Security threats Toolkit

Story: United Nations calls for ISPs to police spammers

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Trying to block spam is pointless. Only going after the source will make a change. There are two targets here: those that transmit the spam and those that pay to have spam sent. Both are traceable, especially the latter because if nothing else, the spam contain contact information for chumps to send money to.

AOL claims to be blocking between 1.5 billion and 2 billion emails a day. So what? No mention of how many of those were real messages that where mistakenly blocked as spam. Nor is there any mention of how many of those let through were really spam. It's all just an ineffectual waste of time to make themselves feel good.

Only going after the sources of spam will make any difference. The real bite is that this problem was one of the foreseeable problems brought up in the early discussions in the early 1990's about the possibility of commercializing the Internet.

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