[plug] New spam vector

[James Elliott]

Hi Leon

Talking of spam promted me to think about what you read here and there
about the Internet staggering under the sheer volume of material flowing
through it.

We are all victims of the forwarded jokes.  So many teenagers, bored
housewives, mindless husbands, and others receive these fowarded materials
and then pass them on to everyone n their own list.   Imagine it:
person one sends out a joke to 10 people
who pass it on to 10 people each
who pass it on to 10 people each
who pass it on to 10 people each
who pass it on to 10 people each
who pass it on to 10 people each
.................... and so on .............

Already we have turned one message (a joke) into a million messages and it
has only passed through 6 primary hands.  Imagine how many copies of this
joke will have been put onto the Internet when it has been forwarded on for
a month or two.  An imagine a million or millions of these forwarding freaks
doing this several times a day .... the mind boggles at the unimaginable
size of the numbers involved.

It is a shame that we can't limit forwards to 1:1, or if that won't work, to
one or two hops (that way a developer could still contact a lot of people -
a whole list in fact - but not initiate a chain reaction of exponential
proportions)

Better still, limit the Internet to licensed opperators and to get a license
you have to demonstrate 100 points of competency .... for example:

Windows user:      -10
Linux user:            +100
PLUGer:               +100

and so on ....................

Kind regards,

James Elliott

----- Original Message -----
From: "Leon Brooks" <leon at brooks.fdns.net>
To: "Perth Linux User Group" <plug at plug.linux.org.au>
Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2002 8:37 AM
Subject: [plug] New spam vector


> I got a spam today (one of 41) apparently relayed via Yahoo's UseNet News
> server. In German, MIME64 encoded plain text. I wish there was a better
> outlet for all of that ingenuity. It might be worth updating your spam
> blocker patterns for this one.
>
> Cheers; Leon
>
>
>