The Spam War
By far the biggest problem with using the Internet is the massive amounts of spam that is clogging up the works. The most common is the spam you get in your email inbox, but increasingly there are tons of junk sites with nothing but useless content. If you run a forum or blog, you have to constantly monitor things due to the comment spam entries you get daily. Of late, I decided to start fighting back. Though I am not sure how effective the FTC is these days, I started to forward any and all spam emails I get to any of my email addresses.
If you get spam email that you think is deceptive, forward it to spam@uce.gov. The FTC uses the spam stored in this database to pursue law enforcement actions against people who send deceptive email.
I found out that Mac OS X has a really handy feature, unique to the 10.4 release. Regardless of the program, if you hold the pointer over a URL link, the operating system shows you a tooltip window with the actual URL that the link is redirecting too. I am not sure this would work for shorturl redirection urls, but it does help quite a bit with many phishing emails.