Enough to make you SPIT

Although 2005 promises to be exciting in terms of technological innovation, it is also highly likely this year will see increasingly cunning ways of using technology in ways not originally intended.

Is there any hope of relief, or is the tendency to abuse good things an ineluctable human trait?

Most users of e-mail as an essential business communication tool will be all too familiar with the deluge of unsolicited commercial messages (spam) that floods into their mailboxes on a daily basis. (Today, I am sure I counted at least one an hour!) This is little else but pure abuse of technology.

However much pleasure one may derive from deleting these wretched messages en masse, the fact remains that they waste valuable time and bandwidth in addition to their pure nuisance value.

The bad news is that despite the growing number of anti-spam "solutions" being developed, nobody really seems to be winning the war.

Some would say that as long as spam works and there is money to be made, greed will always drive people to find ways around any anti-spam measures. Is this view pessimistic, or simply realistic?

As always with such questions, only time will tell, but it would seem any victory against spammers of the world is unlikely in the near future.

The threat to VOIP as communication channel is as clear as its advantages.

Warwick Ashford, Journalist, ITWb

Extremely close at hand, however, is the advent of a more liberalised telecommunications era, that has local Internet service providers and other companies with value-added network service licences gearing up to provide commercial voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) services.

Ever since communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri announced a relaxation of telecommunication regulation would come into effect from 1 February, there has been quite a lot of excitement around the opportunities that it will create, especially in the VOIP arena.

Business communications may well be revolutionised with the advent of commercial VOIP, enabling organisations to save money by consolidating telephony and networking infrastructures, integrating voice with e-mail and contact-management applications, and replacing traditional phones with IP phones integrated into computer workstations.

As attractive as that may sound, warnings have begun to sound all over the world that this apparently ideal new technology-enabled communication channel may be just as vulnerable to spam as its predecessors.

The threat to VOIP as communication channel is as clear as its advantages. Experts warn it will be as easy for marketers to send vast quantities of spam over Internet telephony (SPIT) as it is to send spam via e-mail, instant messaging (SPIM), or SMS on mobile phones. This means voice-recorded messages of around 30 seconds could be sent to thousands of voice IP addresses within seconds.

While audio spam is not a problem yet, many industry representatives are saying it is only a matter of time before SPIT begins swamping Internet telephony with unsolicited and unwanted voicemail as the use of VOIP becomes more widespread. Concerns have also been raised that denial-of-service attacks could literally block IP phone lines.

The good news is local VOIP users are likely to be protected for a while longer than their US and European counterparts because most VOIP providers are expected to use the International Telecommunications Union H323 standard. This standard is more SPIT-resistant than the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). However, the threat of SPIT is likely to increase as the more flexible SIP multimedia standard becomes more popular.

Just as with e-mail spam, there appears to be no effective anti-SPIT solutions on the horizon. Consequently, the worldwide consensus appears to be that spam and all its spin-offs will continue to bedevil all those who use computers, cellphones and now IP telephony for some time to come.

When human greed takes an inherently good thing and perverts it to facilitate something undeniably bad, it really is enough to make one spit. Technology has great potential for doing good; if only we humans could escape our nature long enough to allow it.