Surprisingly, the overwhelming winner of Worst Problem on the Internet was "stupid users", garnering 38% of all responses. Spyware came in a distant second at 15%, and third place went to spam, with 10% of responses.

Only 5.7 and 6.5 percent of respondents thought that phishing and identity theft were the worst problem, respectively, and only 2 people out of the 618 respondents thought that lost email was the worst problem.

Granted, this survey was done by visitors to a well-known anti-spam site. So the "stupid users" answer may reflect the opinion of these tech-savvy users that spam is perpetuated only because (stupid) people buy stuff from spammers.

But there could be more to it than that. One commenter on the site said "If it weren't for etards, computer viruses, worms and trojans would be almost nonexistent. Almost all of the problems listed in the survey would disappear if there weren¡¯t so many practicing etards."

There is an element of truth to that, or course. Lack of education on computer safety and security is a huge factor in the problem. It seems the Internet service providers could do a lot more in that regard. This is one of the hot buttons in the TOURBUS newsletter, so why don't the ISPs just make it mandatory reading for all their customers? :-)