Spam [electronic resource] : a shadow history of the Internet / Finn Brunton.
Brunton, Finn, 1980-
2013
HE7553 .B78 2013eb
Available Online

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Title Spam [electronic resource] : a shadow history of the Internet / Finn Brunton.
Author Brunton, Finn, 1980-
ISBN 9780262313940 electronic book
026201887X hardcover : cover alkaline paper
9780262018876 hardcover : cover alkaline paper
Publication Details Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2013.
Language English
Description 1 online resource (xxiii, 270 p.)
Call Number HE7553 .B78 2013eb
Dewey Decimal Classification 384.3/4
Summary 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.
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references and index.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
Source of Description Description based on print version record.
Series Infrastructures series.
Available in Other Form Spam.
Linked Resources Online Access
Record Appears in Online Resources > Ebooks
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Introduction: The shadow history of the internet
Ready for next message : 1971-1994
Make money fast : 1995-2003
The victim cloud : 2003-2010
Conclusion.

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