CAUCE board member Ray Everett Church writes at internetnews.com:

According to the majority of the testimony at this month’s “Spam Summit,” held by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the state of the fight against spam is pretty much the same as it has been for the last several years.

The two days of presentations can largely be boiled down to the following bullets:

• Spam volumes continue to increase, being driven by the growth of “botnets” – networks of hijacked computers run by hackers and rented out to spammers.
  

• Spam is one of many high-tech tools being used by organized crime, international terrorist organizations, and can be expected to play a major role in future conflicts between nations.
  

• Anti-spam technologies are improving, but deployment of sophisticated technologies such as cryptographic-based email authentication is sorely lacking.

Oh, and the spam wars are a lot less exciting than they used to be. Case in point: unlike last time, there were no fist-fights at this year’s shindig. ...

Read the rest at Internetnews.com

CAUCE North America wishes to announce the launch of a new support program, now featuring many levels of individual and organizational membership for those wishing to actively assist with our important work and goals.

CAUCE actively advocates on behalf of consumers to governments, legislators, law enforcement agencies and industry associations about matters related to the blended threat of spam, viruses and spyware.

Whether you are an individual or an organization of any sort, please consider a CAUCE membership

I recently published a couple of personal and business blog entries that may be of interest to the CAUCE community:

Trench Warfare in the Age of The Laser-guided Missile - a clarion call to de-silo and take the offensive
and
How the Sender Community Can Help Fight Spam

CAUCE recently joined the Anti-Spyware Coalition.

The ASC is a group of anti-spyware software companies, academics, and consumer groups such as CAUCE. It seeks to bring together a diverse array of perspective on the problem of controlling spyware and other potentially unwanted technologies. It has created a common set of software behavior that can be characteristic of spyware, and is also working on consumer tips.

CAUCE joins its neighbor CAUCE Canada, already an ASC member, to work in the areas where anti-spam and anti-spyware efforts overlap, particularly in laws against fraudulent computer activity.

The problems of spam and spyware share the complicating factor that the same activity might be legitimate or not depending on whether the recipient has given permission. The identical mail from a mailing list could be legitimate to a recipient who'd asked for it but spam to a recipient who hadn't. Similarly, a program that remotely controls a user's web browser could be legitimate if used as a support tool with the user's consent, or spyware otherwise.

CAUCE looks forward to working with the ASC in areas of shared concern.