Spam

The Johns Hopkins University is tightening its computer security after hackers broke into a computer at the medical school and secretly used it to generate a flood of e-mail advertisements.Efforts by the university to cope with the October break-in have caused balky and intermittent e-mail service for seven months for hundreds of staff members at the East Baltimore campus. At least once, e-mail service through the system, called "welchlink," shut down for two days."What was unique about this break-in was how slick it was," said J. Robert Sapp III, director of advanced technology for the Welch Medical Library.

Every day, 78-year-old Albert Adler opens his electronic mailbox looking for messages from family and friends. Increasingly, this is what he finds: electronic come-ons from nude dancers and lascivious Lolitas inviting him to visit erotic Web sites or call a 900 sex number.And that's only half of it. Like many Internet users, the retired publicist also has to wade through scores of messages touting get-rich-quick schemes, miracle herbal cures, and "free" cruises to the Bahamas. When Adler sends e-mail to marketers asking them to drop him from their lists, his messages bounce back undeliverable.

Do you have e-mail overload? Is your mailbox overflowing with joke files, chain letters, random musings, political treatises or knee-jerk petitions? Do you get lost in your in box, searching desperately for that urgent memo from your boss and all you can find is a Dr. Seuss-style poem about Zippergate or a recycled rumor, long since proven false, about designer Tommy Hilfiger?If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you're not alone. You're receiving what what I call spam from friends, or fram, for short.

The manager of a corner grocery was charged early yesterday with attempted murder after being accused of shooting a man he suspected of shoplifting several cans of Spam at a Northwest Baltimore store.Robert Chung, 60, was charged with attempted first-degree murder and a handgun violation in the incident at the Pennsylvania Supermarket in the Penn North neighborhood.David Rich, 30, was shot while scuffling with an employee inside the store in the 2400 block of Pennsylvania Ave., police said.

A fledgling business group is threatening to make public the electronic addresses of 5 million America Online customers if the world's largest online service refuses to accept unsolicited commercial e-mail from its members.Joe Melle, president of the National Organization of Internet Commerce in Chino, Calif., said the companies in his 3-month-old group want to use electronic mail to pitch products cheaply to AOL's 10 million members.NOIC wants to send the unsolicited e-mail -- called "spam" -- but AOL has refused to enter into negotiations with the group.

UNTIL NOW, back issues of National Geographic inevitably called to mind doctors' waiting rooms and musty storage boxes. But soon those stacks moldering beneath the cobwebs in America's garages and basements may be destined for recycling bins. The Complete National Geographic (for Windows or Macintosh, from Mindscape Inc., at about $200), a collection of 30 CD-ROMs, contains a digitized version of every page of the magazine from the first issue in 1888 through the December 1996 edition.Collectors may not want to chuck their yellow-spined treasures just yet. The CD-ROM collection omits all the large map supplements (though it includes a large world map on paper)

Long before the huge crowds arrived at the Maryland State Fair yesterday morning, a band of hardy gourmands and amateur chefs toted their casserole dishes and rolls of aluminum foil into Timonium as if they were the very weapons of war.Indeed, it was war -- a food fight of the first order -- the Spam Cooking Contest.Among the 20 entries were Green Eggs and Spam, Rootin'-Tootin' Spam Loaf, Rack O' Spam on a Bed of Pringle's, Italian Spam Pie, Spam Breakfast Burritos, Spam and Apple Strudel and Yosemite Spam Frittata.

PHILADELPHIA -- Here's what you've got to undertand about Sanford Wallace, the enterprising, friendly young man known in cyberspace as the Spam King. He's not trying to annoy anyone.All he's trying to do, he explains, is make money. Nothing wrong with that, right? It's the American way.So every day, Sanford Wallace sits down at his computer terminal in his rowhouse office in Northeast Philadelphia and edits the advertisements that make him the most hated man on the Internet.WIN! WIN!! HOME BUSINESS -- NO MONEY DOWN!

Too bad the great American poet Dr. Seuss didn't live to see the Big Bang of cyberspace, with the Internet going from geek retreat to nationwide playground in just a few years. The creator of the lorax, the sneedle and the wumpus would be at home with the gigabyte, Unix, Spam, RAM and ROM.The world of computers has long been full of elaborate and arcane jargon, seemingly designed to separate the newbie -- novice -- from the pro. But the soaring popularity of the Net has spread that jargon far and wide, and it seems like you can't open a package of gum without seeing something like http: //bubbles.

Home cooks: It's time to overcome your cyber-phobia and learn to love the Internet. It can do marvelous things for you, even if you're a technological turkey and a clumsy cook to boot.Now, don't panic. We, unlike all those other writers, are going to ++ be concrete here. We're going to go slowly, and we're going to define each term as we use it.I know, I know. From the outside, the Internet seems like a bottomless soup of data bits floating somewhere -- in outer space, maybe -- so scattered as to be worthless, like a library full of books whose pages have been blown loose by a hurricane.

Some things should never make a comeback: the Yugo, Celebrity Boxing with Tonya Harding and Danny Bonaduce, the lime-green pantsuit Hillary Clinton wore on her first campaign swing through Iowa. I put Spam on the no-comeback list, too. Yet now comes word that Spam - the pink slab of pork and ham that comes in a can from Hormel, not the junk mail in your inbox - has become wildly popular again in this staggering economy. At a little over two bucks a can, it's a cheap way to eat something that looks like meat's illegimate cousin, but is, in fact, actual meat.

Beware of a spam e-mail claiming to be from FBI Director John S. Pistole. The FBI warns that the fraudulent e-mail advises recipients that they are the beneficiary of a large sum of money, which they will be permitted to access once fees are paid and personal banking information is provided. The appearance of the e-mail, which incorporates photographs of FBI officials and the FBI seal, leads a recipient to believe that it is authentic. The typical schemes using the FBI name's are lottery endorsements and inheritance notifications, but they can cover a range of scams, including threats and malicious computer program attachments to bogus online auctions.

Let's dish about spam - the kind that comes in a can at the grocery store and the kind that fills up your computer's in-box. First, let's consider original Spam, a pork and ham food product that is formed into a block. I always thought pork and ham were somewhat similar if not interchangeable terms. Thankfully, the official Spam Web site reveals that ham refers to a specific cut of meat - the upper hind leg - whereas pork can refer to "several delicious cuts." To me, this means pork probably includes many "delicious cuts" we might never before have considered delicious, but which turn out to be darn yummy when rendered unrecognizable, pressed into a generic meatloaf.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham's Spam Data Mine is warning consumers about a new spam trend using MSNBC that attempts to trick e-mail readers into clicking on a site that will infect their computers. UAB says that since the new spam attack is based on real e-mail messages sent to MSNBC Alert subscribers, it will be nearly impossible to block the spam without also blocking legitimate MSNBC mail. Gary Warner, UAB's director of computer forensics, said that for several days last week, one of the top spam messages detected by the Spam Data Mine was "CNN Alerts: my Custom Alert," which forged a CNN e-mail.

Two spam e-mail messages floating around the Internet contain a malicious virus that forces you to wipe your hard drive clean to get rid of the infection, warns the Better Business Bureau of Greater Maryland. One e-mail purports to be from UPS, telling the recipient that a shipment could not be delivered. The reader is asked to open an attachment to gain access to an invoice waybill in order to pick up the shipment, the BBB says. The attachment contains the damaging virus. The second e-mail, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, directs the recipient to click on a link to read an article about the FBI vs. Facebook.

Early this year, Gary Brawerman's e-mail account was hijacked. As much of a nightmare that was, it didn't compare to the lack of concern he found when he called his Internet service provider, Comcast Corp., for help. Brawerman noticed trouble Jan. 21 when he went to log on to the e-mail account he'd used for four years but could not access it. The system couldn't even find his e-mail address. "That's when I knew something was wrong," said Brawerman, owner of a local mattress store. "I called Comcast and they told me they needed 24 hours."

meatpaper.com The online version of the new journal Meatpaper is about meat "as a provocative cultural symbol and phenomenon," write the editors. You can read articles on kosher animal slaughter and on an artist who has made a map of the world out of Spam.

I received the nicest e-mail last week from Daisy Larkin Pritchard, telling me my order had been approved. Later that day, the happy news was repeated by Janice Accuracy Hutchinson and Davina Bovine Shoemaker, and again that night by Carmella Iniquitous Stovall and Iva Cowhide Dahl. These e-mails intrigued me not only because of the names of their senders but because I hadn't placed any order. They arrived in my AOL "spam" folder, where they joined similarly uninvited correspondence from Vince Episodic Trujillo, Christian Bite Fernandez and Rigoberto Handset Prince, plus two dozen other notes, some written in Cyrillic and promising Russian delights, and others in Japanese kanji and katakana.

Ilive way out in the country and it's beautiful, but I am literally the last phone on the local line. My download speeds are very slow. And obviously there is no cable or satellite access. What can I do other than move back to the city? Are there different speeds from the Internet service providers, or am I stuck napping while waiting on a download? - E. DeVane You're not out of satellite range. While I am not a great fan of Internet by satellite, it's sure better than your painfully slow dial-up speed.

I've always hated Spam. Since before I was born. Well, practically. It is no exaggeration to say that Spam never had a chance with me. A child of the suburbs in the 1950s, I was all too sensitive to the domestic depravities of that era. And Spam, 16 years on the market by the time I was born, qualified as one of those depravities. For one, Spam was the color of the 1950s: preternaturally pink, a slightly speckled flesh tone shared by Caucasians and pigs. When fried, Spam acquired an even more unfortunate hue, kind of like a radioactive tongue.