SPAM. It's not just for breakfast anymore.

Note: This entry is a draft of an article that I am submitting to a local newspaper.

SPAM. It’s not just for breakfast anymore.

By Pete Davis

12/20/07

One of the things I am most often asked to address in regards to computer problems is Spam, technically known as UCE, or Unsolicited Commercial Email. The term Spam comes from an old Monty Python (a show on the BBC and PBS) skit where patrons of a restaurant were forced to order Spam on the menu. The menu choices were Spam and eggs, Spam and eggs and beans, or Spam and eggs and Spam and beans. The skit goes on and on where the customer and the waiter argue back and forth, and the whole group eventually breaks out in song with everyone singing SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM.

I actually like Spam. As long as it comes in a can, and comes from Hormel. Spam sandwiches, Spam and eggs, or Hawaiian Spam grilled with Pineapples and cherries are nice also. I just don’t want to eat it for every meal.

Regarding the e-mail type of Spam, there are basically three types of Spam. (junk email).

The first kind is advertisements for fake Rolexes, bootleg software, fake medicine, or whatever.

If the local jeweler was selling what he claimed to be a $40,000 Rolex watch for $199, you wouldn’t waste your time with it. If the local PC shop was offering a $500 software package for $1.99, you wouldn’t think it was legit, and if the drugstore offered $12/pill heart medicine for $3/1000, you wouldn’t risk your health on it. I don’t know who would trust these swindlers with their money over the internet.

Besides selling you stuff that you wouldn’t want to buy in person, there are “hot stock tips”, “new investment ideas”, and “work at home” plans that all usually involve a pump-and-dump stock, or buying gold, platinum, or hamster futures through some shady brokerage, or a work at home scheme that is so simple, they can’t even tell about it unless you send them $29.99. None of these schemes are new. There are new greedy people out there every generation who will always be sending these people money with the hopes to get rich.

The last category is the sexually explicit email. Apparently there are women who REALLY want to chat with you live on their website and show you pictures that would make a sailor blush. These emails are available regardless of what your pleasure might be. If you like men, women, animals, or any combination of any of these with any perversion of any inanimate objects, whether legal or illegal, there is someone out there willing to show it to you for a price. This type of email is the most offensive to the most people, but its (apparently) the most profitable. The online pornography business has exploded in the past 10 years since the privacy of your own home is preferable to most people rather than to be seen by someone coming out of a porn shop carrying magazines and videos. At least some people are ashamed of their perversion enough to hide it on their computer.

Regardless of what type of UCE that you receive, whether it be on your home email, your work email account, or your school account, the cost of processing it by the ISP is high, the cost of having to read it all and manually filter it is high, and it can all be very frustrating, and the risk of infecting your PC with a virus is high. There are other costs as well; especially the fraud, identity theft, and the other online security risks that Spammers bait, but I will save those for another article.

For years, people have suggested making Spamming illegal. The problem with that is that Spam can be sent from ANYWHERE. There is nothing that the US Congress could do to stop Spammers in Denmark, the Cayman Islands, or Malaysia.

Other options include charging everyone, including Spammers a fee to send mail. Since there is no single clearinghouse for all email to pass through, then whoever tried to implement the idea would run them away to then next Internet provider. Unless every ISP adopted a uniform method for charging a small fee for every email message, that idea would never work. Its also currently impossible to charge and account for charging 6 billion people $0.01USD for each email message that goes out. Electronic micro payments are just not standardized enough to roll out worldwide. It would cost 2 cents to process a payment of 1 cent.

If regular mail (brought by postal carriers) could be sent with free postage, free ink, free paper, and could contain claims and offers that would otherwise yield jail time by the Postmaster General, then we would each receive a huge Santa Claus sized mailbag every stinking day! We would have to dig through a mountain of mail to find the electric bill, the phone bill, and the birthday card from Grandma with $10 inside. In the meantime the junk mail would all look like bills and Grandma’s letters.

The solution: Oh, yeah, the point of this article was to tell the readers how to avoid email. There are seven tips.

1. DO NOT ever publish your email address on a website. If you need to put it on a website, make a graphic image of the email address and embed it into the website. The words fjohnson@picklefactory.com will be detected by “robot” programs and Mr. Johnson will get on a LOT more Spammer lists than if it were a graphic image that had to be manually typed by the reader. Another way to hide the email while explaining it on a site would be to put it fjohnson [at] picklefactory.com.
2. DO NOT sign up for anything free on a website that you don’t know or trust. If a pop-up ad says “click here to win a free laptop” and you follow the link, you will be GUARANTEED to receive Spam to every email address that you enter in their signup. You will not get a free laptop, regardless of what the ad says.
3. DO NOT respond to Spam. Even if the bottom of the message says “click here to unsubscribe”. Following any link in any Spam message will potentially acknowledge that the email address they sent to is actually read by a real live person. Once you effectively validate your email account, you move to the top of the new list. The new list gets 40 messages tomorrow.
4. Change your email account. Once you get buried in Spam, most ISP’s will allow you to change your email address. Be sure to send a message to everyone in your address book with your new email account. Your old one will start bouncing when you turn it off. You may need to notify your bank, your online billing services, your school, etc.
5. Ask your ISP to filter your email. Most ISP’s today offer a filtering service, usually at no additional cost. Sometimes you have to log in to set it up.
6. There are MANY Spam filtering programs that you can install on your own PC, and many clients (Outlook 2007, Mozilla Thunderbird, etc) are capable of separating the good, the bad, and the ugly. These usually have a Bayesian filter that will learn what YOU call Spam and what YOU consider legitimate email. For example, a pharmacists may not want to filter every message with the word “Viagra”, and a cancer doctor may not want to filter every message with the word “breast”
7. Forward your email to an online service. Spamcop.net offers a web-mail service what will filter email and let you keep your existing address. Google and Yahoo offer similar services, where identified Spam is held in a “SPAM” folder for 14 days or so.

Despite your best efforts, you will surely find that none of the methods are foolproof. You will still get some Spam in your inbox and some legit mail in your Spam folder.

There are other ways that I am sure you have heard of, but these are what I have found to work well. If you have any more ideas for fighting Spam, or have any other ideas for future articles, feel free to drop me a line. I would love to hear from you. Pete [at] callpete.com. Be careful out there, and be nice.

Tolerance

After re-reading the blog post that I posted yesterday, and reading an article of by Pat Buchanan regarding Romney, I realized that my position on things is very intolerant by today's standards.

There are things that Christians should be tolerant about. There are things that Christians should NOT be tolerant about.

To illustrate this point, I am reminded of something I once read about manufacturing tolerance. In the 1980's, Dodge came out with their Caravan, which started the whole "minivan" line of vehicles by every auto manufacturer. They were wildly popular, and to keep up with manufacturing demands, the Chrysler Corporation contracted the building of transmissions to the Japanese, via the Mitsubishi company. The next year when the new model of minivans hit the showroom floors, it seemed that a "random" number of transmissions had fatal problems within 200 miles. Upon further investigation, it turned out to be the ones made in USA that failed. When they checked with the Japanese engineers to troubleshoot why the Japanese made transmissions lasted so much longer. It turns out that when they got the blueprints, and specs for the transmissions, the parts had a 0.1% tolerance specified. The Japanese engineers re-tooled all of the machines that make the parts, and built the new transmissions with 0.01% tolerance. In other words, if a part was meant to line up with 1mm variance one way or another in the US, it was made with 0.1mm variance in Japan. This tighter (LOWER) tolerance reduced friction by 90% and almost ELIMINATED the failure problem during the break in period. The US engineers re-tooled their

Today's Political Correctness seems to be demanding a higher tolerance of everyone, especially Protestant Born Again Christians. They demand tolerance of everything. They demand that we be tolerant of homosexual marriage, despite the fact that it cheapens traditional Christian Marriage. They demand that we should be tolerant of Muslims, Hindus, Mormons, or any other cult, despite the fact that you can be fired from your job as a schoolteacher for having a Bible on your desk or a Jesus Saves pin on your lapel. The same crowd of people who demand that we cannot scrutinize a radical Muslim from taking a plane ride, because it might offend someone, also demands that we cannot have a prayer over the PA system in a public school football game. They demand that we allow two homosexual men to be allowed to adopt a baby, but they have problems with a school voucher system that allows free trade and true competition in the education marketplace.

Truth is truth. Jesus said that you shall seek the truth, and the truth will set you free. All Truth is God's Truth is the title of a book written by Christian philosopher Arthur F. Holmes. It teaches some very important philosophies. Namely, that anything that is proved to be true cannot contradict anything else that is true. There is NO SCIENTIFIC PROVEN FINDING that can ever contradict the truths that are in the Bible. This cannot happen. Logic dictates that if A=A and A=B and B<>C then A<>C.

There are other concepts about truth that we cannot ignore. 99% truth is a lie. 99% clean is dirty. If you are 99% right, you are still wrong. You can have a DNA 90% similar to a chimpanzee and NOT be a chimpanzee.

Scientists have been trying for years to discredit God from creation. The more we learn about ourselves from a scientific standpoint the more scientists are convinced of the idea of Intelligent Design. We are far too complex to be here by accident. You cannot shake a box of watch parts and end up with a watch. You certainly wouldn't end up with one that is wound up and running and keeping perfect time. Even if you opened the box and carefully put the parts together, and wound and set the watch, you STILL wouldn't have a watch that could reproduce itself. Even a box full of watches left alone with romantic music wouldn't reproduce.

If I was the first man to explore the moon and I found a wristwatch, I don't think that I would assume that it evolved from the rocks. I would have to draw the conclusion that it was designed and manufactured by SOMEONE.

Its funny to me that we have to be tolerant of everything but the truth.

Romney, Obama, religion and politics, faith and beliefs, advancement and decline.

An original rant by Pete Davis.

Anyone who knows me knows that my political position is generally very conservative on most issues. Some might be surprised to know that I am somewhat apathetic on many issues, and anarchist on others.
The religious church affiliation and alliance that a person has I think has little to do with his character. With that said, I won't be voting for anyone who I don't believe to be a Born-Again Believer in Jesus Christ. I believe that G.W. Bush is a Believer with strong convictions that he stands behind. It would be easy for him to back down on the stem-cell issue to gain more popularity. It would be easy for him to fall back into his old ways of alcoholism to "fit in" to the Washington crowd and the social scene more.
I don't think that Bill (or Hillary) Clinton are true believers in Christ. They (like Bush) are members of the Methodist Church, but they have long stood in FAVOR of legalized abortion, Gay rights, and on the "non-Christian" side of a lot of issues. Actions speak louder than words. I have never known of the Clintons to stand up for the moral right side of the issue. I may be wrong, and they are morally upstanding people, but I have only heard the worst side of things.

I am not saying that I will never vote Dem, but as long as (as a party) they are voting to legalize (and subsidise) the killing of unborn children, I won't be a part of that team. I don't know how a follower of Christ can justify that position.

You may say that since the President and Congress don't make that call, it doesn't really matter what they think. The Supreme Court can overturn the Roe V. Wade ruling, and the Supreme Court is appointed by the President and Affirmed by the Congress. Pro-life executive and legislative branches will give us a Pro-Life Judicial branch.

Nit Romney is Pro-life and a Repblican. He is also a Mormon. The Mormon faith adds so much to the Bible, that I don't think I can ever embrace and support a candidate with an alliance to the Mormon Church. Satan is a real force in the world today. His only goal is to stop the non-believers from becoming believers, and to become a stumbling block for believers. A group of people who can contaminate the truth "just enough" that it still sounds good, but leads souls astray is definitely not doing the work of God.

Here is some of what I consider "Core beliefs" that I cannot budge on:
Faith in Christ is the ONLY method of Salvation.
Everyone needs Salvation. It is available to all men who will repent and ask God for it.
Jesus Christ is Deity. He is the Only Son of God.
Jesus, The Holy Spirit, and God (Jehovah) the Father make up the Trinity (Godhead) that created all things.
Jesus was born of a Virgin, lived a perfect life, and was crucified to pay for our sins.
The Holy Bible is the COMPLETE and INSPIRED word of God. The Koran, the Book of Mormon, the Apocrypha (Catholic), the Hindu holy books, or any other books that contradict the Bible are not the truth, and not worthy of my faith.
Anyone who denies the "core truths" of the Christian faith is a false leader. I don't care if he has millions of followers, if he denies Christ, he is not doing the work of God.

With that said, there are many things that I believe that I can accept some people who differ with me on some issues. If a God-fearing Bible-Believing Christian wants to sprinkle instead of dunk in the baptistery, I won't stand in their way. If they don't want to allow their children to listen to secular music or wear makeup, thats fine with me.
If different groups of Believers have different practices and convictions involving Holidays, Christmas Decorations, Secular activities, or styles of worship, I really don't have a problem with that. I have my convictions, and you have yours.
If you get 100 Christians together, you will have at least 100 different opinions on the following questions
How should Baptism be performed?
What is appropriate clothing for a minister?
Is the KJV the only revision of the Bible that should be read by Christians?
Should Christian Children be allowed to attend Secular school, Halloween celebrations, Easter Egg Hunts?
Should children be allowed to wear jewelry, makeup, short pants?
Should mixed race marriage be allowed?
Should a Christian fight in war, own a gun, or work in law enforcement?

I have my answers to those questions and I am sure that you have yours.

Philippians 2:12 (King James Version)
King James Version (KJV)
Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

Getting back to the subject at hand: I hope that we can have a Christian in the next presidential election that we can all rally behind. I can deal with a lot of things, but I don't think the country needs a leader who isn't grounded in a solid faith. Barak Obama is a member of the Church of Christ (not a Muslim as earlier reported) but is he a Christian? Does he support Christian values? Can a Christian support Abortion? Gay marriage? Can you support those things and have a strong faith in God?

Do more Christians need to be involved with Political things? I think so. Unfortunately, most of the people that I respect enough to vote into office don't have the stomach to get involved. Its a conundrum. In this day and age, I don't know if someone can keep their faith and compromise themselves enough to get the support they need to get elected.

We are living in an age now where Congress has openly homosexual members, whore mongers, liars, thieves, and people with any number of religious labels. Diversity in the US is inevitable, but I don't know how much longer God will protect us as a nation with the overwhelming turning away from Him that our leadership has made, especially over the last few generations.

The next election will have many issues facing the candidates:
Global warming (a non-issue, but you can't explain that to some people)
Socialized medicine (we already have it. No ER can refuse treatment based on your ability to pay. The govt picks up the tab, we apparently need more administration and bureaucracy involved)
Border control. (a lot of words and emotions behind this one. Little action will ever take place)
The war on terror.( Maybe we can sign a peace treaty soon. Maybe a surrender will happen. Maybe the enemy will give up. Who? When? Where? How? I understand how we got in, but I don't understand how to ever get out without a LOT more bloodshed and heartache. )

I will be 40 in 2008. I have seen a LOT of change in my lifetime. The political baseline has moved FAR to the left since the 60's. People used to have shame.
At the same time we have had great improvements in technology in that time. The PC I am typing on was unthinkable back then. The Internet was barely on the drawing board in 1968. There has been more wealth created in my lifetime, more inventions developed, more advances in automotive, agriculture, energy, space travel, and information and other technologies than in any other period in history. I wonder sometimes if we have become so advanced in spite of our collective loss of faith as a people. I am reminded of a passage in Romans

Romans 1
20For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:

21Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

22Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.

As we have indoctrinated our young people in the Church of Academia that God is not real, not necessary, or not the complete truth with absolute black and white behavioral guidelines (sins and commandments) while at the same time we have made all of these advancements in technology, have we once again chosen the fruit from the wrong tree? Have we made ourselves fools? Is there any turning back? Will we as a people ever see the need to repent? I think that we have gone further down the slippery slope of the moral slide that we may never collectively see the error in our ways.