Monty Python's Legacy Lives On
by Paul McGoldrick
I personally like Spam, a nice thick slice fried and served with scrambled eggs; I am from the era when Spam and canned corned beef (bully beef) were more readily available than fresh meat in the UK after World War II. But the lasting duration of the Spam-with-everything skit in Monty Python's Flying Circus -- which ranks right up there with the fish slapping dance -- by the naming of the stuff that comes into our e-mail boxes every day, puts it into the class of an historical legend.
It is at amusing to see legislators the world over running around in their own ways to legislate the end of spam forever -- even the EU got into the act this last week with its own universal laws banning unsolicited mail after October 2003. Good luck. The only practical way to have no spam in your mail box is to have nowhere for it to go. But you would as soon remove the mailbox from your house as you would do without e-mail. Any and all attempts to legislate spam are doomed to failure, as we in the electronics world know only too well. Drive it from one state to another, drive it from one country to another, there will always be an ISP connected to the web who will be able and willing to deliver the stuff. And with the cost of sending spam set at virtually nothing the volume is always going to be factors higher than any junk snail mail you have ever received.
I send back all the business reply envelopes that I receive, in the belief that if I can jack up the senders' costs they may think twice about including me on their lists. I cannot do that with spam, of course, but deleting it is not really all that troublesome a task. My ISP's spam filter works reasonably well so most of the time I can visit that holding pen once a week and delete in bulk.
What gets to me is not the spam, it is the mischievous stuff that is getting sent around. Sony reported about a week ago that mail was being sent out under its name requesting personal information for "SonyStyle Customer Service" presumably as a way of getting more accurate demographics for spam -- or even, perhaps, for identity theft.
There are also the silly hoaxes. I've received maybe half a dozen copies of how to search for and delete an .exe file that may be sitting hiding in my computer because I am in so-and-so's address book. It will sit there for 14 days and then will cause unimaginable damage. Hoax, hoax, hoax! And there are the messages telling me about my movie, or my answer, or my information all of which have a ZIP attachment. The fact that these messages allegedly come from Microsoft, or ESPN, or some other large organization that you are sure to trust is even more invidious. But I'm sure there are not many analogZONE readers who would be stupid enough to open such a file.
All in all there seem to be a whole bunch of people who have nothing much to do with their lives, and who therefore enjoy this kind of infantile behavior. As always, if they devoted nearly as much energy to a money-making project they would probably be rich. In my community we even have somebody who spends his/her day calling telephone numbers just to say nothing. The point?
But if any of our readers can think up a way to trace the hoaxers, the
time wasters and the malicious we would very much like to hear about them
so we can share. Even if you cannot, at least try a piece of pan-fried Spam
for breakfast.