<IT WORLD>
One down, many to go
By Martin J Young

HUA HIN, Thailand - In a significant victory in the war on spam, a notorious fraudster dubbed the "Spam King" pleaded guilty in the US last week and could face up to 20 years inside. Robert Soloway admitted to sending out tens of millions of unsolicited corporate emails with fake headers over the past five years. He used a system of bots - automated scripts and computers infected with malicious software - to distribute his wares through his Newport Internet Marketing Corporation, which sold broadcast email services.

Seattle's US District Court has become the venue for a number of high-profile spam cases recently; many attribute this to Microsoft, which has filed more than 130 lawsuits against alleged US-based spammers. Many of them have been filed in Seattle courts, which makes the city a hotbed of spam-based litigation and prosecution. Microsoft filed and won a US$7.8 million civil judgment against Soloway for spamming through its Hotmail service in 2005.

Soloway sold his services as opt-in and permission-based email but actually ended up spamming millions of inboxes, which resulted in many of his clients getting blacklisted by Internet service providers and others. He has also pleaded guilty to mail fraud and failure to file tax returns and will be sentenced on June 20.

These cases highlight the inherent problems with email and the software that the majority of people use to send and receive it. The days of a small slice of Amazonian rain forest coming through your letter box and piling up on your doormat have been replaced by the same problem in the cyber world. Spam is the scourge of the Internet - although many will disagree and put the blame on Asia Times Online's occasionally tawdry network advertisements - and something needs to be done to stamp it out.

It has reached such levels now that many free web-based email providers have employed such strong spam filters that users may be losing up to half of their genuine email. Two major culprits of this are Hotmail and Aol, which will dump anything remotely spammy into users' junk box, which rarely gets looked at. The future of email may be that you can only receive from addresses that you have deemed safe and placed in a "white list" - everything else goes into the e-toaster.

Many people already employ this practice or use a system whereby the sender needs to go to a third party site to fill in a form to prove that they're not sending you spam. This takes time and email is all about saving time, so plenty of time-challenged individuals will simply not bother, leaving the recipient again missing out on genuine email.

Software security flaws also allow malicious little cretins into the system so they can manipulate it to suit their needs, in this case setting up a "zombie" computer that just churns out spam while disguising the origin. The owner of the PC remains blissfully unaware and continues to write letters to auntie Maple and play solitaire while his computer is beavering away doing its best to promote the Russian porn industry.

There are a number of steps one can take to make a computer a little safer and less of a target for spam and malicious software. The obvious one is to stop using Microsoft products, but that's not always practical. A third-party firewall, updated antivirus software and a couple of good spyware and malware scanners should do the trick. Going online without these few basic tools today would be the equivalent of leaving the keys in your car, the door open, and engine running when parked in a city's rougher regions overnight and expecting it to be there the next morning. The Internet is one big bad neighborhood so you need to take a few basic precautions before you venture into it.

If you are unfortunate enough to already be the recipient of more spam than a Monty Python sketch there is not a great deal you can do aside from using a decent email client (such as Mozilla Thunderbird) which can help you manage it and send it where it belongs. Once your email address is out there on the distribution lists it's hard to get it back. It is good practice to have two accounts, one kept private and one for use publicly and on the Internet; the latter will soon become a spam receptacle as email addresses these days are sought-after commodities, especially to the likes of Soloway the "Spam King" who will sell them on for vast profit.

Software
After months of delay and re-fixing numerous faults, Microsoft released Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista this week. The heavy 435-megabyte download contains all of the updates for the past year as well as a number of reliability and performance improvements which speed up file transfer amongst other things. The service pack is also available through the Windows update feature; it will automatically detect problem drivers, which are quite abundant according to recent reports. So now that Vista has had its first major tune up can we expect a problem-free, smooth-running operating system? I think you know the answer to that one!

Industry
Two industry giants put their corporate heads together this week in an effort to finance university research into breaking new grounds in computing technology. Intel and Microsoft will be fronting a $20 million research grant for new departments and laboratories at Berkeley and the University of Illinois. It is hoped that the combined efforts will pave the way into a new generation of computing whereby the industry can move on from increasing speed on silicon chips.

Currently the emphasis is on multi-core processors and two-, four- and even eight-core CPUs can be found in the marketplace. However, should a step be made towards 100-core processors there needs to be the software to take advantage of it. The new research program will assist in the development of parallel computing systems from a hardware and software perspective.

The research labs at IBM have also been a hotbed of activity with the company hard at work developing optical switches for faster and more energy-efficient on-chip communication and data transfer. The nanophotonic switches are the smallest of their kind developed so far, according to IBM, which aims to replace traditional copper wire as a medium of information transfer. "It is envisioned that using light instead of wires, as much as 100 times more information can be sent between cores, while using 10 times less power and consequently generating less heat," the company stated.

With all this high-speed computing soon to be available, let's hope that telecommunications companies and Internet providers can get their digital fingers out and improve the infrastructure so that Internet speeds and bandwidth can keep up with the pace. Then those of us not blessed with blisteringly fast Internet connections maybe able to download the Vista service pack in less than half a day!

Martin J Young is an Asia Times Online correspondent based in Thailand.

I dont think spam will ever end or spam scams. There is just too much.

i got a spam mail this morning asking me if i wanted to buy natural male enhancement pills....I'M FEMALE....why would i need that o.0