填空题 A. The "oceans of Spam" problem
B. It"s all garbage
C. The free ride
D. It"s worse than computer viruses
E. The theft of resources
F. It might be illegal
Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most Spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. We often get very upset when we receive e-mail which was not requested.
1
Spam costs the sender very little to send—most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender. For example, AOL has said that they were receiving 1.8 million Spams from Cyber Promotions per day until they got a court injunction to stop it. Assuming that it takes the typical AOL user only 10 seconds to identify and discard a message, that"s still 5,000 hours per day of connect time per day spent discarding their Spam, just on AOL. By contrast, the Spammer probably has a T1 line that costs him about $100/day. No other kind of advertising costs the advertiser so little, and the recipient so much.
2
At the moment, most of us only get a few Spams per day. But imagine if only 1/ 10 of 1% of the users on the Internet decided to send out Spam at a moderate rate of 100,000 per day, a rate easily achievable with a dial-up account and a PC. Then everyone would be receiving 100 Spams every day. If 1% of users were Spamming at that rate, we"d all be getting 1,000 spares per day. If Spam grows, it will crowd our mailboxes to the point that they"re not useful for real mail. Users on AOL report that they"re already nearing this point.
3
An increasing number of Spammers, such as Quantum Communications, send most or all of their mail via innocent intermediate systems. This fills the intermediate systems" networks and disks with unwanted Spare messages, takes up their managers" time dealing with all the undeliverable Spare messages, and subjects them to complaints from recipients who conclude that since the intermediate system delivered the mail, they must be in league with the Spammers. Many other Spammers use "hit and run" Spamming in which they get a trial dial-up account at an Internet provider for a few days, send tens of thousands of messages, then abandon the account, leaving the unsuspecting provider to clean up the mess. Many Spammers have done this tens or dozens of times, forcing the providers to waste staff time both on the cleanup and on monitoring their trial accounts for abuse.
4
The Spam messages I"ve seen have almost without exception advertised stuff that"s worthless, deceptive, and partly or entirely fraudulent. It"s Spam software, funky miracle cures, off-brand computer parts, vaguely described get-rich-quick schemes, dial-a-porn, and so on downhill from there. It"s all stuff that"s too cruddy to be worth advertising in any medium where they"d actually have to pay the cost of the ads.
5
Some kinds of Spam are illegal in some countries on the Internet. Especially with pornography, mere possession of such material can be enough to put the recipient in jail. In the United States, child pornography is highly illegal and we"ve already seen Spammed child porn offers.
Any one of these would be enough to make me pretty unhappy about getting junk e-mail. Put them together and it"s intolerable.