[Air-l] Re poor spam scam targetting

elijah wright elw at stderr.org
Sat Dec 4 11:03:41 PST 2004



> Authorities in the US are calling this scam "phishing."  I guess it's a 
> play on the word _fishing_, but I doubt it has anything to do with the 
> band. :)

"phishing", terminologically, has been around for at least three years in 
the e-mail tech community.  (think blacklist operators, spam filter 
designers, and infrastructure operations folk...)

blaming the "authorities" for the term gives them more credit than they 
deserve.  they barely understand the problem, much less any possible 
solutions (of which i think there are practically none, other than serious 
user training / common sense / rhetorical awareness...).

--elijah




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