Colin McEnroe Show: The Spam Scourge
We've grown to tolerate it, but it's not it's going away.
Published: Jun 16, 2011
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WNPR mascot Clarence gets spammed.
Photo:Chion Wolf
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Colin McEnroe Show: The Spam Scourge
Early in the career of Cassius Clay, a boxing writer saw him fight a lesser opponent and said it looked like a man trying to kill hornets with a shovel. That's not a bad description of the efforts to combat electronic spam.
Using ingenious and low cost methods, spam replicates by the trillions. It costs us billions of dollars a year. We think of it mainly as a nuisance, but the subsoil of spam contains a lot of criminal activity, ranging from fraud and money laundering to violent crime.
The volume, the dangers and the implications of spam are all a lot bigger than what we had imagined going into this show. And yet, there's also some thing vaguely funny about these oddly worded messages. The filter on my blog is full of spam comments offering to sell people term papers. The comments are in broken English, which doesn't say much for the papers.
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