In computer news this week:

Lead: Inside the Internet spam can Part 2

There are many many problems when it comes to regulating spammers on the internet.

Last week we talked about the problem that internet registrars allow people to register domain names with phony information, and that when we use the whois function of the internet to see who owns a website - the data is obviously falsified.

But one of the internet spam fighters that I talked to has this very interesting opinion of the whois data:

"Expecting the whois data to be accurate is hopeless as well as worse

than useless.

If you try to force the spammers to have valid whois data, they'll

simply switch from their recognizable creative names like Alphonso

Corrino to using bogus names that are not obviously bogus such as

random names and addresses from telephone books. This was demonstrated

recently by the famous case of the Buffalo Spammer that used the

name of his sister's brother-in-law."

So this creates the situation today that anyone can apply for and get a domain name - or website name - using completely false information.

It is also possible to get a totally free domain name, particularly one of the new types, like dot biz.

Spamfighters say "Anyone with any sense treats a .biz website like a shouted "This is at least a Spammer's Web Site and Probably a Stupid Fraud and Con!"

Another spam problem is free email providers. You can get a free email address on the web at hundreds of places, without any verification process as to who you really are. This gives spammers an easy way to use an existing email service for free to send spam. Included in this list of free email providers are excite.com, yahoo, lycos and hundreds of others. Some spam filters automatically block email from these domains specifically for this reason.

So anyone can get a free email address and use that free email service to send spam.

The next problem related to spam is free website hosting. Again there are hundreds of places on the internet that will host your website, or a spam website, for free. Some of them provide a spammer with everything they need, free email accounts and free website building tools.

So you can get a free website name using false information, get your website hosted somewhere for free, and get a free email address so you can spam millions of people for free and direct them to your free website, even get free ecommerce services - the ability to take credit card orders for free.

Many spammers sell non-existent products and get rich schemes. Once you've paid online for their services, or sent a check and it's cashed - they're gone.

They've disappeared - with your money - and there's no way to track them because all the information related to them and their operation was false.

And the worst news - is that they're doing it again under a completely different false set of names, websites, and email addresses- right now. Why ? Because it's so easy.

90% of all spam received by Internet users is sent by a hard-core group of under 200 spam outfits, and we'll learn about them next week.

For Raw Bytes, This is Frank Delaney

POB 222 Spangle, Wa 99031 (509)245-3736 624-7230