I agree with Mike, and am somewhat gloomy on ever legally shutting down spammers.
We may accomplish this in the U.S., but offshore beckons and they will set up there.
We face what the military calls "bullets vs armor". In this game usually bullets win. I think we will be battling them forever, them killing our cpu cycles grinding on useless electronic garbage. I think as a whole we have to come up with some form of "aggressive armor" that identifies spammers and makes it costly for them to continue.
We can't take them out but we can make it painful.
I think this view misses a critical point. In a "bullets vs armor" the laws of physics are constant. It is a siege. That is why bullets usually win.
The Internet, in contrast, is an entirely artificial environment where we can essentially "change the laws of physics". With a few well placed adjustments we can leverage the computing power of the Internet against it's abuse and make it extremely difficult for spammers to exist.
It's not a trivial task, but it is possible, and as the threat posed by spammers and other malware generators is perceived more strongly - so will the need for change be felt until the adjustments needed are performed.
The race is really against time and politics. Can we "fix" the Internet before it is destroyed by regulation and biases imposed by "big business"? I hope so.
_M
Pete McNeil (Madscientist) President, MicroNeil Research Corporation Chief SortMonster, www.SortMonster.com
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