INDEPTH: SPAM
Porn free: watchwords to safe surfing
Gary Graves, CBC News Online | Sept. 25, 2003
Updated December 17, 2004
Spam has become the most irksome and expensive time-waster in modern business. Millions of hours, and millions of dollars are spent ridding electronic inboxes of unwanted mail. It's estimated that as much as 75 per cent of the e-mail moving through the world every day is unsolicited, and the vast majority of spam is sex-related.
FACT BOX
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From the Pew Survey on the internet and American Life
each day 15 billion spam messages cross the wires of the internet
most spam messages are diverted and never reach the inboxes of users
AOL and MSN both report they block a daily deluge of 2.4 billion spam messages from reaching the inboxes of their customers
AOL reports that this equals about 67 spam e-mails per inbox per day, or up to 80 per cent of its incoming e-mail traffic
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If your computer is connected to the internet, there's no way to protect it completely from pornography. The most common way for sex sellers to find you is to use electronic mailing lists. Computer programs troll the internet looking for Web pages that give out e-mail addresses, and then add this harvest of addresses to a mailing list. This technique is now illegal in the United States, but lists already created are circulating among spammers.
Other programs just use simple alphabetical logic and sheer weight of numbers to "guess at" likely e-mail addresses. Eventually, by sending unsolicited e-mail from a computer running through an address list that is changing incrementally, a legitimate and unsuspecting address becomes a target. For example, the spammer starts at jale@isp.net, moves to jame@isp.net, and then to jane@isp.net.
The first two e-mails may be returned to the vendor as "no such address", but the third one – Jane's, in our example – is noted as a successful address and her name remains on the list. Experts say that even with a .001 per cent sales success rate, spammers earn a fortune in profits because of the enormity of the original mailing. It's not uncommon for spammers to send out several million letters at a time.
Software makers and e-mail systems are fighting back. Many providers of web-based e-mail, such as Hotmail, Yahoo or Excite, offer "spam filters" as part of the user options. Many users, however, are too new to the internet or too confused by the array of options on the screen that they don't know how to engage the filters.
These filters can be simple or sophisticated. Generally what they do is allow you to refuse or redirect to a Junk Mail folder mail you receive from addresses that you have identified as unwanted. The problem is, this has only limited value since spammers often use a return address only once.
Most of the large e-mail providers have moved beyond this simple filtering although it's still common in e-mail software such as GroupWise. An improvement on this feature examines the incoming e-mail to see how many other people it has been sent to. If the recipient list is large, the filter decides that the mail is likely spam and redirects it to your Junk Mail folder. The most sophisticated filtering processes actually scan the incoming e-mail for words that can trigger filtering. For example, if the subject or body of the letter uses the word "porn", the mail gets redirected. In the best packages, you can decide what words the system should watch for.
In many corporations, the local area network (LAN) may run a content filter to search for key words and quarantine mail containing the forbidden phrases. There are problems with this system, however. Legitimate mail that contains the key words can be removed from distribution. This article, for example, might be filtered out because it uses the word "porn." Also, spammers are now combatting key word filtering by using distortions of words, such as po9n, po*n, p+rn.
Some file sharing software such as Kazaa offers keyword filtering. In their Options or Tools menu, these programs may have a way to activate an "Adult Content" filter that contains a list of graphic words describing sexual content. If an incoming file contains these words, the file is refused. In Kazaa's case, the built-in filter offers you the option of adding words and phrases such as "underage" or "free porn" which are not part of the built-in list.
Having a fully editable watchword file is particularly useful for parents who want the flexibility to add new words, or variations of words, to keep out sex spammers. One warning, however: viewing the keyword filter list is something that should only be done by an adult – the words are explicit, graphic and upsetting.
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November 26, 2003:
On CBC Newsworld, David Gray interviews media lawyer Michael Geist from the University of Ottawa Law School about how to tackle spam.
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On CBC Newsworld, Christopher Thomas interviews Ontario privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian about how Canada is fighting spam.
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