Here's hoping the proposed agency practices the art of "dynamic entry". I can think of no one more deserving than these...people.

I wonder if a case could be made against comment spammers, after all, they are inserting advertising for their products into our comments section, eating up memory that we pay for. I agree Dean, it's only a matter of time before something is done.

Val, if you're having trouble with comment spammers, let me know and I'll install MT Blacklist for you. Also MT 2.661, which has some useful anti-spam features.

We hatses the spammers! Tricksy spammers, always so disgusting. Preciousss helps us buy things! They lied to us, preciousss, they wanted to destroy the preciousss!

internet scammers are quickly raising the bar on this type of stuff. it used to be that the e-mails you'd receive with viruses or fraudulent scams would be so unprofessional as to be laughable, but i've recently got a spat of e-mails claiming to be from my service provider, saying that i was inadvertantly spamming other people on the server with a virus, and i needed to open "document.zip" in order to get instructions about what to do. the e-mail's header information tipped me off that it was bogus, but other than that (and the fact that anything named "document.xxx" is almost always a virus), the e-mail was pretty professional, and i bet it fooled a lot of people.

I get that child-porn spam all the time. I've also got spam telling me my bank account was frozen. Spam, spam, spam, delete, delete, delete... NEVER give a spammer your credit card or bank account or Social Security number. NEVER open an attachment unless you know in advance exactly what it is and who sent it and why (e.g., if a friend wants to send you a story he wrote). Spam, spam, spam, delete, delete, delete...

This remind me of that old "Dark Profits" hoax. Are you sure it isn't just someone's idea of a joke?

I've been getting incredible amounts of spam too, but mostly Paris Hilton type crap.

Child porn is currently investigated by several agencies, including Customs and the FBI, but I agree- there will soon be a day when there is a separate agency to handle this. Along with it, I think, will be more legislation on computer crimes. Not just viruses and spam, but stalking et al...

When I get this type of spam I forward it to one or more law enforcement agencies. Since most of them involve interstate fraud the FBI is a good place to start. I know that the Feebs are kind of busy right now what with minor things like splodeydopes trying to get into the country but interstate fraud is one of the things they do, and quite well. They have to know about it to act, though.
A little note explaining that the spam you get might be of interest to them helps.

Uh, c'mon people, get off your holy horses. There is no such thing. Xlrq is correct, this is a scam perpetrated against websites that have managed to piss off someone (a customer, an ex-employee, etc).

Don't you people ever read Snopes?

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/joejobs/darkprofits03.asp

I got a childporn spam once, I sent a detailed complaint to the spammer's (apparent) ISP. Who knows if anything happened to them. Probably not.

-Never open an attatchment you didn't KNOW was coming, even if it looks like it comes from someone you know.
-Never open an attatchment you didn't KNOW was coming, even if it looks like it comes from someone you know.
-Never open an attatchment you didn't KNOW was coming, even if it looks like it comes from someone you know.

What I tell you three times is true.

If people followed that simple rule, 90% of this virus crap would be stopped dead in the water.

BTW, if you haven't heard yet, there is a new wrinkle out there: now (sometimes) the package is delivered in an encrypted .zip file, with the password in the subject line, or body. AFAIK, this stumps virus scanners, since the encryption causes the unpacker to error out.

As for spam, there are several blockers out there for either the mailer level, or the personal user level. A good example of the latter is Mozilla Mail client, which has a fairly intelligent "learning" ability. It does a decent job of extracting patterns out of what you manually flag as spam. These days %90-%95 of the 419/Viagra/"microsoft security patch"/MAKE MONEY WITH YOUR OPINION crap goes right into the junk folder. I just check every once in a while to make sure something useful isn't in there.

I hate these fucking spammers. They need to have their asses kicked. I get so much of their crap everyday.

I'm getting almost no spam any more at my triticale address. This may mean that Hotmail is doing a good job of filtering, or it may be proof that the concerns I raised are valid.

Filtering software can be a real problem. I heard from my older brother, a professional photographer, that when the National Geographic sent out a call for photographs of animal mating behavior, half the people on their list didn't receive it.

At my personal address, most of the spam I get is from Korea, and completely unreadable. I'm also still getting a few from entities such as Doubts T. Sultan and Defoliant P. Sweeties, but far fewer than before. I'm getting very few virus emails any more; they are going to my wee wifey instead.

I can't find the link at the moment, which is a pity, but all of the hullabaloo surrounding the recent SCO/Microsoft DOS worms disguised the fact that only 25% of machines participated in the DOS attacks.

What was seldom mentioned is that the worms opened backdoors on client machines that would allow spammers to relay spam through them.

The conclusion: the worms are the work of organized crime. The DOS attacks are a smokescreen to distract from the real purpose of the worms, which is to collect legions of spam relays.

Spam and viruses aren't exclusively the work of 'hackers' any more. There are real, professional programmers in the pay of real, professional criminals at work on these things. Spam and viruses are no longer an annoyance, they are a genuine threat.