Spam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements

Rating:
Summary: Fluff dressed up in a fancy suit
Review: Capitalism, in the snake-oil entrepreneurial sense. A titillating read, but so what? It's easy to imagine kings of spam as trailer dwelling ex-nazis pounding out the automated emails for enlargement pills. And maybe that's true... but something else is going on, and this book totally misses it. By focusing almost exclusively on the personalities of the black and white hats, rather than combining that with real insight into the motives of spammers and their customers, as well as a meaningful look at technique, Spam Kings becomes just a tabloid expose, wrapped up in respectable O'Reilly fittings. I really have no more insight into spammers or their methods than before reading this. Worst of all, no solutions are offered or even speculated upon. Personally, as a small Internet services providor, spam affects me in a big way. Someone is paying for all that email bandwidth (guess who?). This book is like reading Wired. Glossy fluff.

Rating:
Summary: Important, Engaging, and Entertaining
Review: Mr. McWilliams brilliantly taught me about an area I knew little about, which it was important to know about, as it effects me everyday, as I wade through hundreds of pieces of spam, which wastes my time, and saps my precious bodily fluids.

Engaging, entertaining, I couldn't put it down. I read it through in one sitting, refusing to eat or sleep until I inhaled the very last morsel. A ten-star read, and I am happy, happy.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book...
Review: S*PAM _KiNgS is one of those running narrative stories that may or may not be entirely accurate but when you study a group more nefarious than the mafia, it serves as a useful guide to find out who was behind those SPAM bombs in the early days.

I myself once battled those forces of dark evil known as spammers. Having cut my teeth on an Apple IIe and having entered the Internet Age using FTP, I saw a promising new medium get destroyed by the Spam creeps who sold their snake oil to the gullable.

The Internet suffers from the "Tragedy of the Commons", an economic theory that any common resource; water, fish, grazing fields, or Internet pipeline must be either managed by government agencies or privatized or it will be destroyed by capitalizm. Sadly, the behavior of humans and nothing more, is to blame.

I will end my review with a note of honors (you know who you are) to those who battled the Spammers, and to those who exploited the internet for selfish interests, I would send you something else but it would probably be illegal...

Rating:
Summary: Informative and Entertaining
Review: The first thing that struck me about this book is that it takes years of emails, newsgroups, and chat sessions and turns it into a story. To a long-time internet addict such as myself, seeing such a thing is rather surreal. But it's something I should get used to, as the world of the web is interacting more and more with the "real world" as this book clearly shows.

Back to the point. I had sometimes idly wondered about spammers. Who they are, how successful they could really be. This book explores that by telling the story of a few major and minor spammers, as well as the anti-spammers that work so hard to defend normal people from their aggressive advertising tactics. I'd known about MAPS, RBL, Samhaus, and Spews, but I never knew much about the specifics of how and why they were created until I read this -- this book even explores how they operate!

Best of all, this is a story about spam. All true, not dull (often dramatic!), and very informative. I suspect this is just one person's perspective of the spam world, and the people mentioned in the book are just a portion of the spammers and spam fighters working everyday (no doubt some were miffed by not being included). But the book is effective in educating people like myself in the spam underground. It also makes me more informed when I hear new news about spammers being prosecuted or new spam laws being enacted.

The only problem with this book is an unavoidable one. Because the spam wars are ongoing, the story is never over. I can see a "Spam Kings 2" being released in 5 years to catch up on what's happened. To keep folloing the spammers and spam fighters in their battles.

Rating:
Summary: Enlightening and Essential Reading
Review: This book is both enlightening and essential reading for those interested in technology and the Internet, the benefits and hazards of global communications, today's mass culture, and whodoneit's and scoundrels. McWilliams brilliantly weaves together spellbinding, and surreal, true tales from start to finish.

Rating:
Summary: Where's the beef?
Review: This book really let me down and I get the feeling it was written by a none technical person. Would have liked more information, body or content to really make it worth while buying it.
In terms of spam books, there are very few, if I was to recommend a better title I would say : Inside the Spam Cartel, by Syngress. It had much more body and content and I didn't feel `empty' when I finished it.

No disrespect to the author, but I finished the book and still felt hungry for information.

Rating:
Summary: The Dirty Work of Spammers Revealed
Review: This book sheds light on the technical sleight-of-hand - -forged headers, open relays, harvesting tools, and bulletproof hosting - -and other sleazy business practices that spammers use; the work of top anti-spam attorneys; the surprising new partnership developing between spammers and computer hackers; and the rise of a new breed of computer viruses designed to turn the PCs of innocent bystanders into secret spam factories.

Author McWilliams does a marvelous job of telling the story of how junk email has evolved to the point of being such a nagging problem for most all computer owners, and this story is an important contribution to the growing literature on computer and information technology history. In addition, he updates readers on the status of the main spammers, as of 2004, providing a glimmer of hope that international anti-spam efforts may one day result in the end to this obnoxious annoyance.

All IT professionals and anyone with a computer will find the book to be a delightful read, and will be intrigued by the tale that required extensive digging by this hard working author.

Rating:
Summary: Better than Spam
Review: This book started out quite strong - it reminded me of some of Steven Levy's better work (Crypto, Hackers). It sort of petered out towards the end of the book. It seemed to lose focus, and I was left feeling as though I never reached "closure" with some of the characters.

I appreciated the objective tone the author set - this is a subject that could easily have been presented with venom, but instead was presented with an eye to all perspectives. It humanized the spammers - which is important, as they ARE humans, and thus are creatures that exhibit both good and evil, and are motivated by the same types of dreams and hopes as the rest of us (mostly).

I would recommend this book, but not say it's one you should rush out and grab, necessarily...

Rating:
Summary: Even Better Than The Cuckoo's Egg
Review: This spy thriller story will be of interest to anyone using email today, experts or beginners. It will not tell you how to avoid the always coming spam garbage. It will give you an inside look at the methods used by the spammers and reveal the dedicated efforts of individual anti-spammers who continue to fight the world's biggest spammers.

There is fast moving action in every chapter. It took a few pages to realize it is not fiction. The very first paragraph is indicative of much more to come: "People are stupid, Davis Wolfgang Hawke thought as he stared at the nearly empty boxes of swastika pendants on his desk. It was April 22, 1999, two days after the one-hundredth anniversary of Adolph Hitler's birth. Orders for the red-and-black necklace had been pouring into his Knights of Freedom Nationalist Party web site every week since he built it nine months ago. The demand nearly outstripped what his supplier could provide. Hawke gazed out the window of his mobile home at the hazy South Carolina sky and thought: This is the ultimate hypocrisy. If even half of these people actually joined the party, I would have a major political movement. Instead all they want is a pretty, shiny pendant."
Davis Hawke, the leading character in this book, is exposed in the first chapter by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a Jew who is hiding his heritage after changing his name from Andrew Britt Greenbaum upon graduating from high school in 1996.

The first paragraph quoted above gives you a taste of the author's writing style, a lot of detail and descriptive prose in every paragraph. Some of the language is obscene.

Through eleven chapters we follow the parallel paths of Hawke and female spammer tracker Shiksaa (Susan Gunn) through the spam underworld. Readers will meet bizarre characters including:
- Sanford Wallace (Spam is a first amendment right).
- Jason Vale (Laetrile for cancer).
- Rodona Garst (Stock pump and dump scams by email).
- Thomas Cowles (Anonymous mortgages and pornography).
- Terri DiSisto (Home videos of young men being tickled).
- Alan Moore (Dr. Fatburn, diet pills and pirated software).
- Scott Richter (Internet's biggest "opt in" junk email operation).

The 11 page index contains many names, organizations, and references. Eight pages in a Glossary contain a long list of terms and definitions. Fourteen pages of Notes fooled me into believing this to be a very scholarly writing with appropriate End Note documentation. Not so, it is almost all a kind of calendar of dates when various events or emails occurred. These could easily have been included in the main text.

It was amazing to type Davis Hawke into Google and receive 157,000 entries, many of them for the leading Spam King in this book. Readers will have similar surprises when they do a search for the other characters or organizations. In the Epilogue there is no happy ending to this book. Davis Hawke has so far escaped the jail sentence some others have received. The CAN-SPAM act has done little to help.


Rating:
Summary: A compelling ride through the underbelly of the spam war
Review: You don't have to be a computer geek or technologically savy to enjoy this story. McWilliams delivers a very engaging and well researched portrait of the war over spamming. The depth and detail of his access to these unsavory characters is impressive. Somehow he earned the trust of some real and very powerful internet sociopaths. From a psychological perspective, this book covers the polar opposites of human nature. I hope McWilliams will deliver more down the road.