Article-Jet

News last week that Internet service provider Verizon settled its lawsuit against Detroit-based spam king Al Ralsky was of little comfort. Ralsky agreed to pay a fine and stop spamming Verizon customers, but he still has plenty of other targets. And there are still hundreds of other spammers who have never visited a courtroom and are all too eager to fill our inboxes with business propositions from deposed Nigerian dictators. Fortunately, the rise of junk e-mail has fueled a vast anti-spam industry, with ISPs and software makers all competing to solve the Net’s most intractable problem.

According to a recent study conducted by Ferris Research, a market and technology research firm specializing in messaging and collaboration, Spam will cost U.S. businesses over $10 billion in 2003.

Spam not only clogs our servers and in-boxes, but it also costs us hours and hours of lost time in productivity.

Well what happen to the War in Spam, it has been two years and the Federal Trade Commission is over budget, asking the United States Congress for more and still no end in site to all this SPAM. The casualties in the War in SPAM may soon reach some 2500% increase since it started. And there are now Spammer insurgents from neighboring nation states supporting these folks.

While the Federal Trade Commission is busy fighting over definitions of “What is SPAM;” Microsoft and Bill Gates are taking it to the enemy. Today Microsoft announced another case and legal action, which is being taken against a spammer who is in Germany. Microsoft did not announce the name of the company it has filed suit against but it is based in North Rhine-Westphalia.

Spam can be an absolute nightmare, and one that seems to spiral out of control in some of my email accounts. If i’ve been away for a few days and haven’t had a chance to check my emails, I dread having to open up my email client when I get back online in anticipation of hundreds or thousands of spam emails.

The war in Spam is over seas and the insurgents are coming from outside our borders. The Federal Trade Commission says it is impotent in reducing Viagra Ads in your inbox and in the War in Spam, because it has no jurisdiction there. The information highway is littered with roadside bombs and the weapons of anti-SPAM technology are evolving as fast as the Spammers.

Will other spammers take heed? Don’t count on it.

Effectively stopping spam over the long-term requires much more than blocking individual IP addresses and creating rules based on keywords that spammers typically use. The increasing sophistication of spam tools coupled with the increasing number of spammers in the wild has created a hyper-evolution in the variety and volume of spam. The old ways of blocking the bad guys just don’t work anymore.

The Federal Trade Commission has once again admitted to incompetence, this time on their so called and previously purported; “Aggressive Attack on SPAM.” In a recent report to the United States Congress from the FTC’s Consumer Protection Division “Effectiveness and Enforcement of the CAN-SPAM Act,” the FTC gave numerous excuses to their piss poor performance. In fact since the Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003, the FTC has done little more than define what SPAM is, filed 60 lawsuits representing less than one-percent of the SPAM and now further defines the problems with SPAM in a 116 page report probably designed to baffle the Congressmen with Bull Sheet. It worked for the Congress apparently but you and I are still screwed as our inbox is filled with SPAM.

Effectively stopping spam over the long-term requires much more than blocking individual IP addresses and creating rules based on keywords that spammers typically use. The increasing sophistication of spam tools coupled with the increasing number of spammers in the wild has created a hyper-evolution in the variety and volume of spam. The old ways of blocking the bad guys just don’t work anymore.