Only some of today's regular Internet users can recall that humanity repelled the first onslaught of spam half a century ago. The extremely intrusive advertising campaign that the American company Hormel Foods organized after the end of World War II to liquidate surplus canned spiced ham (Spiced Ham) caused genuine idiosyncrasy among potential consumers. The reincarnation of spam, which has already become a common name for everything low-grade and intrusive, occurred in 1994, when the then very few electronic mailboxes found themselves clogged with one and the same offer — Make Money Fast.
Nothing new — the canonical offer to rewrite the message a certain number of times, send it to new addresses and wait for sudden enrichment, which will certainly come crashing down, but only on the initiator of the message. Advanced programmers and poor students — at that time the most typical owners of "mailboxes" — treated this offer rather frivolously. And simply ignored it. In doing so, they gave the "green light" to a virtual plague that poses a colossal threat to all virtual commerce.
According to estimates by the California company Postini, as of January 14, 2005, 72% of electronic messages worldwide were unsolicited commercial electronic mailings. Per day that is 124 million irritating messages. Per month — 3.5 billion. Such a precise tie to the date is entirely necessary given the rapid rates of growth of virtual garbage with which the mailboxes of both individual users and large corporations are being clogged. After all, back in 2002, every tenth electronic message in the USA was spam, and only every fifteenth in Great Britain. And already in the summer of 2003, the share of spam by average indicators exceeded 50% of the entire contents of electronic mailboxes.
Attempts to convert tons of spam into dollars are rather conditional in nature. Thus, according to data from Nucleus Research, each American employee spends an average of 6.5 minutes a day deleting it, which translates into annual losses of $874 per employee. Alternative calculations give figures at least five times higher. Overall, these direct losses are estimated at $9 billion a year. But the total losses, which include payment for traffic, the purchase of special programs that filter out virtual garbage, the fight against viruses, as well as the potential losses of companies engaged in electronic commerce, approach the figure of $200 billion a year. At the same time, the profit received by malicious distributors of spam is estimated at $1 billion a year. And companies that supply means of combating it "rake in" seven times more from this "stew."
As malicious virtual tongues assert, 90% of spam is produced by fewer than one and a half hundred people residing in the USA. Not only do they feed themselves and their families. They also provide a not-bad source of income for lawyers who draft laws restricting the spread of spam, and for firms specializing in the development of special filters.
And yet salvation from spam may well become the work of the "spammed" themselves. The most zealous fighters for the purity of the Net propose sending anti-spam to the addresses from which unsolicited mailings come, as well as informing the competent authorities about them. And if usually many of us are loath to spend our time on such actions, then in the case of the spread of child pornography, surely it is still not worth being petty.
Yevhen STASHEVSKYI (based on materials from the foreign press)