Kim Cameron published a great synopsis of a WSJ summary of a recent Gartner Group study that shows quantitatively how much the explosing of phishing, pharming, and spamming is affecting everyday user behaviour.

In short, the problem of steadily degrading electronic trust is forcing us to solve it just as we had to solve the problems of pirates in the open seas or outlaws in the Wild West.

As Phil Windley puts it in citing Kim’s post:

In short, the lack of a credible identity infrastructure for the Internet, threatens to arrest progress in electronic transactions and could very well ruin the net for anything of any sophistication. Even blogging is under attack. I’ve been getting hammered today with comment and trackback spam. Ugh!

Ugh, indeed. Time for this infrastructure we’ve been building to see the light of day.