We have come to think of the internet as a place of anonymity. A place where we can lose ourselves for a few hours and do things we could not normally do. We can study the world news without it being filtered for the “American” view. We can learn how to make all sorts of items using knowledge that only privileged members of our military know. We can have an entirely new life-style on the internet. Unfortunately, the freedom to do every one of the things I listed above is rapidly disappearing. From watching what you download, to installing software without your, various companies and government agencies are monitoring your every move on the internet.
When most of the world’s internet users surf the internet, they experience what has become all too common in today’s digital world, spam. Unsolicited advertising (also known as spam) is taking over the internet. This spam comes in many forms. It ranges from junk e-mail to the less obvious hidden programs that install themselves on a computer.
Spam e-mail is a multi-million dollar industry. This is due to the fact that there are billions of e-mails sent daily to unsuspecting victims. If only one out of every thousand people answer these e-mails it still constitutes enormous revenue for the companies responsible. Some companies have tried to create so called spam-blockers. The problem with this approach is that spam is almost completely unidentifiable to a computer. The computer reads all e-mail as e-mail and therefore cannot successfully filter any one type of e-mail from another. (more…)