MIT Conference Takes Aim at Spam E - mails
It's going to take the best and the brightest to slam the spammers.

Hundreds of programmers gathered Friday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to apply their collective brainpower to a problem that has evolved from annoyance to menace: the rising flood of unsolicited e-mail.

Companies and Internet service providers put up a fight with the latest filtering programs, but spammers quickly bypass their defenses.

Organizers had expected a small gathering of 40 to 80 programmers, hackers and Internet activists, but several hundred packed an auditorium to hear the latest in spam countermeasures.

For the more clinical, spam simply poses a difficult technical challenge. Others are downright offended by it.

William S. Yerazunis, an MIT computer scientist, compared spam to petty street crime -- cheap to carry out, profitable for the offender and enormously expensive to halt.

``It's really theft,'' said Yerazunis, 46, a researcher at MIT's Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories. ``And the theft efficiency ratio is about the same as stealing hubcaps and car radios.''

Spam traffic has grown from 8 percent of Internet e-mail in 2001 to as much as 40 percent in 2002, according to Brightmail Inc., which provides filtering products for several major Internet service providers.

Spam is costly for everybody. It costs about $250 to send a million spams, but about $2,800 in lost wages, at the federal minimum wage, for those million spams to be deleted, Yerazunis estimates.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Ending-Spam.html