Reporter Brian McWilliams – an ex-collegue from PC World – has written an interesting article in Salon about the risks involved in trying to « unsubscribe » from spammers’ lists.
« I decided to try contacting some of the people on the remove lists. I’d remind them that clicking spammers’ unsubscribe links has been known to install Trojan horse software on your computer. What’s more, you can’t even trust some mainstream companies. A recent study found that Amazon and other high-profile firms are sometimes embarrassingly lax in honoring remove requests. »
Brian recently published a book called Spam Kings, published by O’Reilly.
« Spam Kings chronicles the evolution of Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a notorious neo-Nazi leader (Jewish-born) who got into junk email in 1999. Using Hawke as a case study, Spam Kings traces the twenty-year-old neophyte’s rise in the spam trade to his emergence as a major player in the lucrative penis pill market–a business that would eventually make him a millionaire and the target of lawsuits from AOL and others.
Spam Kings also tells the parallel story of Susan Gunn, a computer novice in California who is reluctantly drawn into the spam wars and eventually joins a group of anti-spam activists. Her volunteer sleuth work puts her on a collision course with Hawke and other spammers, who try to wreak revenge on the antis. »
Sounds like the pitch for a great screenplay! The first chapter is available in PDF format.