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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Wednesday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week 8/08/2007 Canning that damn spam .. This
week’s New Yorker magazine has an article by Michael Specter on the
current losing battle against spam. And it is a losing battle. Among many
things he points out that Microsoft’s Bill Gates had proudly claimed
back in 2004 that quote “Two years from now, spam will be
solved.” And now,
3 years later, spam has doubled in size.
Of course a long time ago Bill had also said that he wanted to make
Windows so easy to use that even his Mother could use it, and I believe the
dear lady passed away before Windows evolved to that state of user friendliness, which is still
questionable today. My own mother
was a retired school teacher and a brilliant woman, but she had difficulty
with the concepts of windows, email, and particularly using a mouse. Some of
the trivia and dismaying statistics in Mr. Specter’s article: The first
spam was sent back in 1978 by the DEC corporation on the old predecessor of
the internet and the world wide web – which was then primarily a
governmental and education network known as
Arpanet. The message was that DEC was about to introduce a powerful and
radically different new computer system. Even though DEC was firmly censored
for this, they ended up selling 20 computers for a million dollars each. I
think this is what we would now call positive spam reinforcement. Then
after the WWW actually began, 2 attorneys bombarded the early web in 1994 with
emails offering their services to immigrants seeking to remain in the United
States. They sent millions of messages, they were denounced and revoked by their ISP, but
they picked up over a thousand clients, and went on to jointly write a book
“How to make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway”. Again,
positive spam reinforcement way back then, so how can we possibly hope to
stop it now.... There are
now 2
millions emails sent a second, 171 billion a day, and most of them are
spam. Although the spammers are
being fought by dedicated organizations like The Spamhaus,
the US Federal Government, and Microsoft which uses
130,000 of its own Hotmail accounts for the purposes of trapping and
examining suspected spam, the spammers are staying ahead of their pursuers. Many
spammers operate from servers hosted in Russia and China, and surprisingly
their preferred method of operations is through the use of Zombie computers
– computers unknowingly infected and turned into spam machines without
their owner’s knowledge. And again
the biggest temptation for you to resist it not to click on a Remove link in
a spam you receive. Usually most spasm have this,
and they insult your intelligence by saying that you opted in to receive their
spam, but you can remove yourself by clicking on their remove link.
Don’t do this !!! Otherwise the spammers will
know you are a real live person and you will be spammed for eternity. If a
spam shows up in your regular inbox, mark it as junkmail
and it will automatically go to your junk email box. If one shows up in your junk email
box, just delete it, as your email filter has already figured out it’s spam. Do maybe
we really can’t can spam, but we can get smarter about knowing how to
deal with it. |
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For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2007 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html PO Box 31522 Spokane, Wa 99223-1522 (509)624-7230 |
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