Spam ohoy

It finally happened. I'm starting to get Swedish spam (well, obviously email one, not that pig meat thing) to one of my actual email addresses. Then world is ending! Seriously though, WTF. I just wished that people started to stop clicking on these infernal links. I mean, if someone is willing to pay some amount of money for each email, or just each click originating from a particular email, all we have to do is to stop clicking, right? It's getting ridiculous. We are now having the neural nets we just so touted that would do awesome things to just sort our emails for spam. I bet the irony of the thing would be for the ultimate sentient AI to become self aware and then deciding after getting to know humanity through the spam emails that it needed to be eradicated. Maybe you could make a movie of that... Ah, they already made movies on that :)

Our all knowing repository of knowledge The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.... ehm, Wikipedia defines spam as this. It lists the amount of spam as 90 billion per day. That is just silly. Monty Python also defines spam as this.

Spam is really becoming a real problem. At work I get just a hilarious amount of spam. And we have a spam firewall. And I have never given out my email to anybody online apart from very trusted sites like Microsoft's developer program as well as Sony's. Apart from that it's printed on my business card. And that's it. So how the heck do they get the email? I guess just very clever algorithms. Oh. Wait, they need not be that clever at all, my email address is just a combination of my surname and my first initial. Doh :) We really need to track these people down and just lay the deaths of all these kittens (remember, one dies for each spam email sent) at their feet and have them stand trial for this.

Or hey, we could just try to retire this old unauthenticated email system and switch over to something that is more authenticated and secure. And verify all the addresses with actual persons. So imagine when you sign up for an account at gmail for example. You have to type in your creditcard number and the billing address and your password is mailed to you at your billing address. Yes, through regular snail mail. That way you could be really sure that the user is really somebody that at least have a credit card and an address. Sites that doesn't require security measures like these just get blacklisted and other sites would just not accept email from them. Companies would be legally bound to actively try to prevent spam. After a couple of failures they also go onto the black list until they have gotten their act together. Now of course a whole new other world of corporate backstabbing could happen, instead of DDOS you webserver, companies could have their email service hacked and then get blacklisted in the email net and then have a very hard time doing business (remember that old thing they called a phone?) all of the sudden.

In closing

If you've read this blog a long time, you might noticed that the comment system now requires you to at least log onto the typekey system, making it a little convoluted to post comments. That's because I just got spammed senseless here from automated bots that sent me messages like "Thank you" and a link. Just clicking on these and marking them as spam took a considerable amount of time some days where the bots felt particularly frisky. So there. Now I have been complaining enough for today I think.

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