Spammed A Lot by Scott LaFee - Eureka! on Creators.com

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Spammed A Lot

Stuff that might not get through your filter:

The first spam or unsolicited e-mail was sent in May 1978 by Gary Thuerk of the Digital Equipment Corporation in Massachusetts on the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet, which connected just a handful of academic and military labs in the United States. It was an advertisement for an upcoming sales event.

In 1999, most spam involved get-rich-quick schemes, pornography, bulk mailings and "must-have" reports like credit histories, according to Symantec, a computer software company. In 2009, the majority of spam pitched computer or Internet services, other products like pharmaceuticals, financial services and "Nigerian" lottery scams.

Most e-mail users (which means most people) have become pretty spam-savvy. But it takes only a few consumers to make spamming profitable. An analysis of pharmaceutical spam e-mails sent out over one month in 2008 by just 1.5 percent of one botnet (a collection of software programs that run autonomously and automatically) revealed the following: 35 million spam e-mails were sent; 8.2 million successfully arrived at mail servers (the rest were sent to non-existent addresses or bounced back to sender); 10,500 recipients clicked on the link in the e-mail; 28 actually bought products, which translates to a conversion rate of just 0.000008 percent.

This sounds puny, but extrapolated over the whole botnet, it results in $3.5 million in pharmaceutical sales alone in 2008.

QUIRKS OF NATURE

A new analysis of rare polar bear fossils suggest the species is evolutionarily young, splitting off from brown bears just 150,000 years ago.

VERBATIM

"Hardly any large corporations have 'inventing' as a job."

— Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer at Microsoft

BRAIN SWEAT

Translate the following rebus puzzles:

WINEEEE

2. DAYDAYOUT

3. cl ud

'TRUE FACTS'

The exoplanet WASP-12b was discovered in 2008, a gas giant that is 1.4 times as massive as Jupiter. But WASP-12b is in the process of being plumped up by its nearby host star, in preparation for being consumed altogether.

The star's gravity is stirring up the exoplanet's interior, generating heat that expands its gases and makes it harder for the exoplanet to hold onto its outer atmosphere. Astronomers at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Beijing say this makes it easier for the star to steal matter from the planet and devour it completely in about 10 million years — a cosmological twinkle of an eye.

BRAIN SWEAT ANSWER

1. Win with Es

2. Day in, day out

3. Partly cloudy

WHERE IN THE WORLD? ANSWER

The north side of Mont Blanc du Tacul, a 13,937-foot mountain that is part of the Mont Blanc massif in the French Alps.

To find out more about Scott LaFee and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.