Winter’s Haven

I stumbled across a prescient article on spam, written back in 2002. Paul Graham predicted that in the future the only spam that would be able to get by filters would consist of little more than a snippet of innocuous text and a link. The spam I’ve seen over the past year or so has proven him to be completely correct.

The only comment spam that manages to briefly appear on this blog, before I manually delete it, is nothing but an extremely short, vague comment (“I liked your post.”) with a link to some commercial site given in “website” field of the comments form.

The email spam that slips through the filters is similarly brief, though it tends towards sexual euphemisms. It reminds me of the letterboards outside of strip clubs, which also try to invent quirky sexual puns within a very small space. (On the internet, the strip clubs come to YOU.)

I’m happy to be getting less spam in total, but in a way I’m kind of nostalgic for the deposed African princes of yore.

This entry was posted 2009-Mar-2 and is filed under Technology. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.