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The agency overseeing the national Do Not Call Registry is considering opening a loophole in the year-old program to allow companies to deliver ”pre-recorded message telemarketing.”

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based privacy watchdog, says the change could result in the 64 million people on the list being bombarded by ”answering-machine spam” and other unwanted voices on voice mail.

”Even those enrolled in the Do Not Call Registry will be affected by the proposed loophole,” the group said.

The Federal Trade Commission said it does not think the change would have any dramatic results.

Solution: drop your land-line. Seriously. Now your unlisted number, that you went ahead and put on the do-not-call list to protect yourself from callers who just selected numbers randomly, will be given to the telemarketers as a number that is fair game for them to call.

This is the worst of all possible amendments. Automated phone spam is already the most abusive, as it usually grabs the phone line and won’t let go until it’s done with its spiel. This wastes your time if you happen to answer the line, and wastes the limited space on your answering machine tape if it picks up. Automated phone spam is the MOST likely to not have a valid way to get off the list. Oh, sure, it may give you an 800 number to call, but that’s likely to reach some convoluted voicemail system that never gets you anywhere. And the concept of “prior contact” has already been stretched to mean “your uncle’s second wife’s stepsister’s kindergarten teacher once bought a widget from us. That establishes a clear prior business relationship between you and us.
And when we say ‘us’, we mean the company that recently phoned the company down the street from our sister company which resides in Malaysia. And of course, we had records of all of this, but we recently put them in the paper shreader and then burned it, for your security’s sake.
“. Not only that, but the upshot will be that telemarketers uniformly go to an automated model – much cheaper for them.

I wonder how long it’ll take marketeers to discover Skype.

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olarPC today announced the availability of a $100 PC called the SolarLite. It is a solid-state computer targeted at organizations that require the efficiency of a maintenance free Internet PC. The SolarLite was also created to offer an ecologically and economically viable method to provide information to billions of disadvantaged people around the world. In addition, it serves as a response to last month’s challenge by Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer for the computer industry to build a $100 PC.