[78-L] reunion OT

[fnarf at comcast.net]

> The one that really 
> confuses me is the one I keep getting that wants to sell me a window air 
> conditioner. 

This is why the "just click delete" argument, and the "rely on filters" argument about spam fail. There are MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS of small, medium and large businesses in the world, and eventually all of them are going to try spamming. I get vast quantities of spam from Chinese companies whose junk mail I can't even display the character set for, let alone read. I get spam in Arabic, Tagalog, Russian, and Portuguese all the time. I get spam for hinges, stuffed animals, coffee pots, toner cartridges, plastic water pistols, house painters, tax accountants, and everything else you can think of, beyond the more obvious pharmaceuticals, porn, and Nigerian 419 scams.

There's a new kind of spam, too, that's totally nonsensical -- whether through broken virus scripts or just plain vandalism, random spam that doesn't even try to sell you something, but is just designed to overload the global email system for the sheer hell of it. 

Almost all spam comes from infected computers nowadays, ordinary users like you and me who've contracted an infection of some sort of "malware" -- software with bad intent. There are hundreds of millions of these infected machines cranking away 24/7 (or whenever they're powered on), connected together in vast "botnets". I guarantee that some 78-L members are infested. 

And yet the official government response to spam continues to be "how can we enable it?"