Lazy Guide to Net Culture: Fighting penis enlargement

If you want to appear like you’re at the cutting edge of net culture but can’t be bothered to spend hours online, then never fear. Scotsman.com’s pathetic team of geeks, freaks and gimps will do the hard work for you. While you sip wine, read a book or engage in normal social interaction, they will burn out their retinas staring at badly designed web pages and dodge creeps in chatrooms to prepare for you: Scotsman.com’s lazy guide to net culture.

This week’s online cause: Fighting penis enlargement

First, a word of comfort: it's not just you. Your friends have not been talking about you. There is not a hidden camera in your bedroom.

Your email box may be stuffed with offers to make the male regenerative organ larger, but it's nothing personal. Everyone in the world with an email account has been offered a larger penis at some point. Even women. And,more worryingly, children.

The person sending the email does not know anything about its recipients because it's being sent to millions of people. Spam (mass unsolicited email) now accounts for half of all email. And a recent study by Symantec, an internet security firm, found that 80 per cent of children get adult-oriented spam - offering them drugs, dating services and financial offers along the lines of "send me your life savings and I'll give you millions of dollars. Honest."

And of course, there's the sexual spam. I get it by the bucketload. I get dozens of messages each day offering me "intimate enhancement", cures for impotence, Russians brides and, bizarrely, cheap printer ink cartridges.

This doesn't happen because I spend my time trawling dodgy sites looking for Slavic ladies with a thing for office supplies. I get so much spam because my email addresses regularly appears on the web.

Top tip: It's all a con. And if you fall for it A) you're an idiot and B) you're encouraging more spam.

Spammers use automatic programs called bots to crawl across the internet looking for emails. When they find one they pass it back to the spammer and he or she sends you his junk mail.

There is a way to defeat this. If you post your email on the web don’t write it like this: skirpatrick@scotsman.com, write it in words (skirkpatrick at scotsman dot com). The bots are looking for the magic "@" sign and don't understand "at".

Most people fight spam by ignoring it. However, it's getting harder to do this as a lot of spam tries to look like legitimate messages. Thus it is that you open an email like "Re: that thing you asked me" and find yourself faced with lurid text promising significant increases in length and firmness - usually when you're talking to your boss, mother or a party of vicars being shown round the office.

Top tip: If you open such an email and see an "unsubscribe" link at the bottom saying something like "click here to stop receiving emails like this", ignore it. All that will happen is that the spammer will be notified that your email address is used regularly and he or she will then sell it on to others. For this reason you should never reply to spam. In the rare event of your message getting through, you will only succeed in verifying that your email account is active.

Along with everyone else in the world, I've had enough of this. When I got my latest tranche of spam I decided to track down the person responsible.

I chose a message that purported to come from "Gertrude Godwin" because the name sounded like one of Dickens's less successful heroines. I was intrigued to find out why a minor character from the Mystery of Edwin Drood was offering me girth-increasing unguents.

I went to the site named in the email. I did a "whois" search on the URL (web address) through DNSstuff.com. This provided me with contact details for the person who owned that address. They appeared to be based in Mexico, but the information looked like it might be bogus. Lo and behold, the email address turned out to be false.

I then did a "traceroute" search on the URL, which showed me the connections that led my PC to the site. I followed this up with a whois search on the last IP address (a string of numbers that identifies a computer) in the list. This gave me the name and address of an internet service provider in Pakistan.

However, just because the trail ended with that ISP, it did not mean that I had found "Gertrude". The original spammer was probably just routing his or her stuff through that ISP. I still had no concrete information on who they were.

At this point I realised I was floundering around and should stick to watching how the expert anti-spammers do it.

The first to catch my eye was Francis Uy. He successfully traced down a spammer and posted the man's name, address and contact details on a website - a practice that is becoming increasingly popular.

The spammer, George Alan Moore Jr, then sued, claiming that as a result he had received numerous threatening phone calls and hundreds of unsolicited magazines and catalogues.

Needless to say, his case was thrown out. But he did succeed in making himself very well known and now Mr Moore's contact details are very popular on the internet. This comment from a visitor to geek.com is typical: "Don't anyone harass this guy: Maryland Internet Marketing LLC, George Alan Moore Jr, 300 Twin Oaks Rd, Linthicum MD, 21090-2154, 877-655-3438, 410-963-8226. Clearly he has suffered enough already at the hands of that cruel, cruel Francis Uy!"

Another anti-spammer trick is particularly fiendish. Spammers' email addresses are tracked and then collated on a website like Spamerang.net. Remember I mentioned that the spammers use bots to search for email addresses on the web? When they search Spamerang they pick up all those lovely email addresses and add them to spam lists. The spammers then spam each other.

But the anti-spam crown goes to "Man in the wilderness". His site, belps.freewebsites.com was being used by a spammer to mask her activities. He asked her to stop. She didn't.

Big mistake.

"Man in the wilderness" is a computer security consultant, which means he knows a lot about hacking.

He not only found the spammer, he hacked into her PC. He got a screenshot of her forging his domain. And he went through it with a fine-tooth comb digging out all sorts of personal information, secrets and details of scams. He discovered that the spammer had accomplices so he did the same to them.

He then anonymously turned over all the information to the authorities and posted it on his site.

He even found a topless picture of the main spammer that she had stored on her hard drive. It's online too.

Of course, this kind of hacking is illegal, but then again so is flaying spammers alive and dousing them with lemon juice - and I don't think we should rule out any punishment for these scumbags