spam (Page 2)

We recently wrote about a spam vigilante who identified the spammer who was making his life miserable. Now we’ve discovered a “reformed” spammer who’s quit the computer game and owns a nightclub in New Hampshire. As head of the junk e-mail company Cyber Promotions, he was “cyberspace’s most hated person in the 1990s.”

Brian McWilliams writes in wired.com that Sanford Wallace, known as “Spamford,” is now known as “DJ MasterWeb” at Plum Crazy in Rochester, NH. He says, “Now, instead of making money near a bunch of computers, I make money near a bunch of beautiful women.”
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Ever wish you could personally go after the people who are sending you all that annoying, often disgusting, spam? One person did it.

Michele Delio writes in wired.com that graphic artist Andy Markley discovered that a spammer was sending out hundreds of pieces of spam, using Markley’s domain. His computer mailbox was filled with complaints from people who received the spam.
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A new version of the SoBig computer worm is expected any day, and this one will lead to a massive increase in spam (as if we’re not overwhelmed by it already). The SoBig.F worm was designed to make computers all over the world send out a flood of spam. Some experts say that over half the spam you are receiving right now is a result of the virus.

Will Knight writes in New Scientist that there have been six different versions of SoBig so far, one of them released right after another. Each one enables an infected computer to be used by spammers to reroute junk email, evading efforts to block it.
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To switch on your e-mail and not see at least half of it filled with spam (including a lot of pornography) seems like an impossible dream. But the Anti-Spam Research Group is determined to stamp out spam. One of the major problems is defining exactly what spam is. Anti-spammer Paul Judge says, “Spam is a problem of unwanted messages and we believe that you as an individual or organization should be able to decide the messages that you want and the messages that you don’t want.” Steve Atkins of Spamcon.org says, “Fifty per cent of all e-mail is spam. It’s costing an estimated eight to nine billion dollars in lost productivity in America alone. Worldwide, 628 million users find spam annoying and today people are getting 200 pieces of spam a day.”
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