spam

I’m fascinated by the rich variety of the human sexual experience — and by the widespread denial about same.

For all that Cardinal Pell, bless his little silk knickers, thinks that sex only happens between (one) man and (one) woman who are married, have the lights turned off, and are not enjoying the experience but are breeding to better the Catholic Church, actual experience proves the complete opposite. Humans have and enjoy sex in pretty much every combination that can be imagined.

I was therefore fascinated with a massive spam comment which I’ve just deleted, which purported to list “What people search for” on the porn sites it was promoting.

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On Wednesday my Twitter stream was dominated by the Politics & Technology Forum, and I’ll write more about that later. The other highlights this week:

1. MYOB continue to flood me with far too much promotional material, even when specifically requested not to. Losers.
2. People continue to install new software on the very day of its release, discover that it’s still buggy or insecure, and then complain. Do you never learn?
3. The Aurora Hotel in Surry Hills and the C Bar on the corner of Pitt and Campbell Streets in the Sydney CBD have free Wifi.
4. The comedians on stage at The Sly Fox Hotel on a Monday night are 300% more bitter & disturbed than I am.
5. There is no evidence that 17 Massachusetts schoolgirls became pregnant because of a “pregnancy pact”
6. There is not, but should be, continuous 3G or HSDPA phone coverage on the highway between Sydney and Canberra. In some places there isn’t even GSM!
7. “The 7 categorises of satedness: Food. Sexual pleasure. Alcohol. Music. Visual appeal. Amphetamines. Blue cheese. Agreed?”
8. The Concourse Bar at Wynyard Station has Coopers Ale for $4.70 a schooner and a choice of six cocktails for $7 each.
9. “Backpacking” has descended from “travel world for enrichment” to “global party by indulgent drunken arseholes”. Hence, “gas them”.
10. Automatic weapons really do solve so many everyday problems.

[Credit: Cartoon Twitter-bird courtesy of Hugh MacLeod. Like all of Hugh's cartoons published online, it's free to use.]

Hannover Fairs, the organisers of the CeBIT Australia IT trade show, must be shitting themselves about poor ticket sales or something. They certainly seem desperate.

These guys are spammy at the best of times, sending at least one email a week every week. But this year I’ve received three “Exclusive Limited Offer: Free Exhibition Entry” emails this month alone, plus today another one via the Australian Computer Society — yeah, that’s fuckin’ exclusive, eh? They’ve emailed a “Dear Bloggers” media release and phoned. Gawd!

I was underwhelmed last year and annoyed with the marketing wank-words.

Do these shows actually achieve anything any more? I mean, if you’ve got a new IT product you just tell TechCrunch and the geek world’s blogosphere of feral goldfish do the rest, right? Why herd everyone into a room, except to fuel an industry of hangers-on who make t-shirts and lame promotional giveaways?

[P.S. I am actually going. If nothing else I can collect some high-grade sarcasm for my podcast. But enough with the spam already, Hannover!]

70% of the email processed by my business’ mail server is spam, at least according to this morning’s stats.

8990 messages Scanned by MailScanner
253.5 Total MB
6341 Spam messages detected by MailScanner
1117 Messages forwarded unscanned by MailScanner
8 Viruses found by MailScanner
18 Banned attachments found by MailScanner
401 Content Problems found by MailScanner
6361 Messages delivered by MailScanner

That’s pretty much the same as last year. And the vast majority of inbound email connections are rejected for being from known spam sources before they even get a chance to be processed by MailScanner!

While clearing out the spammers’ attempts to post comments to this website today, I was struck by the rather attractive rhythm they formed — if “attractive” is the right word. Here, then, is the first poetry I’ve written in more than 20 years, entitled…

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On Australia Day, Google Maps did a flyover of Sydney to take low-level photos. A small ISP decided to create an advertisement in the photos. So is that spam? Or as one commenter pointed out, were they just acting on Google’s invitation to “get involved”?

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Could the most popular search engine Google, which claims it can make money without doing evil, be engaged in spamming? Recent activity on this blog would suggest so — and they certainly have both motive and opportunity.

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