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Time Warped The Sunday Business Post is not known for the accuracy of its technology reporting. It also has the worst designed newspaper website in Ireland from an aesthetic viewpoint. However the latest bit of cluelessness involves an article about spam and it features Cyber Promotions. Cyber Promotions was Sanford (Spamford) Wallace's venture that essentially co-invented spamming. The first acknowledged incident was the Canter and Siegel spamming of the Usenet newsgroups for their US immigration green card "services". A rake of legal actions and technical countermeasures took care of Cyber Promotions and Spamford Wallace a few years ago. However the Sunday Business Post seems to be temporally confused. An article about how Irish internet users could be vulnerable to spammers was considerably devoid of technological facts. Surprisingly it seemed to resurrect Cyber Promo in order to pad out a rather poor article. A search on www.news.com turned up quite a few hits concerning Cyber Promotions. Wallace Spamford announced his retirement in April 1998. AOL and Earthlink hammered Cyber Promotions into dust with judgments for damages. Clearly the inclusion of Cyber Promotions in the article would not mean much to the people at the Sunday Business Post and apparently to the author of that article. But to veteran users of the internet and to system administrators, it is one of the most hated entities. The people who write for the Sunday Business Post, not being, (perhaps with one or two exceptions) technologically sentient, would not appreciate the work that went into taking care of the spam problem a few years ago. |
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