Comments on: Alliance turns up heat on spam

A group of ISPs releases recommendations for stopping junk e-mail. Among their advice: Kill the "zombies."

[KDoggMDF]

Spam will die!

SPAM needs to die. Every day, no matter what I do, there is always new spam arriving at my inbox and I hate it!

Something gotta be done

I'm getting 20-50 spams per day and seeing spam & virus mails
alledgedly sent by me but impossible as they're windoze worms
and I run Mac. It is way out of hand. The ISP's and the
government need to get on this problem and get some real
results. Lets start jailing spammers!

[ajbright]

Why is this our problem?

It's all very well blaming end users for using zombie PC's, but how is this our problem, aside from the fact it means we have unwanted spyware and trojans on our machines?

First they sell us flawed operating systems, internet browsing software and anti-virus tools, then they tell us that if we don't fix the problems they've made possible because of this flawed software, they'll switch us off from the net.

So where is the one click fix for us to download and protect our machines from this spyware?

Does this now make them liable if we are infected?

If companies like Microsoft and AOL were serious about this problem, especially spam, they could have done something about this a very long time ago.

Unfortunately greed is getting in the way of the solution.

On the one hand you have ISPs that don't want to lose their corporate customer base, particularly the guys responsible for spam, as these are the very people they make their money from.

On the other, you have each Internet software provider wanting to be the one that owns the standard that will help irradicate spam.

They know how to do it, using techniques such as intelligent verification, i.e. requiring that each new email address received is verified via a code that could only be translated by something as flexible as a person - similar to the verification process they use to prevent spammers from automatically opening up thousands of hotmail, yahoo, aol, etc email accounts.

Another is to require that all email senders receive and translate a simple calculation on their machines before an email server will accept their message. For someone that is only sending normal email, this would result in virtually negligable use of their processor for a fraction of a second.

For someone sending millions of emails a minute/hour or whatever, this would tie up their PC's with these calculations rendering them useless - effectively causing a denial of service attack on themselves.

These are just simple solutions from someone who has little or no software engineering expertise.

As I said, this problem is not ours in the making, and the solution, or at least the means to a solution should be placed squarely in the laps of these companies that want to deny our access because it's spoiling their profits.

When Microsoft start distributing free antispyware and antivirus software, professional enough that it doesn't need weekly updates - when they volunteer to remove the problem items from our machines at their time and expense, then they can start talking about restricting access to the net. BTW do you really think that Norton, CA, etc update their own software weekly - can anyone explain how they are able to respond with antivirus updates within minutes of a new virus being released? If they were to sell the software they used, they would be out of business, because it would not require any sort of update for years at a time.