The Linux Extremist

One of the hazards of running a website is that you can open yourself up to all sorts of spam. Registering a domain and then pushing a website out onto Google is a god-send to the greedy little trolls who are seeking out any and every e-mail address they can find.

I usually don’t bother to read spam, but just out of curiosity, I looked at one of these messages this morning. It made me think that the Colonel from Monty Python (as played by Graham Chapman) was going to somehow appear and say, “Stop that, stop that, it’s silly”. Note the contents of this particular message -

Even if you have no erectin problems SOFT CIAzLIS would help you to make BETTER SE X MORE OFTEN! and to bring unimagnable plesure to her.

Just disolve half a pil under your tongue and get ready for action in 15 minutes.

The tests showed that the majority of men after taking this medic ation were able to have PERFECT ER ECTI ON during 36 hours!

VISIT US, AND GET OUR SPECIAL 70% DISC OUNT OFER!

=======there’s a fight we’ll be a lot more help there than here.”‘ maybe I’d have a listen. For now, I understood only one thing: he had to The trick, according to Chiang, was for Jonathan to stop seeing normally, but halfway down it was as if something pulled it to the side, and but he didn’t appear to notice. He held his practice sessions directly He nodded at me seriously, as if to say, I won’t chicken out. His nose

stay here and learn on this level - which is quite a bit higher than the “That’s what we in Harmont call the thieves who risk their lives in the

Apart from taking out the link, that’s the complete message. Note how it is swinishly idiotic crap. It’s loaded with bad grammar, poor spelling and the quotation at the end is utterly nonsensical. Yet, each and every day I get between 6 and a dozen messages of this type. From time to time, I also get messages from the widows of African dictators hoping to involve me in money laundering schemes, with the sole intent of laundering my money.

I can delete these messages and laugh a bit at them, though they are a nuisance. There is a serious side to it however - the European Union estimates that in 2002, spam cost businesses approximately 2.25 billion Euros. And of course, one wonders why spam should exist at all as a viable form of advertising - if no one did purchase Cialis this way, or tried to get hold of the bank accounts of Nigerian dictators, the spam would stop.

So who are these idiots? Are they little old grannies and grandfathers who don’t have sufficient net savvy to tell the difference between a fraud and the genuine article? Are they the people who move their lips while reading the Sun? Is it the bastard who cut me off in traffic the other day? Perhaps it is these people, just as much as the spammers themselves who need to be hunted down. They should be put in re-education camps and told the following:

1. Don’t be stupid - it’s never a good idea to buy prescription medication online and without consulting a doctor.

2. Don’t be stupid - no product is going to instantly make you into a millionaire or a sexual bull moose.

3. Don’t be stupid - no one seriously wants to share the looted billions of Nigerian dictators with you.

4. Don’t be stupid - you didn’t win some lottery you never entered.

5. Don’t be stupid - any company that can’t spell its advertising correctly is unlikely to be reputable.

Of course stupidity appears to be increasing at the same time that our knowledge is expanding. We have so much information but so little wisdom and common sense, and it is in the gap between the two that the likes of spammers thrive. One can only hope that this chasm narrows, lest the spamming industry, such as it is, will continue to plague both business and private individuals. And I will want to continue to see both the spammers and those who respond to spam hit with a birch cane repeatedly. Strike that, drop a forest of birch logs on them.

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