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Spam, April 2013
Hardcover / e-Book
A Shadow History of the Internet
MIT Press
April 2013
On Sale: April 12, 2013
290 pages ISBN: 026201887X EAN: 9780262018876 Kindle: B00C4UU2E8 Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
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 -- spam versus
anti-spam. Spam shows us how technologies, from email
to search engines, are transformed by unintended
consequences and adaptations, and how online communities
develop and invent governance for themselves.
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