Wayne State University
College of Lifelong Learning
Interdisciplinary Studies Program
Fall, 2000
http://www.cll.wayne.edu/isp/drbowen/inetf00
|
Instructor: David R. Bowen
2311 A/AB
Wayne State University
Detroit, MI 48202 |
Daytime tel: (313) 577-1498
Evening tel: (248) 549-8518
FAX: (313) 577-8585
Email: d.r.bowen@wayne.edu |
Instructor's
home page (David R. Bowen) at http://www.cll.wayne.edu/isp/drbowen
|
eCommerce: Using the Web to Find and Service
Customers
AGS 3360 Section 986 Call Number 92073
or ISP 5500 Section 982 Call Number 92136 |
Computers, the Internet, and Society
AGS 3340 Section 981 Call Number 96761
or ISP 5990 Section 982 Call Number 99915 |
Link back to course Welcome...
Last updated: 11/16/00
 |
Agenda for
Computers, the Internet, and Society
Class #6 -- November 15, 2000 |
This agenda and class are for Computers, the Internet, and Society only.
Changes from original agenda:
- Change in assignments - Essay 2 was deleted from the assignment schedule. I do not plan
to change the web page on assignments, this late in the semester.
- I passed out the Final Exam topics, and we went over them briefly. Each member of the
class signed up to post something regarding one of the A-B-C topics for Release 2.1 under
II on the exam topics. I hope that this will start a discussion of the textbooks online. I
think that the list below is right, but I don't have my notes with me this
morning:
- Earline Yelder
- Paul Mungar
- Thelma Blakely
- We went over the handout "Forms of Computer Information. We got as far as starting
graphics information, bitmaps only, and will continue this during the next (last) class. I
will make a list of graphics encoding schemes. Generally, the bitmap or "paint"
schemes divide the screen into "pixels" arranged in rows and columns, and then
have an encoding scheme or way of describing the color of each pixel. These schemes start
at the upper left corner of the picture and scan across the top or first row, then start
over on the second row, and so on. For each pixel, color information has to be stored.
- Another conference topic can be questions about the Final Exam topics, which include
Quiz 1 and Quiz 2 topics.
- The Final Exam will be Friday December 15 starting at 6:30 PM.
- For uploading your personal web page,
- You can use either FTP or the web upload page.
- For either system the User Name is inetf00 and the password is stustu.
- Only Earline's personal web page is there now.
Original agenda:
- Quiz 2 - one hour
- Announcements
- If your name is listed below, puh-LEAZE go to the course web site and fill in the course
information form.
- Nafeesah Abdullah
- Paul Mungar
- Mary Phelps
- Chandra Williams
- The computer tutor is available at no charge (paid directly by ISP). His name is Matta
Vijay Kumar and he is available as follows:
- Tel 313-832-6585
- Lab hours (also lab is open and you can work in there): Fridays 10 - 12 and 3 to 7 PM
- Student Evaluation of Teaching for this course will be next class - December 6.
- Reminder of what you should be doing online on a regular basis -- these are part of the
grade
- Signin, from the lab, only on days for the class(es) you are taking
- Weekly course report (if you are taking both classes, a single report will do)
- Conference postings (one for eCommerce, two for Computers, the Internet, and Society,
three if you are taking both). In order to count towards the requirement, postings should
be (a) minimum of five lines and (b) about the course topic(s). What to post about? Here
are some possibilities
- Quiz and Exam questions. Ask a question, but better yet try answering one. I will
respond, and then you know that you can answer it.
- Readings. With fewer class meetings, the discussion goes in the compueter conference.
- Use of Word, Excel and Access
- Not required, but do it anyway - check your email on at least a weekly basis. Don't have
email: use hotmail - it's easy and free. See me if you need help.
- Last assignments - reminder (see syllabus and assignment schedule for details)
- Essays
- Personal web page
- Getting ready for Final - it will be cumulative
- Email
- Review of Internet security
- Public key encryption
- Ways to use it
- Digital certificates
- Release 2.1
- Information broker
- Encryption at destination as well as en route
- Internet - issues / Read the news!
- Just another technology?
- Will there be enough jobs for people?
- Permanent underclass?
- Racial / ethnic / cultural equality
- Invasion of privacy
- Relationships between Employees and Employers
- Falsifying information and/or the source of information
- Intellectual property rights
- Pornography and children
- Pollution and environmental degredation
- Dependence and the potential for disasters
- Y2K problem
- IV.Internet trends
- What can we expect from the Internet in the near future?
- Continued rapid growth - doubling every year or so
- Increased speed - cable modems, Internet 2
- More services, e.g. movies
- It is not clear that security will be improved, although that could easily be done -
there is little demand for it
- Decreased costs for connection ("Internet appliances" such as iNet)
- Making the web smarter - XML or Extensible Markup Language. This is a system for
describing data so that it can be handled as the number ordered or currency, etc. This wil
mean that web pages can incorporate data types, much like a database. Since this will make
the web more useful, it should also make the web even more popular.
- ConvergenceMerging of several functions into one device. Example in class.
- Communications power shifting to the individual
- Can more easily choose between stores
- Can search for stores
- Can send messages to anyone connected to the Internet - also many services to find
people
- Can easily and cheaply set up a web server to sell, inform, etc.
- There is no licensing authority
- There is no claim here that the Internet is a perfect communications medium for the
individual. the claim is only that it gives more power to the individual, compared to
earlier forms.
- For example, setting up a web server can cost $1,000 or less. Setting up a "brick
and mortar" communications medium such as a newspaper, a TV station or a radio
station costs $1,000,000 or more.
- Some people claim that big business will find a way to take over and control the
Internet. This has been tried and so far it has failed. Customers will flee an ISP that
does not give full access, for example. Since it is cheap and easy to become a small ISP,
if this preference continues, big ISPs will have trouble if they try to restrict access.
There are no guarantees, however.
- Types of computer information - handout
- Information security
- Passwords
- Your User ID is often public, so the password is your protection
- Everyone should have their own account, no sharing or borrowing
- Passwords minimum of six characters in length
- Do not use dictionary word - can use electronic dictionary easily
- On a case-sensitive system (Unix) use both upper and lower case
- Use alphabetic, numeric and special characters (!@#$% etc.) - this means that many
password guessing programs will not work, and those that will work have many more
combinations to search through
- Change your password when required
- If you have so many passwords that you must write them down, keep different passwords on
different lists. Do not keep the lists out in the open. Each time you are required to
change your password, write a new list, so that you don't reveal patters.
- Cookies
- A cookie is...
- Cookies are stored in the file
- Netscape 4: ~\Netscape\Users\<user name>\cookies.txt
- Netscape 3: ~\Netscape\cookies.txt
- Internet Explorer 3: Each cookie in its own file in ~Windows\cookies
- Internet Explorer 4: Each cookie in its own file in ~\Windows\Profiles\<user
name>\cookies\
A Netscape cookie file
# Netscape HTTP Cookie File
# http://www.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html
# This is a generated file! Do not edit.
www.convene.com FALSE / FALSE
1293753383 EGSOFT_ID
141.217.142.125-1703054704.29172376
.preferences.com TRUE / FALSE
1182140414 PreferencesID
E2IdffK474DcHzHh+B35ja
mspress.microsoft.com FALSE / FALSE
1293753636 EGSOFT_ID
141.217.142.125-3471568240.29230935
.imgis.com TRUE / FALSE
1075947957 JEB2
035D4A55DB225B898DD98E7D3004A67F
.yahoo.com TRUE / FALSE
1271361591 B 1eg330u675o1i
.doubleclick.net TRUE / FALSE
1920499108 id af7fdfa5
.amazon.com TRUE / FALSE
2082787192 x-main
cJf6dW@0qzPZl34oCBrxZg
.amazon.com TRUE / FALSE
2082787192 ubid-main
002-6336269-9683841
.netscape.com TRUE / FALSE
1293839881 UIDC
141.217.142.125:0932073186:810001
www.courseweb.wayne.edu:5001 FALSE /
FALSE 2137622208 CFTOKEN
55688078
www.courseweb.wayne.edu:5001 FALSE /
FALSE 2137622208 CFID
113
.netscape.com TRUE / FALSE
1293846050 HITO_VISITS
A4357A03B+1DA4CB*E15EE*1
.track-star.com TRUE / FALSE
978307151 tsid
M12.36762581891.15.12-160|11_36_105_12
.pparadise.com TRUE / FALSE
2051222282 SITESERVER
ID=56cc24c9b0788389a4f52729ffb27749
www.pparadise.com FALSE / FALSE
2145801482 NGUserID
c000008d-203-947110936-1
www.pparadise.com:80 FALSE / FALSE
2145801482 NGUserID
c000008d-203-947110998-1
.valueclick.com TRUE / FALSE
953939705 b_s
a0015728&1&a0016486&1
- You can control how your Browser handles cookies. The method is slightly different for
each Browser and version, but generally you can opt to:
- Accept all cookies with no notice (this is always the default)
- Accept no cookies
- Accept only cookies that can only be retrieved by the originating server (this may not
be foolproof, but would prevent another server from looking at all of your cookies)
- Notify you and give a choice about accepting/rejecting each cookie (this can get
annoying!)
In Netscape, choose the menu item Edit / Preferences

In Internet Explorer,

Reportedly, new versions of Internet Explorer do not let you reject all cookies, because
Microsoft's Active Server Pages (.asp extension) require cookies to work.
- Keeping track of your cookies
- You can view cookie files with Notepad or Wordpad in Windows, and probably with
Teachtext for the Mac. Usually viewing a cookie will not do you much good, because only
the web server that set the cookie will know what each part means, and how the information
is encoded.
- Users say that you can delete Netscape cookies by deleting their line in cookies.txt, or
by deleting the file for Internet Explorer. This despite all of the warnings in
cookies.txt. In fact, you can reportedly delete Netscape's cookies.txt altogether, and all
of the files in the cookies folder for Internet Explorer. They will be regenerated during
the next start-up, less all of the individual cookies.
- "Cookie Utilities" are programs that you can download to manage your cookies.
These are generally free for a trial period (say, thirty days) but may require purchase
later. I have used Cookie Pal, but it doesn't seem to do much more than I have told you
above.
- Cookie Crusher: http://www.thelimitsoft.com/cookie.html
- Cookie Pal: http://www.kburra.com/
- From the point of view of the cookie "setter" (the server which puts the
cookie on the user's computer), cookies are both good and bad:
- The World Wide Web does not connect successive "hits" from the same user (the
technical language is that the Web is "stateless"). This is necessary for
transactions such as choosing an article from an online catalog, and then making the
purchase, or for answering a series of questions for an online test. Without this state
information, any kind of dialogue with a user is impossible - which user are you talking
to? Cookies preserve the state and make dialogues possible.
- Cookies only identify the computer, not the user. For example, I have Amazon.com cookies
on my home and office computers. I am the same person, but Amazon.com doesn't know this.
Also, if someone else is using the computer, the server thinks they are the same person.
- There are alternate methods for preserving the state information on the Web. The cookie
normally happens without notice to the user. Another method is requiring a login. This does
identify the person, but many users are reluctant to do this, so web sites tend not to use
it. Hidden elements can also be put in web pages to track the user, but savvy users can
see this tracking information (View Source).
- Credit cards Vs debit cards over the Internet. You have much more control and protection
with a credit card. Your losses are limited, and your credit card company is almost forced
to take your side in a dispute with a merchant, since you haven't paid them yet.
- Encryption and Certificates. These two technologies make it possible to protect
information such as a credit card number while it travels over the Internet, to identify
which computer the information comes from, and that it has not been changed during travel,
and to identify who the computer actually belongs to. These technologies are not
absolutely foolproof, but neither are their IRL equivalents absolutely foolproof either.
Security professionals claim that the digital forms are far more secure than their IRL
equivalents.
- Encryption "scrambles" information before it is put on the Internet, and
unscrambles it on the other end. Modern-day encryption systems use a "key" - a
digital number - to scramble and unscramble. The length of the key determines how
difficult it is to crack the code without having the key. Cracking the code is equivalent
to guessing the key. Current standards are 40-bit and 128-bit keys. Cracking a 40-bit key
is currently difficult for an ordinary person with a desktop computer. (My son-in-law the
computer pro says that the cracker would probably do better with a gun.) 128-bit is the
current standard for banking and equivalent information, but such a key was recently
cracked by combining something like 100,000 computers for a year during their spare time.
Of course, as computers get faster, these tasks will become easier for ordinary people,
but each additional bit makes it twice as difficult to crack the code. So security
professionals say that it is time to migrate to 512-bit keys. There are two basic forms of
key encryption.
- Private-key or symmetric encryption. The same key is used to scramble and descramble.
The problem is - how does the receiver get the key? If over the ordinary Internet, the key
can be intercepted and used to read the message. This is not a secure system.
- Public key, asymmetric or public key/private key encryption. These keys come in matched
pairs. One is the private key that the individual keeps secure, and the other is the
public key that is given out. If either of these keys is used to encrypt a message, only
the other can decrypt it. Cracking this system is equivalent to factoring a number with
the number of bits of the key length. This is a workable scheme, and is the scheme
currently in use. Here are some examples:
- You buy a book from Amazon.com. Amazon sends you its public key to encrypt your ordering
information with. (Your Browser handles your end of this without your involvement. You can
tell this is a secure transaction because the key in the lower-left hand corner, instead
of being shown broken as is normal, is whole.) Use of the key is triggered by the method
"shttp" (https is a less-common method). You are satisfied because you know that
only Amazon's private key can decrypt your credit card number. You can trace amazon's
public key back to a certifying agency which vouches that this is really Amazon. Amazon is
satisfied because they know the credit card number was not altered during transmission.
The credit card number is decrypted when it arrives, and stored in the decrypted form.
- You send a contract via email. You encrypt the contract with your private key. The other
party decrypts it with your public key, which guarantees it came from you and was not
altered during transmission. The other party can use your public key to identify you,
equivalent to a notarized signature.
- Both parties to a communication can use both their private keys and public keys,
guaranteeing that each is who they say they are.
- Digital Certificates are private key/public key pairs that come from a Certificate
Authority (CA), which acts like a public notary. The public key contains the public key of
the CA, and so tells your correspondent who vouches for your identity. Examples of CAs are
Thawte, VeriSign (a subsidiary of Thawte) and Truste.
Broken key icon
and fixed key icon 
https URL 
- Most computer security breaches are not due to unauthorized intrusion (cracking or
hacking) but to unauthorized use by authorized users. Transmission encryption will not
protect against this. Dyson in Release 2.1 writes that we should begin to require
on-site encryption also. This would help, but continued commitment and training are also
necessary. A lot of unauthorized use comes from human curiosity, such as the desire to see
Bill Gates' income tax return, if you work in the IRS, or the curiosity perhaps to see a
neighbor's grades if you work at a University.
- Identity brokers - see Release 2.1 on data intermediaries (Pg 282 ff)
- Dyson writes that individuals are afraid of being exposed to public scrutiny by
wholesale breaches of their personal information. On the other hand, the complete
opposite, anonymity, has problems also. She makes two points here:
- From the point of view of society, complete anonymity permits or at least does not
restrain antisocial behavior. She cites the example of Internet communities that virtually
destroyed themselves through complete anonymity. Some visibility may keep us close enough
to the straight and narrow that society can be functional.
- The individual wants some information to be public, since this fosters trust and the
ability to make deals, buy goods, trust information, and so on.
- Dyson predicts that there will be companies that manage this for you as a paid service,
like your credit card company or the credit rating bureaus do. They will guarantee your
credit, in the case of the credit card company. Dyson predicts this practice spreading to
other areas. You would reveal yourself to you data management company, and in the future
they would vouch for your credit, your trustworthiness, your moral character and so on,
without revealing the information on which that is based. So you could subscribe for the
level of service that you wanted. If the company lied about its ratings of you, it would
lose its credibility, which is its source of value.
- Antivirus protection
- Viruses
- What is a virus? A computer virus is a program that saves itself as a file on your
computer and/or changes existing files. The end result is that almost anything bad can
happen, depending on the type of virus. There are tens of thousands of known viruses that
can delete files, change file extensions, cause your other programs to malfunction, and
always try to get into other computers. Viruses spread via floppy diskettes and other
portable disks, and via modem and network and Internet connections.
Originally viruses were standard executable programs but with the advent of Microsoft's
widespread and powerful scripting languages for Word and Excel, macro viruses have become
common. (Access also is vulnerable, but it is not used often enough to attract virus
developers.) Application scripting languages are not as powerful as regular programming
languages, so macro viruses have so far not done as much damage.
- Until recently, email messages could not carry active viruses. Viruses can be contained
as *.exe or .com in attachments, but the attachment has to be extracted and then activated
before the virus can work its evil. But Microsoft Outlook has a scripting language that
can be inserted in a message, and executed by simply opening the message to read it.
Also, web pages now have scripting languages such as Java, JavaScript and VB Script. (VB
script is not popular enough to attract virus developers.) These scripts run automatically
when the page is viewed. Since it was recognized very early that this presented a danger,
web scripting languages are generally only enabled for working within the Browser window.
Microsoft's ActiveX controls are exceptions; their language is quite powerful. Microsoft
has a program of certifying ActiveX controls as being legitimate, and this prevents
uncertified controls from executing.
- What motivates people to develop viruses? Eastern Europe has many highly educated but
underemployed computer programmers, who see their Western colleagues as rich and spoiled.
Many viruses come from this region. Some viruses are more or less innocent experiments
that get out of control. But most viruses are written to demonstrate the user's
superiority over the common user, or the careless server administrator. Ultimately, the
motivation of the virus developer is irrelevant. The user must protect him/herself.
I can promise you that getting infected by a computer virus will/make you be good and
protect yourself, at least for a year or two. But highly effective and easy to use
protection is widely today, so there are few excuses. The best protection is a good
anti-virus program that is updated regularly, and starting with other methods is not meant
to steer anyone away from that. Here are some methods for protecting your computer.
- Be careful about whom you accept files from. Commercial "shrink
wrapped" software is supposed to be very safe. Safety goes downhill from there.
- Watch for unusual operation after loading a new program on your computer.
- Applications with scripting languages should have settings for which you
are warned before a macro can run. Make sure that these settings are enabled. Do not let
the macro run if you have reason to doubt the source.
- The big one. Buy a virus program. The common ones are all excellent;
Mcafee, Symantec (Norton) and IBM. As each new generation of viruses comes along, the
programs must be rewritten, most recently to check email macros, so don't find an old
program and recycle it. Plan on buying a new anti-virus program every year or tow. If you
see "shield" in the name, that means that the program will put a virtual shield
around your computer, and scan all files that you open, whether on a floppy or a network.
And in addition, it should prompt you to scan all existing files regularly. Modern
anti-virus programs also automate regular updating of the virus definition files, and free
updating should come with the product. The program should prompt you regularly, say every
two weeks, to check its home site for updates. The updates should be downloaded and
installed automatically. When your anti-virus program tells you that it is time to update,
let it do its thing.
- Recently, with the Babylonia virus, it has been demonstrated that Windows help files
(extension .hlp) can also contain a virus. The following types of files can contain
viruses:
- .exe
- .com
- .dll
- .doc, .dot (Word)
- .xl* (Excel)
- .mdb (Access)
- .hlp (Windows help)
- One additional point: corporate computers are extensively connected by LANs, and
therefore make it easier for viruses to spread. Virus writers know this, and most viruses
are found on corporate computers. Viruses on home computers are less common, but on the
other hand, home computers do not have the extensive technical support, so viruses are
harder to repair.
- Virus hoaxes are false warnings about computer viruses. Why do this? Creating a good
virus can be difficult and can land you in jail. Creating a virus hoax is easy, and you
probably would not go to jail if caught. And you can write a good scary email and sit back
and watch it spread. Many virus hoax messages simply make small changes in a previous hoax
and resend. I have gotten several virus hoax notices in these classes; hence this topic. A
virus that destroys its host computer, or deletes all the files on its hard drive, cannot
spread itself after it does that. Any notice of a virus that will destroy all of the
files, destroy the computer, or something like that, is probably a hoax. A favorite phrase
is that IBM, or AOL, or IBM and AOL, have verified that this hoax does all of those
terrible things.
- To check out notices of viruses and hoaxes, I like the following web sites:
http://www.av.ibm.com/BreakingNews/VirusAlert/
http://www.av.ibm.com/BreakingNews/HypeAlert/
http://www.mcafee.com/centers/anti-virus/default2.asp
http://vil.mcafee.com/hoax.asp
Network Associates (McAfee) http://vil.nai.com/villib/alpha.asp
Computer Incident Advisory Capability (CIAC - US Department of Energy antivirus site) http://ciac.llnl.gov (find other anti-virus links here)
CIAC Virus Hoax page http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/CIACHoaxes.html
- From Agenda 4: Protecting yourself from being taken over for Denial of Service attacks.
An article in the New York Times' "Circuits" section today (2/17/2000, Pg D1)
gave suggestions about how to protect your home computer from Internet-based attacks, or
being coopted in a DDoS attack.
- A free Internet site, www.grc.com, called ShieldsUP!
will scan your home computer for Internet vulnerabilities in the way that a hacker would,
and tell you about them. The site also has a tutorial on Internet security.
- Internet vulnerabilities can be exploited to place computer files on your computer. The
first line of defense, according to the article, is a good antivirus program with
"Shield" capability and up-to-date virus definition files.
- The article lists several programs that you can run on your computer to set up a
firewall that inspects all Internet traffic coming into your computer, and blocks
unauthorized packets. More of these programs are expected on the market soon, but here are
some available now:
- BlackIce Defender, $40 from Network Ice at www.networkice.com
- Norton Internet Security 2000, $55 from Symantec at www.symantec.com
- (Recommended by reviewer) ZoneAlaram 2.0, free download from www.zonelabs.com. Pops up an alarm if your system is
being scanned for vulnerabilities. Also monitors your running programs to see which ones -
legitimately or otherwise - are trying to send information back out to the Internet.
- Spam is bulk email, like junk mail, usually for advertising purposes. At its worst, Spam
can overload a user's mailbox, making email unusable. Spammers are both amateur and
professional.
- Spammers get addresses from UseNet news groups, and by scanning web pages with
"mailto" links in them. Lists are posted to the Internet and exchanged.
- One line of defense is to look at the email headers to find out where the mail came
fromand how it was passed. Directions for doing this vary widely among email programs.
Consult http://digital.net/~gandalf/spamfaq.html
for hints. Here is a sample set of headers:
Received: from post.info.drugstore.com (post.info.drugstore.com
[216.32.6.82])
by mail1.wayne.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA05623 for
<d.r.bowen@wayne.edu>; Tue, 14 Mar 2000 10:37:06 -0500 (EST)
Message-ID:
<200003141537.KAA05623@mail1.wayne.edu>
Received: from PickupDirectory by post.info.drugstore.com with SMTP
(Microsoft Exchange Internet Mail Service Version 5.5.2448.0) id
19TQ02D9; Tue, 14 Mar 2000 07:33:39 -0800
From: "drugstore.com" <drugstore.com_000268@info.drugstore.com>
To: <d.r.bowen@mail1.wayne.edu>
Subject: Save the planet with great natural products
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2000 04:13:20 -0800
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_1DD030_01BF8D6B.A1E66030"
X-Recipient_Key: 162568
X-Cq_Job: 268
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3612.1700
The goal is to pick out the address of the spammer's Internet Service Provider. Then email
that ISP and complain. Since spammers are universally reviled, many ISPs will discipline
clients who are spammers.
- There is software to filter out Spam, both at the user level and the ISP level (incoming
and outgoing). Yous ISP may install this if you are victimized. Here is a list from Yahoo
- Anti-Spam Provisions in Sendmail
- BlackMail Anti Spam
Mailer Daemon - a highly configurable SMTP mail filter that runs at a system level as
a proxy to your existing mailer.
- Fight Junk Mail - two packages to help combat
internet spam.
- Infinite Ink's Mail Filtering and Robots
- jmfilter
- junkfilter - a procmail-based
junk email filter system. Filter junk from Cyber Promotions, Nancynet, Quantcom, and many
more. End junkmail with falsified headers. Filter it!
- makebait - how to make your own bot
bait.
- NewApps.com
Anti-Spam Tools
- Procmail Filters Kit
- RBL Code
- S.C.S. Spam Mail Filter for NT -
freeware for users of EMWAC's Internet Mail Software.
- Sam Spade - web interface to many network tools,
including traceroute, dig, whois, secure web browser, URL decipherer.
- Spam Hater - free Windows
software that helps you to hit back at the spammers.
- Spambam
- Spambot - stops robots from collecting you email
from a web page.
- Spambot Beware - Help on how to hide your
email address on web pages. Also shows ways to detect and harass spambots.
- Spammer Slammer
- Using check_* in
sendmail 8.8 - rulesets for validating RCPT, MAIL, check_compat, etc.
Most email clients will also filter out unwanted email. Here is an example of a filter
dialog, from Netscape Communicator:

This dialog defines a single filter; multiple filters can be combined. Other email
programs will do this slightly differently, of course.