Spam : A Shadow History of the Internet / Finn Brunton.

Includes bibliographies and index.

1. Ready For Next Message: 1971-1994 -- Spam And The Invention Of Online Community -- Galapagos -- The Supercommunity and the Reactive Public -- Royalists, Anarchists, Parliamentarians, Technolibertarians -- The Wizards -- In The Clean Room: Trust And Protocols -- Interrupting The Polylogue -- The Charivari -- Complex Primitives: The Usenet Community, Spam, And Newbies -- Shaming And Flaming: Antispam, Vigilantism, And The Charivari -- For Free Information Via Email -- The Year September Never Ended: Framing Spam's Advent -- This Vulnerable Medium: The Green Card Lottery -- 2. Make Money Fast: 1995-2003 -- Introduction: The First Ten Moves -- The Entrepreneurs -- Let's Get Brutal: Premier Services And The Infrastructure Of Spam -- Building Antispam -- The Cancelbot Wars -- Spam And Its Metaphors -- The Charivari In Power: Nanae -- You Know The Situation In Africa: Nigeria And 419 -- The Art Of Misdirection -- Robot-Readability -- The Coevolution Of Search And Spam -- 3. The Victim Cloud: 2003-2010 -- Filtering: Scientists And Hackers -- Making Spam Scientific, Part 1 -- Making Spam Hackable -- Poisoning: The Reinvention Of Spam -- Inventing Litspam -- The New Suckers -- "New Twist In Affect": Splogging, Content Farms, And Social Spam -- The Popular Vote -- The Quantified Audience -- In Your Own Words: Spamming And Human-Machine Collaborations -- The Botnets -- The Marketplace -- Inside The Library Of Babel: The Storm Worm -- Surveying Storm: Making Spam Scientific, Part II -- The Overload: Militarizing Spam -- Criminal Infrastructure -- Conclusion -- The Use Of Information Technology Infrastructure -- ... To Exploit Existing Aggregation Of Human Attention.

The vast majority of all email sent every day is spam, a variety of idiosyncratically spelled requests to provide account information, invitations to spend money on dubious products, and pleas to send cash overseas. Most of it is caught by filters before ever reaching an in-box. Where does it come from? As Finn Brunton explains in Spam, it is produced and shaped by many different populations around the world: programmers, con artists, bots and their botmasters, pharmaceutical merchants, marketers, identity thieves, crooked bankers and their victims, cops, lawyers, network security professionals, vigilantes, and hackers. Every time we go online, we participate in the system of spam, with choices, refusals, and purchases the consequences of which we may not understand. This is a book about what spam is, how it works, and what it means. Brunton provides a cultural history that stretches from pranks on early computer networks to the construction of a global criminal infrastructure. The history of spam, Brunton shows us, is a shadow history of the Internet itself, with spam emerging as the mirror image of the online communities it targets. Brunton traces spam through three epochs: the 1970s to 1995, and the early, noncommercial computer networks that became the Internet; 1995 to 2003, with the dot-com boom, the rise of spam's entrepreneurs, and the first efforts at regulating spam; and 2003 to the present, with the war of algorithms --

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