Colorado Bill Ritter signed in to law a bill making spam and violation of the CAN-SPAM ACT a crime under state law and allowing recipients to recover damages of up to $10 million if they can identify the sender and prove financial loss. Sending spam to any Colorado resident will become a misdemeanor. The law will go into affect on August 8th and replaces a previous state law regarding commercial email. The bill's sponsors claim that spammers cost U.S. businesses about $70 million annually in lost productivity and IT costs.

Matt Cutts, the head of Google's webspam team, was at at the recent Web 2.0 Expo offering some tips to help users who manage websites fight back against spam.

"Spammers are human," Cutts said. "You have the power to raise their blood pressure. Make them spend more time and effort...If spammer gets frustrated, he's more likely to look for someone easier."

Here are a few of his tips, courtesy of Cnet:

• Use captcha systems to make sure real people, not bots, are commenting on your site. He uses a simple math puzzle-what's 2 + 2?-but he also likes KittenAuth, which makes people identify kitten photos.

One blogger merely requires people to type the word "orange" into a field. "The vast majority of bots will never do that," Cutts said.

• Reconfigure software settings after you've installed it. A little modification of various settings will throw bots off the scent. "If you can off the beaten path, away from default software installations, you'll save yourself a ton of grief," he said.

• Employ systems that rank people by trust and reputation. For example, eBay shows how long a person has been a member and how satisfied others are with transactions with that person.

For more tips, check out PCMag.

May 3rd will mark spam's 30th anniversary. It was on that day in 1978 that a marketing rep at a computer firm called DEC emailed an invite to every single West Coast user on the Arpanet, the precursor to what we know today as the Internet. Here is the Monthy Python skit that lead to the naming of unsolicited commercial email as spam. It's been all downhill ever since. So who's going to celebrate spam's big day? Me either!

Popular social networking site Reunion.com has been outed as a spammer. According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, the site dupes people into joining by sending an email pretending to be from someone who's looking for them. Once the person signs up, their address book is scraped and the site spams them with the same type of email. Nice, huh? Here's an excerpt of one victim's story:

West L.A. resident Elaine Schmidt experienced Reunion.com's aggressive marketing for herself when she received an e-mail the other day that appeared to be from a longtime acquaintance. It said: "Hi, I looked for you on Reunion.com, the largest people search service - but you weren't there." The e-mail instructed her to click on a link to see who else has been searching for her. Curious to see if her acquaintance had left a message, Schmidt, 44, clicked on the link and found herself at Reunion.com's site, where she was prompted to register so she could see who'd been searching for her.

In Schmidt's case, the e-mail that prompted her to open her address book to the company appeared to come from Vera Eck, a Santa Monica psychotherapist whom Schmidt has known for a while.

"I wasn't searching for her," Eck told me.

Just an hour or so before Schmidt received her e-mail, Eck, 46, said she received a message from what appeared to be the father of one of the kids in her son's Cub Scout pack. Curious to know why he was searching for her, she registered at Reunion.com to see if her acquaintance had left a message.

Eck provided access to her Gmail address book as part of the registration process. And so it goes.

The bottom line is that Reunion.com is employing a despicable marketing practice. If you get an email from them, delete it!

PCWorld is reporting that Chinese hackers appear to be preparing for an attack on CNN scheduled for April 19th. The attack is being spurred by the recent pro-Tibet coverage in the media. A Chinese site called Anti-CNN is protesting what it considers anti-Chinese propaganda and is calling for protests in several countries including Germany, France and the UK. The attack threat however, appears to be unrelated to the Anti-CNN site. The hackers, believed to be members of The Red Hat Alliance, are calling for a DDoS attack against CNN to coincide with the protests. It is not yet known if the group is capable of backing up its attack threats, but security firms and media outlets will be watching closely to find out. It's quite possible one of the many botnets thriving on the net may be used to carry out such an attack. So far, CNN has not had any comment on the threat made against their website.

In case you weren't sure if the amount of junk mail on the net is increasing, a new study from Sophos confirms it. According to the study, 92.3% of all email sent during the first three months of this year was spam. It also found that over 23,000 new spam sites were created during the same time period. That's roughly one every 3 seconds. There's also a new country joining the ranks as one of the top 5 spammers. Turkey has take over the number 3 spot. Russia and the good ol USA are still second and first, respectively. If the Internet is the information superhighway, spammers are the potholes, and like the real ones, they just never go away.

SpamStopsHere, Inc., today launched a blog to inform and educate the public about security and spam issues. Ted Green at SpamStopsHere posted a very interesting blog post "Why is there Spam", When you get a chance do read it. If you've got ideas, suggestions, questions or other ways to control spam please let me know, by leaving a comment here.