What is flood and spam on the Internet?

The Internet has brought to our lives not only manyuseful information and new acquaintances, but also a lot of new words that peacefully migrated to our vocabulary from English and become familiar. It is known that every user of the World Wide Web, going online, has a specific goal: someone is looking for information on scientific websites to prepare for a seminar at the university, someone turns on the computer to pick up another girlfriend for the evening, someone is working. Every Internet user has often encountered a so-called flood and spam.

So what is flood and spam in fact?

Spam - unauthorized distribution of messages,which are of an advertising nature, to persons who do not wish to receive them. Spam can be compared to paper correspondence, which we often find in your mailbox: all kinds of booklets and advertising brochures.

In order to answer the question "what is flood?", We turn to the English language. Literally flood is translated as "flooding" or "flooding". It's very easy to distinguish the flood from the usual message. It is often empty or, conversely, cluttered with all sorts of signs, a message. A person who sends out such messages is called a flooder, and his kind of activity is by flooding or flooding.

Floods are messages that do not carry anysemantic load, often sent to forums and online chat rooms. For a person who does not understand the intricacies of the Internet, spam and flood mean virtually the same thing. The verb "zafludit" (verbatim: flood any forum with a stream of messages) also means - to surprise someone, to shock him with unexpected information. Fluder - he is also a violator of the peace of the Internet society.

Spam is a special kind of advertising. At the same time, his sender-spammer does not care about the composition and age of the audience. The main purpose of his activity is to send messages to as many users as possible. Sometimes spam is sent to send trojans - special programs that collect information from the user's computer. For sending spam in a number of countries provides for administrative responsibility. Often the only form of punishment for spam in Russia is to block the spammer's account and deny him the ability to send out a large number of messages.

What is flooding is not known to every user, although he often encounters it on the Internet. In the colloquial language, "flood" means "to talk off-topic." What is it for?

First, to draw attention to one's ownperson. Often, flooding is used by personalities, so to speak, deprived of nature: they do not have jokes in store, they have no interesting stories from life, and they want to chat in a chat. That's when the flood comes to the rescue.

Secondly, to distract and disperse attention. For example, you gave out some terrible secret, which nobody should know at the forum. In order to divert the attention of the members of the forum you can start flooding, that is, to translate the conversation into a completely different channel.

Sometimes flooding is useful, but most often itsignificantly clogs communication in the network. To facilitate the activities of the flooder, a lot of programs have been written for a long time. For example, the program for flooding FeykWM allows you to steal account users of the forum. If a message appears on any forum written on your behalf, you should change your password or account.

Often the term flood refers to a hacker attackon any server. What is a flood for a hacker? This is an automatic distribution of messages, the main purpose of which is to clog network channels and bring to a complete stop of the site. Today you can flood the Internet with impunity. The only punishment for such behavior on Internet forums can be ban - restriction of the user in his rights on the site (for example, the right to write messages).