Saturday, April 30, 2011

Junk fax in United States

(Spam Twitter)-Junk faxes are a form of telemarketing where unsolicited advertisements are sent via fax transmission. Junk faxes are the faxed equivalent of spam or junk mail. Proponents of this advertising medium often use the terms broadcast fax or fax advertising to avoid the negative connotation of the term junk fax.

United States
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (47 USC 227), or TCPA, among other things specifically outlawed junk faxing:
the use of any telephone facsimile machine, computer, or other device to send an unsolicited advertisement to a telephone facsimile machine (paragraph (b)(1)(C))
The TCPA also requires a fax transmitter to identify the source phone number and transmitting organization or individual on each page. The process of war dialing to determine what phone numbers reach fax machines was also prohibited by the FCC rules under the TCPA.
The TCPA, in particular the junk fax provision, has been challenged in court on First Amendment grounds, but the law has withstood legal challenges.
In 2005, the United States Congress passed the Junk Fax Prevention Act of 2005. It amended the TCPA so as to no longer prohibit unsolicited fax advertisements if:
the unsolicited advertisement is from a sender with an established business relationship with the recipient(paragraph (b)(1)(C)(i))
and the sender complies with other requirements.
In April 2006, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) implemented changes to the fax advertising rules of the TCPA. The new rules: (1) codify an established business relationship (EBR) exemption to the prohibition on sending unsolicited fax advertisements; (2) define EBR as used in the context of unsolicited fax advertisements; (3) require the sender of fax advertisements to provide specified notice and contact information on the fax that allows recipients to “opt-out” of any future transmissions from the sender; and (4) specify the circumstances under which a request to “opt-out” complies with the Act. The new rules took effect in August 2006.
The federal TCPA permits state junk faxing laws that are equal to or more restrictive than the federal law, and so many states have their own laws regarding junk faxes. Additionally, some courts have ruled that unsolicited fax advertisements are common law conversion, independent of any statutory provisions or exemptions.
Enforcement
The FCC can investigate violations and impose fines on the violators. Individuals who receive junk faxes can file a complaint with the FCC. Complaints must specify:
That the sender did not have permission to send the fax (i.e. unsolicited)
That the complainant did not have a prior business relationship with the sender
That the fax was for a good or service
Any telephone number or addresses included in the fax
Your name, address, and a telephone number where you can be reached during the day
The telephone number through which you received the fax advertisement
A copy of the fax advertisement, if possible, or confirmation that you have retained a copy of the fax
Failure to provide any of the above information may result in the complaint being closed without further action.
State authorities can also take actions against violations of the TCPA.
It is also possible for the recipient of a junk fax to bring a private suit against the violator in an appropriate court of their state. Through a private suit, the recipient can either recover the actual monetary loss that resulted from the TCPA violation, or receive $500 in damages for each violation, whichever is greater. The court may triple the damages for each violation if it finds that the defendant acted willingly or knowingly. The FCC and/or the FTC can impose additional civil penalties of up to $11,000.00 per fax transmitted.

Speedy deletion

(Spam Twitter)-Criteria for speedy deletion specify the only cases in which administrators have broad consensus support to, at their discretion, bypass deletion discussion and immediately delete Wikipedia pages or media. They cover only the cases specified in the rules below.
Deletion is reversible, but only by administrators, so other deletions occur only after discussion. Speedy deletion is intended to reduce the time spent on deletion discussions for pages or media with no practical chance of surviving discussion.
Administrators should take care not to speedy delete pages or media except in the most obvious cases. If a page has survived a prior deletion discussion, it should not be speedy deleted except for newly discovered copyright violations. Contributors sometimes create pages over several edits, so administrators should avoid deleting a page that appears incomplete too soon after its creation.
Anyone can request speedy deletion by adding one of the speedy deletion templates. Before nominating a page for speedy deletion, consider whether it could be improved, reduced to a stub, merged or redirected elsewhere, reverted to a better previous revision, or handled in some other way. Users nominating a page for speedy deletion should specify which criteria the page meets, and should consider notifying the page creator and any major contributors.
Criteria
Abbreviations (G12, A3...) are often used to refer to these criteria, and are given in each section, though plain-English explanations are often more appropriate.
Immediately following each criterion below is a list of templates used to mark pages or media file for speedy deletion under the criterion being used. In order to alert administrators of the nomination, place the relevant speedy deletion template at the top of the page or media file you are nominating (within for templates). Please be sure to supply an edit summary that mentions that the page is being nominated for speedy deletion. All of the speedy deletion templates are named as "db-X" with "db" standing for "delete because". A list of the "db-X" templates can be found at Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion/Deletion templates.
Deprecated criteria
Deprecated criteria include:
A4. Attempts to correspond with the person or group named by its title
Merged with and later superseded by "No content" (A3) in November 2005 as part of a bold rewrite that was made to simplify the CSD criterion (Archived Discussion 1, Discussion 2, Discussion 3).
A6. Attack articles
Superseded by "Attack pages" (G10) in March 2006 (Discussion).
A8. Blatant copyright infringement articles
Superseded by "Unambiguous copyright infringement" (G12) in October 2006 (Unopposed proposal).
R1. Redirects to non-existent pages
Merged into "Pages dependent on a non-existent or deleted page" (G8) in September 2008 (Discussion)
C3. Categories solely populated from a template
Merged into "Pages dependent on a non-existent or deleted page" (G8) in October 2008 (Discussion)
T1. Divisive and inflammatory templates
Was repealed in February 2009 (Discussion). Instead, "attack pages" (G10) may be applicable in some cases. Otherwise, use Wikipedia:Templates for discussion.

Wikipedia External link spamming

(Spam Twitter)-Links normally to be avoided and Wikipedia:Conflict of interest
Adding external links to an article or user page for the purpose of promoting a website or a product is not allowed, and is considered to be spam. Although the specific links may be allowed under some circumstances, repeatedly adding links will in most cases result in all of them being removed.
Phrasing to avoid
It is also important to avoid giving an opportunity to spammers. Sometimes, the way an article is phrased attracts spammers. For example,
Social networking has flourished with websites such as Friendster and MySpace, ...
Examples of detergents include Tide, ...
The most notable MLM companies are Amway, ...
Many people feel Dr Pepper is the best tasting soft drink ... (this is also weasel wording)
Many blogs arose discussing this, see Some blog, ...
because it is far easier to add a link to the end of this kind of sentence than to add encyclopedic content.
Source soliciting
Source solicitations are messages on article talk pages which explicitly solicit editors to use a specific external source to expand an article. The current consensus on Wikipedia is that templates, categories and other forms of anonymous solicitation are inappropriate. Every article on Wikipedia can be expanded as a matter of course, but the question is in the details on a per-article basis. It is not possible to simply say "all articles of X type can be expanded using Y source".
There is no hard rule on when this crosses over from being a legitimate attempt to improve the article into being internal spam, but some guidelines and questions to consider:
Is the solicitation being made anonymously through the use of a template or Category?
Is the solicitation being duplicated across many articles at the same time, particularly when the articles relate to different topics?
Has there been no discussion (of a specific and substantive nature) on why the source should be used in each article?
Is the source controversial, such as being non-peer reviewed, old or polemic (see Wikipedia:Reliable sources)?
Is the source a commercial one?
External link spamming with bots
A few parties now appear to have a spambot capable of spamming wikis from several different wiki engines, analogous to the submitter scripts for guestbooks and blogs. They have a database of a few hundred wikis. Typically they insert external links. Like blog spam, their aim is to improve their search engine rankings, not to directly advertise their product.
If you see a bot inserting external links, please consider checking the other language wikis to see if the attack is widespread. If it is, please contact a sysop on the Meta-Wiki; they can put in a Wikimedia-wide text filter. Any Meta sysop can edit the Wikimedia-wide spam blacklist to add or remove the patterns that are recognized by the filter, with the changes taking effect immediately. New links can also be added to the list if a new spammer should start making the rounds.
Sysops are authorised to block unauthorised bots on sight. Spam bots should be treated equivalently as vandalbots. Edits by spambots constitute unauthorised defacement of websites, which is against the law in many countries, and may result in complaints to ISPs and (ultimately) prosecution.
The link spam problem extends far beyond Wikimedia projects, and is generally worse on smaller wikis where the community struggles to keep it clean. meta:Wiki Spam page (now obsolete) has some more general information and advice for users of wikis elsewhere on the Internet, while the MediaWiki Anti-Spam Features page describes features available in MediaWiki (for administrators running this software).

HarvestChoice

(Spam Twitter)-HarvestChoice is a research initiative, which generates information to help guide strategic investments in agriculture aimed at improving the well‐being of poor people in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia through more productive and profitable farming. The initiative is coordinated by the International Food Policy Research Institute and the University of Minnesota and supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Purpose of the Initiative

Farming entails a great deal of risk and uncertainties. Weather varies, price fluctuates, soil degrades, pest damages, and, even climate changes. Farmers everywhere must cope with these uncertainties. Throughout the history of agriculture, many options, such as fertilizer application, irrigation, improved varieties, and farming machinery have been developed to help manage the risks, increase yields, increase efficiency, and, increasingly, promote sustainability of the overall system.
Types of Information provided

The use of spatially‐referenced data and spatially‐explicit analysis to generate spatially‐specific knowledge is a cornerstone of the HarvestChoice initiative. A fundamental characteristic of agriculture (particularly subsistence agriculture) is the close coupling of its performance with prevailing biophysical conditions, conditions that can vary widely over space and time. HarvestChoice relies on its own and its partners' spatial datasets to provide new information on:
the location of the poor and undernourished in relation to major crop production systems
the dependence of both urban and rural poor on specific crops and crop products
the incidence and severity of major production constraints such as drought and disease in focus crops and locations
the potential benefits to the poor from alleviating such constraints
an inventory and characterization of existing and prospective technologies that might help address
an economic evaluation of the potential crop production, consumption, price, and trade, as well as the likely hunger and income consequences of a range of technology scenarios, and
the potential commercialization challenges that promising technology options might face.
Types of spatial data
There are five major, intertwined geographies of direct relevance to the work of HarvestChoice;
the spatial distribution and performance of agricultural production systems,
the spatial distribution and severity of production constraints (e.g., drought, low fertility soils, pests and diseases),
spatial variation in the potential efficacy of on‐farm interventions (e.g., improved seeds, mulching, supplemental irrigation, fertilizer use, biological control of pests),
spatial variation in access to input and output markets (e.g. time of travel to markets, farmgate prices of fertilizer and agricultural products),
spatial variation in national and local policies and regulations (that influence, for example, marketing decisions, the quality of infrastructure and services, the generation of and access to, and uptake of new technology).
Spatial products

HarvestChoice makes available spatially (and socio‐economically) explicit estimates of the potential welfare benefits of a range of interventions (e.g., on‐farm, market and market access, and national policy).
These maps (alongside tables, graphs, and text) provide information of direct relevance to agricultural development investors and policymakers. They do this by detailing the potential scale and distribution of economic benefits – including the identification of locations and social groups whose welfare might be impacted negatively. These outputs will, however, be supplemented by a larger collection of novel spatial data products that represent key, intermediate factors.

Flyposting

(Spam Twitter)-Flyposting is the act of placing advertising posters or flyers in illegal places. In the U.S., these posters are known as bandit signs, snipe signs, or street spam,.
In most areas, it is illegal to place such posters on private property without the consent of the property owner, or to post on public property without a sign permit from the local government. Some areas, however, have public bulletin boards where notices may be posted.
It is an advertising tactic mostly used by small businesses promoting concerts and political activist groups, but there have been occasions where international companies subcontracted local advertising agencies for flyposting jobs in order not to get caught in illegal behavior, as a form of guerrilla marketing. In 2004 Sony Music and BMG were threatened with anti-social behaviour orders by Camden Borough Council for illegal flyposting.
Flyposting is commonly seen as a nuisance due to issues with property rights, visual appearance and littering and is a misdemeanor in many countries. In India, the Election Commission has banned this practice, but it continues unabated.
A particularly noteworthy incident of this type occurred in Boston, Massachusetts. In the case of the 2007 Boston Mooninite Scare, advertisers had placed electronic signboards without notifying local authorities, prompting a costly reaction by the Boston Police Bomb Squad when the signs were mistaken for bombs.

Spam (gaming)

(Spam Twitter)-Spamming, in the context of video games, refers to the rapid, repeated use of the same item or action. For example, "grenade spamming" is the act of a player throwing a large amount of grenades in succession into an area. In fighting games, one form of spamming would be to execute the same offensive maneuver so many times in succession that one's opponent does not receive a chance to escape the series of blows.
Spawn spamming
One form of spam which is regarded as reprehensible by the gaming community as a whole is spawn spamming (also known as spawn reaping) (see spawn camping). As the name implies, this involves spamming an enemy's spawn point with weapon fire in an effort to kill the enemy as they spawn. Many games include some kind of spawn protection which prevents players being injured for a few seconds after spawning. Spawn points may be spammed using grenades, proximity mines, bullets, or other weaponry.
Sandbox spamming
In some sandbox-style open ended video games, players may spawn props, NPCs or other items. This is prevalent in the Half-Life 2 modification Garry's Mod, where it is possible to spawn numerous quantities of large, complex, or explosive items in order to crash the server. This is also common amongst Griefers in Second Life, who spam sandboxes (areas which allow anyone to spawn custom scripted items) with the intent of either slowing the FPS for other players, or crashing the server altogether.
Skill spamming
In Role Playing Games (RPG) spam usually takes the form of repeated use of one powerful or low-cost skill or spell. Buff, debuff, and condition spamming has the goal of making the player or his allies invulnerable, or the enemy too weak to react. More common is direct-damage spamming, where a single attack or spell, which has a low casting-cost and recharge time, is used continuously. One notable example is the spell 'Charged Bolt' in Diablo II. Its instantaneous cast and low cost allowed high level mages to cast the spell as quickly as they could press the casting key, dealing large amounts of damage in the process. Players can also spam high-end powerful skills, such as the 'Apocalypse' spell in Diablo or the Moonfire spell available to druids in World Of Warcraft, which can be spammed to do high amounts of damage in a short period of time. Most games place heavy restrictions on the most powerful skills to prevent this kind of spamming, however, and it is often only possible through the use of cheats.
Chat spamming
Chat spamming is the repetition of a word or line typed out by a player using a game's chat system. As most games have some form of text messaging built for in-game communication, there is little to stop a frustrated player from flooding a server with text in the same way a user can flood a chat room. Some servers enforce rules regarding text spamming, possibly resulting in players being kicked or banned. Some games allow text to be turned off or mute the player after a limited number of messages at the same time, hence nullifying this form of spamming. People usually "Copy and Paste" or use spambots.
Grenade spamming
Grenade spamming or 'nade spamming involves throwing multiple grenades into an area. Grenade spamming can have two distinct sub-genres. The first occurs when a single player will repeatedly acquire grenades (usually with the assistance of hotkeys) and throw them without moving. The second version involves a player or group of players all throwing large numbers of grenades into an area. Grenade spamming has the effect of real-life artillery barrages, suppressing an area of the map and killing any characters caught within the spammed zone. When multiple players spam the same area, it is near-impossible for the opposing players to avoid having their avatars wounded or killed, and this effectively denies that area to enemies.
Weapon spamming
Apart from grenades, "spam" can also describe spray and pray tactics with firearms. In its most general definition, weapon spamming involves using a large amount of ammunition irrespective of having any visible targets. While rapid automatic fire is often desirable against multiple targets or for suppression purposes, many gaming communities will frown on the reliance on automatic fire.
The issue is most evident in games with light, fast automatic weapons and plenty of ammunition, such as light machine guns, allowing players to run around maps with the trigger held down and usually being able to score many points before being killed. While this style of gameplay often exposes players to direct conflict, as the style is largely based on luck, players relying solely on spam tactics are often looked down upon for their apparent lack of skill. However, some differentiation is made between weapon spamming against invisible targets (identified by sound, for example) and simple blind firing with the hopes of randomly hitting a target.
Move Spamming
Spamming in fighting games is very prevalent and it's use is just as controversial as other forms of spamming. Move spamming involves using the same move or set of moves repeatedly. Usually these moves have high damage and/or speed and can be difficult to block. Move spamming allows a player to inflict high damage with little effort and prevents the opponent from getting into a good footing to attack.
Like other forms of spamming, many players complain that it is unfair and diminishes the skill of the game, but experienced players will frequently use spamming to force their opponents into a different fighting style or into a compromising position. The downside to move spamming is that it frequently leaves the player open to attack if they are not careful of when they spam a move. Frequent spamming of particular moves can also make a player very predictable, making the likelihood of an opponent falling victim to a spam move very low. Many games attempt to reduce move spamming by having long recovery times at the end of highly effective moves, giving characters effective counters to break spamming, as well as the damage of a move gradually lowering as it is used repeatedly.

Spam (Monty Python)

(Spam Twitter)-"Spam" is a popular Monty Python sketch, first televised in 1970. In the sketch, two customers are in a greasy spoon café trying to order a breakfast from a menu that includes the processed meat product in almost every dish. The term spam (in electronic communication, and general slang) is derived from this sketch. The sketch was written by Terry Jones and Michael Palin.
Impact

The phenomenon, some years later, of marketers drowning out discourse by flooding Usenet newsgroups and individuals' email with junk mail advertising messages was named spamming, due to some early internet users that flooded forums with the word spam recounting the repetitive and unwanted presence of Spam in the sketch. This phenomenon has been reported in court decisions handed down in lawsuits against spammers - see, for example, CompuServe Inc. v. Cyber Promotions, Inc., 962 F.Supp. 1015, n. 1 (S.D.Ohio 1997).
The Python programming language, named after Monty Python, prefers to use spam, ham, and eggs as metasyntactic variables, instead of the traditional foo, bar, and baz.
[edit]Hormel's response

Spam makers Hormel, while never happy with the use of the word spam for junk email, have been supportive of Monty Python and their sketch. Hormel issued a special tin of Spam for the Broadway premiere of Eric Idle's hit musical Spamalot. Also, the sketch is part of the company's Spam museum in Austin, Minnesota, United States. The sketch was also mentioned in Spam's on-can advertisements for the product's 70th anniversary in 2007, though the date of the Python sketch mentioned was incorrect (1971 when it should be 1970).
In 2007 the Hormel company decided that such publicity was part of their corporate image, possibly for the better, and sponsored a game where their product is strongly associated with Monty Python , even featuring a product with "Stinky French Garlic" as part of the promotion of SPAMalot, a musical based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Sketch

Only three and a half minutes long, it builds up into a semi-argument between the waitress who has a menu limited to having Spam in just about everything (among them, "Lobster Thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce, garnished with truffle pate, brandy and a fried egg on top and Spam"), and Mrs Bun, who is the only one in the room who does not want Spam. She asks for an item with the Spam removed (despite there already being some items mentioned that do not actually include Spam), much to the amazement of her Spam-loving husband. The waitress responds to this request with great disgust. Eventually, Mrs Bun resorts to screaming, "I DON'T LIKE SPAM!!"
At several points, a group of Vikings in the restaurant (referred to as the Green Midget Café in Bromley) interrupt conversation by loudly singing "Spam, lovely Spam, wonderful Spam." They are ordered to "shut up" by the irate waitress several times, but they resume singing more and more loudly.
The sketch abruptly cuts to a historian in a television studio talking about the Vikings. As he goes on, he begins to uncontrollably insert the word 'spam' into everything he says ("...and Spam selecting a Spam particular Spam item from the Spam menu, would Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam..."), and the backdrop is lifted to reveal the restaurant set behind. The historian joins the Vikings, Mr. and Mrs. Bun are lifted by wires out of the scene and the singing continues on and on...
It premiered on 15 December 1970 as the final sketch of the 25th show of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and the following end credits were changed so every member of the crew has either Spam or some other food item from the menu added to their names. (Spam Terry Jones, Michael Spam Palin, John Spam John Spam John Spam Cleese, Graham Spam Spam Spam Chapman, Eric Spam Egg and Chips Idle, Terry Spam Sausage Spam Egg Spam Gilliam, etc.) The sketch became immensely popular. The word Spam is uttered at least 132 times.
This sketch has also been featured in several Monty Python videos including Parrot Sketch Not Included - 20 Years of Monty Python.

Spam (food)

(Spam Twitter)-Spam (officially trademarked as SPAM®, possibly a portmanteau of "Spiced Ham") is a canned precooked meat product made by the Hormel Foods Corporation. The labeled ingredients in the classic variety of Spam are chopped pork shoulder meat, with ham meat added, salt, water, modified potato starch as a binder, and sodium nitrite as a preservative. Spam's gelatinous glaze, or aspic, forms from the cooling of meat stock. The product has become part of many jokes and urban legends about mystery meat, which has made it part of pop culture and folklore.
Varieties of Spam include Spam Classic, Spam Hot & Spicy, Spam Less Sodium, Spam Lite, Spam Oven Roasted Turkey, Hickory Smoked, Spam with real Hormel Bacon, Spam with Cheese, and Spam Spread. Availability of these varieties varies regionally.


Nutritional data

Spam is typically sold in cans with a net weight of 340 grams (12 ounces). A 100 gram (3.5 ounce) serving of original Spam provides 310 calories, 13 grams of protein (26% DV), 3 grams of carbohydrates (1% DV), 27 grams of total fat (41% DV), including 10 grams of saturated fat (49% DV). The cholesterol content of Spam is 70 milligrams (23% DV). A serving also contains 57% of the recommended daily intake of sodium (1369 milligrams). Spam provides the following vitamins and minerals: 0% vitamin A, 1% vitamin C , 1% calcium, 5% iron, 3% magnesium, 9% potassium, 12% zinc, and 5% copper.
Varieties

There are several different flavors of Spam products, including:
Spam Classic – original flavor
Spam Hot & Spicy – with Tabasco flavor
Spam Less Sodium – "25% less sodium"
Spam Lite – "33% less calories and 50% less fat" – made from pork shoulder meat, ham, and mechanically separated chicken
Spam Oven Roasted Turkey
Spam Hickory Smoke flavor
Spam Spread – "if you're a spreader, not a slicer ... just like Spam Classic, but in a spreadable form"
Spam with Bacon
Spam with Cheese
Spam Garlic
Spam Golden Honey Grail – a limited-release special flavor made in honor of Monty Python's Spamalot Broadway musical
Spam Mild
Spam Hot Dogs
In addition to the variety of flavors, Spam is sold in tins smaller than the twelve-ounce standard size. Spam Singles are also available, which are a single sandwich-sized slice of Spam Classic or Lite, wrapped in plastic instead of a metal container.
United States and territories
In the United States in the aftermath of World War II, a troupe of ex-G.I. women was created by Hormel Foods to promote Spam from coast to coast. The group was known as the Hormel Girls and associated the food with being patriotic. In 1948, two years after the group's conception, the troupe had grown to 60 women with 16 forming an orchestra. The show went on to become a radio program where the main selling point was Spam. The Hormel Girls were disbanded in 1953. Spam is still quite popular in the United States, but is sometimes associated with economic hardship because of its relatively low cost.
The residents of the state of Hawaii and the territories of Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) consume the most Spam per capita in the United States. On average, each person on Guam consumes 16 tins of Spam each year and the numbers at least equal this in the CNMI. Guam, Hawaii, and Saipan, the CNMI's principal island, have the only McDonald's restaurants that feature Spam on the menu. In Hawaii, Burger King began serving Spam in 2007 on its menu to compete with the local McDonald's chains. In Hawaii, Spam is so popular it is sometimes dubbed "The Hawaiian Steak". One popular Spam dish in Hawaii is Spam musubi, where cooked Spam is combined with rice and nori seaweed and classified as onigiri.
Europe
In the United Kingdom spam is often sliced, battered and deep-fried becoming known as 'spam fritters', and is still a popular way of eating Spam today. It gained popularity in the 1940s during World War II, as a consequence of the Lend-Lease Act when Hormel began to increase production towards British and Russian markets.
Asia
Spam is often served with rice in Asia.
In Okinawa, Japan, Spam has become very popular. The product is added into onigiri alongside eggs, used as a staple ingredient in the traditional Okinawan dish chanpurū, and a Spam burger is sold by local fast food chain Jef.
In Hong Kong, Spam is commonly served with instant noodles and fried eggs, and is a popular item in cha chaan teng. Spam is less popular than Ma Ling Meats, its main competitor in the Hong Kong processed meat market. Although recent controversies surrounding high salt content in Ma Ling products may allow Spam to gain market share.
In the Philippines, Spam is a popular meal, most commonly eaten with fried rice and eggs or as a sandwich with pandesal. It is often eaten for breakfast. During the rescue efforts after the catastrophic typhoon of 2009, Hormel Foods donated over 30,000 pounds of Spam to the Philippines branch of the Red Cross.
Name origin

Introduced on July 5, 1937, the name "Spam" was chosen when the product, whose original name was far less memorable (Hormel Spiced Ham), began to lose market share. The name was chosen from multiple entries in a naming contest. A Hormel official once stated that the original meaning of the name "Spam" was "Shoulder of Pork and Ham". According to writer Marguerite Patten in Spam – The Cookbook, the name was suggested by Kenneth Daigneau, an actor and the brother of a Hormel vice president, who was given a $100 prize for creating the name. At one time and persisting to this day in certain books, the theory behind the nomenclature of Spam was that the name was a portmanteau of "Spiced Meat and Ham". According to the British documentary-reality show "1940s House", when Spam was offered by the United States to those affected by World War II in the UK, Spam stood for Specially Processed American Meats. Yesterday's Britain, a popular history published by Reader's Digest in 1998 [p. 140], unpacks Spam as "Supply Pressed American Meat" and describes it as an imported "wartime food" of the 1940s.
In popular culture

In the 1960s, the original Mercury astronauts were referred to as "Spam in a can" by aircraft test pilots, as a derogatory reference to their restricted role as being unable to control the flight of the Mercury spacecraft in which they were launched.
In 1970, the Monty Python comedy group televised a sketch "Spam" in which almost every breakfast meal served in a restaurant included Spam. The dialog hyped the menu as being "Spam, Spam, Spam and more Spam".
In the 1990s, excessive, unwanted e-mail was termed "spam" after the phenomenon of marketers drowning out e-mail discussions, by flooding Usenet newsgroups and individuals' email with junk mail advertising messages. This was due to some early internet users who flooded forums with the word "spam" recounting the repetitive and unwanted presence of Spam in the Monty Python sketch. This phenomenon has been reported in court decisions handed down in lawsuits against spammers - see, for example, CompuServe Inc. v. Cyber Promotions, Inc., 962 F.Supp. 1015, n. 1 (S.D.Ohio 1997).
The Python programming language, named after Monty Python, prefers to use the words "spam", "ham", and "eggs" as metasyntactic variables, instead of the traditional words "foo" or "bar" or "baz".
In 2004, the Broadway musical comedy Spamalot was created as a parody of the 1975 Monty Python film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Spam (electronic)

(Spam Twitter)-Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social networking spam, television advertising and file sharing network spam.
Spamming remains economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high. In the year 2011, the estimated figure for spam messages is around seven trillion. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.
People who create electronic spam are called spammers.
History

Pre-Internet
In the late 19th Century Western Union allowed telegraphic messages on its network to be sent to multiple destinations. The first recorded instance of a mass unsolicited commercial telegram is from May 1864. Up until the Great Depression wealthy North American residents would be deluged with nebulous investment offers. This problem never fully emerged in Europe to the degree that it did in the Americas, because telegraphy was regulated by national post offices in the European region.
Etymology
According to the Internet Society and other sources, the term spam is derived from the 1970 Spam sketch of the BBC television comedy series "Monty Python's Flying Circus". The sketch is set in a cafe where nearly every item on the menu includes Spam canned luncheon meat. As the waiter recites the Spam-filled menu, a chorus of Viking patrons drowns out all conversations with a song repeating "Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam... lovely Spam! wonderful Spam!", hence "Spamming" the dialogue.The excessive amount of Spam mentioned in the sketch is a reference to the preponderance of imported canned meat products in the United Kingdom, particularly corned beef from Argentina, in the years after World War II, as the country struggled to rebuild its agricultural base. Spam captured a large slice of the British market within lower economic classes and became a byword among British children of the 1960s for low-grade fodder due to its commonality, monotonous taste and cheap price - hence the humour of the Python sketch.
E-mail
Main Post: E-mail spam
E-mail spam, known as unsolicited bulk Email (UBE), junk mail, or unsolicited commercial email (UCE), is the practice of sending unwanted e-mail messages, frequently with commercial content, in large quantities to an indiscriminate set of recipients. Spam in e-mail started to become a problem when the Internet was opened up to the general public in the mid-1990s. It grew exponentially over the following years, and today composes some 80 to 85% of all the email in the world, by a "conservative estimate". Pressure to make e-mail spam illegal has been successful in some jurisdictions, but less so in others. Spammers take advantage of this fact, and frequently outsource parts of their operations to countries where spamming will not get them into legal trouble.
Instant Messaging
Main Post: Messaging spam
Instant Messaging spam makes use of instant messaging systems. Although less ubiquitous than its e-mail counterpart, according to a report from Ferris Research, 500 million spam IMs were sent in 2003, twice the level of 2002. As instant messaging tends to not be blocked by firewalls, it is an especially useful channel for spammers. This is very common on many instant messaging system such as Skype.
Newsgroup and forum
Main Post: Newsgroup spam
Newsgroup spam is a type of spam where the targets are Usenet newsgroups. Spamming of Usenet newsgroups actually pre-dates e-mail spam. Usenet convention defines spamming as excessive multiple posting, that is, the repeated posting of a message (or substantially similar messages). The prevalence of Usenet spam led to the development of the Breidbart Index as an objective measure of a message's "spamminess.
Mobile phone
Mobile phone spam is directed at the text messaging service of a mobile phone. This can be especially irritating to customers not only for the inconvenience but also because of the fee they may be charged per text message received in some markets. The term "SpaSMS" was coined at the adnews website Adland in 2000 to describe spam SMS.
Forum spam
Main Post: Forum spam
Forum spam is the creating of messages that are advertisements or otherwise unwanted on Internet forums. It is generally done by automated spambots. Most forum spam consists of links to external sites, with the dual goals of increasing search engine visibility in highly competitive areas such as weight loss, pharmaceuticals, gambling, pornography, real estate or loans, and generating more traffic for these commercial websites. Some of these links contain code to track the spambot's identity if a sale goes through, when the spammer behind the spambot works on commission.
Blog, wiki, and guestbook
Main Post: Spam in blogs
Blog spam, or "blam" for short, is spamming on weblogs. In 2003, this type of spam took advantage of the open nature of comments in the blogging software Movable Type by repeatedly placing comments to various blog posts that provided nothing more than a link to the spammer's commercial web site. Similar attacks are often performed against wikis and guestbooks, both of which accept user contributions.
Spam targeting search engines (spamdexing)
Main Post: Spamdexing
Spamdexing (a portmanteau of spamming and indexing) refers to a practice on the World Wide Web of modifying HTML pages to increase the chances of them being placed high on search engine relevancy lists. These sites use "black hat search engine optimization (SEO) techniques" to deliberately manipulate their rank in search engines. Many modern search engines modified their search algorithms to try to exclude web pages utilizing spamdexing tactics. For example, the search bots will detect repeated keywords as spamming by using a grammar analysis. If a website owner is found to have spammed the webpage to falsely increase its page rank, the website may be penalized by search engines.
Spam targeting video sharing sites
Video sharing sites, such as YouTube, are now being frequently targeted by spammers. The most common technique involves people (or spambots) posting links to sites, most likely pornographic or dealing with online dating, on the comments section of random videos or people's profiles. Another frequently used technique is using bots to post messages on random users' profiles to a spam account's channel page, along with enticing text and images, usually of a sexually suggestive nature. These pages may include their own or other users' videos, again often suggestive. The main purpose of these accounts is to draw people to their link in the home page section of their profile. YouTube has blocked the posting of such links. In addition, YouTube has implemented a CAPTCHA system that makes rapid posting of repeated comments much more difficult than before, because of abuse in the past by mass-spammers who would flood people's profiles with thousands of repetitive comments.

Noncommercial forms

E-mail and other forms of spamming have been used for purposes other than advertisements. Many early Usenet spams were religious or political. Serdar Argic, for instance, spammed Usenet with historical revisionist screeds. A number of evangelists have spammed Usenet and e-mail media with preaching messages. A growing number of criminals are also using spam to perpetrate various sorts of fraud, and in some cases have used it to lure people to locations where they have been kidnapped, held for ransom, and even murdered.

Trademark issues

Hormel Foods Corporation, the maker of Spam luncheon meat, does not object to the Internet use of the term "spamming". However, they did ask that the capitalized word "Spam" be reserved to refer to their product and trademark. By and large, this request is obeyed in forums which discuss spam. In Hormel Foods v SpamArrest, Hormel attempted to assert its trademark rights against SpamArrest, a software company, from using the mark "spam", since Hormel owns the trademark. In a dilution claim, Hormel argued that Spam Arrest's use of the term "spam" had endangered and damaged "substantial goodwill and good reputation" in connection with its trademarked lunch meat and related products. Hormel also asserts that Spam Arrest's name so closely resembles its luncheon meat that the public might become confused, or might think that Hormel endorses Spam Arrest's products.
Cost Benefit Analyses

The European Union's Internal Market Commission estimated in 2001 that "junk e-mail" cost Internet users €10 billion per year worldwide. The California legislature found that spam cost United States organizations alone more than $13 billion in 2007, including lost productivity and the additional equipment, software, and manpower needed to combat the problem. Spam's direct effects include the consumption of computer and network resources, and the cost in human time and attention of dismissing unwanted messages.
In addition, spam has costs stemming from the kinds of spam messages sent, from the ways spammers send them, and from the arms race between spammers and those who try to stop or control spam. In addition, there are the opportunity cost of those who forgo the use of spam-afflicted systems. There are the direct costs, as well as the indirect costs borne by the victims—both those related to the spamming itself, and to other crimes that usually accompany it, such as financial theft, identity theft, data and intellectual property theft, virus and other malware infection, child pornography, fraud, and deceptive marketing.
General costs
In all cases listed above, including both commercial and non-commercial, "spam happens" because of a positive Cost-benefit analysis result if the cost to recipients is excluded as an externality the spammer can avoid paying.
Cost is the combination of
Overhead: The costs and overhead of electronic spamming include bandwidth, developing or acquiring an email/wiki/blog spam tool, taking over or acquiring a host/zombie, etc.
Transaction cost: The incremental cost of contacting each additional recipient once a method of spamming is constructed, multiplied by the number of recipients. (see CAPTCHA as a method of increasing transaction costs)
Risks: Chance and severity of legal and/or public reactions, including damages and punitive damages
Damage: Impact on the community and/or communication channels being spammed.
In crime

Spam can be used to spread computer viruses, trojan horses or other malicious software. The objective may be identity theft, or worse (e.g., advance fee fraud). Some spam attempts to capitalize on human greed whilst other attempts to use the victims' inexperience with computer technology to trick them (e.g., phishing). On May 31, 2007, one of the world's most prolific spammers, Robert Alan Soloway, was arrested by U.S. authorities.Described as one of the top ten spammers in the world, Soloway was charged with 35 criminal counts, including mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. Prosecutors allege that Soloway used millions of "zombie" computers to distribute spam during 2003. This is the first case in which U.S. prosecutors used identity theft laws to prosecute a spammer for taking over someone else's Internet domain name.
Political issues

Spamming remains a hot discussion topic. In 2004, the seized Porsche of an indicted spammer was advertised on the Internet; this revealed the extent of the financial rewards available to those who are willing to commit duplicitous acts online. However, some of the possible means used to stop spamming may lead to other side effects, such as increased government control over the Internet, loss of privacy, barriers to free expression, and the commercialization of e-mail.
One of the chief values favored by many long-time Internet users and experts, as well as by many members of the public, is the free exchange of ideas. Many have valued the relative anarchy of the Internet, and bridle at the idea of restrictions placed upon it. A common refrain from spam-fighters is that spamming itself abridges the historical freedom of the Internet, by attempting to force users to carry the costs of material which they would not choose.

Spamdexing

(Spam Twitter)-In computing, spamdexing (also known as search spam, search engine spam or web spam) is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes. It involves a number of methods, such as repeating unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevance or prominence of resources indexed in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system. Some consider it to be a part of search engine optimization, though there are many search engine optimization methods that improve the quality and appearance of the content of web sites and serve content useful to many users. Search engines use a variety of algorithms to determine relevancy ranking. Some of these include determining whether the search term appears in the META keywords tag, others whether the search term appears in the body text or URL of a web page.
Content spam

These techniques involve altering the logical view that a search engine has over the page's contents. They all aim at variants of the vector space model for information retrieval on text collections.
Keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing involves the calculated placement of keywords within a page to raise the keyword count, variety, and density of the page. This is useful to make a page appear to be relevant for a web crawler in a way that makes it more likely to be found. Example: A promoter of a Ponzi scheme wants to attract web surfers to a site where he advertises his scam. He places hidden text appropriate for a fan page of a popular music group on his page, hoping that the page will be listed as a fan site and receive many visits from music lovers. Older versions of indexing programs simply counted how often a keyword appeared, and used that to determine relevance levels.
Doorway pages
"Gateway" or doorway pages are low-quality web pages created with very little content but are instead stuffed with very similar keywords and phrases. They are designed to rank highly within the search results, but serve no purpose to visitors looking for information. A doorway page will generally have "click here to enter" on the page.
Scraper sites
Scraper sites sites, are created using various programs designed to "scrape" search-engine results pages or other sources of content and create "content" for a website. The specific presentation of content on these sites is unique, but is merely an amalgamation of content taken from other sources, often without permission. Such websites are generally full of advertising (such as pay-per-click ads), or they redirect the user to other sites. It is even feasible for scraper sites to outrank original websites for their own information and organization names.
Article spinning
Article spinning involves rewriting existing articles, as opposed to merely scraping content from other sites, to avoid penalties imposed by search engines for duplicate content. This process is undertaken by hired writers or automated using a thesaurus database or a neural network.
Hidden or invisible text
Unrelated hidden text is disguised by making it the same color as the background, using a tiny font size, or hiding it within HTML code such as "no frame" sections, alt attributes, zero-sized DIVs, and "no script" sections. People screening websites for a search-engine company might temporarily or permanently block an entire website for having invisible text on some of its pages. However, hidden text is not always spamdexing: it can also be used to enhance accessibility.
Meta-tag stuffing
This involves repeating keywords in the Meta tags, and using meta keywords that are unrelated to the site's content. This tactic has been ineffective since 2005.
Link spam

Link spam is defined as links between pages that are present for reasons other than merit. Link spam takes advantage of link-based ranking algorithms, which gives websites higher rankings the more other highly ranked websites link to it. These techniques also aim at influencing other link-based ranking techniques such as the HITS algorithm.
Link-building software
A common form of link spam is the use of link-building software to automate the search engine optimization process.
Link farms
Link farms are tightly-knit communities of pages referencing each other, also known humorously as mutual admiration societies
Hidden links
Putting hyperlinks where visitors will not see them to increase link popularity. Highlighted link text can help rank a webpage higher for matching that phrase.
Sybil attack
A Sybil attack is the forging of multiple identities for malicious intent, named after the famous multiple personality disorder patient "Sybil" (Shirley Ardell Mason). A spammer may create multiple web sites at different domain names that all link to each other, such as fake blogs (known as spam blogs).
Spam blogs
Spam blogs,are blogs created solely for commercial promotion and the passage of link authority to target sites. Often these "splogs" are designed in a misleading manner that will give the effect of a legitimate website but upon close inspection will often be written using spinning software or very poorly written and barely readable content. They are similar in nature to link farms.

Spam in blogs

(Spam Twitter)-Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam is a form of spamdexing. (Note that blogspam has another, more common meaning, namely the post of a blogger who creates no-value-added posts to submit them to other sites.) It is done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly accessible online discussion boards. Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target.
Adding links that point to the spammer's web site artificially increases the site's search engine ranking. An increased ranking often results in the spammer's commercial site being listed ahead of other sites for certain searches, increasing the number of potential visitors and paying customers.
History

This type of spam originally appeared in internet guestbooks, where spammers repeatedly fill a guestbook with links to their own site and no relevant comment, to increase search engine rankings. If an actual comment is given it is often just "cool page", "nice website", or keywords of the spammed link.
In 2003, spammers began to take advantage of the open nature of comments in the blogging software like Movable Type by repeatedly placing comments to various blog posts that provided nothing more than a link to the spammer's commercial web site. Jay Allen created a free plugin, called MT-BlackList.
Possible solutions

Disallowing multiple consecutive submissions
It is rare on a site that a user would reply to their own comment, yet spammers typically will do. Checking that the user's IP address is not replying to a user of the same IP address will significantly reduce flooding. This, however, proves problematic when multiple users, behind the same proxy, wish to comment on the same entry.
Blocking by keyword
Blocking specific words from posts is one of the simplest and most effective ways to reduce spam. Much spam can be blocked simply by banning names of popular pharmaceuticals and casino games.
This is a good long-term solution, because it's not beneficial for spammers to change keywords to "vi@gra" or such, because keywords must be readable and indexed by search engine bots to be effective.

Mobile phone spam

(Spam Twitter)-Mobile phone spam is a form of spamming directed at the text messaging service of a mobile phone. It is described as mobile spamming, SMS spam, text spam or m-spam..
As the popularity of mobile phones surged in the early 2000s, frequent users of text messaging began to see an increase in the number of unsolicited (and generally unwanted) commercial advertisements being sent to their telephones through text messaging. This can be particularly annoying for the recipient because, unlike in email, some recipients may be charged a fee for every message received, including spam.
Mobile phone spam is generally less pervasive than email spam, where in 2010 around 90% of email is spam. The amount of mobile spam varies widely from region to region. In North America, much less than 1% of SMS messages were spam in 2010, while in parts of Asia up to 30% of messages were spam.
Criminality and law enforcement

SMS spam is illegal under common law in most jurisdictions as trespass to chattels. Jurisdictions with specific SMS spam regulation and fines include Australia, the EU and others; in the US, violators face substantial costs; in a 2008 settlement, the violator agreed to pay $150 to each spam recipient. In a 2010 class action settlement of Satterfield v Simon & Schuster, a case that reached the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, defendants agreed to pay $175 to each spam recipient. In response to Satterfield, entities who make money sending mobile phone spam formed the Mobile Advocacy Coalition (MAC) to lobby the government to legalize that activity. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has expanded Phone Spam regulations to cover also Voice Spam—mostly in form of prerecorded telemarketing calls—commonly known as robocalls; victims can file a complaint with the FCC. In California, Section 17538.41 of the B&P Code bans text message advertisement. Consumers can sue on an individual or class basis per a private right of action against unfair business practices.
Enforcement in small claims court
The FCC released an order in Aug, 2004 that reiterated that SMS spam messages to cellphones are illegal under the existing Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and also under the CAN-SPAM Act. Each such unsolicited message received without permission entitles the recipient to take the sender to small claims court and collect a minimum of $1 for each violation. They said this in 2003, and reiterated it in 2004: 'In 2003, we released a Report and Order in which we reaffirmed that the TCPA prohibits any call using an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded message to any wireless telephone number. We concluded that this encompasses both voice calls and text calls, including Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging calls, to wireless phone numbers.
Factors complicating SMS spam reduction

Fighting SMS spam is complicated by several factors, including the lower rate of SMS spam (compared to more abused services such as Internet email) has allowed many users and service providers to ignore the issue, and the limited availability of mobile phone spam-filtering software. Filtering SMS spam at the recipient device would be an imperfect solution in markets where users are charged to receive messages, as the user may still be charged for the message once the provider sent it, even if software on the device blocked it from appearing on the device's display. This problem is not present in most of the world outside the U.S., however, where users are not charged to receive messages.
Countermeasures

There are several actions and strategies that can help reduce SMS spam.
Legal actions can be effective and remunerative.
Many carriers (such as AT&T in the US) allow subscribers to report spam by forwarding the spam messages to short code 7726 (spells SPAM on a traditional phone keypad) (33700 in France). It's reported that 1/2 million spam reports in France resulted in the disconnection of 300 spammers, and many more cease-and-desist orders were sent.
Some spam countermeasures depend on detection, and there are two developments in that area: a GSMA pilot spam reporting program, and the development of Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) standards for mobile spam reporting. In February 2010, the GSM Association has announced a pilot program that will allow subscribers to report SMS spam by forwarding it to short code '7726' which spells "SPAM" on most phones. AT&T Mobility, Korea Telecom, and SFR announced their participation, and a large number of other mobile operators are expected to join after the pilot period.