Spam Rage


An interesting story at Yahoo! News! Service!. It’s not quite illegal yet to send spam. Well, ok, it is illegal, but it’s not enforceable. There you have a situation where the government cannot take care of its citizens. The problem is, even though people are breaking the law, the consequences of the crime are insufficiently bad to warrant significant retaliation. In the end, it’s just annoying, not dangerous. So, in comes the question, how do you keep yourself from being annoyed? One man has an answer:

Booher threatened to send a “package full of Anthrax spores” to the company, to “disable” an employee with a bullet and torture him with a power drill and ice pick; and to hunt down and castrate the employees unless they removed him from their e-mail list, prosecutors said.

There’s a lesson here. It is, indeed, a free country (depending on where you live, of course), but it still isn’t a good idea going around acting like a dick. Somebody, somewhere, is eventually going to take exception, no matter how much you whine and complain that what you’re doing is legal. That’s what the answer to any litigiously unsolvable problem is. You simply make the creation of the annoyance a) not worth the effort, or b) too dangerous. Maybe spammers will one day become the subject of personal retaliation, not litigation.

Contrary to appearances, just because a company produces devices to enhance the already-impressive penis, doesn’t mean they send spam. The money quote:

[Albion Medical’s Mackay] said his firm does not send spam but blamed a rival firm which he said routes much of their unsolicited bulk e-mail through Russia and eastern Europe. Mackay said such firms gave a bad name to the penis enhancement business.

(Links via Drudge)