Karim, I'm not sure that the spammers as sophisticated as you imply. I got a copy of the same Cricinfo spam sent to the LTSC-LOM mailing list. A slightly different spin on this, though, is it's interesting to see that Cricinfo is resorting to these tactics. For any AIR-L people who share an interest in cricket, there's a fascinating piece on the evolution of the Cricinfo site (a volunteer-originated web site which has grown to become the sponsor of the main English domestic cricket tournament last season): Alastair Maclellan (2001), The Cricinfo Story, The New Ball Vol. 6 (an excellent journal, subtitled 'the best new cricket writing'). Steve

Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2002 14:31:08 -0500 From: "Karim R. Lakhani" <lakhani@MIT.EDU> Organization: MIT - G.W.F. Hegel Centre for Dialectical Inquiry To: air-l@aoir.org Subject: [Air-l] Ethnic Spamming?? -- FWD:lakhani, incredible cricket software released!] Reply-To: air-l@aoir.org

Hi All,

This spam came as a real surprise to me. Somehow these guys have figured out that I am of South Asian descent and assumed that I like cricket and thus my absolute need for "cricket score software."

AFAIK, I have not signed up to any "indian" or "pakistani" or south asian websites, they must have dredged e-mail addresses and then matched them with ethnic names.

Anyone else come across this fine grained spamming? best,

Karim

cricinfo123@btv.org wrote:

_____________________________________________________________________ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

This will change the way you get cricket scores in your computer!

Until now, you had to visit slow and tedious websites to get live ball by ball commentary...

With this revolutionary software, you will never be stuck at those slow websites to get live score updates.

The CricketBar relays simple commentary and ball by ball score directly to your desktop in a small window strip that you can dock at the botrtom or top of your screen.

You continue to surf other sites or use your computer for whatever you want, while the score is relayed to you without interrupting your

work.

This is so good, that within a few days we've had over 7000 users!

With CricketBar you can now work and have fun at the same time!

Get your FREE copy now at >>> http://www.cricketbar.com/ref.asp?re=sonal

_____________________________________________________________________ ---------------------------------------------------------------------

-- =================================== Karim R. Lakhani MIT Sloan School of Management MIT Open Source Research Project e-mail: lakhani@mit.edu voice: 617-851-1224 fax: 617-344-0403 http://opensource.mit.edu http://mit.edu/lakhani/www ===================================

Steve Walker, Senior Lecturer School of Information Management Leeds Metropolitan University