Spam King Arrest Won't Stem Junk Mail Tide

The vaunted arrest earlier this week of Robert Soloway, the "Spam King" from Seattle, won't do as much to stem the flood of  junk email as the feds want to think it will, says Andy Greenberg in Forbes. The clients who paid to use his 'zombie" computers to forward their marketing pitches will just find another spammer.

Indeed, spam traffic didn't decrease appreciably since Soloway's Wednesday dentention, trackers report. The only way to stop spam is to remove the financial incentive, Greenberg argues. Hope looms with a new system that embeds encrypted digital signatures in messages, which would force spammers to register new domains frequently—at considerable cost—to avoid being blocked by the ISPs. (More internet stories.)