Just because you round up with a few government officials to talk about fighting spam doesn’t mean you’re going to get satisfaction. Just ask the executives and academics who rounded up with a Federal Trade Commission-sponsored panel November 10 only to be told the spammers are already well enough ahead of those e-mail service providers who think a system to verify e-mail senders will choke off the spam.
“We’ll be lucky,” Pavni Diwanji, chairman of e-mail security provider MailFrontier, lamented to reporters after the panel conference, “if we solve 50 percent of the problem.”
Which didn’t mean the panel participants were ready to abandon the idea entirely, since authentication is considered a significant building block toward other spam solutions. But zombies – computers infected remotely by spammers, whose victims are often unaware of the takeovers and whose products look as though they come from legitimate and even widely known sources – now account for a majority of spam.
On the other hand, the newest member of the FTC is urging panelists not to surrender all hope.
“Several authentication systems have been developed and show promise—including both both IP-based and signature-based approaches,” said FTC commissioner Jon Liebowitz. “I am pleased to see that market forces appear to be working. In determining and deploying some type of authentication system, or combination of systems, we need to ensure balanceand flexibility, to accommodate various types of users.”
Liebowitz said authentication systems need to protect privacy, anonymity, and free expression of non-commercial e-mailers, including political dissidents and domestic abuse victims, though he did not elaborate on why he singled out those two classifications. Above all, he continued, it was well past time for American spam fighting interests in and out of government to understand that spam is a world, not just a country’s problem, and will probably require a world solution.
“We should be mindful of international implications, standards, and compatibility issues,” he said.
