Nickname: Suresh Ramasubramanian

Review: The comment about U.S. ISPs being more accountable is quite correct. Several U.S. and European ISPs have joined together to form www.maawg.org, which has a code of conduct that treats spam origination or hosting problems at an ISP as just as serious a problem as spam coming in to the ISP's users. Not many ISPs in Asia have apparently realized that. And they are rushing to implement the latest in inbound spam filtering (whether spamassassin or SPF / Domainkeys) while moving at a much slower pace on outbound spam and spam hosting issues, fixing which invariably requires top down policy initiatives rather than simply turning on a filter. A paper that I wrote for the OECD covers these issues in some detail - http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/5/47/34935342.pdf

Date reviewed: Oct 31, 2005 1:25 PM

Nickname: Accountability

Review: Spamhater is correct, the headline is a little misleading. Asia is not the factory, it is the delivery service. That said, what American ISPs have done is become accountable for the traffic leaving their networks. Their Asian counterparts should do the same. As fewer and fewer providers allow spam to be sent from their networks, the spammers are forced to move to ever murkier corners of the net. When they do that those networks become easier to block without the risk of blocking legitimate traffic.

Date reviewed: Oct 26, 2005 9:13 PM

Nickname: spamhater

Review: Your headline is disingenuous and misleading. In the article you state quite clearly (but curiously without any numbers) that the largest 'producer'of spam in the world is the US, you further add, again correctly that the numbers from Asia are driven by US based spammers. You quote a good source;Sophos, as identifying the US as being the source or relay, but omitted the figure; it's 26.35% of all spam vs. 19.73% for Korea and 15.7% for China/Hong Kong, as of October 2005. The key word here is 'relaying' not 'origin'. The increase in both countries as a spam source is quite clear; it corresponds with a year on year decrease from the US from 41.5% in October 2004. This is just another illustration of 'Asia bashing' that attempts to lay blame for a problem - that is of US origin - of US spam that is being illegally 'outsourced' to Asia, as is clear from the content of most spam received.

Date reviewed: Oct 25, 2005 11:49 PM

Nickname: ashwan

Review: Technology is leaping forward to help us communicate. However the human factor and the substance of the message is digressing.

Date reviewed: Oct 25, 2005 2:05 PM