The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

146 Edges
spam while still permitting all “meaningful” e - mail to penetrate safely.
And still it is a foregone conclusion that each e - mail session will require
a certain amount of manual spam identification and deletion.
Spam is not quite as aggressive as a computer virus or an Internet worm,
and though spam attachments can be viruses or worms, spam is by
and large something to be deleted or marked as trash. As an informational
entity, spam is less a question of antivirus protection and more
one of bureaucratic data management: algorithmic filtering of the
meaningful from the meaningless, marking the corralled messages for
deletion, junking attachments from mailboxes, and approving or deny -
ing the status of one message over another. Spam leverages the low
marginal costs of electronic mail by exploiting the flaws (some would
say features) of the planetary e - mail network and in doing so elicits
an antagonistic response from users in the form of informatic network
management.
Spam signifies nothing and yet is pure signification. Even offline
junk mail, anonymously addressed to “Current Resident,” still contains
nominally coherent information, advertising a clearance sale or fastfood
delivery. Spam is not anonymous, for a receiver address is a technical
requirement, and yet its content has no content, the receiver
address the result of algorithmic data collection and processing done
by Web spiders and collected in massive databases. Often spam uses
Web bugs that call back to a central server, confirming the existence
of the receiver’s address, nothing more, nothing less. The spam might
be deleted, but the damage is done. A subject line might advertise
one thing—typically the three P’s, porn, pharmaceuticals, and payment
notices—but often the body of the e - mail advertises something
else entirely. Misspellings and grammatical errors are strategic
in spam e - mails, in part to elude spam filters in an ever - escalating
game of syntactic hide - and - seek. Thus Ambien becomes “Amb/ en,”
or Xanax becomes “X&nax.” Many spam generators use keywords
from e - mail subject headings and recombine those terms into new
subject headings. But in the end, spam e - mail simply wants to generate
a new edge for the graph; it wants the user to click on a URL, or
to open an attachment, either action a new link in the net.
In the midst of all this, something has happened that may or may
not have been intentional. Spam e - mails, with their generated mis-