Free Republic

One evening late in 2001, Julian Green's 7-year-old daughter came upstairs from the computer room of their home in the resort town of Torquay, in western England, and said, "The home page has changed, and it's something not very nice." When Mr. Green checked the machine, he found that the family PC seemed almost possessed. The Internet home page had somehow been switched so that the computer displayed a child pornography site when the browser software started up. Even if he turned the machine off, it would turn itself back on and dial the Internet on its own. Mr. Green...

<p>WASHINGTON -- The junk e-mail accumulating on Roger May's computer seemed innocent enough at first with typical spam subject lines like ``payment declined'' and ``did you hear the news?'' But when May opened the messages, he was greeted with graphic pornographic pictures and links promoting adult Web sites. ``It did not give me any indication from the subject that it was pornographic,'' said May, 48, an engineer from a Houston suburb with two teenage children. ``If I had my wife or children around they would have seen these images without me ever knowing it before I had opened it.''</p>

Every person on the net has one thing in common. They all hate spam. E-mails offering Viagra via the net Anyone who has an e-mail account will have received these unsolicited commercial messages that offer you things you do not want, at prices you will not pay, from companies you will never call. 2002 was a bumper year for these messages and now 30% of all mail flying around the net is thought to be spam. Filtering firm Surf Control has compiled a list of the top 10 most annoying spam messages sent across the net in the last 12...