One in eight receive offensive emails – the poor loves!
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New government figure show that “one in eight people received an offensive e-mail in the last year.” The Ranger scoffs. One in eight? Surely this is a joke? One of the great sadnesses in the Ranger’s (very) long relationship with the internet has been the rise of spam. Way back in 1995 when the Ranger first got an email address, spam was more or less unknown. Now… well, you know. For the service offered by Naturenet, which involves exposing some of his email addresses to the world, the Ranger presently gets at least 1,000 spams every day, occasionally more than twice that.
The contents of these messages vary, although not by much. Perhaps you’d like to see a few of those presently in the Ranger’s spam box? These are taken entirely at random; it’s the top of the pile:
How anyone could fail to recognise these as offensive is beyond the Ranger’s meagre wit – and believe me there are far worse than these. And in this the Ranger surely cannot be alone – or even in a minority of one in eight. Now, it’s probably a bit disingenuous to equate spam with the sort of offensive emails that the government is talking about. They mean emails from people you know, not spam. But is it? Surely spam like those shown above is a message, sent specifically to you, with offensive content? What’s the difference? For the government, it seems, the difference is that we are supposed to just put up with spam, or, as in the case of the Ranger, pay good money to a splendid filtering service to avoid it. It’s hard to deal with spam, we all know that. Efforts to prevent nasty emails are worthy. But by contrast, efforts to prevent spam are absolutely essential.
Good news for all of us, UK has banned spam messages and put strict penalties. Under the new law, spammers could be fined
If only we had a constitution too! It sounds great. Perhaps if you’ve got an old one you’ve finished with we could borrow it? ‘Cruel and unusual’ is a great phrase – I’ve often heard it and wondered at what it might mean. Does it have to be cruel AND unusual, or does it really mean cruel OR unusual? Or perhaps I’m straying off-topic here – don’t want to start a human rights blog… ooer! Thats’a a bit grown-up and serious.
While your suggestion has obvious merit, in the United States our constitution prevents the use of cruel and unusual punishment, even for cruel and unusual crimes like spamming. Perhaps the spammer would need to be transported to a secret facility in a third country to mete out your well-fitted punishment.
Ha! Tempting, but why be so conventional? Whilst pondering your very good proposal I hit a concept which I think can better it: incarcerate the spammer with an infinite supply of stationary until he’s written by hand a personal postal letter of apology to everyone he’s ever spammed, and sent it to them with an extra stamp inside the envelope, all at his own expense, as compensation. Hee hee!
Your list is so disturbing that now I feel dirty, so dirty. I am not really in favor of the death penalty but I might make an exception for spammers.