The Day SPAM Destroyed the World
This email somehow slipped through my spam-blocker. A hoax or a terrifying glimpse of the shape of things to come?
You decide.
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Sent: 16:25, July 25th 2013
Received: 03:10, February 13th 2004
From: J@lie Shd’mire
Subject: W4RNING – This how it ends… fgyeo;vgraa,yhoo.com bundle
I am writing to you in the, perhaps, vain hope that you have an open mind and can contemplate the possibility that what I am about to tell you is the truth.
We used to think that hackers and virus creators would destroy the world-wide network of computers. Anti-virus and firewall creators worked in constant battle to try to keep one step ahead of the malicious vandals that flooded email accounts with viruses and bounced emails from communications never sent.
It was believed that eventually the defences would become insurmountable. Work would be able to continue unhindered by such attacks.
They were wrong. Dead wrong.
Sp*mmers were on the increase and, working in unregulated countries and from secret locations, volumes of unsolicited email began to be unmanageable.
In 2006 no email account could be operated without utilising a filter at the server level to weed out unwanted email. Liberals bemoaned the lack of freedom but, without the use of email to communicate their vitriol, demonstrations in major cities were the only way their voices could be ignored.
By 2007, sp*m had reached unprecedented levels. Even servers could no longer cope with the demand of filtering the incoming emails. Many small and medium-sized servers went under leaving the heavy hitters to soak up the flood of new business.
Many small companies and individuals working from home could no longer afford the exorbitant fees charged by these service providers and resorted to grovelling before the bosses they had previously fired in a bid to find gainful employment.
But the sp*m kept coming.
The breakthrough seemed to have been made when the international community united to create a new form of email communication. Every major service provider (just 1508 remaining by August 2007) refused email that wasn’t sent using the new GPSMS (Global Positioning System Messaging Service) software.
Every email sent from that day forward was embedded with a code based on the location of the PC sending the message. Any user sending unsolicited mail could quickly be located and incarcerated. Offenders received 3 year minimum sentences with major sp*mmers receiving life sentences.
For five years the world lived a sp*m free existence. The home business flourished as people all over the world re-fired their bosses who were too busy re-building their own confirmed opt-in mailing list to care.
Once again the experts re-focussed their efforts on the hackers and virus builders, convinced this was where the real threat lay.
For five years they forgot about the successful sp*mmers of the last two decades sitting on a fortune they now invested in finding another way…
A way that I found.
For five years I concentrated my efforts on inventing the technology to send emails without connecting to the internet. This achievement would allow sp*m to return without any way of tracing its origin.
In 2012 I began sending emails at the quantum level. If successful, this would be an untraceable approach. The difficulty was in directing the streams of 1’s and 0’s. I could send the email at the quantum level, but I had no way of telling where it might end up. I was reduced to sending out millions of communications a minute, in the hope that one would reach a target.
It was like trying to find a unusually small needle in an unusually large haystack after your hands had been chopped off.
I was almost ready to give up hope, when it happened.
A “message delivered” email arrived in my inbox. One of my emails had been delivered! The question was where? I sent another 10 at the same quantum frequency and received another 10 confirmation messages. Excited, I sent a tried and trusted advert for anti-virus software that converted at a steady 0.2%.
10,000 adverts went out and I waited. And waited. And waited.
The confirmation emails arrived, but no sales. Something was obviously wrong. For months I wrestled with the problem to no avail. I was about to have my funding removed, when something strange happened.
My PayPal account showed $200 more than I could account for. I reconciled my account for six years until I uncovered the source. On January 12th, 2007 I sold 22 pieces of software that had previously never shown. I queried PayPal and they insisted that these sales had always been there.
The truth nagged at me for days before I could accept the truth. My sp*m had resurfaced on the internet six years into the past. It was only by a fluke that I advertised a URL that hadn’t changed for over 10 years. Otherwise I would never have discovered the truth.
I send another 10,000 emails and, as if by magic, another $200 appeared in my PayPal account. I sent another 10,000 emails. And another 10,000. I was like a kid with a new toy. Every set of bulk email produced another set of sales ocurring on January 12th, 2007.
This was our key to unlimited riches. During the next three months I partnered up with some of the oldest and richest sp*mmers and collected together their most successful adverts from January 2007. We set up our on-line accounts to siphon off the profits as soon as they arrived and then loaded in every email address we could find in our archives that dated back to 2007.
The program was ready. Capable of sending over 1,000,000,000 emails per hour, we prepared ourselves for the greatest bulk emailing of all time. SpamCop, if they still existed, would have had a heart-attack.
On July 25th, 2013, I pushed the button.
For a few euphoric seconds, our off-shore accounts bulged with 11 figures of cash. Then it fell apart.
Our computers could not redirect the funds fast enough and our online accounts jammed. We had a score of technicians on hand to react to such an event, but their computers also appeared to have jammed. Everything slowed down. Power became intermittent.
We checked the archived internet and watched in horror as history unravelled before our eyes. Reports from 2007 announced a massive surge of email from an unknown source had halted servers around the world for as much as 24 hours. Within minutes the report changed to 48 hours. Then a week. Then a month…
Then there was talk of the internet never coming back on-line. Power failures in one country after another. Factory melt-downs. The threat of nuclear disaster became more and more likely every time history re-wrote itself. And with our computers inoperable, we had no way of shutting things down.
It turned out that every email sent was arriving in in-boxes all around the world simultaneously. We had filled the on-line world with enough sp*m to destroy it. And the off-line world was close behind.
Chaos ensued. Some associates left in a panic to try and find their families. Some freaked out and hid under tables. At the rate of change, our present would be unrecognisible in less than 20 minutes. It seemed hopeless.
But I don’t have an IQ of 190+ for nothing.
I typed this email as fast as my fingers could manage and recalibrated our bulk-emailer. I couldn’t stop what was being sent, but I could add to its load. I added this email to the list and set it to send at high-speed to a randomly generated frequency at the quantum level.
It was a slim hope, but it was all that remained. My hope is that this email will appear in someones inbox, somewhere, before 2007.
If it succeeds and you are reading this, don’t ignore it.
Abandon email while there is still time. A new electronic form of communication must be created before it is too late.
Go to http://myrss.com/ while you still have time and embrace change. Otherwise the worse is inevitable.
Sp*m will destroy the world. You cannot bargain with it, you cannot reason with it. It doesn't feel remorse, or pity, or fear, and it absolutely will not stop.... ever, until you are dead.
leftytirgimble the seamonkeysketvyu has my sefieh version2.099898 money day.. 28/1—09/19c
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Clearly the work of a fevered imagination. But it’s worth a thought.
Some have predicted the end of email as SPAM reaches unprecedented levels. Usually they are pedalling some unrealistc alternative. But should we take note?
How often in the past have warnings been ignored until the disaster actually happens?
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This article first appeared in The Nettle Ezine.
If you enjoyed it, why not try The Nettle Magazine at www.thenettle.com
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