Gary Warner, Director of Research at the UAB Computer Forensics, posted a very interesting analysis from the past 48 days concerning the amount of spam which has ties to China. 

The post is a call for increased awareness of the situation with certain registrars and hosting providers in China who have become spam havens in recent times.  It is our hope as with Gary's that by exposing the amount spam, fraudulent messages, and criminal activity occurring within a few areas of China, that those of you who have contacts in China may be able to educate our respective counterparts at ISPs, hosting providers and in law enforcement to the statistics.  With that education, we expect that the government or high level business personnel will take appropriate steps to mitigate this situation as has been done with other locations in years past.

Thanks Gary for posting this very enlightening blog located at garwarner.blogspot.com/2009/06/spam-crisis-in-china.html

With that form of spam crisis in mind for everyone, I am curious if anyone else in higher education noticed that the last couple of classes of freshman do not use email at an increasing rate.  It has been my observation that the spam problems along with the growth of social networking sites like facebook and twitter that this future generation will continue the trend away from traditional email delivery in lieu of other forms of messaging.  This seems to be causing some problems within the higher-ed community with how to officially communicate to students without looking like spammers ourself in these other communication venues.  Perhaps a new crisis on the way for those of us who must do "official spam" to our organizations.

Scott Fendley
ISC Handler on Duty