Story: Choking on spam

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Implementing new protocols to stop the flow of spam will only hurt more. It'll require public records which black hat hackers and spammers can have a field day with. It'll only increase the administrative load on the Internet. It won't stop zombied PC's. It'll cost companies a lot to make it somewhat working and guess who will pay for that 'extra service' in the end. Etc, etc.

The irony being that solid anti-spam, anti-spim, anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-phising, anti-ID-theft and what not 2 to 4 figure solutions already exist today but PR brainwashed and commercially motivated people would rather see 6 figures or more solutions that can also be billed for per customer.

Great, that's exactly the kind of environment spammers and the like can exploit to the fullest. No-one feels responsible. There's no low-cost combined effort. And the only thing that really gets attention is: how much can I charge for that?

If ISP's would be required to install an anti-spam, etc solution of their choice as a standard free service for all of their customers then things would dramaticly change for the better in no time. Thing is that mainstream ISP's charge by the byte. So filtering out spam would hurt their business model. On the other hand. The first batch of mainstream ISP's that do filter out spam etc etc will most likely see an increase in the number of customers they have.

Nevertheless. Stopping spam as close to the source as possible is key to putting a stop on it. Also because stopping spam as close to the source as possible greatly increases the chance that there's some form of legal contract between the spam source and the ISP detecting that source.

Another thing that will be key to stopping spam will be resorting to simple, yet effective by strength in numbers, and cheap solutions. Symptom fighting by means of complex and expensive new technology will only result in a low adoption rate that'll most likely be bypassed within months.

Today, and there are a bunch of people out there who'll have a hard time accepting this, the most promising weapon of defence against spam etc etc that's cost efficient, simple in method yet great in strength and fast enough to solve new emerging problems in time would be the wide scale adoption of Open Source solutions.

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