Spam Solution
I love the Internet, but I have two major pains in my ass that bugs me to no end. I dare claim that anyone reading this can chime in on the severity of these dual curses of technology.
Curse #1: Spam. I get 150-200 spam e-mails per day on my personal e-mail account. Then I get another 50 or so on my work e-mail. Last but not least, I get a handful from each of the dedicated e-mail addresses I have for my various Web sites. Spam filters are generally useless, since they all do a terrific job of blocking mail from coworkers, PR agencies (kind of important when you work as a tech journalist) and of course my grandmother, whose diabolic e-mails gets whacked upon sight.Curse #2: Script kids. As opposed to real hackers, who spend their days productively trying to hack into the FBI Web site to post nude pictures of Shakira, script kids are those contemptible morons who keep hammering your firewall 200 times while slowing your connection speed down to a crawl in stupid attempts to break into your computer. I get an average of about 500 attempts or so on any given night.
The thing that really bugs me is how utterly, totally POINTLESS the whole thing is. A recent Newsweek article put the spotlight on ‘bulk e-mailers’ (aka. ‘Hellspawned Spammers’) reporting about 90% of the spam originates from some 150 people or so (they set their servers to crank out dummy sender IDs, which makes any kind of blocking-attempts to fail.) Since I’m apparently on every spam-list known to the civilized world, that means these people have drowned me with junk on a daily basis for 5 years. 5 years times, say only 200 e-mails per day, makes for about 365,000 spam e-mails I have deleted so far. Now, after 365,000 attempts, one would think that they, somehow, would get the hint that I’m not interested in growing my pecker 3 inches in 10 days or getting fabulously rich by buying into some mail-stuffing pyramid scheme. Yet they keep sending me this shit and clogging up my mailbox in a matter of days if I’d dare go on a vacation.
Then we have the script-kids. These guys have dedicated their lives to finding suckers who have not installed a bulletproof firewall to keep them from hijacking your computer. Well, here’s news; I’m not one of them! Unfortunately, there’s apparently a whole lot of them out there trying anyway, sometimes bringing my computer down due to sheer overload. I bet that earned them some real gratification. I can picture them sitting in some shack in Idaho, cackling evilly to themselves while pressing their pinkies to the sides of their mouths. I hope to become that cool when I grow up, too.
Now, since these two groups of morons are not going to go away by asking nicely, the question is: What can we do to get them out of our hair? The answer is, in my opinion, simplicity itself; Get the script-kids to target the REAL menace to the Internet, the spam-kings! Better yet, get some real hackers to focus their energy on obliterating the spam servers rather than some boring Government site! Since the spammers have set up these complex systems to hide their identity and cover their tracks, it should be a nice challenge for the script-kids and hackers to get to them. And by continuously attacking spammers again and again as soon as they try to revive their crashed and hacked servers, there should be a marked decrease in spam across the nation. Eventually, they’ll go out of business due to excessive technical costs and lost contracts from not being able to deliver their so-called ‘services.’
Given the fact that a large portion of the spam being sent out by these people are pushing illegal scams resulting in tons of crimes being committed, I imagine few law enforcement agencies would feel the urge to crack down too hard on the perpetrators in this particular case. So, how to motivate the script-kids and hackers to go after the spammers? Enter the power of the Internet. If everybody who hates spam donated a dollar to a giant virtual bucket of dough, a small committee could dole out cash awards to individuals who could prove that they actively participated in driving a known spammer out of business. If a lone hacker spearheaded a huge, month-long assault and brought a spammer down single-handedly, he’d get a hefty sum on his own. If a gang of 100 small-timers do the same thing through small but unrelenting disruptions, they all get smaller pieces of the cake and so on. You get the idea.
So what are we waiting for? I’d pay a dollar to get rid of spam forever. I’m sure you would too.
LEGAL DISCLAIMER: Of course I’m not encouraging anybody to commit a crime. This is all just a joke. I have the highest esteem for the bulk e-mailing profession, and it would just break my heart to see these people driven out of business. So, please respect the integrity of their profession and open your next batch of 216 spam e-mails hawking Viagra and rape-sex with a smile knowing you’re supporting a truly vital function of the Internet.
SPAM — You Can’t Beat The Feeling.