PACIFIC RESERVE, INC.
PRIVACY STATEMENT
INFORMATION SUPPLIED BY OUR VISITORS
All information we collect on this site is done so through the explicit use of forms.
Visitors to our site have the option to provide or not to provide any information.
If you elect not to provide information, we do not take any actions to obtain any
information about you through any other means. Our site does not use cookies.
We do not and cannot use cookies to access or collect any information
about you in any way.
Any information you submit through forms on this site, or through any other means
(such as fax, E-Mail, etc.,) is used solely for the purposes of keeping track of
our visitors on this site. We do not sell, rent,
or otherwise distribute your data to any company or individual.
SERVER ACTIVITY LOGS
All web servers maintain detailed logs about activity on its sites. This information
includes a record of every page accessed, the IP address of the visitor, and the
time and date of the visit. Pacific Reserve, Inc. uses our site logs solely for the purpose
of identifying which areas of our site are used the most, and which areas are rarely
accessed. It is through this type of site activity analysis that we can determine
what information is of the most use to visitors to our site. In this way, we can
strive to provide you with an interesting, informative, and helpful site.
WHAT IS SPAM?
Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message,
in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise
choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for
dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services.
Spam costs the sender very little to send -- most of the costs are
paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender.
There are two main types of spam, and they have different effects on Internet
users. Cancellable Usenet spam is a single message sent to 20 or more Usenet
newsgroups. (Through long experience, Usenet users have found that any
message posted to so many newsgroups is often not relevant to most or all of
them.) Usenet spam is aimed at "lurkers", people who read newsgroups but
rarely or never post and give their address away. Usenet spam robs users of
the utility of the newsgroups by overwhelming them with a barrage of
advertising or other irrelevant posts. Furthermore, Usenet spam subverts the
ability of system administrators and owners to manage the topics they accept
on their systems.
Email spam targets individual users with direct mail messages. Email spam
lists are often created by scanning Usenet postings, stealing Internet
mailing lists, or searching the Web for addresses. Email spams typically cost
users money out-of-pocket to receive. Many people - anyone with measured
phone service - read or receive their mail while the meter is running, so to
speak. Spam costs them additional money. On top of that, it costs money for
ISPs and online services to transmit spam, and these costs are transmitted
directly to subscribers.
One particularly nasty variant of email spam is sending spam to mailing
lists (public or private email discussion forums.) Because many mailing
lists limit activity to their subscribers, spammers will use automated tools
to subscribe to as many mailing lists as possible, so that they can grab
the lists of addresses, or use the mailing list as a direct target for
their attacks.
WHY IS SPAM BAD?
Q. Why do we get so upset when we receive E-mail which was not requested?
There are several reasons:
- The free ride. E-mail spam is unique in that the
receiver pays so much more for it than the sender
does. For example, AOL has said that they were receiving 1.8 million spams from
one particular spammer per day until they got a court injunction to stop it.
Assuming that it takes the typical AOL user only 10
seconds to identify and discard a message, that's still 5,000 hours
per day of connect
time per day spent discarding their spam, just on AOL. By contrast, the
spammer probably has a T1 line that costs him about $100/day. No other kind
of advertising costs the advertiser so little, and the recipient so much. The
closest analogy we can think of would be auto-dialing junk phone calls to
cellular users; you can imagine how favorably that might be received.
- The "oceans of spam" problem.
Many spam messages say "please send a REMOVE message to get off our list."
Even disregarding the question of why you should have to do anything to get off
a list you never asked to join, this becomes completely impossible if the volume
grows.
At the moment, most of us only get a few spams per day.
But imagine if only 1/10 of 1% of the users on
the Internet decided to send out spam at a moderate rate of 100,000 per day, a rate
easily achievable with a dial-up account and a PC.
Then everyone would be receiving 100 spams every day.
If 1% of users were spamming at that rate, we'd all be getting 1,000 spams per day.
Is it reasonable to ask people to send out 100 "remove" messages per day? Hardly.
If spam grows, it will crowd our mailboxes to the point that they're not useful for
real mail.
Users on AOL, which has a lot of trouble with internal spammers, report that they're
already nearing this point.
- The theft of resources.
An increasing number of spammers
send most or all of their mail via innocent intermediate systems, to avoid blocks that many
systems have placed against mail coming directly from the spammers' systems.
(Due to a historical quirk, most mail systems on the Internet will deliver mail to anyone,
not just their own users.)
This fills the intermediate systems' networks and disks with unwanted spam messages, takes up
their managers' time dealing with all the undeliverable spam messages, and subjects them to
complaints from recipients who conclude that since the intermediate system delivered the
mail, they must be in league with the spammers.
Many other spammers use "hit and run" spamming in which they get a trial dial-up account at
an Internet provider for a few days, send tens of thousands of messages, then
abandon the account (unless the provider notices what they're doing and cancels it first),
leaving the unsuspecting provider to clean up the mess.
Many spammers have done this tens or dozens of times, forcing the providers to waste staff time
both on the cleanup and on monitoring their trial accounts for abuse.
- It's all garbage.
The spam messages we've seen have almost without
exception advertised stuff that's worthless, deceptive, and partly or
entirely fraudulent. (We include the many MLMs in here, even though the
MLM-ers rarely understand why there's no such thing as a good MLM.) It's
spam software, funky miracle cures, off-brand computer parts,
vaguely described get rich quick
schemes, dial-a-porn, and so on downhill from there. It's all stuff
that's too cruddy to be worth advertising in any medium where they'd
actually have to pay the cost of the ads. Also, since the cost of
spamming is so low, there's no point in targeting your ads, when for the
same low price you can send the ads to everyone, increasing the noise
level the rest of us have to deal with.
- They're crooks.
Spam software invariably comes with a list of
names falsely claimed to be of people who've said they want to receive
ads, but actually consisting of unwilling victims culled at
random from usenet or mailing lists. Spam
software often promises to run on a provider's system in a way designed to
be hard for the provider to detect so they can't tell what the spammer is
doing. Spams invariably say they'll remove names on request, but they almost
never do. Indeed, people report that when they send a test "remove" request
from a newly created account, the usually start to
receive spam at that address.
Spammers know that people don't want to
hear from them, and generally put fake return addresses on their messages
so that they don't have to bear the cost of receiving responses from
people to whom they've send messages. Whenever possible, they use the
"disposable" trial ISP accounts mentioned above so the ISP bears the cost of cleaning up
after them. We could go on, but you get the idea. It's hard to think of
another line of business where the general ethical level is so low.
- It might be illegal.
Some kinds of spam are illegal in some countries on the Internet.
Especially with pornography, mere possession of such material can be enough
to put the recipient in jail. In the United States, child pornography is
highly illegal and we've already seen spammed child porn offers.
OUR POLICY ON SPAM
Pacific Reserve, Inc.'s policy on spam is simply: We will not tolerate or
participate in spamming of any kind.
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Copyright © 1999 Pacific Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.
Last revised: Wednesday 14th of May 2008
