In the decade to come, it’s clear that the Internet will face two related challenges:

• Increasing volume of spam, and
• Increasing sophistication of viruses.

These two are related because spam is being increasingly used to spread viruses, and viruses are increasingly used to subvert security measures on computers and to turn them into spam relays.

The Register reports that a hacker has produced the first PocketPC virus. Oh joy. Along with the recent discovery of cell phone viruses, we can expect an entire new generation of annoyances and irritations, if not thefts and vandalism.

I don’t mean to sound like a Luddite, but I do have some fear for the future. Our increasing reliance on the relatively weak infrastructure we’ve developed is dangerous. Depending on who you talk to, somewhere between thirty and eighty percent of the bandwidth on the web is tied up in processing spam. Many of these messages carry virus payloads. And it’s likely to get worse before it gets better.