Spam, Popup Blockers and Britney Spears

Recently, while I was surfing the backwaters of the internet, I happened to visit one of my much-frequented websites, www.osnews.com; this stands for Operating Systems News and is a very respected and reliable website for news in that domain. However, on this particular visit, there was a very peculiar side-bar on an otherwise very conservative website. It featured the picture of the posterior end of a very scantily clad female. Beneath it was a caption which claimed that if you could guess whose delectable derrière that was, you would win a Sony DVD player. Now I’m usually not the kind of chump who falls for this kind of bullcrap. But I DO pride myself on being that certain lecherous, scum-of-the-earth low-life who can recognize a woman by looking at any body part of hers. There happened to be three choices; Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez and Christina Aguilera. Judging from the anatomical and dermatological evidence (read form and skin color), I picked Jennifer Lopez, a new window popped up which told me that I guessed correctly and I could claim my ABSOLUTELY FREE DVD player if I would be kind enough to subscribe to one of the following credit cards (pay their fees). Well, needless to say I was disappointed at the loss of the aforementioned appliance.

Now, I’m a very nitpicking kind of person. So before going on to read the latest articles at OSNews, just for fun, I clicked on Ms. Spears as the answer to the question. I was taken to the same website where they informed me that, yes you guessed it. CORRECT. I went back and this time clicked on Ms. Aguilera, and even this time I was proven correct. One of my other traits-apart from being nitpicky-is being pragmatic. Therefore I assumed that the website was lying and indeed the three rich and famous ladies who take off their clothes on stage to make a living do NOT infact share the same backside (which is also supported by the fact that I once saw the two backsides of Ms. Spears and Ms. Aguilera simultaneously in the video of a concert, not to mention the veteran backside of Madonna as well).

This got me thinking. That cheap website has enough money to advertise prominently on one of the geek-world’s major websites. And trust me, geek websites are expensive to advertise at, because geeks have major buying power (usually also in corporate capacities). Therefore, it is safe to assume that they make good money. Now that leads to only one conclusion, that people actually DO fall for this crap.

Now what these websites are doing is eating up increasingly scarce bandwidth. This is compounded by the fact that these same websites are also sending out spam by the billions. A study recently published stated that nearly 50% of all email traversing the internet nowadays is spam. Looking at my oldest address (a hotmail one), I would guess the figure should be closer to 90%, although recently hotmail seems to have implemented very heavy filtering. But this heavy filtering is bound to report many false positives (legitimate emails recognised as spam). Also, the average size of emails has increased almost 100 times since the early days of the internet, whereas the average bandwidth has not. This has specially drastic consequences for countries like Pakistan, where most people have dialup connections and where the entire country’s bandwidth is less than the bandwidth available to most universities in Europe or the US.

Oh well. I guess one day some very smart people will come up with a way to put a stop to all this. Until then, use a junk mail filter, install a popup blocker, and don’t surf infront of older relatives and younger siblings.