Spam

There is a group of spam emails I regularly get. You can label them quickly because of the blue rectangle in the middle of the email. The title in your list of emails says: "Fraud Marketing", then it says, "URGENT: There has been a change to your credit score".

Oh no, you think, now what? When you open it you see this:

In the body of the email it shows this:

Now all of a sudden it says there "MAY" have been changes to your credit score. But that doesn't mean a damn thing. Does it.

Then below that in the blue rectangular area it says: "Your credit score has changed...." HAS changed, not may have, now it says, HAS.

I find it interesting that the email is labeled before you open it as Fraud Marketing. How apt. I can't really divine whether these people are just stupid with software that allows them to pull this kind of bandwidth flooding nonsense, or, if they actually have a sense of humor and irony.

After all, they are fraud marketing, aren't they.

This kind of stuff so annoys me. It's intrusive (to my life), it's abusive (of my time), it's stealing (my bandwidth that a I pay for and even though I pay for all that is available to me, I still need more, so stealing any is too much). I had heard some years ago that businesses were suing people like this for costing their company money for things like time, bandwidth, even networking equipment.

I loved it. I would like to see an international consortium put together that could cross international boundaries and imprison these people, with harsh penalties.

Because basically, they are pirates. And not the cool type. Not the Pirate Party, the high tech oriented group who seem to be sweeping through world governments lately from Sweden, to Germany, to America.

I like how we have to suffer through the FBI warning at the beginning of ever single movie we ever watch on tape or disk or whatever form, warning us not to "Pirate" their intellectual properties. Yet when there is a group or individuals stealing OUR individual and personal intellectual properties (our time, our piece of mind, our bandwidth), NO one does a damn thing about it, or even seems to care.

I think we need SPAM laws, like we have RICO for racketeering.

Why is that?

Spam has grown so big and become so evasive, that it has become a white noise until no one bothers do anything about it other than buy extra unneeded software for our home PCs to take care of most of the spam which shouldn't even be there in the first place. I blame that crap that has come to us in our physical mailboxes all my entire life. We let that get through back then and now, here we are. It was bad enough getting it in our physical mailboxes, but now having added computing capabilities and we really have a problem.

What if we suddenly had no spam on the internet at all? None. Nada, zip, nothing. One has to wonder, just how fast would the internet be. I bet images would hit my screen so fast and hard that I'd get a black eye, a broken nose, or my screen would crack. Look, I'd chance it, okay?

Who benefits from the usage of these people pirating all this bandwidth?

Hmmm... well, one has to ask oneself, who do we pay for all this bandwidth? The Telecomms. The Telecommunications companies, right? And yes, also the companies that sell anti spam software. But the telecomms are really the big ones.

Since back in the days of "Ma Bell" when fears were that she would one day rule the world (See the film, "The President's Analyst"), are we still at her beck and call, and payments? I say "her", but now really, it's more like "their", because of the anti-monopoly laws have lulled us into a false sense of security with our now having all these little "bells" as they used to say. So then, just who owns all of them, now? There's no connection, right? Really?

Haven't you noticed them being eaten up, one by one? I used to work for US West Technologies in the 90s. When I moved here my home phone service was Sprint. Since 2000 here where I live, Sprint got bought by Embarq. They got bought by CenturyTel who changed to CenturyLink, who then recently bought Quest who had previously bought US West. It seems there was another company change or buy out involved in all that, but hey, who can keep it all straight through the years?

There was a book in my University library, probably located online now (and for a fee), where you can look up who owns what. When I was in college I heard about that book, so I started looking up some companies to find who owned what. I was surprised to find that some companies, who I thought were sole entities, if you looked hard enough and kept looking up through owner after owner, or umbrella company, you would find that way back, in the darkness, up at the top, were basically only a few very large super corporations that seemed to own everything. This isn't hyperbole, or conspiracy theory, it's in black and white.

Scary.

But still, back to being stuck with spam... I can only hope that the people running those scams, at least, have a sense of irony, or humor.

At least then, I somehow wouldn't feel so abused.

Because then at least someone would be getting a laugh out of this misery.