CAUCE board member Ray Everett Church writes at internetnews.com:
According to the majority of the testimony at this month's "Spam Summit," held by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the state of the fight against spam is pretty much the same as it has been for the last several years.
The two days of presentations can largely be boiled down to the following bullets:
- Spam volumes continue to increase, being driven by the growth of "botnets" — networks of hijacked computers run by hackers and rented out to spammers.
- Spam is one of many high-tech tools being used by organized crime, international terrorist organizations, and can be expected to play a major role in future conflicts between nations.
- Anti-spam technologies are improving, but deployment of sophisticated technologies such as cryptographic-based email authentication is sorely lacking.
Oh, and the spam wars are a lot less exciting than they used to be. Case in point: unlike last time, there were no fist-fights at this year's shindig. …
