As Steve Linford walks his German shepherd, Zen, across the gangway from his houseboat into his prim little garden on this small island in the Thames, he hardly looks like a man in a battle over the future of cyberspace. He has a salt-and-pepper beard and a twinkle in his blue eyes, but the effect is more former hippie than Sean Connery.
After Zen gives a good bark at the ducks, the two return to the boat, and Linford climbs a spiral staircase into a sunny home office with nine computer screens piled on a black desk. This is the unlikely command center for the Spamhaus Project, one of the leading groups that is trying to make the world safe from junk e-mail.
As a cause, stopping spam may not be as urgent as, say, curing AIDS. Yet thousands of activists, of whom Linford may be the most visible, have mobilized to fight it.
By some counts, spam is now as much as 80 percent of all e-mail. It is a drag on human endeavor, in the sense that people collectively spend billions of seconds each day opening, puzzling over, complaining about and deleting messages from charlatans and pornographers -- and, yes, legitimate if unloved marketers.
"E-mail is the most incredible communication vehicle invented, and it is on the verge of being made useless," Linford said.
On the floor of Linford's houseboat office, near the Hampton Court palace of Henry VIII, just south of London, is a cube-shaped Apple computer that is the nerve center of Spamhaus, controlling servers on five continents. In its database are dossiers on the 200 most prolific spammers and the addresses of the 8,000 computers they use to inundate people with ads. Spamhaus makes the list available to Internet service providers, which use the information to weed spam from the e-mail boxes of 160 million users.
Not everyone sees Linford as a hero. Most of the marketers who are his targets say they don't send spam; they call Linford a vigilante. And the Internet companies he pressures to stop doing business with spammers say he sometimes pushes too hard. He is known to have blocked the e-mail of Internet service executives he thinks aren't kicking off spammers fast enough -- a method that often wins results, if not friends.
Yet Linford, 46, has earned the respect of most Internet service providers as the best source of information about spammers.
"Spamhaus is the only clearinghouse for information on the spammers themselves, and for that it is invaluable," said Laura Atkins, who runs Word to the Wise, an e-mail consulting firm in San Carlos, California. "Any time one of my clients has ended up on their list it is because someone received mail they didn't ask for."
Linford has focused on making his list of spammers reliable enough for big companies to trust. He publishes his e-mail address and phone number and responds to complaints that listings are incorrect.
That is in sharp contrast to other spam-blocking lists, which are often run anonymously and, at times, recklessly. Some block the mail of innocent Internet users to create pressure on the Internet provider to kick off spammers.
For now, sending unsolicited e-mail isn't illegal in the US, but it has just been prohibited by the EU. Most Internet providers have policies that ban spam from their networks; some providers have sued spammers, contending that tactics used to avoid detection are illegal.
Linford says he has intercepted chat-room conversations between spammers and crackers, the name for malicious hackers who write computer viruses and steal credit card numbers. The spammers have been seeking ways to send their messages to avoid the blocking systems created by Internet providers.
"In the last six months, the cracker world has joined the spammer world," Linford said.
Aided by crackers, the spammers have secretly infected and taken control of thousands of computers around the world, most of them owned by home users with high-speed Internet connections.
These machines -- called zombie drones -- relay mail for spammers and serve as hosts for the Web sites where people are sent by spam, all without the computer owner's knowledge.
Since last June, zombie drones have also been subjecting Spam-haus to what is called a distributed denial-of-service attack, perhaps the most virulent weapon in a hacker's arsenal.
Tens of thousands of enemy machines have simultaneously deluged Spamhaus' computers with so much meaningless data that they can barely perform their intended missions. Similar attacks have put several smaller anti-spam organizations out of business.
This month, the crackers took the attack to a new level: They released two computer viruses that have already spread to hundreds of thousands of machines. The purpose was to attack Spamhaus and two similar groups.
"For the spammers to actually manufacture and release a worldwide virus specifically to attack you, you're probably making quite some impact on them," Linford said.
How did Linford end up as an avenging angel of cyberspace?
Discouraged by the economic stagnation of England in the 1950s, Linford's parents moved to Rome, where his father ran a factory that made industrial platinum. Steve Linford dropped out of a college photography program, bought a motor home, parked it on beaches and played his guitar in coffee shops for money. He eventually met Ennio Morricone, the legendary Italian film composer. Linford can be heard singing on the soundtrack for Copkiller, a 1983 Italian film starring Harvey Keitel.
Linford later became a road manager for acts like Pink Floyd and Michael Jackson when they toured Italy. As he saw technology embrace music production, Linford became enamored with computers. In 1986, he drove the motor home back to London and started a company devoted to putting musical tours online. It flopped, but he did start a Web page design and hosting business, called Ultradesign Internet. It was there that he had his first run-ins with spam.
Linford's initial reaction to spam was similar to that of countless others. Outraged, he asked the senders to remove him -- and his clients -- from their lists. Getting no response, he turned to the Internet providers. After he failed to get results there, an activist was born.
In 1997, he created a series of sophisticated Web sites with tools to help spam fighters, databases of people selling software for use in sending spam, and assistance for people who wanted to write to an Internet service provider to complain about spam.
Because he owned an Internet company, Linford encouraged activists to use far more moderate language, without the typical threats and demands. In 1998, he started what would become his main site: Spamhaus.org, a clearinghouse for information on the organizations behind most of the spam.
Spamhaus takes no money for its services, and the computers it uses to host the service are donated. So far, Linford has paid all of the direct costs, about US$25,000 a year, using money from Ultradesign, the company he still owns and runs.
That will have to change, he acknowledged. He has asked the British government for a grant but has not received one. Whatever the source of funds, he says he hopes that access to his services will remain free.
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