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03/05/2004 Archived Entry: "Unhappy birthday, spam"

Unhappy birthday: according to Netcraft, the first mass unsolicited commercial Internet message -- the notorious Canter and Siegel ad -- was posted ten years ago today, on Internet newsgroups.

Still... with over half of email now estimated to be spam, and modern spam containing so much random gibberish, I do wonder how easily the NSA can scan and analyze the world's email traffic. Netcraft even suggests (in suitably concerned tones) that spam offers new opportunities for encoding secret email. A charming notion, to those of us who are privacy advocates.

Who would have thought that the dark cloud of spam has a silver lining?

brad