Net Gurus Rally Anti-spam Forces
Like Greek gods high atop Mount Olympus, the masters of the Internet have long been watching the spam wars. But this week they decided to step in and settle the fight -- once and for all.
The Internet Research Task Force, the closest thing the Internet has to a governing body for all matters technical, inaugurated the Anti-Spam Research Group this week to develop "a taxonomy of the (spam) problem and the proposed solutions."
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of mailing lists, message boards and anti-spam organizations already fighting junk e-mail, but experts say the new research group is uniquely positioned to effect real change on a large scale.
Chaired by Paul Judge, director of research and development at CipherTrust, an Internet security firm, the ASRG will seek to establish a more systematic, research-based framework for collaboration among those fighting spam.
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"A lot of tech companies sit in their corner of the world and develop something to help with the spam problem. This has resulted in a lot of localized symptom relievers,"
said Judge.
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"This is good and necessary. But they, overall, haven't worked on a real cure for the spam problem."
The first step toward the cure, according to Judge, will be crafting a widely acceptable definition for spam -- a tricky undertaking, as one user's junk mail can be another's cherished employment opportunity.
The ASRG will solve this problem, according to its charter, by generalizing the problem into
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consent-based communication
whereby
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"an individual or organization should be able to express consent or lack of consent for certain communication and have the architecture support those desires."
Beyond the difficulty of deciding what is and what isn't spam, figuring out exactly what this " " will look like will be at the heart of the research group's challenge.
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