Hawaii Spam Jam

Every April, Spam fans from across the globe find their way to the island of Oahu to pay homage to their favorite mystery meat. The Waikiki Spam Jam is Hawaii’s largest food festival, and the largest Spam celebration in the world. More Spam is consumed in Hawaii than in any other state. Streets are lined with vendors selling an assortment of meaty dishes, from traditional Spam musubi (sliced or grilled Spam on top of rice), sizzling slices of pizza topped with Spam, Spam flan, and chocolate-covered Spam.

However, it is not the only one. You can find a smaller, week-long Spam party in Austin, Minnesota, the birthplace of the iconic meaty mash. Also, Spam has become a staple of South Korean life, and is now the biggest consumer of it outside the US. Spam is available in 41 countries. 

Bacon Spam

To many, especially Hawaiians it does not seem possible to make Spam any better. Most agree it takes a lot to make spam taste better. Hormel has done it. Brand owner Hormel Foods has 16 varieties of this iconic canned meat, including Spam with Real Hormel Bacon.

New Spam

Yesterday I received a "thank you for your purchase" email supposedly from Apple iTunes for $99. There was no credit card info and when I hovered on the link, it was for a bitly web site. Other things I hovered on were also not from Apple. Bottom line, if there is no credit card info, delete the email after you mark it spam.

Electronic Spam

Spam is shoulder pork and ham and is also unsolicited junk email. Eighty six percent of the world's email traffic is spam. That amounts to more than 400 billion messages sent a day, according to a report by Cisco Systems.

One way to eliminate spam might be for all of us to reply to the spammer with a copy of the email. When they get 400 billion messages back, they may just understand what we deal with every day. Oh, delete your signature line, but do not worry that they will get your email address. Obviously they already have it.

Top Ten Web Facts

There are 14.3 trillion web pages on the World Wide Web.

68.8% of all email traffic is spam. (back in 2008, 53.8 trillion spam emails were sent)

51% of all spam is about pharmaceuticals, the top category of all spam.

30.8% used Internet Explorer in 2012 (in 2008 it was 70%)

43% of the top 1 million websites are hosted in the U.S.

44.8 % of internet users live in Asia

11.4% of internet users live in North America

68.4% of smart phones use Android operating system (introduced Sept 2008) vs. iPhone (introduced June 2007) 19.4%

4 billion hours of video are watched on YouTube each month

In 2012, there were 2.7 billion likes on Facebook each day and 5 billion Google's +1 button  each day.

Secure Message Isn't

This week I received an email from mailsafe.keybank.com that was titled: "You have received a secure message." It had an attachment and the message said to download the attachment and read it. It also gave a 888 number to call if I had questions. I looked it up and found it was a cell phone number in India.

Many infections to computers come from this type of spam. If you see something that you suspect, the best thing to do is delete the message. Never open an attachment.

What's in a Name, SPAM

The name SPAM is an acronym of "Shoulder of Pork And Ham." It is unique, both in its computer form and in its canned pink form. The two words have more in common than you might think. The computer spam actually derives its name from a Monty Python sketch set in a café with an entirely Spam-centric menu. In typical Monty Python fashion, the characters (including a chorus of Vikings) break out into a song consisting almost entirely of the word “spam,” thus “spamming” the dialogue.

The sketch was a commentary on the influx of commercially available canned meats during a period of desperate agricultural rebound, the word made its way into the computer world as the annoying and excessive influx of unwanted mail or advertisements.

During the 1980s, online advertising companies attempted to acronym the word as “Sales Promotion And Marketing,” but online spam is worse than any meat or meat byproduct.

Spam a Lot

Have you ever wondered how much spammers make and how many spam emails are sent out? UC San Diego and the International Computer Science Institute wondered too, so they hijacked a botnet to find out. The team intentionally infected eight computers with a middleman virus, software they found that was relaying instructions between a botmaster computer and the network of computers it had secretly turned into spam-sending zombies. That is how many viruses work.

They changed the orders for their own research. Instead of sending people to the botmaster’s website, spam ads instead funneled them to a site built by the team. It looked like an authentic Internet pharmacy, but didn't take orders, it just gave an error message. The team used the info to calculate an estimate of how much money the spammer grossed per day.

Interesting statistics from the spam experiment -  23.8% of messages were actually delivered, of those, .0127% of people responded, and 2.66% went to the site to buy something for an average price $100. In all, they infected just 550 PCs which each sent out an average number of 1.7 million emails per day. The average daily take was about $7,000. Annual take $2.55 million.

Considering that spammers infect much higher numbers of PCs and some mail out many more than 1.7 million messages, and they do it 7 days a week, it begins to quickly add up. If you just did five times that amount, it comes to $12.8 million a year. Not too bad for a few lines of code and letting all the others do your mailing.