White Knights Riding Trojan Horses

I guess I don’t get an overwhelming amount of junk mail by today’s standards, certainly not as much as my wife does. I think it might be her affinity for online shopping since many of these places tend to “share” e-mail addresses with their “business partners” (i.e. trade their list through a broker).

But I do get a certain amount of unsolicited garbage, as do most people. One offers to sell me Microsoft Office for $69 or Photoshop for $99, which is obviously bogus – not just from the unprofessional appearance of the e-mail, but also because I traced the URL to somewhere in Russia. Others pitch their porn websites or offer to sell Viagra and other such drugs without a prescription.

I hate to think how many people fall for these scams, sending in their money and never hearing from the scammer again. Even if they’re willing to admit to some consumer advocate or government agency that they got scammed trying to buy illegal software or drugs, what do you think is going to happen? Nothing. They will just get their name and e-mail address put on another list. That money is gone.

And then there are all those online scam businesses that sell regular stuff – things that you need like batteries or water filters or office supplies. There are plenty of those who have put together a very professional website with absolutely no intention of shipping anything. They just collect orders for a while and then take down the site and put up another one. When I think about all the money that is stolen this way, it makes me want to reach through the internet pipeline and grab those crooks by the throat.

So I started to think, why isn’t there a way to do just that, figuratively. While there are more than enough twisted minds willing to spend a great deal of effort to construct viruses that create havoc just for the fun of it, aren’t there also some people with the same genius directed towards a more socially beneficial pursuit?

I’d be willing to pay good money for a program that intercepts scam e-mails and replies with a Trojan Horse that takes down the website. If not that, then something that creates havoc with the ISP who facilitates their mass e-mailing enterprise.

Yes I know, you’re going to say that if it were legal to do that, then all sorts of online wars would break out between legitimate businesses who are unscrupulously competitive. That’s probably true unfortunately. But I still think it is an idea worth considering. I bought a $25 program for my wife’s computer that filters out spam at the local level, according to her judgment, not someone at Earthlink or Google. It seems to work pretty well, diverting stuff to the “suspected spam” folder that she has previously identified as such. When something goes in there that she wants to read, she tags it as “good” and it is left alone thereafter.

I don’t necessarily want to encourage White Knight vigilantes on the internet like the sort of folks patrolling the Arizona border this month, but I wouldn’t shed a tear if some “anti-bacterial” software accidentally got loose on the internet and started to eat away at scammers and phishers around the globe.

If you also have some thoughts on what the Engineers and Inventors of the world should be working on, check out my other project: Inspiration 2025.