Talking Spam.

This article discusses focuses on the technology developed by Qovia, a voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VOIP) management company in Frederick, Maryland, to contain the possible explosion of voice-mail spam. Internet technology makes it easy for a single caller to send voice messages to thousands of people's VOIP mailboxes. Indeed, Qovia engineers managed to write software for two major types of VOIP systems that sent voice messages to 1,000 targets per minute in simulations which is the first known demonstration of spam over Internet telephony (SPIT). In 2003, there were only about 131,000 residential VOIP subscribers, according to the Yankee Group, a Boston, Massachusetts-based communications research firm. By 2008, that number is expected to increase to more than 17.5 million, roughly the number of people who were using e-mail when spam took off around 1995. The result could be an at least temporary resurgence of telemarketing; the Federal Trade Commission's do-not-call registry does not restrict calls made over the Internet. But by monitoring factors such as the length of calls and the rate at which calls are being made from particular Internet addresses, Qovia's software can identify and block up to 95 percent of SPIT before it reaches its intended recipients, says chief technology officer Choon Shim. The company plans to incorporate the technology into its VoIP security software in 2004, and if Qovia customers such as Nortel Networks build the software into their systems, SPIT may not become a real problem at all.