The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts
Notes and queries
Does spam email actually work?
The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts
US outlaws robocalls that use AI-generated voices
‘It seems like something from the far-off future, but this threat is already here,’ says chair of Federal Communications Commission
August 2023
Meta closes nearly 9,000 Facebook and Instagram accounts linked to Chinese ‘Spamouflage’ foreign influence campaign
Company says users targeted in Australia, UK, US and elsewhere by political spam network across more than 50 platforms
June 2023
Commonwealth Bank fined a record $3.55m for breaching spam laws with millions of emails
Australian Communications and Media Authority says bank sent 65m customer emails that breached Spam Act
December 2022
China accused of flooding social media with spam to crowd out protest news
US firm says network of bot accounts also hijacking hashtags in large-scale attempt to obscure coverage
August 2022
Musk subpoenas Twitter whistleblower as he battles to end takeover deal
Billionaire seeking documents on ways Twitter’s spam as he alleges company misled him about true number of bot accounts
Judge orders Twitter to turn over to Elon Musk data from 2021 users audit
The company had said the information did not exist, but it sampled 9,000 users in order to estimate the number of spam accounts
How Twitter’s whistleblower could boost Elon Musk’s legal battle
Peiter Zatko, former security chief, brought allegations of widespread security threats and spam concerns against the company
April 2022
Telstra to scan all text messages for malicious content in anti-scam program
Telstra joins other major telcos in scanning SMS messages, with consumer watchdog saying the moves have halved reported scams
January 2019
Ask Jack
I got a phishing email that tried to blackmail me – what should I do?
Pauline received a spam message that looked like a sextortion or webcam scam
May 2018
Liberation day! Don’t email me. I sure won’t be emailing you
Charles Arthur
Facebook closed 583m fake accounts in first three months of 2018
October 2017
Domino's blames data breach on former supplier's systems
Customers complain about ‘eerie’ personalised spam emails and lack of communication from pizza seller
August 2017
Spambot leaks more than 700m email addresses in massive data breach
Millions of passwords also contained in breach, a result of spammers collecting information in attempt to break in to users’ email accounts
March 2017
How the internet found a better way than illegible squiggles to prove you're not a robot
