Mega-Spam: No Breathing Space

The website ThisIsLondon.co.uk reports that “image spam” could bring the internet to a standstill. “At first, they seem like your average junk email, containing share tips or an advertisement for Viagra, along with a small, slightly garbled picture.But this, experts say, is the spam that could bring the internet to a virtual standstill this year.”

“To bypass anti-spam software, the emails use an image instead of text. In the past six months, this image spam has seen a massive increase and now represents 35 per cent of all junk email, according to security software firm F-Secure and image spam is taking up 70 per cent of the bandwidth bulge. The emails, generally containing stock tips, come from gangs and even bored teenagers in the United States and Russia trying to inflate prices in a swindle called ‘pump-and-dump’. They promise that a cheap, usually American, stock will take off. The perpetrator then dumps his stock as buyers leap in before it collapses.”

“Dmitri Allperovitch of computer security company CipherTrust said: ‘They're niche companies with no profit and no products, so when you see a spike from almost no trades to two or three million when the spam is sent out, you know there were a lot of people who fell for it.’” Is your PC a slave unit to such schemes?

Are you unwittingly passing bogus information to millions of other people?

Too Much Email of the Wrong Kind

50 billion e-mail messages worldwide are sent each day, equal to seven messages for everyone on the planet, although the vast majority of people are not online. In 2001, e-mail traffic was less than 12 billion.

Of the 50 billion messages sent daily, more than 88% cent of e-mails are spam including about 1 per cent which are virus-infected. So that means at least 44 billion spam messages are sent each day, 365 days a year, and each day 4.4 billion e-mail messages contain viruses. Has junk email become an issue for you? It’s time to arm yourself to the teeth with with spam protection, virus protection, and a private email account.

Are You Racing the Clock?

No matter how conscious I am of saving time throughout the day, I still find myself racing the clock. What, if anything, am I doing wrong?

A. Consider the following example: any one-hour activity that you undertake in the course of the day will consume one solid year out of the next 24 years of your life. One hour is to 24 hours as one year is to 24 years.

B. With this realization, consider the cumulative effects of reading junk mail for only 30 minutes a day or spending 15 minutes a day in line at the bank – both of which could be avoided if you used mail, phone, or email services.

C. Obviously there are some things that you couldn't or wouldn't want to give up and it is silly to apply this kind of arithmetic to activities such as personal hygiene.

What to Tell the Junk Mailers

Please remove my name, and all its variations, and remove all of my contact information from any and all of your databanks, mailing lists, shared files, etc.

I do not want any mail, including solicitations, flyers, brochures, catalogs, announcements, circulars, postcards, promotions, faxes, or email at any time, ever, from you or any of your associates, affilitates, subsidiaries, vendors, or clients.

Thank you

Tired of Receiving Junk Faxes?

Here’s a letter you can use…

YOUR UNSOLICITED FAXES ARE NOT WELCOME HERE. READ THIS AND IMMEDIATELY CEASE AND DESIST SENDING THEM TO [your fax number]

Under U.S. Code Title 47, section 227 (b) (1) (c): It shall be unlawful for any person within the United States to use any telephone facsimile machine, computer, or other device to send an unsolicited advertisement to a telephone facsimile machine.

"A telephone facsimile machine is defined in Sec. 227 (a) (2) (B) as: "equipment which has the capacity to transcribe text or images (or both) from an electronic signal received over a regular telephone line onto paper."

Under this definition, an e-mail account, modem, computer and printer together constitute a fax machine. The rights of action are as follows: Under Sec. 227 (b)(3)(B):

"A person or entity may, if otherwise permitted by the laws or rules of a court of a State, bring in an appropriate court of that State:

(A) an action based on a violation of this subsection or the regulations prescribed under this subsection to enjoin such violation,

(B) an action to recover for actual monetary loss from such a violation, or to receive $500 in damages for each such violation, whichever is greater, or

(C) both such actions. If the court finds that the defendant willfully or knowingly violated this subsection or the regulations prescribed under this subsection, the court may, in its discretion increase the amount of the award to an amount equal to not more than 3 times the amount available under subparagraph (B) of this paragraph."