Spam: The Answer

As you all know, I have been engaged in a battle with spam for many years. So far today, for example, I have recieved 15264 spams. This is not an unusual total.

Something needs to be done. A little while ago I wrote an open letter to whoever buys from spam, but short of resorting to buying an e-mail list to spam it out myself, it has become clear to me that it will never have the desired effect.

I have therefore come up with a simple solution. And no, it isn't arranging for an international hit-squad to kill all of the spammers. No, this idea is inspired, in fact, by the Kama Sutra.

I refer, of course, to the worm by the same name that was supposed to wreak havoc on the users of the internet today, by deleting their files. Now, the kind of people who are going to get infected by this worm are people who don't run firewall. Who don't have virus protection software.

Who are exactly the same group of people who will let their machine become part of a spamming botnet.

So there is a very simple and elegant solution, that will rid the world of spam, and net me my very own island paradise in the process:

  1. Get an island

    This is important. It can't be any old island, it has to be one that doesn't really belong to any country - because by doing so we will escape the long arm of the law. That little man-made island out in the north sea would do, but failing that, BoingBoing have a very appropriate link today to people who sell islands. Score.

    Although to be honest, I'm not so keen on the idea of buying an island - if it's not protected by any parent country, I can build a long-boat and invade with a small army of viking warriors, and we can rape and pillage our way across the island, just like in the good ol days. I will be publishing the application form shortly, if you are interested in joining my viking army. Yes, there will be broadband and wifi on the boat.

  2. Write a virus

    See, this is why we need the island - I don't want to go to jail. The virus will have to perform the very simple tasks of replicating like a bunny, followed by locking the hard drive a few days later. How it does these things doesn't really matter - e-mailing, exploiting vulnerabilities, renaming C:\Windows, deleting the MBR - who cares, it just has to spread and disable the machine.

  3. Write an antidote

    It would be a bit mean to break millions of computers around the world and not offer a way to fix them. Of course, it will only come bundled with free firewall and anti-virus software...

  4. Release the virus and antidote

    I am sure AV companies will be quick to offer their customers patches, but that's ok - they're not going to be part of a botnet anyway.

No, I am quite sure that it would all work very well; within a few weeks every vulnerable machine on the planet would be infected and disabled, and they would all have to install an AV+firewall to get it up and running again. All the rest of us would have to do is sit back and watch the spam river dry up, and the spammers try to find real jobs.

Some of you may say 'Well, why not just write a virus that installs the AV+firewall and then destroys itself without disabling the computer?' Well, it's simple - until something bad happens, people don't care. What happens if they go out and buy a new computer a month after the virus naturally dies? They won't have AV+firewall on it, that's what will happen. Whereas if they can't download their porn for a few days, they'll soon learn that viruses are bad, and they'll never leave their computer unprotected again.

Foolproof!

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