On Sat, Nov 04, 2006 at 13:26:20 +0800, Ed Greshko <Ed.Greshko@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Now, the fact that much of the spam is coming from compromised systems > should clue people into how much the 300 million folks in the US take > seriously the concept of computer security. (Insert obvious poke at Bill > Gates here.) It's not just that Windows makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot, so a lot of people do. But also that ISPs push the costs of problems caused by their residential users on to other people. It costs too much to help people clean up and if they cut people off until they cleaned things up themselves (or paid for someone to do it for them), they wouldn't have many customers. On the other side we have the Justice Department with priorities that don't match the costs to the country. While once upon a time spam wasn't clearly illegal, almost all of it now is sent using hacked systems which is clearly a crimminal action. (And if we could get spammers back to needing to send mail from their own IP addresses, the problem would be very manageable.) And even though a lot of the activity is partially done outside of the US, the money trail is going to often lead to US conspirators who could be prosecuted.
