美英报刊阅读教程Lesson 35 课文.docVIP

Lesson 35 Spamming the World by BY BRAD STONE AND JENNIFER LIN | NEWSWEEK From the magazine issue dated Aug 19, 2002 In A Popularity Contest, ‘Bulk E-Mailers’ Would Rank Just Above Child Pornographers. But The Scourge Of The Internet Is Defending Its Vocation. 1. Al Ralsky would like you to have thick, lustrous hair. He also wants to help you buy a cheap car, get a loan regardless of your credit history and earn a six-figure income from the comfort of your home. But according to his critics, Ralsky’s not a do-gooder, but a bane of the Internet–a spammer, responsible for deluging e-mail accounts and choking the Internet service providers (ISPs) that administer them. In real life, the 57-year-old father of three lives in a middle-class suburb of Detroit. He started bulk e-mailing seven years ago, when he was flat broke. To buy his first two computer servers, he had to sell his 1994 Toyota Camry. These days Ralsky sends out more than 30 million e-mails a day and raves about the possibilities of marketing on the Internet. “It’s the most fair playing field in the world,” he says. “It makes you equal with any Fortune 500 company.” 2. In a popularity contest among Net users, spammers would probably rank only slightly above child pornographers. Spam–unsolicited messages that make their way to your e-mail inbox with misleading subject lines and dubious propositions (from pyramid schemes to porno come-ons)–accounts for 30 to 50 percent of all e-mail traffic on the Net. Users are fed up, and big ISPs like AOL and Earthlink, increasingly overwhelmed by the excess traffic, are taking some spam operators to court. Meanwhile, vigilante anti-spam organizations like SpamCop are aggressively blacklisting spam operators and publishing their home and family information on the Web. Anti-spam sentiment has even evolved to the point where spammers themselves are feeling like victims, and are defending what they call an honest, legal living. Maryland e-mailer Alan Moore, also known as “D