xBlog: The visual thinking weblog
18th December 2001

Fighting Spam

“I have written about the problem of spam in the past, most notably about how some Web sites and content management systems do not do an adequate job of protecting their users’ email addresses from spam harvesting robots (spambots). There are also people out there who just want to cause trouble by using your email address as the return address for thousands of pieces of spam, as Dave Winer has recently found out…”

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18th December 2001

Origin of the term “spam” to mean net abuse

“Much to the chagrin of Hormel Foods, maker of the canned ‘Shoulder Pork and hAM’ luncheon meat, the term ’spam’ has today come to mean network abuse, particularly junk E-mail and massive junk postings to USENET. How did the term get this meaning? I went on a mission of etymological research…”

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