Melbourne Herald Sun, 21 August 2010
How a simple processed meat became a major marketing phenomenon - and everybody's favourite hate - would make a great comedy script, if it wasn't already a comedy script.
In 1970 the Monty Python team screened a sketch that reached new standards of stupidity. Two customers sit in a café where every possible dish contains Spam, the American processed ham. It so happens that sitting next to them, of course, is a crew of cow-helmeted vikings who start to sing "Spam spam spam spam lovely spam" ad nauseam.
This was recalled a decade later, newly-fledged internet email services were being bombarded by floods of unwanted advertising. The geeks of the day christened this "spam" and so it has remained ever since.
Just today, 90 billion spams have flooded the world's computers. And depending on the effectiveness of your spam filter, it probably feels like half of them have hit you.
Over the past 40 years the computing world has fought a continuing war against these ether-borne locusts. Today 96 per cent of all business email is spam.
In front-line defence is a spam and virus hunter called Mailguard. This is an Australian company, headquartered in South Melbourne, that protects companies in 18 countries. Managing Director Craig McDonald does not see the problem going away any time soon. "Some of our clients get - literally - thousands of spam emails per employee per day."
His company protects corporations, government departments and retail chains, including Acer, Baker's Delight, the AFL, the Australasian College of Surgeons.
In the darker recesses of the web you'll find 'botnets' - computers captured by a virus that turns them into groups of slaves, up to two million strong, pumping out email. Such a new spam site has just a few hours to operate before it is spotted and blacklisted by the anti-spam services of the world. But this is long enough to send out billions of letters.
If that's not sci-fi enough for you, they have 'spambots' that crawl the net seeking out computers that are not locked down and secured, and convert them into 'bots' to send out email.
Have I made your hair stand on end yet? Surely with so much effort, they must get some result to make it all worth while? Well a research project secretly measured the activities of a botnet for a month. Their conversion rate was well under 0.00001 per cent. From which they would have made about $3000. However there were other sites in the network, bringing the total up to about $3.5 million a year - not bad in a developing country.
Just what is it that they sell? Like the detective searching the suspect's rubbish bin for evidence, I lowered myself into my own garbage skip - the spam file on my computer. This is where all the rejected mail is sent by my Symantec anti-spam program. Before I empty the folder I always take a quick look, in case some legitimate mail was swept up by mistake.
Out of today's trawl - almost a hundred emails - about 90 per cent were pharmaceutical. This is common with a lot of people I talk to, and reassures me that I have not been specifically targeted for sexual enhancement.
However, I have been selected to receive many millions of dollars which will be passed to me as soon as I give Mr McWealth my bank details. And if that's not enough, Mr Frank Walter has offered me $10 million at three percent interest.
More worrying, I can quickly become a qualified radiologist able to carry out x-rays, diagnosis and treatment with radioactive compounds. I'll bear that in mind before my next medical check-up.
I can easily get an accounting degree - which might explain some of the funny-money stories that appear in this section of the paper. And I've just won half a million dollars in the Nokia competition.
All together now: "Spam spam spam spam, wonderful spam!"
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