Three things seem to be the bane of constructive use of the internet. Pornography (see here for related statistics), viruses, and spam. Spam is defined as:
Spam
1: a canned meat made largely from pork
2: unsolicited e-mail, often of a commercial nature, sent indiscriminately to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups; junk e-mail
The inedible kind of spam plagues any who dare to post reasonable content on the internet. It’s a constant battle between Good and Evil. The Good side works to prevent, block, outlaw, and ban unsolicited bulk advertisements. The Evil side works ever harder to abuse the system and make cash. The other 95% of people have to deal with the effects when they check their email or get peppered with pop-up windows. Some interesting articles:
A View Into the Mind of a Spammer
The Evils of Spam
As one of the small number of people who host a website/blog/picture gallery themselves, I often deal with spam. People sit at their computers and figure out devious ways to post large amounts of inane data using this blogging system, for example. Then I must either manually delete it or devise a clever way to disallow any access by said offenders.
I actually feel a little sorry for the average PC user. They get a new computer, hook it up to the internet for email, and browse a few sites. Then they start getting spam, malicious viruses that eat their files, pop-up windows… And that’s just the “outside”. If they try to fix any of this, they find that Windows is not as user friendly as they thought. If their hard drive crashes, not only do they lose their data, but they pay someone a lot of money to fix it.
Anyway, there’s my rant on spam and PC’s. Oh, and due to malicious spam on this site I need to approve any comments before they’re posted. If you leave a comment expect a delay before it’s displayed!
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