Okay, we all know that junk email is a problem. But today, within the space of about 15 minutes, three things happened, and they illustrate a problem…
- A Facebook friend has apparently picked up Koobface, the Facebook virus whose least-troublesome symptom is spamming all your friends with posts (which link to the virus file — therein lies the much-more-troublesome aspect of Koobface). So my Facebook page was filled with junk posts.
- I logged into this WordPress blog, which uses a cool utility to restrict comment spam. After I deleted the 327 junk comments that had been posted in the past weeks, here is the message.
- At the same time, my email program pops up an indicator that I have received 11 new messages — 10 of which are junk.
The point is not that junk mail is a problem — it is, but we all know that. The point is that the problem has spread. Not content to clutter up my email inbox, the jerks who put this stuff out there are hitting my blog, and now Facebook, and MySpace, and Ning, and as many other interactive contact points as they can find.
It’s not really me I’m worried about… I set up filters in my email, and they work pretty well. Akismet keeps my blog comments pretty clean, and I set it to manually approve anything that gets through. As for Facebook, well, my common sense keeps me from clicking on ridiculous links.
It’s everybody else that worries me. As we use more and more widgets, and embed things from one site inside another site, how can anyone be expected to keep all the security holes closed?
Problem is, you have to do it. It takes time, specialized tools and some common sense, but you have to commit to all of those things, and not enough people are. Yikes.
