Anti Spam
Spam blocker
Spam This country is drowning in spam. It now accounts for nearly
half of all e-mails and it is growing at the rate of 50 per cent a month
Hardly a week goes by without my receiving a fax that says something
such as: "Have YOUR say in American Democracy." It goes on to ask a
topical question such as: "Was President Bush right to declare war on
Iraq?", and then has boxes for "Yes" or "No". The giveaway to the fax's
aim comes when it says: "Please fax back your replies to..."--followed
by a 1-900 (a premium rate) number. In other words, if you fax back, you
are paying money on your phone bill to the senders of the fax. A nice
little scam, that.
Such fax scams were supposed to have been made illegal by a 1991
law--and it is true that these are the only junk faxes I now receive,
together with one that says: "Check Your Wall Street Investments NOW!"
But what has become a true scandal here, and is threatening to bring
businesses to a grinding halt, is the proliferation of junk e-mail,
known as spam. In the US, spam accounts for nearly half of all e-mails,
and is growing at the rate of 50 per cent a month. The average consumer
receives 110 unwanted e-mails a week, and corporate spending to combat
it is now costing between $8bn and $10bn a year. This year no fewer than
two trillion unsolicited e-mails will wing their way through cyberspace.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) estimates that around two-thirds
contain false or deceptive information.
The most common are for prescription drugs ("Get VIAGRAA," said one I
received last week--a deliberate misspelling to which I shall return
later), penis and breast enlargement, getting out of debt, and offering
large payments from Nigeria. I receive dozens of these a day, and AOL
sometimes blocks as many as 2.4 billion spams a day from its 27 million
users in the US--though many, many more get through. So bad has the
problem become that the three big rivals in cyberspace--Microsoft, AOL
and Yahoo!--recently announced that they were joining forces to fight
what, at the very least, is an annoying daily occurrence for all
internet users here.
I know that there is spam in the UK, too, and an EU directive, which
will come into effect in October, will try to get it under control. But
spam has got entirely out of hand here over the past three years and is
now reaching intolerable levels. (The term "spam", incidentally, does
not derive directly from the processed meat that came out of the Second
World War rations--but from the cyber-generation's fascination with a
Monty Python sketch in which "Spam, Spam, Spam" was sung as the
refrain.)
With the big three internet companies declaring war on the spammer, a
fierce cyberspace battle of attrition is now in full spate. The big
companies--and small ones, too--are investing millions in software and
cyber-detectives to catch the bad guys. But the bad guys nearly always
remain a step ahead, to the extent that Panix, a small internet service
provider (ISP) with 5,000 subscribers, says its profits will fall by
between 12 and 15 per cent in 2003.
For example, filters used to stop words such as "Viagra" getting through
are beaten by deliberate misspellings of the word--hence the (unwanted)
"Viagraa" I was offered a few days ago.
There are three basic ways the spammers get hold of e-mail addresses,
all of them underhand. The first is by the use of "spyware", software
programs that plant a bug in a computer and then enable the spammers to
root out e-mail addresses used on legitimate websites; most computers
(particularly if they are used to download music) have such spyware
implanted without the user's knowledge.
The second is by the collection of e-mail addresses from marketing
companies that have legitimately acquired them but which then sell them.
Typically, these firms will charge more unscrupulous individuals
$500-$2,000 for a million e-mail addresses, which will then be targeted
for Viagra, longer penises and so forth.
The third method of finding e-mail addresses is to use the so-called
"dictionary" method, by which computers generate every possible
combination of letters and numbers for a particular domain
("john8734@aol.com", say). If one in a hundred succeed in getting
through to a real e-mail address, they are doing well. It costs only
pennies to send millions of e-mails, and when the non-existent ones are
bounced back, the spam merchants know that those aren't real addresses.
They then concentrate on what they have discovered are genuine e-mail
addresses, add them to a list--and then sell the lists. If recipients
send an "unsubscribe" e-mail back, the spammers have an alternative
method of discovering genuine e-mail addresses. And so the spam
proliferates.
So much so, in fact, that the FTC held a week-long, bad-tempered
conference at the end of last month to discuss the problem: one of those
trying to prevent spam nearly came to blows with another who is in
favour of it. Pro-spammers say it would be a violation of free-speech
constitutional rights; certainly any federal law against spam (and there
are currently four rival anti-spam bills before Congress) would be
fraught with problems, not least that it would not affect spams sent
from abroad. And spammers, as every ISP knows by now, are notoriously
difficult to track down: they use every trick in the book to disguise
the computers from which they operate.
The junk fax law allows consumers to sue violators for between $500 and
$1,500 for each unwanted fax received. In the case of the e-mail scam,
so far 26 states have passed anti-spam laws; Delaware bans the
unsolicited sending of e-mail, and in Virginia it is a felony punishable
by up to five years in prison to send more than 10,000 copies of any
unwanted e-mail. But if just one recipient out of 100,000 hands over
money as a result of spam, then spamming can remain profitable.
All this is why, before the problem gets totally out of hand and brings
internet communication to a halt, the companies are desperately trying
to crack down. AOL has launched an intense legal assault, suing a dozen
spammers last month alone; while another big American ISP, Earth Link,
has launched more than 100 lawsuits. Despite the problems in securing
convictions, a man known as the "Buffalo Spammer" was recently ordered
to pay EarthLink $16.4m in damages; he had sent more than 825 million
unwanted e-mails since March 2002. Last year, one K C Smith of Tennessee
was ordered to pay $25bn to EarthLink, none of which has so far been
collected; in evidence, it came out that he had sent more than one
billion spams.
The filters that the companies use and update every day do not just fail
to catch misspelt words. "Make Fast Cash" -- three typical words in a
spam and obvious candidates to be filtered out -- can become M*A*K*E
F*A*S*T C*A*S*H, and thus missable by filters. Pornographic pictures are
notoriously hard to catch by even the most sophisticated software, and
can easily be confused with an innocent picture of, say, a baby. There
is another problem, too: a legitimate e-mail with the words "Virgin
Islands" in its subject line is likely to be filtered out, sometimes
angering customers. So it is hard -- if not downright impossible -- for
the ISPs to win the intense cyber-battle.
The biggest problem of all in the spam war alas, is that recipients
sometimes really do shell out money to buy bigger penis pills or to get
out of debt. One survey estimated that no fewer than 37 per cent of
recipients had at some time bought something offered by spam e-mails.
If that figure is remotely correct, it makes spamming potentially
profitable, and something that consumers dictate should stay. Another
statistic, however, belies this one: 13 per cent of customers have
already changed their e-mail addresses this year to avoid the dreaded
spam.
And so the ferocious cyberspace arms race here continues, with each side
in the spam business desperately trying to outwit the other every day.
Legitimate advertising by e-mail last year generated $1.4bn. And spam
profits? They are hard to estimate. But some people, somewhere, are
daily making profits from what Monty Python so memorably called Spain,
Spain, Spain: an unappetising meal in its original form, but positively
atrocious for all of us in its present one.
For the latest information about
spam
The Goals of spam
The goal of spam
is to determine the intrinsic grouping in a set of unlabeled data. But
how to decide what constitutes a good spam? It can be shown that
there is no absolute “best” criterion which would be independent of the
final aim of the spam. Consequently, it is the user which must
supply this criterion, in such a way that the result of the spam
will suit their needs.
For instance, we could be interested in finding representatives for
homogeneous groups (data reduction), in finding “natural
clusters” and describe their unknown properties (“natural” data
types), in finding useful and suitable groupings (“useful” data
classes) or in finding unusual data objects (outlier detection).
For the latest information about
The Goals of spam
Who uses spam?
Many different types of organizations use
spam as a vital
part of the work. A sampling of these include:
-
Marketing:
finding groups of customers with similar behavior given a large
database of customer data containing their properties and past
buying records;
-
Biology:
classification of plants and animals given their features;
-
Libraries:
book ordering;
-
Insurance:
identifying groups of motor insurance policy holders with a high
average claim cost; identifying frauds;
-
City-planning:
identifying groups of houses according to their house type,
value and geographical location;
-
Earthquake
studies: spam observed earthquake epicenters to
identify dangerous zones;
-
WWW:
document classification; spam weblog data to discover
groups of similar access patterns.
For the latest information about
Who Uses spam
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