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Spam spreads to cell phones and web logs
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by Meredith Dietrich
Thursday, November 20, 2003
Spam e-mail, something people unwillingly receive everyday, is unsolicited e-mail, generally from unidentifiable senders. Spam has become a large problem in recent years, as it has spread from the e-mail box to cell phones and instant-messenging programs.
Web logs, or “blogs,” can be online diaries or forums for information to be shared and discussed about different topics on the user’s web page. Recently, many “bloggers” have noticed that their chat forums have become bombarded with unwanted spam or advertisements from fake users with the names of companies and websites.
Spam today is no longer just about getting people to click on the link and visit the website. Instead, it boosts a website’s position on search engines such as Yahoo.com or Google.com. On these search engines, there are robots that scan the site for keywords or links and use them to establish relevance.
Adam Kalsey, a blogger who set up a business web log three years ago, discovered that people were posting comments like “Sounds great!” with user names such as “Generic Viagra” or “Online Gambling” and links to those websites. In an effort to stop the spam revolution, Kalsey created a “Comment Spam Manifesto” on his blog to discourage spammers.
“What you failed to understand is that bloggers are smarter, better and more technologically savvy than the average e-mail user. We control this medium that you are now attempting to exploit. You’ve picked a fight with us and it’s a fight you can’t win,” the manifesto stated.
University of Wisconsin students also express disgust regarding unwanted Internet screens. UW sophomore Sylvia Mataczynski said pop-up ads are pointless because they only make people angry.
“Do the people who send those seriously think that anyone reads them? It almost seems like they don’t even care about the advertising aspect of the ads and their only goal has become to piss people off,” Mataczynski said.
In the fight against spam, spammers have taken on their own argument, claiming that stopping them from sending these e-mails is a direct violation of the First Amendment. Telemarketers and spammers alike are claiming that the government has no say in what is valuable information for the consumer and what is not.
“We ought to be legislating general concepts — things like, you can’t market to somebody who’s asked you not to. But in the case of spam, that hasn’t really worked,” David Sorkin, a law professor at John Marshall Law School who studies spam, said.
Spam has now reached cell phones and become a problem there. People are now receiving text messages on their cell phones, and the phone companies are charging for every text message received.
However, Nextel, a cell-phone company, has installed a filtering system into its cell-phone programs and refunds anyone who calls to make a complaint about unwanted text messages.
In October, the U.S. Senate passed a bill in a 97 to 0 vote to try and stop spam e-mail. The bill requires that advertisers clearly state their e-mails as advertisements and include their return address so consumers can tell them to stop sending them e-mails. U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, a co-sponsor of the bill, said it is necessary for the right of the American people.
“Americans are tired of just watching and fretting over inboxes clogged with offensive e-mail, and this legislation is an important step toward giving consumers more control,” Wyden said.
