LET'S LAUGH SPAM OFF THE NET - Hoisted with their own petard.
by Augustine

Amongst all the trash I have to delete every day before I can read my genuine e-mail, there's a lot of spam offering to rid me of spam if I will purchase their services. And I ask myself: why in heaven's name should I pay for spam-blocking or spam-cleaning when the very existence of spam is a crime? A crime like stalking, mugging, obscene phone-calling, assault, robbery, invasion of privacy, fraud, etc. They spy on us, steal our e-mail addresses, break into our websites, flood our private space with their rubbish. Maybe some spam-control systems work fine and maybe spamming will be declared illegal one day. I discovered SpamCop, a good place to report spammers, and this site tells you how to 'mung' or spam-block your e-mail address so it can't be harvested. But I've had a more fun idea:

What would happen if all of us - and I mean hundreds of thousands of bloggers - started making fun of spammers, using their own spam, their own words, to laugh them off the net? For one thing, Google and all the other search engines would pick up these words from our blogs and that would create chaos among the spammers because nobody would know which was their product and which our jolly japes. I'd like to hear what other people think: could it be a deterrent? I've made an experimental spamcollage, with special attention to the 419 Fraud gangsters who think I'm an easy touch - they send me offers of billions of dollars every day, each with a new see-through tale, a new alias and a new country of origin - some are even bringing God into their stories. I imagine them sitting around in their ill-gotten villas, competing to see who can come up with the best scam, falling off their chairs laughing as they visualise the suckers who will line up to offer them full access to their bank accounts. Well, bloggers, let's show 'em who has the last laugh, heh heh. Put your creative hats on and start recycling spam in amazing new ways.

This post also appears at Open Source Politics