Three years ago, Bill Gates made one of his boldest predictions: The problem of junk e-mail, he said, would be solved by 2006.
Of course, with fewer than thirty days left in the calendar year — and in boxes still inundated with offers of stock tips and penis-enlargement pills — it's a safe bet that Mr. Gates's prognostication will not go down as one his finest moments.
In fact, spam is on the uptick, according to IronPort, a company that sells e-mail-filtering software. Unsolicited e-mail has doubled since last year, the company says, and more than nine out of every ten e-mail messages are nothing but junk.
What's most troubling is that spammers seem to be, in many cases, a step ahead of e-mail filtering tools. "Image spam" — in which the words of an advertisement are part of a picture, not an easily detectable text — has confounded many antispam programs, according to The New York Times.
Spam's continuing stranglehold on the Internet isn't just a problem for colleges and businesses, says Kevin Drum of Washington Monthly: It's also cause for embarrassment. "The Internet is arguably the apex of human technological development, the most complex and paradigm-changing invention so far in the history of Homo sapiens," he writes. "And what do we mostly use it for? Porn, Justin Timberlake downloads, and penny stock scams. Makes you proud, doesn't it?" –Brock Read
