July 6, 2004 3:31 AM PDT

Spammers can be beaten in 2 years, regulators say

Act now, antispam advocates urge, before in-boxes full of porn and Viagra ads drive millions from the Internet.

The story "Spammers can be beaten in 2 years, regulators say" published July 6, 2004 at 3:31 AM is no longer available on CNET News.

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Just dont get Big Brother started
International cooperation is all well in theory. The problem is that governments, and government regulators are going international. The last thing we want is for governments to be able to enforce anti spam laws accross borders, that will be the start of a 1984 scenario.

Regulators all over the world want to regulate the internet, so they can excersise their power over it.
Personally I would much rather have the nuicance of spam than a government body having access to my mailbox, directly or indirectly by law.

One of the bigges chalenges in our time will be to keep the Internet free from government regulation, we are now seeing the first signs of this battle.

With the enormous amount of smart brainpower now beeing thrown at solving the spam problem, it will be solved without government intervention.

Hans J. Lysglimt
runbox.com
Posted by lysglimt (10 comments )
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sure why not
"we may see millions of people abandoning the Net entirely, out of frustration and disgust"
If it's the million of tech-stupid fools who buy viagra online and send thier bank info to the "Presidient of Zimbabwe" then fine, go. Leave the net to the hard core geeks.
Posted by (1 comment )
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ISP blocking will not stop 80% of the current spam--drones are the problem
It's as if these regulators have been asleep for the last year and a half...

Last month, a research report was released showing that 80% of spam originates from people's personal computers, infected by drone spam-bots that have their own locally-running mail servers.

Open-relaying is no longer the biggest source of spam--always-on ADSL and Cable connections are.

*This* is the real problem. It's a problem that is not addressed by any of the anti-spam measures that I've seen discussed so far (not "sender authentication", not "open-relay blocking")

The question is: How do we shut down potential spam-bots whose owners don't even know they exist?

Thoughts?
.../j
Posted by jcharlesworth (1 comment )
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Post true sender address
All we have to do is to use technology to force spammers to use their true e-mail addresses. This will allow the public to have their mail servers and/or their mail clients reject future mail from the same sender.
Posted by (1 comment )
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