25 years ago a salesman from Digital Equipment Corp. sent a message touting a new computer to every West Coast user of the Arpanet. It was the beginning of "spamming". You, blog reader, receive spam in your mailbox too. (If I am wrong, you can spam me here)
Today it is a serious problem, aknowledged both by the European Union and US. Although much more spamming originates and targets US, there is a dark future for Europe too. The European Union took some steps on protecting private information (and e-mail as a private space) from Unsolicited Commercial Communication. There is an interesting spam study produced by EU in 2001 and several legislative initiatives. In US, the scale of the problem has been analyzed at Federal Trade Commission's "spam summit". You can read a Reuters report on this event. I'll be back on spam.