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A L S O__T O D A Y The 21st Challenge No. 15: Haiku for telemarketers By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau Write a poem -- win a prize - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Getting your parents online: Discuss the challenges and rewards of wiring the family in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Is culture endangered in the digital age? By Chris Bray Ironies abound at a Los Angeles conference pondering the future of museums and libraries (10/29/98) Blame it on Rio By Janelle Brown Netheads love the MP3 digital-music format. Why does the music industry hate it so much? (10/28/98) Prime time for hackers is over By Richard Thieme Why did a consultant hack a US West network to solve a 17th-century math problem? (10/27/98) Of math prodigies and canine cosmonauts By David Hudson "Habitus" mixes a dab of literary theory with a dose of the fantastic (10/26/98) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg Microsoft's staggering profits overshadow the courtroom fireworks of the antitrust trial's first week (10/23/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST FEATURES ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - 21st Log MoveOn campaign moves offline; millennium pundit vs. Wired - - - - - - - - - - S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.

the war for _______your e-mail box Do we need anti-spam laws? Some Net veterans think the unthinkable. BY ANDREW LEONARD | The Usenet newsgroup "news.admin.net-abuse.e-mail" is not a civil place. Blood always runs high on the Net when the topic is spam -- unwanted commercial or bulk e-mail -- and "n.a.n-a.e" is ground zero for pro-spam ardor and anti-spam rage. So when Stanton McCandlish, a program director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, kicked off a new topic in the newsgroup last month to straighten out "confusion" over EFF's stance on spam, it was inevitable he'd come under immediate attack. Still, the response to McCandlish was an eye-opener -- dramatic proof of an attitudinal sea change in how the Net is confronting the blight of spam. What McCandlish posted was a restatement of the classic Net libertarian view on how to deal with problems on the Internet: "Yes, [spam] is a major problem," he wrote. But any "anti-spamming legislation" aimed at stamping out spam should be "very narrowly tailored": "The goal cannot be simply passing more laws. The goal needs to be stopping spam ... at the source with technical solutions, with minor adjustments in the law where necessary." The reaction from the newsgroup veterans was ferocious: They immediately derided McCandlish's statement and criticized EFF as spammer-friendly and naive. Technological solutions have failed to do more than slightly slow down the rise of spam, they charged. Bring in the feds! Any latter-day digital Rip van Winkle who had slept through the last few years of Usenet discourse could be excused for rubbing his eyes in disbelief. If, three years ago, some brave fool had stumbled into such a discussion and demanded that spam be outlawed, enraged Ayn Rand-quoting defenders of Net freedom would have immediately pummeled the poor soul into a bloody pool of ASCII text. But today, the opposite is true -- those who speak against government intervention are set upon and gang-tackled. Remember the old saw that claims a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged? These days, a liberal is a libertarian who has been spammed. Like its predecessor, of course, the joke invites vigorous rebuttal. To many of the anti-spam fighters, the issue at hand is fundamentally libertarian: the protection of private property. Spammers take unfair advantage of other people's mail servers, Internet routers and e-mail boxes for their own profit. Libertarians accept the reality that government is needed to enforce "no trespassing" laws. Junk e-mail, or spam, they argue, is trespassing in cyberspace. There are plenty of dissenters: Direct marketers don't want legislation, nor do numerous factions of anti-spam entrepreneurs on the Net. But the political battle is heating up. As the Internet becomes more mainstream, spam has become the kind of populist issue that makes Washington pay attention. As well it should. The fight against spam isn't of concern just to the loudmouths who argue endlessly in Usenet. How this struggle plays out will go a long way toward defining how the Internet functions as a medium for commerce. Forget about Web banners and pop-up ads -- your e-mail box is the real battleground, the most desirable territory at stake in cyberspace. N E X T_ P A G E .|. Log on, opt-out, opt-in -- the many faces of spam management - - - - - - - - - - - - ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM McCAULEY