[extropy-chat] SPAM: The China Flu

[BillK]

On Tue, 14 Dec 2004 08:27:28 -0800 (PST), Mike Lorrey wrote:
> 
> Is there any better demonstration of why nationalized ANYTHING is a bad
> idea? Looks to be like China will become the Love Canal of spam, at
> least until some bureaucrat gets annoyed because his secretaries are
> spending too much time filtering his spam and not enough polishing his
> knob, and decides to round up all the spammers and send them off to the
> organ farms... hmmm maybe nationalizing spam isn't such a bad idea....
> ;)
> 

Mike is just miffed that free enterprise spam from the US has been
knocked off the top spot. Up until now the US has been the main source
spewing spam to the world.

The article also comments:-
According to network management firm Sandvine, about 80% of spam is
now sent via legions of PCs owned by ordinary - and usually oblivious
- computer users around the world. These machines, known as "zombies"
or "spam Trojans", have been infected with various viruses (recent
examples include MyDoom and Bagle) developed specifically to allow the
virus writer to contact them over the Internet and instruct them to
spew out, among other things, vast quantities of spam.
Because of this, it is now meaningless to say that spam itself
originates in any given place - it is truly a cyber-product.

Thank you Microsoft (US).

BillK