Fighting Email Spam
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Spam It's a disgusting topic, and one that most people would
rather turn away from -- which is just how the pornographers like it, of
course. They would rather we just shuddered and threw up our hands. This
goes for all pornography, but I am concerned for the moment with the
kind that arrives by e-mail, cluttering and blighting your in-box.
How's your e-mail been lately? Mine's been pretty foul. I get between
five and ten porno e-mails a day. Others get upwards of 50 -- through no
fault of their own, mind you. Let me provide some choice recent samples
from my in-box. This isn't "nice" porn; it isn't pretty ladies and men
posing on European beaches. It's sick stuff, with a very heavy emphasis
on children, incest, and bestiality.
One e-mail has on the subject line, "Family." And inside: "Incest at Its
Finest. Grandparents give grandkids sex lessons. Dad & Daughter. Young
girl cannot control her urges." One e-mail address is "teeniesuckathon."
Another e-mail has on its subject line, "Sorry about the late Christmas
gift" (this came in early January). Inside: "Girls F***ing Animals After
School" and "Teen Sluts Covered in Sperm." Another e-mail informs, "We
have selected a list of the 25 best pay sites in the preteen industry."
Note "preteen": In all likelihood, this is no idle boast, as anyone in
the anti-child-porn field will tell you. Preteen means preteen. And that
is not only abhorrent, but illegal -- a crime.
A great many people are embarrassed about being the mere recipient of
these e-mails. They're apt to think they've done something wrong: that
they perhaps were on a naughty site, and thus ensnared for all time. And
if they squawk about the porn they're receiving, others might say, "Gee,
why are you so interested? Turn you on a little, huh?" (Anti-porn
activists get this frequently.) Some people are also afraid of being
thought prudish or illiberal if they complain about porn: These things
are part of the big, wicked world, and there's the Bill of Rights, of
course.
But it bears repeating: Child porn is illegal, and so, for that matter,
is "obscenity," whose definition is a lot less slippery than some people
think, or than some interested parties pretend. Many people want to do
more than "just hit delete" ("JHD," as Internetters put it). If the
material is sufficiently bad -- particularly when it involves children
-- they want to do something, not just sit there helpless. And they can.
For one thing, they can contact the National Center for Missing and
Exploited Children in Washington. Four years ago, the center set up what
they call the Cyber Tip Line, found at www.cybertipline.com. There a
concerned citizen can make a report. He can say, "I found something
fishy. Looks like it involves kids. Here it is -- please check it out."
People can also go directly to a Justice Department website,
www.usdoj.gov/criminal/ceos/report.htm, where further information on
reporting child porn is available. No one has to sit helpless, if he
doesn't want to.
At the National Center, there are not only the outfit's own staff but
federal agents from the Postal Service, Customs, and the FBI. All of
these scour the Internet and deal with citizen tips. According to John
Rabun, chief operating officer of the center, the more tips about one
site -- or one "spammed" e-mail -- the better. "It's the old squeaky-
wheel thing." Law enforcement is making plenty of arrests off the tips;
the center has been receiving about 900 a week. But the arrests, says
Rabun, constitute just a drop in the bucket -- which is better than
nothing at all, of course.
One citizen who is very definitely "on the case" is Julie Posey, a
homemaker in Colorado. She's a heroine of the anti-child-exploitation
movement, its archangel, or avenging angel, its Joan of Arc. When you
read about her and talk with her, you think, "They should really make a
movie about her." And they are: A company has just bought the rights to
her story.
Julie Posey's role in life is to monitor the Internet looking for the
abuse of children, sniffing out the pedophiles who lurk there. Her
entire operation is detailed and resident at www.pedowatch.org. "My
mission," she says on her site, "is to protect children online from the
predators who abuse them. I do this by receiving tips from people on the
Internet about suspicious activity that they have found and following up
on the information. I then identify the suspects involved and pass the
information along with all evidence to law enforcement for further
investigation." Her work has led to more than 20 arrests and
convictions. Nothing gives her more satisfaction than to see a pedophile
hauled away. The average pedophile, she says, will rape or otherwise
molest 200 children in his "career." Every time she busts someone, or
leads to that bust, she thinks, "Well, that's X number of children saved
from that particular pedophile." The drops in the bucket add up.
Posey herself was raped when she was an adolescent; the rapist got 90
days. He raped again, of course: and then was put away for longer. Posey
is fearless in going about her work. Others, she understands, can't be
so fearless. "People are afraid to contact police," she says. "They want
to make anonymous tips." They're sort of paralyzed. Since her efforts
have been publicized -- there was a profile recently in the Los Angeles
Times -- people have flooded her website, wanting her to act on this or
that offense. She can hardly keep up. She herself uses
www.cybertipline.com. A better situation, of course, would be a nation
of Julie Poseys, thousands of citizens who get off their duffs when they
spot child porn or suspect child endangerment. Some people -- such as
defense attorneys -- view Posey as a "vigilante" and "busybody." But she
has earned the admiration and gratitude of law enforcement. Professional
badge-wearers can't conduct this war alone.
Child porn has exploded in recent years. Never has there been so much of
it; never has it been so widely disseminated. There are at least 100,000
child-porn sites -- not just pornographic sites, mind you, but sites
devoted entirely to child porn. The demand for the stuff seems
insatiable. As you investigate these matters, it seems bad enough that
there are countless producers and purveyors of child porn -- but then it
hits you that there are many more countless consumers of it. One's
neighbors, presumably. The problem is far larger than the average person
imagines; law enforcement and activists sometimes have to fight
incredulity.
Much of the porn is circulated via "spam," which is the slang term for
(the more formal) "unsolicited commercial e-mail," or UCE. Spam is a
bear to combat. There are many "filter" systems, but they work
imperfectly. Once you're on a list, it can be impossible to
"unsubscribe"; they make you jump through hoops, and by the time you
spend a couple of minutes on it, you may be no better off. It's rather
futile to "block" offensive addresses too, because pornographers -- and
other spammers, of course -- just switch to another address. Your porn
-- and, again, spam generally -- can get so bad, you quit your account
and acquire a new one. But the new one, too, can quickly get spoiled and
overrun with spam. Some people -- including Julie Posey -- report that,
when they start a new account, the porn spam begins arriving within 24
hours.
And porn can assault you when you're just doing some general -- and
innocent -- web surfing. In fact, this is called "assaultive porn," or
"ambush porn" -- it's just in your face, all of a sudden, perhaps on a
"pop-up screen." All the experts say that this will not go away, or
diminish, until the pornographers are made to pay; until it gets too
difficult, too risky, too bothersome for them.
And that means law enforcement -- not necessarily the enactment of new
laws, but the enforcement of ones already written. The Clinton
administration, by consensus -- and not just conservative, partisan
consensus -- fell down on this job. At first it seemed that the Ashcroft
Justice Department, taking over from the Reno Justice Department, was
ushering in a new day. Things were getting worse for the pornographers.
They learned that someone was paying attention, and enforcing, and
backed off. But then came 9/11, and anti-porn harassment and prosecution
sort of stopped. One federal insider says that "Justice Department and
FBI guys were pulled off porn and put on al-Qaeda. And it's doubtful,
frankly, they'll ever come back. When buildings full of people are being
blown up, you have other things to worry about."
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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