Archive for September, 2005

Spam: (referring to unsolicited email advertisements, not the canned luncheon meat.) I hate it. It’s definitely one of the top violations of our privacy on the internet, but there’s almost nothing worse than sexually explicit spam. (The worse being phishing… But that’s another rant for another day.) You know, the ones that hawk everything from finding local "fuck buddies" to increasing the volume of your ejaculation. *sigh*

Occasionally I have to stop myself from replying to these idiots… No, I don’t want to find any local "fuck buddies", as I already have one, and I married him. OR. If I increased the volume of my ejaculation wouldn’t my husband just become jealous, and feel inadequate? The only thing that truly stops me from doing that is the knowledge that it would prove that my email address is "live" making it more valuable, and would just encourage these assholes.

The FTC rule requiring a warning on sexually explicit spam, or spammers face fines for violations of federal law, is a joke. Over half of the sexually explicit spams I receive do not include the warning "SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT:" in the subject line as required, though 75% of the time the subject line gives away what will be found in the email.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with sex, but if I wanted any sort of sexual product, service, or web site I’d look for it myself. Regular spam is bad enough without people adding this bullshit to it. Especially considering that they are basically just sending this kind of crap to any email address they can get their hands on, including the email addresses of children, and they don’t care if they do… As long as they get those idiot people clicking through, and buying whatever is being sold they’ll continue doing it until it is no longer profitable.

Spam exists because the way we do email in this day and age is fundamentally insecure. So much so, it’s almost impossible to find out who these spammers are; nevermind prosecute them. Why do we even have a law in the first place if nothing can really be done about spam? It’s merely a ploy to placate the people who were complaining about sexually explicit spam, but nothing that would truly fix the problem was ever proposed, or initiated. That seems to be par for the course for our government. It’s like putting a band-aid on a bullet wound… Weak, ineffective & inadequate.