The Logic Off Topic list

johnpitcairn wrote:
> Spam-count has gone up by a factor of about ten in the last 2-3 
> months. If those of you in the USA wonder why people in other 
> countries dislike the USA so much, this is just one reason - your 
> culture invented this sort of marketroid shit.


Actually.. we invented the Internet, spam was bound to follow. And for
what its worth, I spent 4 years recently doing tech support and light
system administration for a local dial-up ISP in the middle of
America... 90% of spam originates from .kr, .br, .jp, .my, and a ton of
other countries outside of the USA. The few spammers we ever caught that
actually lived here in the USA we were actually able to do something
about, as just about every single ISP in America does not allow their
customers to send spam. A large portion of all spam comes from unsecure
computers on fast connections (e.g. at universities) that have been
taken over by someone else, and it's virtually impossible to say where
these "hackers" actually live. Since many smaller countries don't have
laws developed yet to make Unsolicited Commercial Email illegal (or
software piracy for that matter) such countries are much more likely to
have people there exploiting this... At least here in the USA, the
president of my old ISP was in contact with the "Kansas Bureau of
Investigation" every single time we cought one of our own users sending
out spam. I'm not sure if we were ever able to actually prosecute them,
but the government slowly is "wising up" to all the stuff happening on
the Internet that shouldn't be. 

Anyway, you might consider changing your email address. I recently made
this a new one and the only spam I'm getting is because of spam sent to
"owner" addresses for various lists on Yahoo that I'm a moderator of.
The more you give out your email address on web pages (signing up for
free contests, registering with companies to download their software,
etc), the greater the odds become that one of those companies will sell
your address (even if they say they won't) to spammers, if not just send
you some spam of their own... A new "clean" email address will easily
avoid the majority of spam, unless of course your email provider is
giving out your addresses (e.g. hotmail/msn, maybe even yahoo). 

Jeremy