As the Apple Turns: Scene 329: Spam and Blackmail (1/4/98)

Spam and Blackmail (1/4/98)

How about that? AOL is continuing its "war on spam" despite one spammer's threat to post the email addresses of every single AOL subscriber. "But AtAT," we hear you ask, "isn't that undisguised blackmail?" To which we'd have to respond by nodding vigorously while jumping up and down and holding up a sign that says HECK YEAH.

That little fact isn't stopping the "National Organization of Internet Commerce" from making their open threat, according to Newsbytes. Unless AOL lifts its spam-ban, the addresses will be released on January 8th (presumably because that's Elvis' birthday, and he probably liked Spam, given its nutritional properties). NOIC says that if they can't spam AOL's members, they lose almost half of their mailing list. Awwwwww.

What truly surprises those of the AtAT staff who have AOL accounts is that AOL is actually fighting spam at all. Yours truly receives an average of ten spam messages a day via AOL, far more than we receive from any other provider; our AOL signal-to-spam ratio is so low that we have Claris Em@iler automatically label all mail coming to our AOL account spam-pink for easy trashing. Heck, we say go ahead and let the spammers post the addresses; it likely won't affect our in-box in the slightest.

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The above scene was taken from the 1/4/98 episode:

January 4, 1998: (Sorry—this was before we started writing intro text for each episode!)

Other scenes from that episode:

327: Best of '97: Mac OS 8 (1/4/98) Now that the new year has begun, CNet has posted their list of the ten best products of the year. Normally we wouldn't care, because we usually find CNet's reviews less than penetrating. However, despite their initially-lukewarm review of Mac OS 8, we're pleased to see that the current version of our favorite operating system ranked fifth in the list. Chalk it all up to Mac OS 8's subtle charms: little things like popup folders and multi-threaded copying don't particularly knock anyone's socks off at the beginning, but the overall elegance and simplicity of this latest Mac OS overhaul eventually wins over most users...
328: Preparing for the Rush (1/4/98) And speaking of Mac OS 8.1, it seems that Apple is being particularly intelligent in assessing the massive number of people who will attempt to download it when it's made available on the Internet later this month...

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