Day 24

6. What is spam (not including scams like Phishing, Nigerian 419 or chain letters) and how does it work? Does anyone really buy the products advertised in spam?

• Spam floods the internet with multiple copies of the same message in order to force users to view it. The majority of spam I encounter is either commercial advertising or those annoying get rich quick schemes.
• Spam can also be sent through email to send unsolicited bulk messages.
• Spam costs the sender very little to send.

The most interesting thing I've learned about spam is where the term originated. It is said to originate from a Monty Python's Flying Circus skit. In the skit, a restaurant serves all its food with lots of spam, and the waitress repeats the word several times in describing how much spam is in the items. When she does this, a group of Vikings start a song:

"Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, lovely spam! Wonderful spam!"

Until told to shut up.

This skit exemplifies what it's like to be continually bombarded with spam.

Day 22: How email works

The first email sent...ever:

• sent in 1971 by an engineer named Ray Tomlinson


• Prior to this, you could only send messages to users on a single machine


• Tomlinson discovered the ability to send messages to other machines on the Internet, using the @ sign to designate the receiving machine
  
  

Email messages are sent using 4 basic steps:

1. Sender's email program or Web browser sends the message to the sender's email sever


2. Sender's email server sends that message to the recipient's email server


3. Recipient's email server recieves the message, filters junk mail, and stores the message so it may be retrieved later.


4. Recipient's email program downloads the message from the recipient's email server to the recipient's computer and removes it from the server.


Other important email vocabulary:

email client: programs used to access emails. Connect to email server so user can send/recieve mail
- stand alone clients: Microsoft Outlook
- clients that appear in a webpage: Yahoo, Hotmail

SMTP server (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol): handles outgoing mail

POP3/IMAP server: handle incoming mail

Diagram of SMTP and POP3 servers

HowStuffWorks "How E-Mail Works"

Day 18

My group is AT&T

• network neutrality definition: the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally
• AT&T CEO: Randall Stephenson
• AT&T's currently against net neutrality
• AT&T has been one of the most outspoken critics of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's proposal to apply new net neutrality regulations to wireless and wireline telecom companies. http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/t-urges-employees-lobby-fcc-against-net-neutrality/2009-10-20#ixzz0VjQBqDPW
• spoken out against Google's 'Google Voice' Service asking FCC to make it a standard calling offering and not an Internet service
• Hands Off the Internet: a nationwide coalition of Internet users, manufacturers and network operators united in the belief that the Net’s phenomenal growth over the past decade will continue if government does not attempt an unwise effort to regulate a market that is otherwise working to give consumers the choices, freedom, prices and diverse experiences they desire in the new age of the Internet.