I'm sure everybody has noticed the massive upsurge in spam over the
last two-three weeks. This increase in volume seems to have begun at
about the end of the NSW school holidays, but I think that their ending
may be more-or-less coincidental.
Just watching the spam arrive, it seems to hit in waves:
1. start up time in USA (say 8.30 a.m.-ish on East Coast)
continues for some hours (start up time on West Coast?)
2. start up time in Oz (East Coast)
3. go home time for Oz kids (say 4 p.m.)
Mind you, these "waves" continue for hours.
Could it be that there is so much "phone home" activity on the average
Window$ machine at boot time that USERs (who don't have a clue anyway)
and MSCE types don't realise that something's amiss?
Of course, there are conspiracy theorists who claim that reducing the
level of spam is not in the interests of those ISPs and phone providers
that charge for traffic in both directions [no names, no pack drill].
But that surely can't be right :-)
BTW, I've posted to SLUG-main rather than SLUG-chat because spam can
never be OT on a list that itself is so heavily hammered.
Robert Thorsby
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