Spam inna can, sort of

Rhe New York Times has an editorial about spammers:

In early 2004, Bill Gates claimed: “Two years from now, spam will be solved.” Today it amounts to seventy percent of all e-mail. Yet there may be a chance to cut it back.
In March, spam volumes tumbled as United States marshals seized computers at internet hosting facilities that controlled Rustock, a huge spamming network. The seizure followed a lawsuit by Microsoft against Rustock’s operators for violating its trademarks with spam that fraudulently claimed a Microsoft link.
Spam volumes had already been declining sharply, as smaller networks were taken down. According to Symantec, an Internet security company, spammers were sending an average of 180 billion messages a day last August. On Wednesday, they were down to 39.4 billion.
It is too early to declare victory. Symantec detected a small spam rebound in May. Tracking down and seizing computers is not easy, even if there is a clear legal basis. We still do not know who operated Rustock. Entities from as far away as Azerbaijan leased computers from hosting firms around the United States. These controlled a million “zombie computers” which, unbeknownst to their owners, sent thousands of spam messages a day.
The good news is there may be other ways to disrupt spammers. The Times’ John Markoff reported that computer scientists at two University of California campuses have found another vulnerability: spammers’ banks. To track the flow of information, the researchers made hundreds of purchases. Buying Viagra from the Pharmacy Express group in Russia involved computers in Brazil, China, and Turkey. The Viagra came from India. But 95 percent of the purchases were handled by three banks, in Azerbaijan, Latvia, and St. Kitts and Nevis. This suggests that, if banks or credit card companies refused to settle payments for some transactions with these banks, they could deliver a blow to the spam economy.
After Congress moved to suppress online gambling, Visa and Mastercard blocked payments for American players. Similarly, Congress might require them to block, say, card-not-present pharmaceutical purchases on the grounds that it is illegal for individuals to import drugs. Though spammers might be able to change banks, the process would be cumbersome. The concentration of business in three banks suggests there aren’t that many willing to deal with spammers. It’s certainly worth pursuing.

Rico says it's not the first, nor probably the last, time that Bill Gates was wrong about something, but let's hope they figure out how to stop the spammers. (Rico says, really, Azerbaijan and Latvia? Fuck 'em; cut 'em off from the internet entirely, see how they like that.)