Spam reaches 30-year anniversary

Spam - the scourge of every e-mail inbox - celebrates its 30th anniversary this weekend.

The first recognizable e-mail marketing message was sent on 3 May, 1978 to 400 people on behalf of DEC - a now-defunct computer-maker.

The message was sent via Arpanet - the internet's forerunner - and won its sender much criticism from recipients.

Thirty years on, spam has grown into an underground industry that sends out billions of messages every day.

Statistics gathered by the FBI suggest that 75% of net scams snare people through junk e-mail. In 2007 these cons netted criminals more than $239m (£121m).

Statistics suggest that more than 80%-85% of all e-mail is spam or junk and more than 100 billion spam messages are sent every day.

The majority of these messages are being sent via hijacked home computers that have been compromised by a computer virus.

The sender of the first junk e-mail message was Gary Thuerk and it was sent to advertise new additions to family of System-20 minicomputers.

It invited the recipients, all of whom were on Arpanet and lived on the west coast of the US, to go to one of two presentations showing off the capabilities of the System-20.

Reaction to the message was swift, with complaints reportedly coming from the US Defense Communications Agency, which oversaw Arpanet, and took Mr Thuerk's boss to task about it.

Despite Mr Thuerk's pioneering spam it took many years for unsolicited commercial e-mail to become a nuisance.

Mr Furr reputedly got his inspiration for the name from a Monty Python sketch set in a restaurant whose menu heavily featured the processed meat.

April 1994 saw another pioneering moment in the history of spam when immigration lawyers Canter and Siegel sent a commercial spam message to more than 6,000 Usenet discussion groups.

The Canter and Siegel e-mail is widely seen as the moment when the commercialisation of the net began and opened the floodgates that led to the deluge of spam seen today.

Since those days spam has grown to be a nuisance and is now used by many hi-tech crime gangs as the vehicle for a variety of scams and cons.

"Spam is a burden on all of us," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. "What's worse is that a lot of spam is deliberately malicious today, aiming to steal your bank account information or install malware."

TEXT 8

Exercise 1. Read and translate the article with the help of a dictionary:

Virtual talks get up close and personal

Times Online

December 05,2006

By Chris Partridge

One thing is certain, in the next ten years international travel is going to become ever more expensive, time consuming and painful. Falling oil stocks, rising carbon taxes and endless security checks will make air travel in particular a nightmare. So companies are already looking again at videoconferencing to bring people together in cyberspace.

The ftrst generation of videoconferencing technology never fulfilled its promise. The blurry video and poor sound quality failed to deliver that here-in-person feeling. The phone lines were plagued by delays that broke up the flow of conversations.

The arrival of internet protocol (IP) communications and the plummeting cost of big TV screens have ushered in a new generation of videoconferencing systems that are much closer to meeting face to face - a technology dubbed telepresence. A telepresence suite looks much like a boardroom, except that the table has an array of very large flat screens along one side. When the screens are switched on, the images show a similar boardroom, as if a mirror was mounted across the table. The others taking part are shown full size, as realistically as possible.

Instead of having a single microphone over each screen, microphones are placed around the room to pick up the direction in which a person is speaking. Participants in the virtual "boardroom" then turn to look at them, as if they were all in the same room. Both boardrooms have the same whiteboard showing the same presentations, and documents can even be "passed" across the table by inserting them into a scanner in one room and printing them out in the other.

One of the pioneers of telepresence is Teliris, an Anglo-American company chaired by Martyn Lewis, the former television news presenter. "With telepresence, the technology disappears and people can start behaving normally," he says. "The absence of the sound delay even makes it possible to interrupt. It is really like sitting opposite someone."

This year IT giants HP and Cisco moved into the market with similar offerings. Lewis is particularly proud of the way telepresence could help to save the planet. Teliris, the company, was recently endorsed by The Carbon Neutral Company as having an immediate impact on carbon emissions by reducing corporate travel.

Telepresence is a big corporate system, each room costing at least £200,000 to equip, but prices are likely to fall dramatically over the next ten years. A future in which workers at home can attend meetings around the globe without sacrificing face-to-face interaction may be on the way.

TEXT 9

Exercise 1. Read and translate the article with the help of a dictionary: