The National Communications Commission drafted a bill that would authorize those who receive Internet spam to claim damages from spammers to the tune of NT$500 or NT$2,000 for each e-mail.
The commission will submit the draft bill to the Executive Yuan next month for approval, officials said, adding that they hoped the legislature would help conserve resources and protect consumer rights without compromising freedom of commercial speech.
Statistics from the Taiwan Internet Association showed that the number of Internet users in Taiwan surpassed 10 million as of December. Every day, each user receives an average of 29 spam e-mails, the association said.
Based on a mailing cost of NT$0.02 per e-mail, sending this volume of junk e-mail costs some NT$200 million (US$5.9 million) a year, the council said.
The draft statute prohibits “dictionary-based” spamming, which means sending unsolicited e-mails to addresses that were automatically generated in alphabetical order.
The draft bill also bans testing and collecting genuine e-mail addresses through “dictionary attacks” on grounds that this heavily consumes e-mail service resources.
However, to protect the freedom of commercial speech and the freedom to conduct business, the draft bill allows businesses to send unsolicited advertisements once to a new e-mail address on condition that the e-mails be discontinued if the recipient does not wish to continue to receive them.
The draft also stipulates that the sender must offer a free link through which the recipient could accept or reject the advertising.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching