http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE

By Levi Nichols

• Junk Food or Unwanted Internet Junk? How about both?

•The food “SPAM” is the processed meat product produced by Hormel Foods described as "Shoulder Pork and hAM"/"SPiced hAM" luncheon meat

•The internet “spam” has today come to mean network abuse, particularly junk E-mail and massive junk postings such as advertisements

•Today, spam affects everyone who uses the internet or has E-mail. And I’m not just talking about the food

• The name spam for unwanted internet junk was adopted in March of 1993

• It was named after the luncheon meat SPAM made by Hormel Foods

• As watched in the video, It was the catchy tune from SPAM commercials performed by Monty Python’s Flying Circus skit “Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, lovely spam! Wonderful spam!” that started the name for internet junk

• Thus meaning, something that keeps repeating to great annoyance

• Surprisingly enough, Hormel Foods didn’t care that the name be used for internet junk as long as the all capital letter form of the word wasn’t used

•The first documented report of spam was sent by E-mail on May 3, 1978

•This E-mail was sent to roughly 400 people who where using ARPANET, which was the “internet” at that time

•Gary Thuerk, a marketer for DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) was the one who sent the E-mail spam

•Gary Thuerk is now known as The Father of Spam, The Grandfather of Spam, and The Original Spammer

•The term “spam” was not yet adopted at this time

Blame this guy

• Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, partners in a husband-and-wife firm of lawyers who on April 12, 1994 posted the first massive commercial spam attack. Both lawyers specialized in immigration laws

• They used a Perl script written by a Phoenix programmer known only as 'Jason', to generate advertisements for their service of enrolling people in the "Green Card Lottery“

•These advertisements, entitled "Green Card Lottery - Final One?", was sent to at least 6,000 USENET discussion groups

•The couple claimed in a December 1994 interview to have gained 1,000 new clients and "made $100,000 off an ad that cost them only pennies"

•In 1997, Laurence Canter was permanently disqualified from practicing law by the Supreme Court of Tennessee

• Infamous quote: “Two years from now, spam will be solved” (2004)

• Microsoft was working on a solution based on the concept of “proof,” or being able to identifying the sender of the spam

•Not much was said on how this method worked but was designed to hit the sender of an E-mail in the pocketbook

• People would set a level of monetary risk - low or high, depending on their choice - for receiving e-mail from strangers. If the e-mail turns out to be from a long-lost relative, for example, the recipient would charge nothing. But if it is unwanted spam, the sender would have to fork over the cash

• This “micropayment” concept is as dead now as it was then

• Maurene Caplan Grey, "Yes, I think spam has been solved… No, it's not going to be eliminated, but filtering has made spam manageable”

• Spam is all about economics and “Get rich quick” schemes

• As search engines have become the primary means for finding and accessing information on the web, web search is vulnerable to pollution. It is estimated that web spam through search engines is a potential $4.5 billion per year business

•Computer scientists at UC Berkeley and UC San Diego recently conducted a unique study of the spamming industry. Using a worldwide spamming software botnet called “Storm”. Using the Storm botnet for 26 days, the scientists were able to send out 350,000,000 emails touting their on-line pharmacy. Of those emails making it to a person’s in-box, 10,522 users clicked on the link and visited the fake pharmacy. Twenty eight people initiated a purchase averaging $100.

•This came to a daily income of $140 for the campaign. This translates to a potential revenue of $3.5 million a year for an internet pharmaceutical company using Storm for spam marketing

• Bayesian Spam Filtering- The advantage of Bayesian spam filtering is that it can be trained on a per-user basis- The spam that a user receives is often related to the online user's activities. For example, a user may have been subscribed to an online newsletter that the user considers to be spam. This online newsletter is likely to contain words that are common to all newsletters, such as the name of the newsletter and its originating email address. A Bayesian spam filter will eventually assign a higher probability based on the user's specific patterns- Bayesian spam filtering is susceptible to Bayesian poisoning, a technique used by spammers in an attempt to degrade the effectiveness of spam filters that rely on Bayesian filtering. A spammer practicing Bayesian poisoning will send out emails with large amounts of legitimate text (gathered from legitimate news or literary sources). Spammer tactics include insertion of random innocuous words that are not normally associated with spam, thereby decreasing the email's spam score, making it more likely to slip past a Bayesian spam filter

• Gmail- Community clicks: When the Gmail community votes with their clicks to report a particular email as spam, our system quickly learns to start blocking similar messages. The more spam the community marks, the smarter the system becomes.- OCR: Google uses optical character recognition (OCR) developed by the Google Book Search team to protect Gmail users from image spam. And machine-learning algorithms developed to merge and rank large sets of Google search results allow us to combine hundreds of factors to classify spam-Authentication, for everyone: Gmail supports multiple authentication systems, including SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DomainKeys, and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), so we can be more certain that your mail is from who it says it's from. Gmail puts all senders through the same rigorous checks

• Richard Stallman, defender of spam!!!- “I didn't receive the DEC message, but I can't imagine I

would have been bothered if I have. I get tons of uninteresting mail, and system announcements about babies born, etc. At least a demo MIGHT have been interesting.”

- “Would a dating service for people on the net be "frowned upon" by DCA? I hope not. But even if it is, don't let that stop you from notifying me via net mail if you start one.”

• Sent by Anonymous:- “I hope Thuerk gets face and butt cancer that lasts

many years before he succumbs to it.”

• Sent by Anonymous:- “I think Google should share this technology with the world so we can eliminate spam once and for all... everywhere.”

• How should we deal with spam?

• Should we use more technical approaches such as better filtering techniques and identification of spamming ISPs?

• Or more legal approaches such as more laws against spamming and laws that would prosecute said spammers?