Letters To The Editor 121Letters To The Editor 121

Fighting Foreign Spam
It's my understanding that there exist offshore companies dedicated to spamming (Microsoft, Spitzer Crack Down On Spammers, Dec. 18). These people will work for peanuts and produce the same results, so if we stop the U.S. spammers, how do we tackle the offshore spammers, which are abundant and hungry for business?
Frank Sanchez
Miami

Aggressive Filtering
In It's Time To Take Spam Fight To The Bad Guys (Dec. 15), Bob Evans says AOL brags that it blocks 1.5 billion spam messages per day. How much of this number is hype and how much is real spam?

We speak from experience. Almost 90% of our E-mail to AOL users never gets there. This isn't advertising or other forms of spam but 100% legitimate E-mail requested by the AOL user. If a purchaser uses AOL, most of the time we need to rely on fax or snail mail.

We applaud the use of spam filters, but given the chest pounding by AOL about how many spam messages it filters and our experience with AOL users, I question its accomplishments.
David Krohn
CFO, The Plaxx Cos., Charlottesville, Va.

Hackers' Double Meaning
I've been in the software-development business since 1982, and I don't ever recall the term "cracker," and "hacker" certainly wasn't a complete compliment (Hacker Versus Cracker, Dec. 15).

Among my peers, a hacker was either someone who used computers to enter other computers without permission or someone who slammed out code quickly, often on fairly technical levels using APIs nobody else knew yet.

Hacker code always needed to be refactored significantly to make it robust, reusable, and secure. When it was more important to be fast than pretty, hacking was the way to go.
David Wall
Kirkland, Wash.