You’ve got to be at least a little brain-dead to wage a campaign of
annoyance against thousands of people you have never met with no
real chance of any financial pay-back or benefit other than the
kudos gained within an international group of equally like-mindless
individuals. But if you’re a Spammer that seems to be enough.
We are all subjected to it, or at least anyone who uses the internet
is, and for thousands of people in Zambia who are already at the
mercy of molluscan dial up connections and that very annoying lady
who tells you “The number you have dialled is note-in-yoose” even
though it patently is, Spam is just another headache. It’s also one
that costs you the user and your internet service provider a lot of
money, chewing up valuable bandwidth, clogging servers and inflating
your phone bill as you stay logged on to retrieve the half dozen
valid messages that are bobbing around in an ocean of flotsam. I
thought I would try to find out a little more about Spam since it’s
a daily occurrence in my life, but the Knights of Spamalot, the
Spambusters, those who apply Spamicidal jelly to the internet are
almost as boring as the twerps who send the stuff out in the first
place.
To
understand Spam you need to suspend credulity and delve deeper than
the superficial definition of the stuff as the internet equivalent
of what the British more correctly call Pork Luncheon Meat; a
product widely recognized as having no nutritive or aesthetic value
and heralded as the Grandfather of Junk Foods. This title I believe
however rightly belongs to tofu, that irrelevant and
pointless stuff that has been masquerading as food since the 2nd
Century BC with no more right to do so than a pencil eraser. In
internet lore the term Spam originated from a specific incident
which drew its puerile inspiration from the famous Monty Python
Viking sketch. This landmark snippet in the history of comedy
involved a group of Vikings singing repeatedly and robustly the word
“Spam!” to the chagrin of everyone around them (i.e.: “Spam, spam,
spam, spam, spam” ad nauseam). Apparently in 1991 a group of
people sat playing an internet game that revolved around a fictional
planet called Pern (an acronym for Parallels Earth Resources
Negligible) based on the science fiction works of writer Anne
McCaffrey. These folks were in the early equivalent of an internet
chat-room called a MUSH (Multi User Shared Habitat) and were at a
particularly crucial point of the game when someone assigned a piece
of code which would continuously echo the immortal line from the
Vikings and thus disrupt the gamers in their fantasy. Did I tell you
this was boring…or what! These were the first people to be Spammed
and one hopes it caused at least a couple of them to put on clean
underpants, brush their teeth and get a life!!
Spam now mostly refers to internet junk mail and is more correctly
defined as the same article (or essentially the same article)
usually advertising something, posted an unacceptably high number of
times to one or more newsgroups. Most of us bin this on arrival
with the use of clever programs that cost $29.99 and are probably
written by Spammers. This in itself is an action fraught with peril
as at worst you run the risk of sending emails from your
Mother-in-Law (see The Dragon of Pern) into quarantine and at
best, missing fresh emails from new business clients offering
lucrative deals worth millions of dollars. All my Spam seems to
relate to three websites; one selling luxury watches, one selling
computer software and one selling drugs to promote “marital
hardware”; which suggests that I have an internet signature
identifying me as a man who
a)
needs an accurate chronograph to remind himself what a pathetically
short length of time three minutes actually is.
b)
should be more efficient in the time he spends on his computer so he
can go to bed sooner.
c)
should be more rigid in the time he spends with his wife.
I
actually followed the links to these websites and they seem
perfectly normal commercial sites so what I don’t understand is if
they are the origin of the Spam why these businesses can’t just be
banned from mass mailings?
Apparently this is a complicated science involving the other
aforementioned army of equally geeky, unshaven and singlet clad
computer boffins with noms de guerre like “The Cancelmoose”
and “The Unknown News Administrator”. These brave cyber warriors
with their armoury of “NoCeM’s”, “Cancel-bots” and “Killfiles”
police the corridors of the internet seeking out Spammers and
getting them Blacklisted.
I’m starting to nod off now so if you want any more info on Spam and
how to stop it (which sounds like more trouble than it’s worth and
may require you to join the FBI or send a letter to G.W Bush …please
use capitals and not joined up writing!) then try this website
I’m off to adapt a tofu recipe by substituting diced ballistics gel,
to see if I can get it to taste of anything, and await Spam attack
by outraged vegans…here’s my address by the way
Tofu4brains@thewhitehouse.com
August
2006
To
understand Spam you need to suspend credulity and delve deeper than
the superficial definition of the stuff as the internet equivalent
of what the British more correctly call Pork Luncheon Meat; a
product widely recognized as having no nutritive or aesthetic value
and heralded as the Grandfather of Junk Foods. This title I believe
however rightly belongs to tofu, that irrelevant and
pointless stuff that has been masquerading as food since the 2nd
Century BC with no more right to do so than a pencil eraser. In
internet lore the term Spam originated from a specific incident
which drew its puerile inspiration from the famous Monty Python
Viking sketch. This landmark snippet in the history of comedy
involved a group of Vikings singing repeatedly and robustly the word
“Spam!” to the chagrin of everyone around them (i.e.: “Spam, spam,
spam, spam, spam” ad nauseam). Apparently in 1991 a group of
people sat playing an internet game that revolved around a fictional
planet called Pern (an acronym for Parallels Earth Resources
Negligible) based on the science fiction works of writer Anne
McCaffrey. These folks were in the early equivalent of an internet
chat-room called a MUSH (Multi User Shared Habitat) and were at a
particularly crucial point of the game when someone assigned a piece
of code which would continuously echo the immortal line from the
Vikings and thus disrupt the gamers in their fantasy. Did I tell you
this was boring…or what! These were the first people to be Spammed
and one hopes it caused at least a couple of them to put on clean
underpants, brush their teeth and get a life!!
defined as the same article (or essentially the same article)
usually advertising something, posted an unacceptably high number of
times to one or more newsgroups. Most of us bin this on arrival
with the use of clever programs that cost $29.99 and are probably
written by Spammers. This in itself is an action fraught with peril
as at worst you run the risk of sending emails from your
Mother-in-Law (see The Dragon of Pern) into quarantine and at
best, missing fresh emails from new business clients offering
lucrative deals worth millions of dollars. All my Spam seems to
relate to three websites; one selling luxury watches, one selling
computer software and one selling drugs to promote “marital
hardware”; which suggests that I have an internet signature
identifying me as a man who
I
actually followed the links to these websites and they seem
perfectly normal commercial sites so what I don’t understand is if
they are the origin of the Spam why these businesses can’t just be
banned from mass mailings?