In this time of the Internet era, almost everyone is familiar with the word ‘spam’. Although the word ‘spam’ has a short history as it has practically been used since 1990s, the social and political impacts that it has brought to this globe were wide and strong that it became one of the social phenomenon of our century. Then what is exactly the word ‘spam’ means? Wikipedia describes spam as “the use of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately.” However, from its birth till now, the meaning of spam has been changing and broadening as it steadily went along with dynamic and ceaselessly changing Internet era.
HiSTORY
Internet and spam
Although there is a record of mass distribution of unwanted commercial messages before the invention of the internet enabled by American telegram in the late 19th century, the invention of the rapidly facilitated the activity of spamming, creating huge number of spammers, spamming techniques, spamming softwares, anti-spamming devices, and new legislations on spamming etc.
The first record of Internet spamming happened in 1978 when a guy named ‘Gary Thuerk’ sent commercial messages to 393 receivers on ARPANET. 10 years later, in 1988, the first form of chain letter, a letter that forces random recipients to copy and spread it to other random people, appeared with the famous title ‘Make Money Fast’. The practice of spamming, officially and professionally used for commercial purpose, began from 1994 when Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, a couple lawyers, started spamming immigration law service advertisement through Usenet. Although there were many condemning voices towards the couple, they defended themselves by claiming freedom of speech. Within a few years, from mid-to-late 1990s, spammers began to actively use e-mail as their medium for spreading spam messages. From this time, the practice of spamming had a major increase in its numbers, becoming one of a prominent social phenomenon, causing various social issues, problems, and debates regarding spam. Today, spamming is actively practiced throughout various Internet media and the number of spammers is constantly growing that one can easily contact with spam as soon as he or she enters the Internet.
Why do we use the word ‘spam’?
The word ‘spam’ actually derived from the spam canned luncheon meat that we all know. In the TV comedy show Monty Python’s Flying Circus, broadcasted in 1970, there was a spam sketch which illustrated cafeteria scene with Viking patrons sitting at a table. Every single dish in the cafeteria had spam meat inside so that waiter and customer kept repeating the word ‘spam’ in their conversation. During the conversation, Viking patrons sang ‘spam’ repeatedly, thus distracting the conversation.
In the very early stage of chatting network when the Internet was connected through phone lines, there were some users who filled the entire page with the word ‘spam’ or the quotes from Spam Sketch with the purpose of distracting the conversation. People started calling this kind of act, spamming. And today, according to the New Oxford Dictionary of English, spamming refers to "Irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the Internet to a large number of newsgroups or users", embracing broader context of its usage.
MEDIA/USAGE
Although e-mail spamming is the most widely known, spammers throughout the world utilize various media to spread their spam for various purposes. Their purposes vary from commercial reason to noncommercial reason such as religious and crime activities. Also various internet media such as instant messaging, Usenet newsgroup, Web search engine, blogs, Wikipedia, Online ads, mobile phone messaging, Internet forum, fax transmissions, social networking site, and file sharing network are utilized by spammers for way to spread their spam messages.
E-mail is one of the most widely used medium for spammers. Through e-mail, large amounts of spam messages are sent to random people everyday, all around the world. These unwanted messages mostly carry commercial contents but also sometimes used for noncommercial reasons.
Zomebie computers are computers that are infected by virus. These infected computers can be controlled by remote areas. Therefore, to avoid their identities being exposed, spammers use ‘Zomebie networks’ to send e-mail spam.
Before e-mail spamming became popular, spamming targeted for Usenet newsgroup was prevalent. At this time, spamming was more defined as repeated posting of similar messages.
Instant messaging spamming is another prevalent spam form today. Since instant messaging does not have firewall protection, a device created to protect and filter unauthorized information from the Internet network, it is recently gaining spammers’ attention.
Forum spamming targets Internet users by spreading redundant messages all over the Internet forums, mostly for commercial purpose. Tactics used for forum spamming is providing external links that link Internet users to the desired sites, thus increasing the traffic to the sites. Forum spamming is mostly done by automated ‘spambot’, a computer program designed to automatically send spam mails.
Along with forum spam, many spammers use online game channel. Online game messaging spamming is mostly targeted for game players with the purpose of selling game items.
Spamdexing is a method of altering HTML pages to be placed on the high rank in search engine relevancy lists. This way, the page has increasing chance of visitors. Spamdexing is enabled by black hat SEO technique. Black hat SEO(Search Engine Optimization) technique is the method of altering HTML pages so that they are placed on the higher part in the search results. Link farms and keyword stuffing are two examples of black hat SEO. Link farm is a group of websites that are all hyperlinked to each other. Keyword stuffing is a practice of narrating keywords in content and meta tags so that they get higher position in relevancy list. However, spammers usually hide those keywords by placing them behind the picture frame or coloring them with background color so that the websites can have irrelevant content from the keywords. In short, spammers utilize these kinds of techniques to make their commercial sites more visible on the search engine.
spammers also utilize video sharing sites to spread spam messages. They upload videos that have commercial contents and link them with thumnail images and information, irrelevant from the content, that interest viewers, thus tricking them to see the advertisement.
Furthermore, spammers are utilizing various Internet media such as blogs, wikis, and guestbooks, where user contributions are possible.
As seen above, most spams are aimed for their advertising purpose. However, there have been many other purposes that spamming is practiced. Mostly recognized ones would be religious, political, and criminal spam.
IMPACT/SOCIAL ISSUE
crime
As mentioned above, spamming has also been practiced for many malicious purposes other than commercial purpose. Spreading viruses and Trojan horses to control the system, steal information, or destroy the system is one of the malicious use of spam. Trojan horse is a software that is seemingly fine but actually designed to steal or harm users’ computer systems.
Not only spreading viruses, but spammers also spread fake messages that trick people, mostly who are unfamiliar with the Internet, to steal their sensitive information such as password and bank account number etc. This strategy is called ‘phishing’.
political issue
Although it seems like many people long for legislations that prohibit spam, many people oppose the intervention of government indeed. Mostly, the people who oppose intervention of government in anti-spam action value the freedom of the Internet. They are afraid that the freedom of the Internet, which was possible by the lawlessness, will be restricted when the government has control over it. Therefore, the extent of government intervention concerning the worsening spamming activities is still on-going political discussion.
Indeed, some laws trying to ban spam activities have been purposed and practiced such as CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which enabled ISPs to fight against spam. However, they failed to successfully prohibit spamming but rather facilitated it by making part of it legal.
CONCLUSION
The features of the Internet such as the freedom of communication, wide distribution of information, and millions and billions of participants all over the world, have created new word, ‘spam’. Those features of the Internet were perfect conditions for people who want to gain money, express their ideas, or influence other people by sending bulk of unsolicited messages all over the world. This activity of mass distributing redundant and unwanted messages to random people through the Internet, is aggressively increasing and seemingly unstoppable. People make laws and anti-spam filtering softwares to prevent spam. However, spammers also devise new creative ways to avoid them. This cycle will continue on since the computer technology is developing on both sides and many new forms of Internet media are created everyday, providing new field for spammers to influence upon.
REFERENCE
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(electronic)
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_computer
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spambots
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_horse_(computing)
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