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ROAD RUNNER

Drowning in spam: New techniques focus on identifying senders

Everyone on the Internet used to be friends.

Take it from Dave Farber, a computer networking guru who was on the scene when the forerunner of today's Internet was being established.

"Back in the '60s, we were all friends," he said of those early research networks. No one worried much about security because snooping in someone else's files wasn't something a friend did. As for email, users were glad to have that capability; no one worried about getting too much.

Fast forward 35 years, however, and the Internet is a lot bigger and far less friendly. In addition to the viruses, worms and denial-of-service attacks launched by devious hackers, email in boxes each day are stuffed with spam -- unwanted messages hawking pills, porn and proffers for mortgage loans.

With more than half of Internet traffic now consisting of spam, it has become a major headache. Efforts to screen it out with so-called spam filters, or legislate it away with the federal Can-Spam Act that went into effect Jan. 1, have had limited success.