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Is the net about to choke to death?
The Sunday Times ^ | May 4, 2003 | Martin Wroe

Posted on 05/03/2003 4:19:10 PM PDT by MadIvan

The uninvited guest on the web is taking over. If we want to continue e-mailing and surfing, spam must be stopped, says Martin Wroe

Sometime in the next six weeks the internet will pass a milestone. In about the middle of July the number of e-mails we don’t want to receive will overtake the number we do. Yes, spam is on course to conquer the web. For Adrian Pearson, an independent film producer based in London, the milestone is already past. Each day he gets more offers of cheap loans, miracle diets and penile enhancement than work-related messages. “It takes up an inordinate amount of time just clearing them out,” he laments. “Sometimes I wonder if I could do without e-mail. But these days it would be like doing without the phone; not possible.”

Because of the adult nature of much spam, he thinks twice about his two young children using the family computer. “Some of the material is sickening. I want to call the police to tell them my home is being violated, but what can I do?” What can anyone do? Research from the anti-spam specialist Brightmail last week found that pornographic spam alone has risen by 400% in the past year. As our inboxes darken with unsolicited mail, some experts believe the sheer volume of spam could bring the net to a halt.

Office workers waste hours deleting messages while businesses hire experts to fumigate polluted networks. The cost to the global economy is estimated at $9 billion (about £5.5 billion) a year.

And unwanted e-mail turns people off the virtual life. When my 10-year-old daughter opened a Hotmail account last week, she wrote to a friend in New Zealand. Next day came the reply — along with five other e-mails offering assorted anatomical enhancements.

“Spam is rapidly undermining confidence in the internet,” explains John Carr of the Children’s Charities Coalition for Internet Safety. “It confirms people’s view that the net is all a bit seedy.”

Last week three big internet service providers (ISPs) — America Online, Microsoft and Yahoo — agreed to fight this virtual epidemic. At the same time, Virginia, home to some of the world’s biggest internet companies, introduced legislation that could put spammers in jail for five years.

But while the ISPs have started to fight back, professional spammers are notoriously hard to track down. Some believe that the billions of spam e-mails emanate from just 150 shadowy companies, programming computers to randomly generate names and fire off mail by the million, 24 hours a day.

According to Derek Wyatt, the Labour MP who chairs the all-party internet group, the UK is only now waking up to the threat. Wyatt claims it was only after he forwarded pornographic mail received at his Commons e-mail account to the Speaker that officials took notice. They introduced a filtering system, but that is now failing.

“Spammers are getting more and more sophisticated,” he says. “The subject lines no longer include words like ‘sex’. Instead they tell you to have a nice day — but the content turns out to be porn.”

Later this month, Wyatt’s group hosts the first UK spam summit, which will be addressed by Stephen Timms, the minister for e-commerce, and in the next few days Home Office advice on unsolicited commercial e-mail will be published.

The net, says Wyatt, is in its “spotty, adolescent phase” and needs to grow up — in particular it needs a global governing body to monitor and legislate for acceptable online practice. An internet charter could threaten ISPs with fines or licence withdrawal if their customers suffer spam abuse. “If they see regulation coming, the ISPs will throw some of their money at it and fix the problem.”

The ISPs claim it is unfair to blame the virtual “postman”. But if the real postman delivered 30 adult magazines and 17 diet-while-you-sleep offers along with the gas bill nobody would let the Post Office get away with telling customers to get a more intelligent letter box.

At present, however, protection from spam is largely down to the humble computer user. Our irritation at this desktop interference is matched only by our confusion at how these dubious people get hold of our e-mail addresses. In fact, very often it is our fault.

An experiment at the American Centre for Democracy and Technology last year found that e-mail addresses posted on websites attracted the most spam. Six decoy e-mail addresses attracted 8,500 spam messages in six months, whereas e-mail addresses not made public attracted very few.

Spammers use “harvesting” software to record addresses placed on websites, in chat rooms for example, and then start mailing them and selling them on to others.

One simple way around this, when posting your address on a website, is to replace the characters in your e-mail address with deceptive equivalents — sheila at britain dot com instead of sheila@britain.com. Or set up another e-mail address for public posting only.

The simplest advice of all is to never reply to the offer to be “unsubscribed” from an unsolicited e-mail. A reply tells the spammer your e-mail address is live and ideal to spam again.

The Sunday Times Doors section recently started a campaign against spam, encouraging MPs, government, software makers and ISPs to work together to improve anti-spam software and prosecute those responsible. It also called for an independent watchdog.

From October, Britain is set to comply with a European Union directive to make unsolicited e-mail illegal across member states. But most spam originates outside Europe and its pedlars will not be trembling at the thought of new laws.

The spammers are always going to be more net savvy than most of us and in the end, says John Carr, it will not be legislation or education that defeats them.

“The solution will have to be a technological one, and that means the ISPs are going to have to invest. If they don’t, they will pay a hefty price because people will just turn away altogether.”


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Extended News; Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events; US: District of Columbia; US: Virginia; United Kingdom
KEYWORDS: choke; internet; spam; thechildren
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I don't like spam.

Regards, Ivan


1 posted on 05/03/2003 4:19:10 PM PDT by MadIvan
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To: alnick; knews_hound; faithincowboys; hillary's_fat_a**; redbaiter; MizSterious; Krodg; ...
Bump!
2 posted on 05/03/2003 4:19:23 PM PDT by MadIvan
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To: MadIvan
I'll have to check my mailblocks.com service in a few months and see if my Hotmail account is clean. It usually gets loaded with spam like you wouldn't believe even though the funny thing is I've never used it to send messages let alone posted my Hotmail address anywhere on the Net.
3 posted on 05/03/2003 4:22:55 PM PDT by goldstategop ( In Memory Of A Dearly Beloved Friend Who Lives On In My Heart Forever)
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To: MadIvan
Well, I couldn't agree more that something needs to be done. A completely free internet was a nice idea, but spam, especially pornographic spam, needs to be controlled.
4 posted on 05/03/2003 4:23:42 PM PDT by Cicero (Marcus Tullius)
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To: MadIvan
But while the ISPs have started to fight back, professional spammers are notoriously hard to track down. Some believe that the billions of spam e-mails emanate from just 150 shadowy companies, programming computers to randomly generate names and fire off mail by the million, 24 hours a day.

  I've heard this line before, linked to how difficult these people are to trace, and I've never quite understood it. Some one has to hire these companies to fire off the spam in the first place. Even if, somehow, only those who want to issue spam can find these people, we know who is hiring them, because they have their identity on the spam mails. Can't we get the contact information from those companies?

  I just don't see why finding these spammers should be so difficult, I suppose.

Drew Garrett

5 posted on 05/03/2003 4:24:38 PM PDT by agarrett
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To: goldstategop
I have an AOL address that I've never used, and a Hotmail address that I've never used, and they both fill up with SPAM. And both are using the heaviest filters short of rejecting all mail entirely.
6 posted on 05/03/2003 4:24:52 PM PDT by Cicero (Marcus Tullius)
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To: MadIvan
36 spam mails just today. I went through and erased every funny sounding cookie.
7 posted on 05/03/2003 4:25:15 PM PDT by Grampa Dave (Being a Monthly Donor to Free Republic is the Right Thing to do!)
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To: Cicero
Especially the pornography and manhood enhancement pitches. What on earth are those folks thinking? Yeah they either don't have kids or they don't give a damn about the damage they're inflicting upon families with children.
8 posted on 05/03/2003 4:25:47 PM PDT by goldstategop ( In Memory Of A Dearly Beloved Friend Who Lives On In My Heart Forever)
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To: MadIvan
Spam should be made illegal. The advertisers First Amendment rights end somewhere outside of my internet mailbox.
9 posted on 05/03/2003 4:25:52 PM PDT by Dog Gone
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To: Cicero
Hmmm.... why someone would send a ton of ads to an address that never gets used, I can't figure out.
10 posted on 05/03/2003 4:26:58 PM PDT by goldstategop ( In Memory Of A Dearly Beloved Friend Who Lives On In My Heart Forever)
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To: MadIvan
Spammers must die. I think they should be tied to a mail box at the bottom of a cliff and then have 5 tractor trailer loads of bulk mail dumped on them from 500 feet.
11 posted on 05/03/2003 4:29:13 PM PDT by agitator (Ok, mic check...line one...)
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To: MadIvan
“It takes up an inordinate amount of time just clearing them out,” he laments.

Whiner. I can get rid of 20 spam emails in 30 seconds. Its very easy to tell by the subject and author.

12 posted on 05/03/2003 4:31:48 PM PDT by toast
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To: Dog Gone
My view is UNSOLICITED commercial e-mail is an invasion of privacy. If you want to sign up to be informed by a particular company once in awhile of new products you might interested in buying, that's one thing. Its an entirely different matter to be flooded with advertisements for things you don't want, aren't interested in buying and which you get irrespective of your feelings about it. I mean the spammers worst offense isn't that they gunk up the Internet, which by itself is bad enough, its their telling us we should have no control over what ends up in our in-boxes. I wish we could put them out of business for good by giving them a taste of what we get on the receiving end here every day.
13 posted on 05/03/2003 4:32:38 PM PDT by goldstategop ( In Memory Of A Dearly Beloved Friend Who Lives On In My Heart Forever)
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To: MadIvan
Bill Gates had a suggestion in his book, The Road Ahead: that we charge people for the privilege of e-mailing us. Basically, if someone wanted to send you e-mail, they would have to pay about a dime to you before your account would accept it. Of course, the money transfers would have to be done automatically, from ISP to ISP, but technologically speaking, it could be done.

The basic idea is, a dime wouldn't stop your friends and family from sending you e-mail. But it would stop Mister Penile Enlargement from sending out ten million e-mails when he expects to get back only ten replies. That works when the e-mails are free, but when they cost $1 million and he only stands to make $100, he'll think again about darkening your virtual doorstep.

14 posted on 05/03/2003 4:33:48 PM PDT by JoeSchem (Okay, now it works: http:geocities.com/engineerzero)
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To: toast
Not if they disguise their subject line so you still have to open it up to make sure you aren't deleting a legitimate message. They are the scum of the Internet.
15 posted on 05/03/2003 4:34:05 PM PDT by goldstategop ( In Memory Of A Dearly Beloved Friend Who Lives On In My Heart Forever)
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To: toast
If you got 200 or 2000 or more, every day, mixed up with your business email, you might whine too.

I don't get any spam in my current email address. It's an .edu, and maybe they have an effective filter.
16 posted on 05/03/2003 4:38:27 PM PDT by ChemistCat (My new bumper sticker: MY OTHER DRIVER IS A ROCKET SCIENTIST)
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Comment #17 Removed by Moderator

To: KBtry4-11
I just discovered that a friend's email sent me a worm. Now I'm getting bogus emails "from" him that contain attachments. Of course, I won't open the attachments, but it really pisses me off.
18 posted on 05/03/2003 4:45:33 PM PDT by EggsAckley ( Midnight at the Oasis)
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To: toast
Whiner. I can get rid of 20 spam emails in 30 seconds. Its very easy to tell by the subject and author.

Cool. Post your e-mail address here and you will get a chance to go for a personal best.

19 posted on 05/03/2003 4:45:44 PM PDT by Blue Screen of Death
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To: goldstategop
Quite frequently, they use just the first name of the sender, ie, Martha, or John... not listing the email address, outright. If you know a Martha or John, you are tempted to open it, thinking your friend sent you something.
20 posted on 05/03/2003 4:49:56 PM PDT by Pan_Yans Wife (Lurking since 2000.)
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