Spam Kings

28 Feb 2005 11:52

Who is behind the seemingly unstoppable tide of spam that besets our email inboxes? And who is fighting to stem that tide? In Spam Kings, Brian McWilliams seeks to illuminate these topics by following a couple of contrasting careers in great detail.

In the ten years that spam's been a problem, you've probably never heard anyone talk about buying anything from spammers. Yet some people clearly must, or spammers wouldn't stay in business. How lucrative a business is it, really? In Spam Kings: The Real Story Behind the Hgh-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and @*#?% Enlargements, Brian McWilliams sets out to investigate the people behind the spam -- as well as the anti-spammers who hunt them. McWilliams' central thesis seems to be that anti-spammers are just as obsessive and sneaky as spammers themselves. To some extent that seems inevitable: how can you catch and expose people who are deliberately and adeptly using technology to obfuscate their tracks unless you get clever about using technology yourself?

To this end, he follows in great detail the careers of Davis Wolfgang Hawke, who started his spamming career at 20 (after a brief stint running a neo-Nazi Web site) and Susan Gunn (a.k.a. 'Shiksaa'), who began a career as an anti-spammer in 1998, when she signed up for AOL and got her first junk mail almost immediately. The book brings in related stories, but primarily it hops back and forth between these two as their careers progress -- Hawke's from selling Web manuals to dabbling in SMS spamming, and Gunn's from the Usenet newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email to The Spamhaus Project. (McWilliams notes that Gunn planned to give up her anti-spam activities in 2004.)

It's a very odd experience, reading a book about spam. Just as you'd exclaim in recognition if familiar names popped up in a book about the history of your home town, you find yourself shouting, 'I remember that one!' Only you're saying it about spam email messages -- things you were hardly glad to welcome at the time. Imagine: nostalgia for spam messages of 1998. A close second in surprise value to nostalgia for TV ads of the 1970s.

The detail McWilliams has unearthed is entertaining. And slightly embarrassing: lots of technology reporters have been online complaining about spam for years without ever wondering too much about who actually sends it out.

But there's a reason for that. Most of us don't care who's sending it -- we just want it to stop. And that's why, somehow, this book's early promise is never quite fulfilled. You learn a lot of fascinating stuff about the people involved, but there's still no way to use this knowledge to end spam. We know the US's CAN-Spam legislation hasn't done it (as The Spamhaus Project predicted), and we know there are real limitations to the blocking and filtering technologies that are the current state of the art. So now what?

Story URL: http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/software/productivity/0,1000001108,39189472,00.htm