The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Each of the offices in the ten-story Ceresota Building on Fifth Street is, like a lot of offices these days, an island unto itself. Each floor of the converted flour mill holds three tenants at most. Some, like the Cooper Law Firm, take up an entire story. So despite the common first-floor cafeteria, interoffice communication seems limited mostly to polite nods in the elevator. There hasn’t been much gossip about the fifth floor, which is the world headquarters of a business that goes by dozens of names but whose office window reads “GeekTech, Inc.”

Most people in the building assume the company is involved in some kind of software development; others know the partial truth that it’s one of the few dot-coms to have survived the bust. A few of them know the full truth: that GeekTech is an Internet porn outfit. Those who know don’t seem particularly bothered by it, even when they hear that GeekTech may be one of the largest purveyors of online pornography in the country.

GeekTech’s office looks like any other, with Fortune and Time magazines on the lobby table. Employees seem friendly enough, but keep to themselves. The place is not crawling with scantily clad, silicone-injected porn stars; GeekTech’s business is all virtual.

But when I mention that the company has been accused of being a chronic source of spam, the neighbors become agitated. Sue, an office assistant next door at Standard Parking, had no idea what GeekTech did. “They’re nice,” she said. When I told her they publish pornography, she shrugged. Whatever. But when I mentioned the possibility that GeekTech’s business may be responsible for a considerable amount of spam, she grimaced and made clawing motions, as if scratching the eyes out of whoever is responsible for infecting her email inbox with a plague of sleazy scams.

Her ire may be well placed. Because of the way GeekTech and many other online pornographers do business, they frequently become conduits for spam, whether they plan it that way or not. Such companies invite anybody with the time and interest to act as an independent marketer for them—sending traffic to paid porn sites in exchange for a piece of the action. Many so-called “affiliates” do this legitimately, by linking from their own Web pages, for example. But many also do it by sending thousands, often millions of emails.

Unsolicited commercial email has reached a critical mass. The problem has become so bad that Congress recently passed a law restricting it (though it is largely symbolic and mostly toothless), and people like Bill Gates are investing heavily in technology meant to stem the deluge. Companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and America Online have filed lawsuits against dozens of alleged spammers. Internet service providers say they are so overwhelmed with spam that they have to siphon money and personnel away from customer service and toward making sure their customers don’t get so much spam that they abandon the Internet altogether.

All spam is annoying, but some is truly offensive. Few people want to launch their email program at work, only to have a large sexually explicit image fill their screen. And most parents would prefer that their kids not be exposed to advertisements for “farmer’s daughter gone wild!”

One of GeekTech’s more successful properties is a core site called Porn City. Mike Strouse, otherwise known as GeekTech’s brash young owner, calls himself its mayor.

Porn City opened for business in 1996. It claimed to be the “first free adult host.” It was right around that time that online pornography became a lucrative business and the free-host business model became common. Not coincidentally, it was also around then that porn spam started to become a serious problem. Since then, similar business schemes have proliferated, along with the spam that inevitably is a part of the formula.

GeekTech’s business works like this: Anybody with an Internet connection, the right software, and a rudimentary knowledge of Web publishing can become a “host” on any one of several sites run by GeekTech. Or, if they’re especially ambitious, they can set up their own independent site. Smaller host operations can get free Web space from GeekTech in exchange for a promise to direct any traffic they attract to the company’s pay sites. Bigger operations usually run their own sites on the servers of their own Internet service provider, and they may act as affiliates for any number of pay-for-porn outfits. These larger hosts tend to be sites that offer hundreds of pages of free pornography, heavily mined with ads and links to the pay sites.

The upside for GeekTech is obvious: the more independent operators that link to GeekTech’s sites, the more paying customers GeekTech signs up. The Web is rife with such “affiliates,” who in essence act as marketers for companies like GeekTech, which provide the actual material. GeekTech gives its affiliates some pictures to lure users. Affiliates direct the users to one of GeekTech’s big pay pornography sites, such as sushichicks.com (Asian women), babeswithboners.com (pre-operative transsexuals), or legsandhose.com (stockings). For every Web surfer who clicks through to a GeekTech pay site and enters his credit card number, the host of the affiliate site gets a check—commonly about $35, though different programs pay different amounts. The link on the affiliate’s Web page to the pay sites contains a code, which is how affiliates are identified and paid.

That’s where the problem comes in. Most spam that advertises Web sites includes a link that contains this code, usually at the end of a long URL. That link leads users to the pay-porn site, and the code tells the owner of the site which affiliate sent the user there. If the user signs up for the site, the affiliate gets a cut of the first month’s payment from the new customer. What could be easier?The “affiliate” business model, because it so quickly creates an army of independent agents, must have seemed like a marketer’s wet dream when it was developed in the mid-nineties. Unfortunately it also provides a perfect motive and opportunity for spammers. Consider: There are an estimated 4.2 billion Web pages in Google’s database. It’s not clear how many of those pages have, say, foot-fetish images on them, but the odds must seem pretty bad amid all that competition. How can any one affiliate hope to attract any serious traffic, and make any real money? The temptation to send URLs by the million directly via email thus becomes hard to resist for less scrupulous agents.

This “affiliate spam” makes up a huge part of the growing problem of unsolicited commercial email. Most spam that includes links to Web sites offering porn, Viagra, or even lower mortgage rates is affiliate spam. But that doesn’t mean that businesses that use affiliates are necessarily at fault. Legitimate businesses are themselves victims of affiliate spam. Any business that uses affiliates must deal with the possibility that rogues will send out spam on their behalf, with or without their approval. They must then deal with an avalanche of complaints or take extraordinary measures to prevent spammers from taking advantage.

Even America Online, Amazon, and Yahoo have had to deal with it, and some have gone so far as to take legal action against spammers linking to their sites. At the opposite extreme, other businesses, many of them porn sites, don’t even have real affiliates: They set up fake affiliate Web pages, advertising their own pay sites, and generating spam solicitations. When they receive complaints, they deflect blame to affiliates who don’t actually exist. They may change the Web addresses, and carry on spamming. Between the two extremes is a large gray area—companies that have real affiliates but who may not screen them to weed out spammers, or who may be slow to shut down affiliate pages once complaints are posted. Some may allow spammers to operate until a critical mass of complaints is generated.

GeekTech seems to lie somewhere in this gray area. Two of the largest spam-blocking services, Spam Prevention Early Warning System (SPEWS) and Spamhaus, have amassed large, detailed files on the company, and the Usenet newsgroups devoted to identifying spammers and fighting spam contain thousands of complaints about GeekTech and its practices. Still, the company certainly has many legitimate affiliates, many of them longstanding members who don’t spam. And GeekTech is in business mainly to purvey porn, not spam.

Interpreting complaints made by antispam activists can be difficult because they tend to treat anyone accused of spamming or of supporting spam with equal amounts of seething hatred. GeekTech has sometimes been associated with the worst spammers on the Net, often based on nothing more than scurrilous rumor. Even if GeekTech is responsible for spamming, it certainly is not even close to being the worst perpetrator. But antispammers don’t care if they spread the tar and feathers a little beyond the margins of the most prolific spammers to besmirch a pornographer here or there.

Spamhaus is run by a single man named Steve Linford from his houseboat on the Thames in England. Along with his volunteer associates worldwide, Linford tracks spammers and provides network operators with a list of Internet Protocol numbers (the numeric addresses of computer servers) that can have their traffic blocked. Spamhaus estimates that just two hundred businesses are responsible for ninety percent of all spam. These are the worst of the worst—people whose sole business is spamming, who clog the Internet with billions of unwanted messages.

“We push three million emails a day,” says Bill MacLeslie, general manager of Minneapolis Internet service provider Visi.com. “About forty percent of it is spam.” Visi may be lucky: By some estimates, spam now accounts for eighty percent of all email. Like its junk-mail predecessor, spam has always been an annoyance. But over the past twenty-four months, it has reached critical mass, and the cost to legitimate business has reached the point where system administrators are demanding action. Antispammers have had some success getting strict laws passed in a few states, such as California and Washington. But borders being irrelevant on the Internet, enforcement is difficult at best, so the activists have spent several years lobbying Congress to pass a federal law that would at least make it easier to prosecute spammers operating within the United States.Almost no one is happy with what resulted. In December, President Bush signed into law the “Can-Spam” (Controlling the Proliferation of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) Act. The law falls far short, critics say, and may even lead to more spam in the long run by explicitly giving more companies legal entrée to our inboxes. Backed by such business interests as the Direct Marketing Association, the law is not aimed at spam per se, but at fraud. Indeed, the law legitimizes unsolicited commercial email, as long as it adheres to certain rules. Email headers may not be forged, the identity of senders must be included, and there must be a way for recipients to “opt out” of future emails. Even porn spam is legal under the law, as long as it is clearly labeled as such.

Joining antispam activists in decrying the deviously misnamed law are state attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission, who say Can-Spam strips them of enforcement power needed to deal with problem spammers. Since the law passed, more aggressive state laws have been trumped. “Unfortunately, this takes away our enforcement power,” said Leslie Sandberg, spokeperson for the Minnesota Attorney General’s office. Minnesota’s law wasn’t particularly useful in any case, activists say, partly because it applied only to spam sent within the state to a state resident. But the new federal law isn’t held in much higher esteem. “The Can-Spam Act just means now you can spam,” says Visi.com’s MacLeslie with some disgust.

The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE), which has lobbied for stricter state and federal laws, says the law will likely have zero effect, and may even make things worse. “It fails the most basic test of legislation: It doesn’t tell anybody not to spam,” says John Mozena, a CAUCE vice president. And in fact, “legitimate marketers might get in” to spam because the law essentially gives them permission to do so. Since the law was passed, there have already been indications that big marketing companies have launched new spam campaigns. Before the law, most of them were scared off by the taint associated with the practice, or by tough state laws.

Of course, pornographic spam carries with it a special set of problems. But getting righteous about the actual content of spam is a quagmire in itself. “We’re pretty content-neutral,” said Mozena. The porn industry itself is ambivalent on the matter. Some of the bigger producers of adult material are concerned about their reputations in the face of massive public criticism of their business. Many have joined the anti-spamming cause for purposes of self-preservation.

Last year, the Free Speech Coalition—a porn-industry lobbyist—officially adopted an anti-spam stance, and then-Executive Director William Lyon told Adult Video News that porn peddlers should refrain from spamming altogether. “Spam is a huge problem,” he said. “Little old blue-haired ladies from Pasadena do not like to see people screwing in their morning email.” But the coalition has moderated its view since then, perhaps as a result of market pressures—or the passage of Can-Spam. They now take a more laissez-faire stance. Pornographers “should have the opportunity to contact a potential customer,” says Kat Sunlove, Lyon’s replacement. While the coalition is against harvesting email addresses from newsgroups or the Web, it isn’t opposed to spamming itself, at least within the parameters of President Bush’s apparent support for the porn industry as expressed in Can-Spam. “We’re in business,” Sunlove says. “Capitalism is a great thing.”

The message boards at Porn City could be viewed as a real-time case study in arrested development. There, GeekTech’s Webmasters and other porn-biz associates chat, trade tips and industry gossip, kid around, and post lots of pictures. They call each other “homo” with astonishing regularity, and the place is rife with dirty jokes worthy of a twelve-year-old boy’s tree fort. The crew returned in January from Internext Expo, an adult entertainment-industry trade show in Las Vegas, and immediately took to the boards to post pictures of themselves at the event. One photo posted by a message-board participant shows himself standing next to a woman. They are both looking toward the camera in what would otherwise be a standard pose, except that she is pulling her shirt up and his hand is on her bare breast. The caption: “This proves I’m not gay.” Misspelling and bad grammar seem de rigueur—so abundant that it almost seems like eloquence must be against the rules. Of course, bad taste has never been a crime. Even here, though, you won’t find a defense of spam.
Most citizens of Porn City—including Mayor Strouse—are officially against it, or at least find spam annoying. Some take a more libertarian stance, saying complaints about it amount to “whining” and anyway, it’s easily deleted. Nobody trades tips or tricks on how to spam, but nobody talks about the spam problems generated by their business, either. This seems a little ironic, since these are precisely the sort of people who understand just how much bandwidth unwanted email is taking up on their servers.

The other Porn Citizens treat Strouse with a deference that mayors of actual cities don’t often enjoy. Pictures of Strouse on the boards show him to be an unlikely pornmeister. He has a soft baby face and short hair with blond highlights. He’s a clean-cut lad in his twenties, and in his ballcap and T-shirt, he would look natural on the sidelines of a pre-teen soccer game.

After not returning messages or emails for months, Strouse finally relented to being interviewed. Once he got past his somewhat hostile and defensive posture, he came across as a personable, good-humored businessman, with precisely the kind of frat-boy-sowing-his-wild-oats persona that has come to symbolize the new generation of virtual pornographers. He may suffer slightly from paranoia; after our interview, he took to his public message boards to complain about the story, which wouldn’t be written until weeks later, saying he was the object of a “witch hunt” and hinting that he might sue for “liable.”

According to several associates who asked not to be identified, Strouse is indeed an agreeable colleague. He works hard and puts in long hours. And he likes to have fun, too—traveling when he can to places like Bangkok to take part in the hardcore nightlife scene there. He’s into boating, which is one reason he stays in Minnesota. But he lives much of the year in Fort Lauderdale, where some of his Web domains are registered. Asked about his business activities in Florida, he said, “There is nothing I am allowed to talk about regarding this right now. Confidentiality agreements force me to keep my mouth shut on that subject for now.”He graduated in 1992 from Wayzata High School and worked for a time in the call center for Damark International, a catalog outfit that had an office in Brooklyn Center. Soon, he started his own Internet design and networking company. “As for savings, I had zero and I had no investors,” he said. “I literally started with a $600 computer and an idea. Also, I never owned nor used a computer up until a couple months before I got my business off the ground. I think mine was one of the last generations to graduate high school before the Internet. One of my customers was a local sex shop. After I saw how much traffic they got, I decided to build a free host like Geocities. There were a lot of amateur mom-and-pop porn sites being kicked off of Geocities at the time, so we decided to give them a home in exchange for a small banner spot.”

Things took off from there, and soon Strouse’s various Web domains were listed among the top porn sites. He says things have gotten tougher since then as more porn sites have sprung up on the Net, but he’s still doing well. He won’t discuss numbers—he won’t even give an idea of what his profit margins are in percentage terms—so it’s hard to know just how much of an effect the proliferation of porn has had on his business. GeekTech’s offerings are actually tame, even wholesome, compared to a lot of other sites that feature every possible permutation of every possible perversion one can imagine. Even with all the free, edgy stuff you can find online, Strouse sticks to the mainstream. He sees this as a sound business strategy, despite the claims of proprietors of fetish sites that they attract traffic in droves. “There may be a couple guys out there who want something really odd. Am I going to cater to that to make $200? No. It makes sense to cater to the masses, not the niche. No one will pay more for something weird, no matter how out of the ordinary it may be.”

The timing of Strouse’s entry into the business was perfect because he got in just before massive Internet merchants began launching affiliate systems, and it was becoming big business. Famously, Amazon expanded beyond books to offer all kinds of merchandise through affiliates. And many businesses other than pornographers—mortgage peddlers, multi-level marketers, and prescription drug merchants, for instance—had problems with spam. But porn was especially attractive to fly-by-night spammers because everything was done online—there were no physical orders to fill and the transactions were simple: post the porn, collect a credit-card number, and that’s pretty much it.

Many companies have left the affiliate-business model because of spam problems. “Legitimate companies have had to deal with policing their affiliates,” said Mozena, of CAUCE. For many of them, it was just too much. For others, it has meant instituting complicated and costly procedures to prevent spam. “Amway has extremely draconian penalties” for affiliate spammers, Mozena noted. But online porn is all about generating traffic. Once they are there, and you have their money, the deal is done. Because the system is nearly friction-free, unlike affiliate systems involving a tangible product, and so easy to exploit, it’s almost guaranteed a porn-site operator will have to deal with spammers whether he wants to or not.

Of the half-dozen or so network managers interviewed for this story—all of them active in antispam newsgroups—not a single one agreed to have his or her name used. They fear retaliation from spammers, and with good reason. Several of them said they have been the target of hacking and denial-of-service attacks, which can potentially shut down a whole network. Both Spamhaus and SPEWS have been the target of several such attacks. One might say they invite this bad behavior; like many victims of spam, they occasionally allow their anger to get the better of them, and sometimes make serious accusations based on dubious evidence. All the antispammers interviewed for this story had no problem condemning GeekTech and others without necessarily having irrefutable proof to back up their allegations. The tone of antispam newsgroups, too, tends to the hyperbolic; however righteous their cause, some activists’ scorched-earth approach can lead to inaccurate information being represented as fact, and innocent parties being accused.

For instance, Spamhaus links Strouse’s hosting business, Archer Communications, with an outfit called Python Video—allegedly one of the worst porn spammers on the Net, and listed among Spamhaus’ top ten most prolific spammers. Python has been removed and banned from several ISPs and is unrepentant about its activities. Apparently, someone once sent a mass mailing that linked to both a Python site and a GeekTech site in the same message. That was enough for Spamhaus to list the two companies together in one of its reports. But there is apparently no relationship, real or implied, between the two. Nevertheless, one activist, a network manager for a Minnesota ISP, had conflated the two companies, going so far as to state with certainty that GeekTech, via Archer, hosted some of Python’s sites. It’s not true.

“Spamhaus is a little like the KKK,” says Strouse. “If they don’t like you, you can’t change their mind, no matter what you say. They just want to see you hung by a burning cross no matter what the cost is.” Still, SPEWS and Spamhaus, as well as the antispam newsgroups, do serve a purpose. No single complaint should be taken as gospel, but the totality of the information they keep can lead to some useful conclusions. GeekTech and its many Web sites have been the subject of hundreds if not thousands of complaints in antispam newsgroups over the years. Most of them are related to affiliate spammers, and while GeekTech apparently has pulled the plug on many advertised Web pages, some affiliates’ accounts are still active despite complaints being sent to GeekTech. Strouse claimed that most of those complaints are “joe jobs”—lingo for the practice of sending out spam that appears to be from someone else in order to deluge them with the inevitable flood of complaints. Fake spam, in other words. Strouse said he’s often the target of such attacks from affiliates he’s booted for spamming, and it seems possible, given the frequency with which such attacks occur. But the huge number of complaints, and the fact that many complained-about spams continue to link to live Web pages on GeekTech’s network, suggests that many complaints legitimately target active GeekTech affiliates and, by extension, GeekTech itself.

Other spams posted in the newsgroups seem to have come directly from GeekTech’s servers. There aren’t nearly as many of these, but there are enough to raise the question of whether GeekTech has not only hosted affiliate spammers, but has occasionally spammed itself. “Look at the headers, it’s right there,” said one network manager, pointing out a spam that was posted in an antispam newsgroup. The recipient who posted it is himself a network administrator. He is a particularly vehement spam opponent, having posted thousands of spam complaints over several years.When I showed the post to Strouse, he said the recepient of the spam is a former GeekTech customer who doesn’t want to admit it. That seems unlikely, though, considering the number and variety of complaints this network administrator has posted in his crusade. He doesn’t appear to have any special vendetta for GeekTech. Also, antispam activists, perhaps more than anybody, know better than to sign up with a site, particularly a porn site, using their main email address. And with so much spam to complain about, why target someone who isn’t really a spammer?

Shown another similar complaint, Strouse blamed anti-porn crusaders for besmirching his company’s name in the newsgroups. “It’s not surprising,” he said. “Anti-porn people commonly opt in just so they can report it as spam. Would you ask a Nazi to be a character witness to a Jew? Come on, consider the source. Do you think anyone is stupid enough to spam a well-known anti-spam person? Seriously?”

Not stupid enough, perhaps, if they knew who they were spamming. It’s not as if spammers run their lists of thousands or millions of email addresses through a filter that weeds out the addresses of well-known antispam activists, or anybody else. Spam is like a firehose, not an eyedropper. Email addresses are collected in huge batches, harvested from Web sites and newsgroups using address-collection software or purchased in bulk from other spammers. Under the economics of spam, costs approach zero. Marginal costs are zero: Once you have the addresses, sending out millions of spams costs no more than sending out one. That’s why it’s such a huge problem, and that’s why most spammers don’t bother to target their messages or filter anyone out.

Whatever the evidence presented in the newsgroups, there’s no rock-solid proof that GeekTech has itself sent out any spam at all. As unlikely as it might seem, it’s possible that the spam examples posted in the newsgroups were forged or sent to real customers. All that’s missing is the motive for posting them. But that still leaves the problems surrounding the affiliate system, which Strouse steadfastly defends. “If you can come up with a better system, the Internet will make you a rich man. I am not a mind-reader and cannot stop something before it happens. If I could do that, I would be quite wealthy. Knowing who we are dealing with and having a reputation as non-spam-friendly is the best way to prevent it.”

GeekTech is in businesses other than porn. Last year, spam advertising a company called HealthStopUSA hit inboxes by the thousands. The newsgroups are rife with complaints about it. HealthStopUSA advertises “human growth hormone,” a controversial dietary supplement that promises to curb the effects of aging. It supposedly reduces body fat and wrinkles, and boosts energy levels, sexual potency, and memory. It’s legal to sell it, but it is widely viewed as a scam, as are many dietary supplements that aren’t considered drugs by the federal government. HealthStopUSA is owned by GeekTech, and operates much like the porn sites. And according to some administrators, it’s generating even more spam. “It, as well as any new and profitable affiliate program, will attract some spammers,” Strouse said. “When they get their accounts shut off and can’t make money promoting it, they go away fast enough.”

Perhaps. But by then, the damage has been done. And therein lies the main problem with affiliate programs: Even if they are operated by people who scrupulously boot spammers, nothing is done until after spam is sent out and people complain. That might not be so bad if there were only a few such programs, but there are thousands—from backroom companies testing the edge of legitimacy to reputable public companies like America Online. Put them altogether and you have a massive spam problem, even before you take into account Nigerian banking scams and fake-diploma mills.

Strouse said his company is better than most. “By comparison our system draws very few complaints,” he said. “We have been operating the same sites for almost eight years. You can’t maintain that longevity by allowing drive-by spammers into your affiliate program. Sometimes they try to sneak in but it doesn’t take long to catch them and blacklist them from the programs. With any luck the new spam law will put an end to the shady, fly-by-night programs and we’ll all see less spam in our inboxes.” Given how much spam has passed through the Net since the Can-Spam Act went into effect on January 1, we’ll need a lot more than luck.