[9468] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Inmac, junk mail, and the death of the net...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sean Donelan)
Thu Jan 6 16:41:30 1994
Date: Thu, 6 Jan 1994 15:38:51 -0600 (CST)
From: Sean Donelan <SEAN@sdg.dra.com>
To: com-priv@psi.com
>Finally, after some phone calls, it doesn't look like it was directly
>Inmac's fault, but rather that someone sold them a list that contained
>this information, they were able to name the source of the list. Don't
>take any of this as a particular grudge against Inmac, looks like they
>were a victim also.
There's a company that was advertising the November "Advertising Age"
address lists of Internet users broken down by interest (newsgroups?).
Claimed to be able to deliever "thousands" of address every day. Probally
just took the domain name and looked it up in the WHOIS database for
the street address.
Perhaps Inmac should start doing some sanity checks on their mailing
lists. 300 new names for the same address should have raised flags
somewhere.
There seems to suddenly be a lot of "Internet Experts" going around. I
have a feeling that we're going to be hearing stories about a lot of folks
that get taken by "Internet con-men." I just hope the word Internet
doesn't get as abused by the media like "hacker" did, but somehow I doubt
it.
--
Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO
Domain: sean@dra.com, Voice: (Work) +1 314-432-1100
