Spam

Well, it was only a matter of time before a bot found this site and started spamming the comments system. Personally, I think that some activists in England are onto something when it comes to socially destructive behaviors. Find those directly responsible, go door to door in their neighborhoods passing out fliers on how the offender makes his/her money.

Ideally, there’d be a central repository of known spam company operators’ names and addresses to facilitate this, with local anti-spammers doing the legwork in their area. Since corporations are required by law to publish their owners’ names and a contact address, that would be a place to good looking.

Of course, the worst part of modern spam is that it’s not even a competant advert. Anti-spam tools have gotten sophisticated enough to block out common spam messages (after all, how many legitimate mails use the word “viagra” 900 times), the spammers have taken to munging the words, making the “advertisement” at best an ungrammatical mish-mash. This is insane from a practical standpoint: who orders pharmacuticals from someplace that can’t even spell the name of the drug they are selling?