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Spam Kiwi Kings Of Spam Sent Third Of All Spam Emails
Two New Zealand men accused of sending about one-third of all spam emails have had their assets frozen and their businesses restrained.
Lance Atkinson and Jody Smith, of the HerbalKing group, are accused of sending ten billion spam messages every day. Their vast web of time-wasting bits ranged from America to China to Canada to Australia - well, you get the point.
The gang is suspected of having control of a slumbering zombie army of hacked personal computers; the US Can-Spam Act was used to prosecute the miscreants.
The earliest reference that I can find in sf for the idea of a spam filter or other way to deal with the problem of spam is in The Moat, a 1991 short story by Greg Egan.
We used to get megabytes of automated invective via email, but that, at least, turned out to be easily fixed; we installed the latest screening software, and fed it a few samples of the kind of transmission we preferred not to receive.
(Read more about Egan's screening software)
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 10/17/2008)
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