Phantasm66
Posts: 4,909 +8
God I hate it! There's nothing worse than opening your mail box to find some unsolicited rubbish about having sex with school girls (yeah, sure they are.... or wait, read on, perhaps they are ) when its easy enough to find that sort of thing on the internet anyway.
If I want to look at porn, believe me I can find it. I don't need it poured into my mail box every morning. And I certainly don't need references to bestiality and paedophilia. :evil:
One thing that makes me very angry is that a child could sign up for a hotmail account quite innocently, and then get bombared with this stuff.
I have one hotmail account that gets about 150 mails a day. 99 per cent of this is spam and about 80-90 per cent of that is porn stuff. (The rest being the usual BS about debt consolidation, getting a "free" degree and what's the best way to make my male anatomy 2 x bigger... )
I also question whether this sort of unsolicited mail is even a very good means of advertisement at all. I believe that the vast majority of people find this kind of thing so annoying that even if they did happen to read a spam that thought was interesting they would not buy anything on principal.
More is to the point, I believe that spam is so annoying that practically no one at all even reads it.
I move that it should be banned from the internet. (Next on my agenda being that pop-up windows.... )
source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/26589.html
If I want to look at porn, believe me I can find it. I don't need it poured into my mail box every morning. And I certainly don't need references to bestiality and paedophilia. :evil:
One thing that makes me very angry is that a child could sign up for a hotmail account quite innocently, and then get bombared with this stuff.
I have one hotmail account that gets about 150 mails a day. 99 per cent of this is spam and about 80-90 per cent of that is porn stuff. (The rest being the usual BS about debt consolidation, getting a "free" degree and what's the best way to make my male anatomy 2 x bigger... )
I also question whether this sort of unsolicited mail is even a very good means of advertisement at all. I believe that the vast majority of people find this kind of thing so annoying that even if they did happen to read a spam that thought was interesting they would not buy anything on principal.
More is to the point, I believe that spam is so annoying that practically no one at all even reads it.
I move that it should be banned from the internet. (Next on my agenda being that pop-up windows.... )
Porn spam on the rise
By John Leyden
UK corporates are bombarded by porn and pedo bulk-emails - and ineffective anti-spam software and outdated email usage policies mean that many are coping badly
That's the warning from messaging firm Nexor which reckons pornographic emails are on the rise and that many are passing through ineffective defences to reach workers' desktops. It reckons pornographic email is growing at a mininum of 20 per cent per annum, and possibly more, because of under-reporting of the problem.
As well as wasting time dealing with offensive messages, employees who respond to such emails and download illegal content from their workplace could leave both themselves and their employers open to investigation, Nexor warns.
Standard methods for spam control rely on key word searching and referral to real time black hole lists which compile lists of known spammers. Spammers are aware of these methods and are developing ways to beat them, according to Nexor, which says porn spam is notoriously hard to intercept. The company sells technology, called Nexor Interceptor, which identifies the content of emails based upon the natural language concepts contained within them, and not keywords.
Its more sophisticated pattern matching and neural network technology does a better job in blocking spam - particularly unsolicited messages containing pornographic content, Nexor reckons.
A recent article by Associated Press provides evidence that spam controls methods in general and organisations such as Spamhaus.org are making life increasingly difficult for bulk emailers.
AP interviewed a number of notorious bulk emailers for the article, including Bernard Balan, 51, of Ontario, Canada, who told the news agency he has gone through "unbelievable hardships" to keep the spam flowing from his one-stop-financial.com operation.
"My operating costs have gone up 1,000 percent this year, just so I can figure out how to get around all these filters," he told the news agency.
Steve Linford, director of the London-based Spamhaus Project, which tracks the Internet's worst spammers and provides blacklists of their IP addresses, reckons specialist software is only part of the solution.
Ninety per cent of spam emails come from 100-150 known spammers, he says, so organisations configuring their mail server to query the Spamhaus Block List, a real time DNS-based database of IP addresses of verified spammers, can block a huge amount of email from junk senders. Referring to Spamhaus' list allows email to be blocked without having to look at its content - saving processor time, he said.
Nexor and McAfee anti-spam products can block email from open proxies, unlike Spamhaus' free services do not block email from open proxies, so Linford reckons firms which achieved the best results from a combination of the two technologies.
Stream of depravity
Technology differences aside, Linford supports Naxor's view that the flood of pornographic emails is on the rise. Many spam messages now often come with photographs attached or containing Javascript which, if opened, causes browsers to open onto pornographic Web sites, he told us.
Many spammers come from a background in the porn industry, so although they might deny it, Spamhaus reckons more than 50 per cent of the worst spammers are sending out pornographic messages.
Pornographic emails bordering on paedophilia are becoming more commonplace, Linford told us, though these most often come from a different group of individuals operating pedo Web sites.
The disturbing popularity of such Web sites was highlighted last weekend when it emerged that the FBI had trapped more than 7,000 British paedophiles in a sting operation.
UK police have been given the names and addresses of 7,272 individuals who used credit cards to pay for indecent pictures of under age children on Web sites seized by the FBI last year, The Telegraph reports. ®
source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/26589.html