Thursday 24 July 2003

Pic of the day: Since the day is ruined anyway ... The Sims Nude Psychics! Censored to avoid, uhm, enlargement among our more sensitive readers. (And no, Nude Psychics - pronounced psi-chicks - is not another expansion pack for The Sims, just me making a drive-by shot at the naked news phenomenon.) (Oh, and the link will take you to a very detached report on the phenomenon, not to the actual naked news.)

Penis enlargement spam

Some months ago we passed the magical barrier when for the first time spam made up most of the world's e-mail. It's quite a bit longer since that happened to me. Having more than 1000 web pages with my e-mail on will probably do that, not to mention using my full e-mail address on mailing lists and web boards. That kind of honestly seems to brand me as a complete moron in the eyes of spammers, especially those operating through eastern Europe. Not only do they send me spam – I am kinda used to that – but they send me the most extraordinarily stupid spam made by man. Penis enlargement pill spam.

I don't have any statistic on this. Sometimes the subject header is pure nonsense, sometimes it is something irrelevant, so you cannot always know for sure until you have seen the text. And when I delete my spam, I usually only click on the first and last mail (to mark the area to be deleted) ... but I think that should be a representative sample. In that case, there is a lot of these now. I don't think they make up the majority even of my spam yet, but the fastest growing segment this year for sure.

They are sorely mistaken in their targeting here: I can enlarge my penis by mind power alone, if that should be necessary. I would like to think that most of us who have such an appendage are in the same situation. There is of course an upper limit for each of us, but that is a racial trait that cannot be changed by anything less than surgery. I can believe that some guys don't know this. But I am hard pressed to see how you can be that ignorant if you have enough education to read. Well, evidently you can, though. This flood of spam would hardly go on and on and on and on, unless there was some money in it. I suppose the target group must be Americans; I understand that in parts of that country, it is considered immoral to learn about human reproduction. (Possibly animal reproduction too, I haven't actually been there.)

Being an INTP personality, I have of course given some thought to how we can eliminate this problem. I don't think laws against spam will have much effect, since it is already being sent from countries in which laws have rather modest effects unless they are martial law. I have therefore concluded that to stop the spam, we must remove the market. We must simply stop giving money to the people who are dumb enough to feed the spammers. It's not like these people can possibly earn their own money, without a functioning brain, can they? I mean, we're talking men here, so it's not like they can make a living with their genitals.

Alternatively we could inform kids about the human reproductive system before they start to use it, and preferably even before these guys drop out of school.

Finally, we could just do nothing and laugh our heads off at the idiots who bite on that kind of spam. I wonder, when all of them have been fooled, if we will get spam trying to sell the Golden Gate bridge, the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben. Nah, probably not the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben. That would require people to know that there is a world outside the USA. Somehow I don't see the target group being quite that well informed. Perhaps the Niagara Falls. Or Grand Canyon. Coming to your inbox soon ... DO YOU WANT A BIGGER CANYON?