SGD wrote:
We have the knowledge, technology, and legal system for this and them
bogus M$ updates along with all other spams, why don't they take care of
this stuff. If it can be done with the phone..., this is the internet;
all data!!!
Actually, the technology for preventing spam is not all that reliable. Things like SpamAssassin and SpamBayes are fairly good at guessing whether something is spam or not, but determining with real certainty whether a particular email is spam or whether it's your aged uncle telling you about his new Viagra prescription requires natural language comprehension, and that's still a way off.
As for why it can be done with the phone, that's because it's not possible to forge the origin of a phone call. Phone call origins can be traced with certainty, while email cannot; this means that it's possible to sue people making improper phone calls, but you can't sue spammers because you can't *find* them. Also, international phone calls are still too expensive to be practical for telemarketing, but international email is no more expensive than domestic email, so litigating spammers would simply drive them to operate out of (for example) Bangladesh or Sudan.
Spam is a more difficult problem than most people realize. As long as there's people who buy products from spam (or who fall for scams), there will be people devising ways past spam filters.
But this is completely off topic, so we should probably stop talking about it here. 
Jeff Shannon
Technician/Programmer
Credit International