The Elder Statesman

By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here

A reader wrote to ask me why I no longer published my e-mail address at the end of my column. I did publish it for a number of years and got a good feedback from readers.

I would love to continue publishing it, except for one reason — SPAM. SPAM doesn’t seem to be an acroymn for any series of words, expect perhaps for being just a nuisance to Internet users.

The term can be traced to a Monty Python sketch, first broadcast in 1970, in which two customers are trying to order a breakfast without SPAM from a menu which includes the processed meat product in every entree. Like so much of cyberspace talk, the term caught on with the young computer oriented minds.

If you have e-mail it seems to come with the territory. It is just electronic junk mail.

I could deal with that with a delete button, but when the SPAM popping onto my screen degenerated into pornography, I changed my e-mail server. The pornography stopped, but it didn’t take long for those unsolicited, unwanted, irrelevant commercial advertising messages to crowd my e-mail inbox.

I tried SPAM blockers, but unfortunately I had to check the SPAM net every day because it caught e-mails that were not SPAM which were sometimes important messages. This meant I had to go through the list daily and retreive what was not electronic junk mail.

Since I still had to monitor the mail wash, I decided I could delete the dozen or so SPAM messages each morning and thus my routine now is to scan the list and delete the unwanted messages without ever opening them.

The Spammers are clever, however. Somehow they have "personal" information about me. A typical message will list the sender by a single name, like Suzanne, and include my name in the subject line. This is to get me to open it thinking it is from the Suzanne I know.

In the cyberspace world this is known as "phishing," pronounced "fishing." It is a scam to steal valuable information once the e-mail is opened.

If it is not directed as a personal e-mail, it might be an official looking e-mail from a bank, or retail establishment, even from a government agency. This week, Jo Anne Barnhart, Commissioner of Social Security, issued a warning about a new e-mail scam involving Social Security.

The agency has received several reports of an e-mail message being circulated that is addressed to "Dear Social Security Number And Card owner" and purporting to be from the Social Security Administration. The message informs the reader "that someone is illegally using your Social Security number and assuming your identity" and directs the reader to a website designed to look like Social Security’s Internet website.

The phony website asks the person for "Social Security and bank information, including the individual’s credit card number, expiration date and PIN number." Whether on our online website or by phone, Social Security will never ask you for your credit card information or your PIN number," Barnhart said.

I am told by computer insiders that through "phishing" the intruder can even get to your e-mail address book to find other electronic bait.

Jim Rapoza wrote a column for eweek magazine in January about the e-mail subscriber who opens SPAM messages and gets offers for free Viagra, a chance to earn a large bonus by helping someone get untold millions out of a troubled country and meeting attractive young singles, by simply saying: "What the heck. I’ll open this strange attachment."

Once the attachment is opened, Rapoza writes, the genie is out of the bottle. With tongue in cheek, he said, "How would viruses spread if everyone avoided opening clearly suspicious attachments?"

Sorry, dear readers for now my e-mail address remains my domain.

(Bill Duncan can be reached at his e-mail address in care of Uncle Sam: P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470. The same address readers should send those funny stories about address stickers before the contest deadline, March 15.)

This entry was posted on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 10:12 am and is filed under Column. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.