• Complain

McWilliams - S*pam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements

Here you can read online McWilliams - S*pam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2014, publisher: OReilly Media, genre: Detective and thriller. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

McWilliams S*pam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements
  • Book:
    S*pam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    OReilly Media
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2014
  • Rating:
    5 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 100
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

S*pam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "S*pam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

The mounting onslaught of email pitches for porn, pills, and penis enlargement has some techno-pundits declaring that spam is on the verge of destroying the internet. In Spam Kings, author and veteran investigative journalist Brian S. McWilliams delivers a compelling account of the cat-and-mouse game played by spam entrepreneurs (including the notorious Davis Wolfgang Hawke, Dr. Fatburn, and Scott Richter) in search of easy fortunes and the cyber-vigilantes who are trying to stop them.

McWilliams: author's other books


Who wrote S*pam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

S*pam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "S*pam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
Spam Kings
Brian S McWilliams
Beijing Cambridge Farnham Kln Sebastopol Tokyo Dedication To my family Special - photo 1

Beijing Cambridge Farnham Kln Sebastopol Tokyo

Dedication

To my family

Special Upgrade Offer

If you purchased this ebook directly from oreilly.com, you have the following benefits:

  • DRM-free ebooks use your ebooks across devices without restrictions or limitations
  • Multiple formats use on your laptop, tablet, or phone
  • Lifetime access, with free updates
  • Dropbox syncing your files, anywhere

If you purchased this ebook from another retailer, you can upgrade your ebook to take advantage of all these benefits for just $4.99. to access your ebook upgrade.

Please note that upgrade offers are not available from sample content.

Acknowledgment

The genesis of this book was an unusual onslaught of junk email in May 2003. Over the course of two weeks, I received over one hundred spams for pills and other products that I traced to a company in nearby Manchester, New Hampshire. I discovered spammers practically in my backyard and decided to tell the world about it.

I am grateful to my editors at Salon.com, especially Andrew Leonard, as well as my editors at Wired News , including David Ian Miller, for encouraging me that summer to write about the company, Amazing Internet Products LLC, and its fascinating founders. Thanks also to Mark Beavis and Jon Greenberg of New Hampshire Public Radio for working with me to advance the story further for radio.

I am indebted to my agent, Martha Jewett, for recognizing that a book about some of the major figures behind the spam problem was long overdue. Marthas help in conceiving Spam Kings was immensely important to me.

My editor at OReilly, Allen Noren, guided this project with just the right mix of hard-boiled skepticism and patient handholding. Nothing motivates an author like knowing your editor is a better writer. Special thanks to Allen and to the rest of the team at OReilly for their dedication to this project.

I appreciate the help of John Levine, who provided a crucial technical review of the manuscript.

My initial research was greatly assisted by Piers Forrest and Gordon Shumway. Reporting on Davis Hawkes neo-Nazi years by Erik Hedegaard and Gary Henderson was a big inspiration. I am also grateful to the scores of people who provided important background but were not mentioned in the book, including Bill Cole, Relic, Jeanne Kempthorne, Anne Mitchell, Dan Clements, Jeffrey Eilender, Brendan Battles, Stan McDonald, Bill Nelson, Tanya Bibeau, Ted Bernard, Andrew Broome, Blair Russell, and the numerous sources whove asked to remain anonymous.

I couldnt have written Spam Kings without the thousands of people who have sent their spam samples to the news.admin.net-abuse.sightings newsgroup. The Archive.org web site and Google Groups search engine were also essential to my research.

Finally, thanks to my family, especially my wife Diane, for accompanying me on this journey and for your feedback along the way.

Introduction

Most businesses jump at the opportunity for free publicity. But none of the email marketers, or spammers, profiled in this book were eager to see their stories in print. In fact, some have even threatened lawsuits over its publication.

No wonder that Spam Kings is the first book to publicly unmask the people behind the junk email problem. As Jennifer Archie, a leading anti-spam attorney, recently told me, a spammers main protection is anonymity.

Once youve exposed a spamming John Doe, he doesnt have a legal defense. So hell guard his anonymity with everything he has, says Archie.

By deftly using anonymity, spammers have tapped into a vast market. Since most spam-related sales transactions are furtive, reliable statistics are hard to come by. But a study published by the U.S.-based Direct Marketing Association estimated that consumers spent over $32 billion in 2003 on products and services advertised by email.

In the process, some say spam has nearly ruined email. Over 60 percent of all email traffic in the first half of 2004 was spam, according to email filtering firm Brightmail. (Only three years ago, the volume of unsolicited commercial email was just 8 percent of all message traffic.) In 2004, an estimated five trillion spam messages will clog Internet users in-boxes. AOL alone blocks over one billion spam messages every day. According to Ferris Research, junk email costs society $10 billion in lost productivity, filtering software, and other expenses.

Once a problem that vexed only Internet geeks, spam has now earned the ire of consumers, business leaders, lawmakers, regulators, and the mass media. For many, hearing Youve got mail is no longer a happy sound.

The people behind the junk email problem are often unsavory characters running shady, if not outright illegal, businesses. So why descend into their world and find out what makes them tick? Why should we, as a society, need the gory details of how these high-tech hucksters make a buck?

As citizens, Internet-dependent businesses, and policy makers strategize for the next phase of the battle to save cyberspace, its my hope that Spam Kings can provide an enlightening and entertaining response to the edict know thy enemy.

Email was built on an architecture of openness and trust. But when spammers discovered the medium, they saw an opportunity that could be exploited. Like air pollution, overfishing, and roadside litter, spam represents the destruction of a public resource by private interests.

Internet users reacted to this overgrazing of their common land like angry villagers with pitchforks. They tried to run the junk emailers out of their virtual communities by publishing spam blacklists and closing off their networks to the abusers. In response, spammers learned a variety of stealthy tactics to disguise their acts and hide their identities.

Spam Kings chronicles five crucial years in the cat-and-mouse game between a dozen or so high-profile spammers and the people determined to drive them off the Internet. With perhaps thousands of spammers currently in operation and many, many people dedicated to fighting them, its nearly impossible to tell the whole story of the junk email conundrum.

But study the rise and fall of one spammer, Davis Wolfgang Hawke, and you will learn nearly all you need to know about the intractability of the junk email problem.

Hawke is the central figure of Spam Kings , but not because hes the biggest spammer of all time. Hawke certainly had his successes. At the age of twenty-five, he became a millionaire by spamming penis-enlargement pills. In the process, he also became the target of numerous lawsuits designed to drive him out of business. A high-IQ chess player and honors student, Hawke chose spamming after his career as a brainy neo-Nazi leader imploded. Hawke put his pursuit of easy wealth ahead of everything else: his education, his family, his girlfriend, and even his own freedom.

Hawkes hubris leads him into a series of confrontations with spam opponents, the most important of whom is Susan Gunn. Gunn, a forty-something, mild-mannered computer novice, was dragged into the fight when her America Online account overflowed with spam. In time, her alias Shiksaa" would strike fear into the heart of spammers everywhere.

Like many junk emailers, Hawke has the misfortune of crossing paths with Shiksaa, who becomes a volunteer for the anti-spam organization named Spamhaus. Throughout the book, she helps to unmask scores of spammers, and even land some in jail.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «S*pam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements»

Look at similar books to S*pam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «S*pam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements»

Discussion, reviews of the book S*pam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.