Ever since DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which funded the research into and the construction of the early Internet) withdrew funding in the late 1980s, capitalism has driven the growth of the Internet. There is money to be made and money to be saved in ways that boggle the imagination. Online banking, shopping, research, music, video, news, travel, sights and sounds, financial services, entertainment, learning, sex, messaging, publishing, broadcasting, surveillance, reading, and of course, spam.
Spammers are making money. Send enough messages and you will get some suckers — er, customers. A 21-year-old online casino operator, allegedly connected with the AOL e-mail theft case (see the section, “Buying and stealing addresses,” earlier in this chapter), was reportedly making $10,000–$20,000 per day. Good Lord Almighty.
I advise people not to open spam messages and not to buy from spammers.
