Comcast's high-speed Internet subscribers have long been rumored to be an unusually persistent source of junk e-mail. Now someone from Comcast is confirming it. "We're the biggest spammer on the Internet," network engineer Sean Lutner said at a meeting of an antispam working group in Washington, D.C., last week. . . .. Comcast's high-speed Internet subscribers have long been rumored to be an unusually persistent source of junk e-mail. Now someone from Comcast is confirming it. "We're the biggest spammer on the Internet," network engineer Sean Lutner said at a meeting of an antispam working group in Washington, D.C., last week. Lutner said Comcast users send out about 800 million messages a day, but a mere 100 million flow through the company's official servers. Almost all of the remaining 700 million represent spam erupting from so-called zombie computers--a breathtaking figure that adds up to six or seven spam-o-grams for each American family every day. Zombie computers arise when spammers seize on bugs in Microsoft Windows--or from naive users who click on attachments--to take over PCs and transform them into spambots. No hard numbers exist, but some estimates say that about one-third of spam comes from zombie computers with broadband connections. The owners of the zombie PCs typically don't even notice what's happening. Because home computers are more likely to be infected than business PCs, and because Comcast has about 6 million high-speed customers, it may have been inevitable that the cable provider became a haven for remote-controlled zombies that churn out junk e-mail. Don't take Comcast's word for it. IronPort Systems' statistics for comcast.net show that while the company's six official mail servers have a monthly outgoing e-mail index of 6.2, there are at least 44 Comcast subscribers with similar scores of 5.8 or higher. Overall, Comcast is the single biggest source of all types of e-mail, with a higher volume than the next two, Time Warner's Road Runner and Yahoo, combined. The link forthis article located at zdnet.com is no longer available. . Verizon's users identified as leading culprits for unsolicited messages, with spam originating from compromised devices.. Comcast Spam Network,Zombie Computer Spam,Email Abuse. . LinuxSecurity.com Team
I agree with the recent Linux and Main editorial that one of the most misunderstood aspects of the spam debate is the confusion about how it should be defined. While I'm willing to admit that there needs to be some discussion . . . . I agree with the recent Linux and Main editorial that one of the most misunderstood aspects of the spam debate is the confusion about how it should be defined. While I'm willing to admit that there needs to be some discussion about the definition included in any laws regarding spam, the essential definition is that unless a sender holds some specific, reasonable permission from me to send an email, it is always spam. Email is not like postal mail or even the phone system. The postal mail infrastructure is in part publicly owned and both postal mail and phone communications are paid for by the sender/caller. The postal system actually owns your mail box, which explains why it is a federal crime to tamper with mail in a mail box, even the one in your yard. And as annoying as telemarketers are, they are paying for the call they place to you. Spammers do not pay for their abuse of my personal property. I do. Email is consensual communications. For you to be able to communicate with me via email, we both have to buy a computer, pay for Internet access and a domain/email provider. Even in the US, this is a high price for us to pay for communications and that cost is made even higher when we have to deal with the additional burden of unwanted communications from people who abuse this system of consensual communications. The link for this article located at LinuxAndMain is no longer available. . The evolving definition of spam now includes unwanted messages across various digital platforms, impacting personal communication and ownership in the online realm.. Spam Definition, Digital Rights, Email Communication. . LinuxSecurity.com Team
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