15th Anniversary of Me 'Coining' The Term 'Spam'

[jayfurr]

I got interviewed by the BBC today.

Twice.

Once by their news division's website and once by a reporter for BBC Radio Five Live. The BBC Radio Five Live interview was sort of preparatory, not-for-airing stuff, and I'll be getting interviewed a third time, live, tonight at 6:50 PM Eastern Daylight Time (just before midnight in the UK).

Whee!

Anyway, here's a link to the article that appeared on the BBC news website:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7322615.stm

Comments

[jhvilas.livejournal.com]

Yes, but what are you doing about the killing that has never been denied of two million Turks by the Armenians! :)

[jayfurr.livejournal.com]

Ah, good old Serdar.

I'd respond in character but the BBC linked my website to the news article and it's just vaguely possible that some of the usual no-sense-of-humor types from Asia Minor might find their way to this entry and then to the comment thread. My Armenian crook/criminal/grandparents would be so ashamed if that were to happen.

-- Joel Furrian

[jhvilas.livejournal.com]

Would you like me to delete the comment?

[jayfurr.livejournal.com]

Naw, you're fine. What would life be without a little danger?

UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

OK, serious hat on, what's your preferred solution to ending spam?

[jayfurr.livejournal.com]

Email spam isn't much of an issue for me lately since both my employer and my two ISPs offer fairly effective spam filtering. My spam is redirected to a folder that I never actually have to look at, and the filters catch 99%+ of the real garbage. The only nuisance is that the Bayesian filters aren't 100% accurate and once in a while catch something that I actually do want to read. Thus, I have to take a look at the stuff that gets caught, at least doing a quick power-scan of the senders and subject lines, in order to intercept anything and drag it back to my real mail.

I feel really sorry for folks who run their own mail servers and who don't have anything like that helping them out. Rather than run my own mail server for furrs.org, I let Earthlink do it and I manage my mailboxes and stuff via their site. I don't think I'd want the, um, liberating experience of managing my own spamcatching.

On the other hand, after years of relatively low spammage in the USENET groups I frequent, Chinese-origin spam has made a huge debut lately. The main newsgroup I look at, rec.sport.football.college, is so incredibly full of spam messages from people trying to sell us sports shoes and stuff that I just about can't stand to go in there any longer. I used to pay a lot of attention to the various anti-spam newsgroups where the folks who were automatically cancelling USENET spam messages hung out, but it's been years since I had the time to keep an eye there -- and I don't know if some of the spam-cancellers have just said "to hell with it" or given up or what. I do know that it drives me crazy.

And I understand that, anecdotally, people with high-traffic blogs get a LOT of spam traffic in the form of garbage comments to their posts. Obviously, rejecting all comments from non-logged-in users will do that, but with my livejournal, I want people to be able to comment without having to set up a livejournal account. Thus, I get several messages a week in the form of 'comments' to-be-approved, but I just sigh and delete them and go on.

But that's not really what you asked. I guess the reason I rambled a bit is that in my eyes, spam takes multiple forms and the forms that annoy me the most are actually NOT the forms that annoy most people. Email spam is what most people think of as 'spam' these days and if you don't have an ISP with a spam filter there's not a huge amount you can do. If your spam in your inbox has passed the 90%-of-all-messages level, you might be better off setting up a new mailbox and only giving it out to people you really trust, and NEVER using it as the email address for things like magazine subscriptions and things ordered online. Even there that strategy wouldn't be 100% successful, because people like my mom sometimes send mass did-you-hear-about-this-urban-legend messages out to virtually everyone in their address book and of course it never occurs to them to do it as a BCC:. Next thing you know my email address would be resent and resent to thousands upon thousands of people as the mail gets forwarded on dozens of times to other poor bastards by their have-you-heard-this-urban-legend mothers.

Another 'solution', meant to address the botnet spammers who use YOUR personal computer and MY personal computer to send out spam by invading it with viruses and stuff: get ISPs to block all traffic originating from port 25 (SMTP) unless a user specifically requests it. A home PC connecting via POP or IMAP to a mailbox on a remote server doesn't NEED SMTP and that's just about the only way that you're going to reduce the botnet spammers at all. It really doesn't matter, you know, if you establish all the whitelists in the world and create authorized-sender credentials -- I can forge message headers if I can invade your machine and I can fake authorized-sender credentials if I want to dedicate the resources to it. The botnet spammers are going to match you innovation-for-innovation, and again, they're going to keep doing this as long as their zombie hosts are able to send mail out.

Wow...

[flaviarassen.livejournal.com]

Can I say I know you? :-)

Re: Wow...

[jayfurr.livejournal.com]

Sure.

Absolutely.

[jayfurr.livejournal.com]

18 months after my post, you comment? :)

Thanks! :)