Laura Gurak asks, "Has anyone else noticed a sudden increase in the amount of porn-type spam they are getting?" Yes, I have. I observe that much of this material seems to come via third-world nations, especially Russia. This means that European privacy laws -- and North American laws, when they are created -- will not be of much use in stopping the problem. A vast amount of the spam I am getting these days is HTML mail that has embedded links that do not work with my email program. I couldn't respond if I wanted to do so. -- Ken Friedman, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design Department of Technology and Knowledge Management Norwegian School of Management Visiting Professor Advanced Research Institute School of Art and Design Staffordshire University
I haven't noticed much in terms of porn based spam, I used to get some a few months ago, but I started routing them to autorepliers and they stopped. What I have been getting is more "nigerian scam" types and strange advertisements from south america and china, for instance i just received an offer for bottled water in argentina, very strange. There was an article on this a few weeks back on wired news about the increase in spam. I believe it tied it to the increase in search engines worldwide and the ease of harvesting e-mails, etc. along those lines, I'm seeing many more search engines hitting the servers here. one thing that seems to affect increases in spam is belonging to e-mail lists that archive but don't remove your e-mail. Air-l and all similar that i run replace the e-mail, though not in forwarded messages:( not much i can do about that without rewriting the archivers. however, an interesting test for such harvesting is to do a google search on your e-mail id, for instance jhuns generates 404 google records. I ran some other frequent posters and generalize that most people that post to lists generate numbers over 100. jeremy hunsinger jhuns@vt.edu on the ibook www.cddc.vt.edu www.cddc.vt.edu/jeremy www.dromocracy.com
participants (2)
-
jeremy hunsinger -
Ken Friedman