Down
Spammers
- The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and
the marrow in the bones,
The exquisite realization of health;
Oh I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,
Oh I say now these are the soul!
Leaves of Grass
If we had their names, addresses, and home telephone numbers we could take our complaints directly to the source so that they would begin to think twice before sending out 4,000,000 pieces of gunk, inundating us with messages for Russian ladies, doubtful mortgages, drugs, fortunes to be made in Central Africa, and penis enlargers. Jeremy Lansman, manager of KYES-TV in Anchorage here offers a few thoughts on how to track them down. I hate it, as much as I hate junk mail. I used to carefully poke all those American Express billing stuffers in with my payment, forcing some poor clerk to sift through all that junk to find my check. Sometimes I would engage telemarketers for good chunks of an hour with witty conversation as a penalty for disturbing my restful evening. Junk e-mail is eroding the value of the internet. As undesirable, unwanted junk fills the in-box, it becomes harder to find desired messages from friends. Although filters can help, none is perfect. So, early on, I went to war with spammers. I used to think that if only everyone would do this, spammers would wither and die. I'll say more about that later. To begin, here are a few tips. All UCE must lead to a seller via a phone number, postal address, fax number, or link to a Universal Reference Locator (URL) --- also known as a browser link. One common spam is the one, I am sure you have seen it, selling reports. It is a type of pyramid chain letter. It has some names and addresses in the message. This is easy. Most of these people are smart enough to use a P.O. Box, but not all. I look the names up in on line phone book directories using George came to the phone. I had called a trailer park in Florida, and George, who was retired, was about 65, and --- I could almost see him --- was overweight. He had nothing left in life except the little dibs and dabs of money he made sending out junk. I told him that his use of the secret code meant that he or his company had illegally broken into my computer, but he vigorously defended his new life's work. "I ain't doing nothing illegal, and a lot of people like receiving my mail." URL to Site Owner Where the money trail is a URL, you can look up the owner of the site. For example, look up my site, www.kyes.com I called one site owner, a school book seller. It didn't seem they would be selling pictures of naked people. The woman who answered the phone sounded just like a school teacher. She was astounded that their site had been hijacked, by.... uh... well, you know. Finding the hidden URLThe law-and-order types have it all wrong. They want to legislate against internet spam. There is a far easier way to get rid of it. Put it in our hands. Make it possible for us to close in on those people who are sending out this garbage.
[To be concluded in our next issue.]