Shortening to ".sec" is not a good idea - on a QWERTY keyboard the C and X keys are next to each other and grandma cannot be trusted to avoid typos...

Slight correction: <span class="pedant">Mandriva is not an OS. It is a distribution.</span>

The underlying OS is GNU Linux - but different distributions differ very little in this respect - at least as far as the typical desktop user would care about.

Beyond the operating system: yes you are correct: The differences listed do not seem to distinguish Mandriva from a plethora of other distributions

Yep. These guys are coming to the same conclusion. Too bad that the title in slashdot claims it to be "solved" - the new paper does not claim to have it solved - merely to have reached the same conclusion with (what appears to be) a higher confidence level.

Don't be misled by the title in Slashdot... :-)

"Scandinavian Regions" - makes sense. But "Scandinavia"!? NOT A COUNTRY - you must just have invented that one. Or perhaps it is a Bushism? Mind you, only a fraction of the scandinavian regions are north of the artic cicle. It's a bit like claiming that the eclipse was seen in the USA even though it was only visible in parts of Alaska...

What is the connection to Denmark? I cannot find any mention of Denmark or any Danish bank in the study?

Being Danish, I was curious about the reference to Denmark in this post. Although the linked article mentions Denmark,I cannot find any mention of Denmark in the PDF from the actual study!?
Am I missing it? If so, please point me in the right direction. If not, then my home country is being unfairly associated with spam (of the email sort) :-(

Hm... We're talking technology here. And you forgot that: "Newer" != "More Advanced"

captcha for emails? This will just encourage innovation in the OCR field and computer vision in general. I believe that progress is being made in these areas already. At most, it will buy time until the spammers evolve, and annoy a lot of innocent users in the process (and discriminate against those with visual impairments). It might work if you assume that it will put people off computers: less people using computers might result in less spam for the rest of us :-)

Education? Good luck with that. In general people are not interested in computers - they view them as tools or just a "magic black box" and have no incentive to understand what goes on inside. They're too busy with their own jobs to dwelve into the black magic of algorithms, patterns, security and whatnot. General sceptical education and encouraging people to think before they click might have some effect though. Until spammers and malware writers evolve new methods.

Taking away how malware developers can profit? Hm... Malware is not really a technical problem, it's just another vector for scam- and con artists that brings the benefits of scale. In the end, they make their money off the victims, not off the computers. The computers are just the means.

so... a new approach? I do not think it is plausible that any of the things you suggest will solve the problem. But then again, I don't have a solution either. I just want to make sure that the cure is not worse than the illness...

I'm not surprised that it is in English. But I am surprised of the reluctance to change it. If it is not changed, then sooner or later we will end up with two separate "internets" and we will all be poorer as a result.

Yeah right. Because everybody in the whole world only uses ASCII right?

Sorry for sounding flippant, but such US-myopia is far to prevalent for my liking.... Come on guys: Wake up and smell the coffee! There is more to the world than the US! There is no reason to make most of South East Asia and China 2nd-rate citizens on the internet.

I agree that there is a lot of software that needs changing as a result though. But that just means more work, right? You could probably sell this as an anti-recession measure too.