Vicodin, Xanax or Viagra Anyone? Come On!
OK… I haven’t written any rants yet, and as hard as I’m trying to I just cannot accept that in the year 2008 I’m still getting bombarded with all sorts of pharmaceutical products in my in-boxes. Its interesting to see how different mail services handle spam better or worse, and I used to chuckle at deleting those caught in the fishnet of the spam filters and marvel at those that escaped, but now its getting to the point where I’m thinking there has to be something that can be done to stop this SPAM MACHINE.
I’m assuming its a model that works. Someone somewhere sometime must be clicking on the links on these emails, buying these medicines that normally require prescriptions from less than reputable sources and ‘over the counter’ or ‘over the e-mail’ and who knows what the pill that gets shipped is, what it contains, what its expiration date is and how many hands its gone through before it makes to the poor individual who will take it and God knows what the result will be - but for every time this happens, someone else is making money.
On top of the health risks of the free trade in these medications and deregulated consumption, I cannot help but denounce and protest the wasted bandwidth, cost and strain on the Internet as a system, as well as the ISPs from having to deal with the enormity of unsolicited, unwanted and unneeded crap mail. Every e-mail sent has a cost associated with it. Every byte of data transmitted, routed, rerouted and delivered is getting in the way of legitimate (one would hope) Internet traffic making my page to load slower and my downloads to finish later. I say enough already!
How many of us legitimately need to use words like xanax, vicodin, codine, viagra and the rest of the medicine cabinet on a daily basis in our e-mail communications? In the spirit of this rant, I propose that these words are regulated and unless you have some sort of digital signature which entitles and authorizes the use of such terms, the e-mail doesn’t even get sent! Straight to the trash. This of course isn’t the best solution, but as we can go to the moon, plan to go again and can browse satellite pictures of our houses from the Internet, we can also protect ourselves from unsolicited e-mail.
Now excuse me while I go send my bank account information to someone who needs to deposit $5,000,000,000 dollars for a few days, but fear not, because I get to keep 1% after the money is withdrawn a week later!
- Stumble it!
Filed under: Rant, internet, technology
Whenever my clients complain that they are getting spam, I always ask them if they believe their penis size is too small (if they’re a female) or if they don’t like how small their boobs are (if they’re a male)… That always gets a chuckle out of them. But seriously, we use DSPAM (http://dspam.nuclearelephant.com) to filter e-mail, and once it’s fully trained (when it receives 2500 legitimate e-mails) we get very high accuracy. Even now, for a newly opened e-mail account that still has 2461 messages to train yet, I’m already seeing more than 82% overall accuracy.
But indeed, the real issue here is not the filter. The problem here is the concept of e-mail as we know it. Basically, anything short of “you pay me to send your stuff to me” is unlikely to have any effect on spam, as spam is so profitable since there is near zero cost, and even with 0.1% of recipients purchasing or falling for scams, it is enough for the s[c/p]ammers to make huge incomes.
Unfortunately, it has become the burden of the recipient to pay for the costs involved in receiving all the unwanted crap and doing something with it.
I find myself asking these questions fairly often:
1. How many people really abuse Xanax, Viagra, and these other drugs?
2. How many people are insecure about the size and/or performance of their genitalia?
3. How many people try to impress with fake rolexes?
4. How many people fall for the 411 scams?
The impression you get is that it’s a lot of people for all these categories. I can only hope in reality that the numbers are very small.
Agreed. The problem is that the ‘bad guys’ are always going to be one step ahead as they continue to evolve how they get in. We’re always playing catchup and being reactive to threats and attacks.
I like the concept of PPETUU - I just made that acronym up… but it stands for Pay Per Email To Unknown User.
I think that may fly. Basically as long as there is a trust relationship between sender and recipient (we can discuss later what that relationship entails, how its managed and maintained), the e-mail is “free” (in quotations because it still has a cost to the provider, just not to the user).
Any e-mail traffic to “anonymous” or “unknown” recipients should be charged with enough of a fee to throw off the business model of SPAM.
This could be an opt in process - as an individual, you pay a small premium (or not - just a possibility) to enroll in this protection program, and then manage your global preferences and trust relationships… I like it
Actually I’m going to stop writing about my idea before someone takes it and makes a product out of it before me! LOL.
Good comment Mishehu!
Unfortunately, given the current state of the USPTO, it’s likely been patented already as a set of methods to charge money to send or receive some abstract item or information on a computer/on the web/on the internet…