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Ah, sarcasm. Tasty.

On a serious note, though, this does give teeth to the concept of punishing phishers. Before, they could do whatever they wanted and pretty much get away with it; now, all a citizen of California has to do is forward phish mails to someone in the Attorney General's office (I assume), and if the e-mail can be traced to any individual or company with ties in California, their ass is grass.
 
It'll take some time, but eventually legislation will be widespread and fine-tuned to remove the kind of spam that is being sent these days. However, spam will migrate to another form, and we'll go after it there. And so on. Like loopholes in tax law, you keep closing them and others keeping appearing. I'm more optimistic than pessimistic, since technology will continue to provide new ways to help privacy just as it provides new ways to invade it.
 
I was wondering... how is this signifigantly going to reduce phishing aimed at people living in CA? I mean, i'm sure there are plenty of phishers who DON'T live in CA who could easily target Californians. If they don't live in CA how would this law bring any punishment to them? :confused:

Did I miss something?
 
I predict spam will spam itself out of existance-- email is fast becoming a poor communications channel for legitimate companies to use, even if they can get users to read them, spam filters themselves pose big risk of the message never being delivered. The Direct Marketing Association has realized this, and they're actually trying to fight spam now (how hard they're fighting, I don't know, but "fake spam" has overpowered their "junk mail"). So, eventually, pretty much all spam will be poor phishing scams, etc. which simply won't work anymore on people. The technology, and consumer habits, will flush the problem out eventually. Granted new scams will pop up, but I don't think legislation and technological crackdowns will solve the problem. I'm very leery of a private company or government deciding they're going to rewrite the whole email scheme to be secure, since the "flaw" of insecurity is what ultimately keeps the internet free.

Anyone know any stats on how many phishers are actually caught?
 
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