out to the public via external hard drives, laptops, flash drives and such. The government has done such a fine job protecting us so far from ID theft.