Comment Articles

How to stop spam and viruses

David Coursey AnchorDesk

Published: 26 Aug 2003 14:40 BST

I have what many of you will consider to be bad news: the only way to stop unsolicited commercial email and the viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and other scourges of the Internet will be to get a new one. A new Internet, that is. Oh, and while we're at it, we'll need new computers and operating systems, too.

We'll also have to learn the difference between privacy and anonymity. Repeat after me: privacy good, anonymity bad. That doesn't mean it should be easy for someone else to read your email. It's just that we should be able to trace things like viruses and spam back to their original senders. People should know that bad deeds on the Internet will eventually catch up to them, just as in real life.

Unfortunately, the only people who seem to agree with my privacy versus anonymity argument are the John Ashcrofts of the world, whose support I barely welcome.

I have another trick up my sleeve: for-pay email. One of the tragedies of spam and email-generating worms is that they eat bandwidth that someone else is paying for. Requiring some sort of a payment to be included with each email sent might make spamming uneconomical and would certainly make spammers subject to theft charges for sending unpaid email.

There have even been suggestions that senders should pay recipients to read their commercial messages. I don't relish a world in which a person becomes known by their specific dollar value (cents and fractional cents, more likely) to email advertisers. I mean, talk about profiling. But I could see this as a way for people to provide money for their favourite causes: sure, I'll read your ad, just send a dime to my animal shelter or the Red Cross.

While it is tragic that we can't count on others to behave respectfully and responsibly, the changes taking place on the Internet only mirror what has already happened in the real world.

Over the past decade the Internet has grown from being a friendly small town where everyone left their doors unlocked and the keys in their cars into being a global cesspool where you have to assume the people you run into are just as likely to hurt you as to be your friend -- more likely, actually, based on the kinds of spam I receive and some of the people I meet online.