Slicing up spam
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 ...agencies, and telecommunications companies will have taken control of one of the last truly free media – perhaps a fate even worse than spam. Some thought this past year would see the end of spam as we know it in the US. The government passed the “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003”, or the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Despite the clever name, the law was widely viewed as toothless. It clarifies a spammer's responsibilities -- they must clearly label their email as advertisement, they must describe how a recipient could arrange to be removed from their mailing list -- but the law never gets around to making spam illegal. And it's not clear yet if such a law could withstand constitutional challenges.

Even if there were a clear and accepted law in the U.S. against unsolicited commercial emails, spam would adapt. According to an ongoing survey by Sophos, an Internet security firm, this country currently leads the world in spam production, with about 54% of spam messages being sent from computers in the US. But most of these operations could very easily be run remotely in countries with no anti-spam laws. Spam operations have to be fairly mobile anyway, moving frequently between service providers, since ISPs will often refuse to serve a company once they realize the nature of its business.

As more Americans have moved up to fast, permanent internet connections like DSL service or cable, they have unwittingly joined the spammers' ranks. Cybercrime investigators don't get involved in cases where personal computers are hacked but nothing of value is stolen, so a new spamming tactic, technically illegal, is now common. Graham Cluley, a consultant at Sophos, writes in their survey that 30 per cent of the world's spam is sent from compromised computers -- regular PCs that have been taken over by a Trojan Horse program that turns the computer into a rabid, remotely-controlled spam broadcaster. A spam marketing contractor is typically in control of a stable of hundreds of these zombie machines, each doing the spammer's bidding. The innocent home computer user notices only that sometimes his computer is really slow and his Internet connection seems really busy.