Hewie's Views & Reviews May 30 2003

In this issue :

++++ Confessions of a Spammer
++++ Map Game
++++ Want to Know What I want for Christmas?
++++ AMD's 64-bit chip

++++ Confessions of a Spammer

I read an interesting article at < http://link.surfsecret.com/?PwR2a > from the May 11, 2003 Oregonian newspaper about "Confessions Of A Former Spammer." The article, which was very lengthy, told about a former spammer. He was making about $1,000 per week, but was working harder than he did in a lot of other jobs that he held.

Much of the spammer's time is not spent gathering and creating addresses, but in finding ways to defeat the anti-spam efforts of software and ISP's. Every time a way of blocking spam is found, the spammers spend the time to defeat it.

He contended that spammers make their money on the sheer volume of messages sent. There are clubs for spammers, although they remain anonymous, even among themselves. They do compare and trade information and lists. In one spam club, he encountered companies looking for people to send e-mail about their products, including loans, insurance offers and the prescription drug Viagra and similar products.

Viagra distributors pay spammers per sale -- about $60 for every $150 order -- while financial companies typically pay for every consumer who requests more information -- as much as $12 for mortgage leads and as much as $5 for insurance referrals, the spammer said. "It's a numbers game."

With a few computers, that numbers game becomes easy to play. The spammer met people in the spam club who had as many as 15 computers sending hundreds of millions of messages a day, increasing their chances of snaring sales and referral payouts.

There are many software programs for the spammers. One that is used scans Web pages for e-mail addresses. It also searches Internet newsgroups -- public bulletin boards. It automatically deletes addresses that have such phrases as "info" and "service," those that likely don't immediately bounce to an actual person. It also tests for unpublished addresses by combining user names -- the portions of e-mail addresses before the @ symbol -- with domain names of other addresses.

Armed with millions of addresses, these spammers have anywhere from 2 or 3 computers to 15 systems, at least 2 broadband accounts (cable or DSL) and have them work 24 hours a day, sending millions to hundreds of millions of messages a day!

No wonder we receive so many of the same messages addressed differently. If the referenced article goes away and you want to read it, email me and I will see that you can find the entire article. It is a great insight into the world of spammers.

++++ Map Game

I'll bet very few readers will fill out this map with less than 20 mistakes: http://www.rethinkingschools.org/just_fun/games/mapgame.html

++++ Want to Know What I want for Christmas?

The Tickle robot is an electronic masseuse that walks around on your body created by Dutch artists Erwin Driessens and Maria Verstappen. It has two high-torque 5V motors, silicon rubber feet and rechargeable batteries. When the slope becomes too steep, it changes directions. Here's the video. ~http://www.xs4all.nl/~notnot/tickle/tickle_a.mpg

++++ AMD's 64-bit chip

Unlike Intel's 64-bit Itanium processor, the new AMD Opteron 64-bit processor can run today's 32-bit programs without suffering a hit in performance. IBM said it would offer a server based on AMD's new Opteron processor. Microsoft, meanwhile, repeated its promise to offer a version of Windows optimized for the chip. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/techreviews/products/2003-04-22-amd-opteron_x.htm