...SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM...
...SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM...
Those of you familiar with my diatribes, you’ll know that my public persona is that of a raging ball of fury and general grumpiness. Anger is my fuel, and there is no impending rage shortage here. No wars due to be fought over whose going to receive my righteous indignation.
Etc. Etc.
You will also notice, those who pay close attention, how angry the very concept of Identity Theft makes me. It’s the new, latest trend in crime. To steal someone’s identity, pretend to be someone else, and the victim don’t know anything about it until it’s too late.
Sure. It’s just little things, but these are important.
At home, I’ve started to receive spam from all manner of people. Now, I don’t understand Spam emails. Sure, I’m flattered that they care so much about my migraines they’re offering me Percodin without an RX, Septic Tanks on tap, and as much as Viagra as I’ve got room to store it – except that I don’t actually want any of that stuff.
I don’t want to “make her scream all night” or “curn as much as a pr0n star” (whatever that means, because it sure as hell isn’t English). I just want to be able to read my emails without a deluge of rubbish in my inbox about sex, septic tanks, and painkillers. Or offers of 10% commission on a $40 million dollar inheritance, delivered direct to my bank account from some Dr. Floogle Woogle from the Upper African nation of Nonsuchazania.
But what really gets my goat is something a bit bigger than that.
If you can decipher the following phrase you too, can speak spam – A new language for you to enjoy, one full of naughty girls, monster phalluses, and septic tanks. Here’s the phrase – let me know what you think :
You too can speak spam. Spam is a new, rising language. A language where you don’t need to know how to spell, or punctuate, or what letters are. In spam you can replace the letter R with the ® and the letter C with the © and the letter S with the number 5 so that they can bypass filters on some people’s email, or that they haven’t got a clue how to put together a sentence, let alone anything that might tempt anyone to part with any money whatsoever. My first rule is simple : if you are going to want me to take any notice whatsoever of your spam email, at least make it in English. So I know what on earth you are going on about.
Nobody, right, nobody is actually going to send you an illiterate email and think you’re actually going to click that link and give them your money, right?
And there’s something even worse than that. These spammers write programmes that trawl the net, look for email addresses and identities, and steal them. That’s right. My email address (one that’s not listed anywhere on the web, that I use exclusively for mailing lists), has been harvested, spammed, and stolen from me, to use by someone called Jeanie, whose promised me I can “Curn as much as a Pr0n star”.
Better send it back to the person who actually wrote it - because if you look at “Curn as much as a pr0n star” it will identify that I wrote the email - and sent it whilst I was asleep!
Even a cursory examination will however reveal that it came from somewhere else. If it was returned to me, I’d get so much spam I wouldn’t know what to do with it, in fact, right now, I get so much Spam I don’t know what to do with it, actually. Not me.
SEND IT BACK
Send it back where it came. Probably from a big black box stuffed with wires in Brazil, where some unscrupulous little bastard who thinks its perfectly normal and ethical to steal other people’s information, steal their identities, steal their email addresses, and rip people off left right and centre so they can get some more money.
It’s high time the world’s laws were brought up to speed with the fact that those who abuse technology know no boundaries, recognise no frontiers, obey no laws, and see everyone else in the world as simply a tool to be utilised, a weakness to be exploited.
It’s high time someone used counter-intelligence. If guys can code programs that do this, surely they can also code programs that do things that people actually want more than a septic tank and a load of drugs : programs that identify spammers protocols and tools, neutralise them, and put them out of action. Tools that return every piece of spam to the actual originator, and clog up their hard drive until it locks up.
It’s high time that every ISP in the world combined to purge the world of this useless, offensive junk mail. Sent it back where it belonged – to the original, cretinous spammer – in triplicate. Clogged the server and brought them offline. And, since it’s all chock full of illiterate, unpunctuated gibberish, marked in red, with corrections.
Maybe then, when the spammers get their just desserts, I will curn as much as a pr0n star. Maybe more. Let’s hope that that septic tank holds up though – I wouldn’t want get a headache and need percodin as well. And who knows where I would get that from if it wasn’t for the Spammers?
© copyright Mark Reed, 1991-2003 except where indicated