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Better Not Send Porn Spam To A Texas Housewife

Otherwise, Dateline NBC will send its crack team of high-tech reporters to hunt you down. I would've loved to have heard them say "Spunkfarm" on TV. More commentary on the lame excuse for journalism (this was just sensationalism, folks) here where one commenter says "If I had to shake hands with someone from that news organization, I'd make sure to count my fingers immediately afterwards."

Posted by Jake on 08/14/05 @ 06:48 PM
Posted in Funny, Journalism | 5 Comments | Permalink
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5 Comments

Mike said on 08/15/05 @ 11:09 AM:
Yes it's sensationalism and NBC is making money from it I'm sure.

I don't know of any way to stop this junk from comming though. It's kind of embarrassing to have that stuff show up at work when I didn't ask for it. Maybe embarrassing them and putting them on TV will help?

Patrick said on 08/15/05 @ 02:12 PM:
Having just read page one, it appears to exactly match the transcript of the show (I did get to hear John Hockenberry ask several people about SpunkFarm)

The show itself, the concept that someone else must be responsible for filtering our email disgusted me. I hate spam as much as the next person, but you can't go swimming in the ocean and expect someone else to keep the sharks away.

I'm sorry that this woman's child saw horses and humans in centaurian relations, but just taking off that crappy email viewer from Bill - or turning off html email would have prevented it. Sending wheelchair bound reporters to the porn hosting houses in Toronto might track down one spammer; it does nothing against the flood that continues to fill up our inboxes. It is a technological problem to a certain degree and as such will be primarily curbed technologically.

Scott said on 08/16/05 @ 06:57 AM:
Sensationalism, but rather interesting anyway. Just the fact that they actually found the sender is interesting. How many messages did they try before they found one they could track? And they found him through an ID in the message itself. Using whois or header info is pretty useless, so it is frustrating to think about how many millions of spam messages can be sent almost entirely anonymously.

And yes, if a user like that has html on in their email, they are asking for trouble anyway.

Chef Booyadee said on 08/16/05 @ 06:40 PM:
Wait a minute... isn't Dateline the show with "Stone Philips" as an anchor?

And we're sure that they aren't the ones sending porn e-mails? Considering the state of sensationalist "journalism" today, it wouldn't be unusual for news shows (or the gub'ment) to make a story. I can see the subject line now: "Have trouble keeping it up with the latest stories? Tune in to Stone Philips and the Dateline crew members on....."

Patrick said on 08/16/05 @ 09:33 PM:
"And they found him through an ID in the message itself. Using whois or header info is pretty useless, so it is frustrating to think about how many millions of spam messages can be sent almost entirely anonymously."

Actually, the spammer was not Spunk Farm themselves (watch Jake's ratings rise on that one ;)) but was someone who was paid when they signed up for the site in question - an affiliate making their commission. So the real "fight" to find the original sender did not end with the site, but they had to track down the owners of the site. Then they had to convince the owner to turn over information on the independent affiliate whose id string was in the url link back to the sign up page.

Indeed this is a touch more than doing a whois on the address.

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