Spam Another Day
Oct 14th, 2007 by Eats Wombats
My other half accused me today of something like enjoying other people’s misfortune. Schadenfreude? Moi?!
It was this report of Enemybook that triggered some mirth:
With Enemybook, a new program that runs on the social networking site Facebook, you can connect to people you loathe, display their photos and evil deeds, and give them the virtual finger.
She suggested a couple of names but in reality this would be unthinkable grudge nursing. Funny perhaps, but bad karma.
And I’m having nothing to do with Facebook either, for now. LinkedIn will do nicely. My current university alumni association has invited me to join Facebook. Meanwhile, a teenager anxious about potential embarrassment is quoted in the latest issue of Fortune magazine explaining to a parent that the only people over 25 on Facebook are dorks. Besides, it’s said to be addictive — and who needs to be both an addict and a dork?
In the score settling and terminally bad karma department: a Russian spammer was reportedly murdered this week. One named Vardan Kushnir was assassinated in 2005 (more here, in an interesting Russian web publication in English). Kushnir wasn’t killed for sending spam, alas, and it turns out that the latest story is a hoax.
Is it possible the would-be killer hoped to solicit money for his legal fees? Surely many people would be willing to contribute.
Even Bill Gates is said to get spam (hah), which should be embarrassing since he famously predicted that this problem would be solved by now. However, if it was easy this form wouldn’t be in routine use on Slashdot, a popular IT discussion forum, to respond to suggested solutions.
Interestingly, the world’s top spammers are mostly well known to anti-spam services, like the Spamhaus Project which operates anti-spam services from a rather unexpected place: the strangely named Eel Pie Island (map) in the middle of the Thames river in London, and now from Geneva too. Most spammers live quite openly beyond the rule of existing laws and are slipperier than you know what. As long as people buy stuff they advertise (here’s how viagra spam works) they will find ways to send it.
The miracle is that fake viagra hasn’t killed anyone yet. Or perhaps it has and the consequences were attributed to irrational exuberance? (Sorry Mr.Greenspan).
It’s bad for business to kill the customers
Dominic Lawson notes in the Independent, writing about people dying of MRSA bug infections in NHS hospitals — the “unpleasant consequences of monopoly service provision”
unless they have nowhere else to go — in which case it’s described as a public service.
