Spam

Do happier pigs make for better Spam?Hormel Foods Corp., which makes the gelatinous canned meat, is betting yes. The Minnesota company said this week that it will stop using gestation crates by 2017. The crates, which are often so small that the pregnant hogs they house can't move, will also be disavowed within five years by McRib pork provider Smithfield Foods Inc. Seems like nowadays, with more consumers interested in the origin of what they eat, food purveyors and restaurant chains are taking care to highlight fresh, healthy - and presumably well-treated - fare.

Ding. Ding. It's 3 a.m., and your cellphone starts making its instantly recognizable, impossible-to-ignore you-just-got-a-text sound. Your heart starts pounding. Is a loved one hurt? Is there some crisis at work? You reach for the nightstand, pick up the phone and read: "Your number was selected as our iPad winner of the day! Enter 'IPAD' here to redeem!" As you probably know, you are not really a winner of the day, you are the victim of mobile phone spam, a modern, insidious annoyance growing at an unacceptable rate.

There is a simple way to get rid of commercial spam ("State Prosecutors Trying to Delete Spam," Sept. 28). Make it illegal to hire someone to send unsolicited advertising (including political) on behalf of another person or company (kind of like pandering). The advertisers must have their contact information, or some way to sign up (in the case of porn sites) on the spam or they wouldn't be able to make a sale. Hit them with big fines and they'll stop hiring the spammers, who will then go out of business.

In this era of "less is more" and "cheap runs deep," it's no surprise that Spam, the canned meat staple that haunted dinner tables of the 1940s and 1950s, is reporting a continued and otherwise inexplicable uptick in sales. Edible forms of Spam continue to enter the culture, with the latest coming courtesy of an aircraft mechanic from Auburn, Wash. He's won the grand prize in the Great American Spam Championship with his recipe for Spam doughnuts. Full disclosure: This writer is not completely unbiased, having once helped her best friend create the winning entry at a private Spam party in Orange County: Spam Zimbabwe, consisting of chunks of Spam, pineapple and hearts of palm impaled on tiny spears.

The sickeningly cute article about that salty, fatty, disgusting stuff called Spam is more an an advertisement than it is news of any kind. I would certainly be more interested in an article about the struggles of the union against Hormel and about the valiant people who fought for years against Hormel's callous treatment of its workers. How about a story on the nutritional inadequacies of Spam? How about a story on the fact that in America, where the stock market is soaring and the rich are rapidly getting richer, many people cannot afford to buy fresh meat?

Some people show great courage in the face of adversity; some just get silly. Here's what happened when the Carnival Splendor cruise ship finally returned to San Diego on Thursday after being left powerless at sea by an engine fire: Passenger Donna Hobbs and some fellow strandees put their ordeal into a snappy sea ditty sung to the tune of the "Gilligan's Island" theme song. Thank goodness someone was laughing. (Click here for the ABC-TV video.) But maybe those lyrics tell a bigger story.

"Lone Guns Set Sites on Spam" (April 16) fails to mention that spam is a disruptive technology for media companies for whom advertising is a primary source of revenue. Should commercial e-mailing become a nonobstrusive avenue for soliciting business, which could very well happen as technology advances, constraints on freedom of expression would be unnecessary. Today's vigilantes would be tomorrow's enemies of liberty of expression. KEVIN KIRCHMAN CEO, Worldfree Corp. Beverly Hills I just had to comment about your article on the self-appointed Internet spam sheriffs.

Every e-mail that Net Global Marketing sends out is spam ("Lost in the Cyber-Kudzu," by Matthew Heller, Dec. 21). The argument that those advertisements are sent only to those who have "opted in" is ridiculous. When purchasing items online, I've never agreed to receive other "offers" from any company, yet I continue to be bombarded with advertisements from every company that I may have purchased from. Most online shoppers probably don't notice a small box that a retailer has preset to "yes" to send future ads. The only good thing about the e-mails is that you can delete all of them with a single click without ever reading them.

Who would have dreamed that spam holds the keys to enlightenment? Like many ignorant humans, I used to consider junk e-mail a nuisance. But once I opened my mind as well as my inbox, I discovered an amazing truth: All I really need to know I learned from those weird proverbs and quotations in spam messages. A few examples: "Never play leapfrog with a unicorn." "If thine enemy offends thee, give his child a drum."

Re "California Bans Spam, Sets Fines," Sept. 24: A penny per e-mail postage for e-mail delivered in the U.S. would bring spam to a halt. If you asked the public to pay postage fees for e-mail, considering the trade-off, I think most would embrace it. Jim Ketcham Malibu

The Constitution and the courts have granted candidates wide latitude to broadcast their slogans, promises and attack ads to voters - even when voters have no interest in hearing those messages. That's why Americans can be inundated with political junk mail and robocalls in an election year. But it's not exactly free speech when the recipients have to pay for it, as they do when campaigns send them text messages - a relatively new phenomenon that regulators should squash before it spreads.

Do happier pigs make for better Spam?Hormel Foods Corp., which makes the gelatinous canned meat, is betting yes. The Minnesota company said this week that it will stop using gestation crates by 2017. The crates, which are often so small that the pregnant hogs they house can't move, will also be disavowed within five years by McRib pork provider Smithfield Foods Inc. Seems like nowadays, with more consumers interested in the origin of what they eat, food purveyors and restaurant chains are taking care to highlight fresh, healthy - and presumably well-treated - fare.

According to the Book of Exodus, it all began with the cloud. First the vaporous mass appeared over Mt. Sinai, heralded by trumpet blasts. Then God descended in the form of fire and gave Moses stone tablets engraved with the Ten Commandments to present to the Israelites. Today, ever-bemused mankind is turning for answers to the digital cloud, the name given to the growing constellation of Internet-based virtual servers that can store thousands of song files and other documents, filter spam, seal off valuable subscription-based content from the hoi polloi.

For roughly 24 hours, Facebook's news feed was not a family-friendly place. Facebook acknowledged Tuesday that the social networking site was briefly infested with a mix of hard-core pornographic images, doctored pictures of celebrities in sexual situations, photos of extreme violence and even a picture of a beaten dog. Facebook said it had identified the problem — if not the culprit. During the attack, users mistakenly downloaded programming language that resulted in their sharing offensive images on Facebook without knowing it, a company spokesman said, adding that the website's engineers were working on a fix. Facebook said it built mechanisms to quickly shut down the malicious pages and will put users who were affected by the offensive spam through "educational checkpoints" so they know how to protect themselves.

For more than 25 years, Radio and TV Marti have served as a reminder of America's failed policy toward Cuba. The stations were launched in 1985 as a way to crack Fidel Castro's control over mass media. Since then, they have become little more than a financial black hole. The government has spent nearly $500 million on, among other things, a twin-engine plane, a blimp and a satellite to beam broadcasts into Cuba. The broadcasts, however, are rarely seen or heard. Castro has successfully jammed the stations' signals, and denounced Washington's efforts as a violation of international treaty obligations.

Email can be a useful tool, but the sheer volume can be overwhelming. This year around 349 billion emails will be sent worldwide, according to the market research firm Radicati Group Inc. That total is expected to grow to 507 billion by 2013. Here's how to stem the flow to your inbox: • Be careful about giving out your email address. When you fill out a form, subscribe to a magazine or enter a drawing, consider whether to provide your email address. Some online "free giveaway" promotions are designed to harvest email addresses for marketing lists.

Legislators are creating a great ballyhoo over spam, telemarketers and privacy to create the impression that they are passing important legislation. Instead they are busy sending our money to Iraq and, in the case of Medicare, to the large drug companies. As for privacy, most of our commercially relevant information is in databases readily available for a price. The solutions to spam and telemarketing are simple: delete; hang up. Ann Maupin Los Angeles

Spam has hit the Kindle, clogging Amazon.com Inc.'s top-selling e-reader with material that is far from being book-worthy and threatening to undermine the company's entry into publishing. Thousands of digital books, called e-books, are being published through Amazon's self-publishing system each month. Many are not written in the traditional sense. Instead, they are built using something known as Private Label Rights, or PLR content, which is information that can be bought very cheaply online then reformatted into a digital book.

The online interest in Osama bin Laden's death has attracted numerous cyber-scammers who are baiting Facebook and Google users by claiming to offer pictures of a deceased Bin Laden. But when users click on the links, expecting to find a shocking video, they are instead treated to malicious software, spam or a trick that re-posts the phony link to their own profile. "The reported death of Osama bin Laden is just too good a lure for cybercriminals and scammers to pass up," McAfee Inc. security researcher David Marcus said in a blog post.