The Weakest Link II

Week of December 26, 2003

• Several major media sources have been quoted as claiming the year 2003 has seen a dramatic increase in the amount of spam on the Internet.
• People pay to have their companies marketed through spam.
• If these people do not realise revenues through this marketing technique, they don't do it again, and the word gets out quickly, namely that spam does not pay.
• If spam is on the rise, and dramatically so, it can only be on the rise because spam works.
• The terms 'spam' and 'scam' are closely related. Only a full-blown idiot would believe the blurbs snuck into mailboxes by the spammers.
• But the companies relying on spam to do their dirty work must be experiencing corporate growth.
• The conclusion therefore is unavoidable: the world is full of full-blown idiots.

The Nigerian 419 scam is a case in point: it too is spam, obviously so, and yet people are getting suckered in all the time - some are even getting killed. There must be a lot of full-blown idiots out there.

If companies relying on spam to sell their less than honest products could not make any money with this marketing tactic, we would not have spam - pure and simple.

And most of us are far more than smart enough to not be lured in by the 419 or any other spam-scam.

It therefore follows what the obvious solution to the plague of spam is. It is not implementing egress controls from SMTP servers; it is not even outlawing AnalogX's Proxy Server (though that might be good in its own right); it is not in passing legislation, which is nation-bound in a world (the Internet) which is international by nature.

For, to paraphrase Ann Robinson, some people out there are not pulling their own weight - they're consistently letting the rest of us down.

And so, as Ann would herself do it, it's time to vote off the weakest link. And there's no doubt that it's the same certifiable morons who are most responsible for the proliferation of viruses and worms and trojans as well.

So from all of us to all of them: You are the Weakest Link - Goodbye!