AFAIK, the lion's share of spam and other nuisance doesn't come from powerful servers on the crossroads of the Web. Nor it comes from the machines legally belonging to those who earn on spam. It comes from infected MS Windows-operated computers. A year ago I would say that there were two possibilities - either MS would finally develop a good OS, maybe even a brilliant one in terms of architecture, or Linux distros and Macs would gradually conquer the desktop. Today, as we see that Vista is going to be the same old crap in a new fancy box, there is only the second possibility left. Should the world's millions of desktop users migrate to more secure, and/or various however compatible operating systems [=Unix], the problem of spam would vanish or at least be no more such a scourge as it is now.
Another point is - what should be considered spam? Advertisement that I have not requested to see, which however shows up and consumes my traffic? Man, look around - the net is SWARMING with advertisement, not all of which is as compact (in terms of traffic) and inobtrusive as Google Adwords. Is it spam or not? And what about the regular printed, audio, TV etc ads - are those spam? Many questions, few clear answers...

[ reply ]

Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/columns/404/33674#33674