Every several minutes my electronic inbox gets another of those annoying spam messages telling me how wonderful Viagra is. Oh, how I hate it. Gone are the days when I could just tweak the filter to include the latest permutation on Viagra. It’s not that I mind being reminded every now and then what the wonderful little blue pill can do. After all, there was that time a year or so back when I had a bad patch and found out how good Viagra is. But to have something every few minutes is just egregiously bad. And now this scum are into jpgs and all kinds of other tricks to get through the mail servers. Images are hard to filter out.
Why this post? Well, I’ve just had a déjà vu moment all over again. When I was just starting out in IT back in the 70s, one of the standard tools was ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) - a code for characters, numbers, symbols, etc. And what did we clever people do when we got bored? And guess what’s just popped into my inbox. You can’t believe in what you see. It’s a headline, “Viagra - $1.10″ with the message built out of ASCII. So it made me sit up and take notice - just like taking Viagra really. Those clever spammers have found a new way to beat the filters.