Pun Salad

Didya miss me? I've been in our nation's capital, at LISA, a yearly conference for UNIX/Linux geeks professional system administrators. I also saw pandas and went to Ben's Chili Bowl on U Street for a Chili Half-Smoke and a chocolate milk shake. I can heartily recommend everything.

At the conference, I learned of the "professionalization" of spamming—by which I mean, the involvement of organized crime. As one speaker put it: Your typical spamming enterprise these days has a hit man in the organization chart.

A couple of speakers alleged (one explicitly, one implicitly) the involvement of (at least) the Chinese government in developing spamming technologies. Many other states (due to corruption, lack of interest, or lack of resources) fail to pursue the crooks.

That's pretty alarming, isn't it? Right now, spammers order their armies of zombie computers to send us all barely-coherent pitches for pump-n-dump stocks, counterfeit Viagra, and porn. What happens when someone decides to move from current tawdry economic goals to political and perhaps military ones? Will we be able to handle those any better? The stuff I heard didn't give me any reason to be optimistic.