Over the last few months, I have increasingly received pornographic images in spam. Various attempts at spam filtering have failed, and now I’m getting several dozen every day. The email in question is usually advertising genital enhancement concoctions, although occasionally it’s for either pornography sites or dating sites. Once or twice it is for prostitutes. Yes, I’m receiving email for prostitute services.

It has reached the point where I simply cannot check my email if my daughter is around.

I imagine that my various attempts to express how angry spammers make me have all fallen rather short. I spend hundreds of hours a year combating their efforts. Large businesses spend billions of dollars a year combating their efforts, and appear to consider it a legitimate business expense.

Additionally, I spend several minutes every day deleting spam comments from my various websites.

It stands to reason that there are people out there who purchase the advertised products, buy the advertised stocks, or buy memberships on the advertised websites. It strikes me as exceedingly unlikely that there are a sufficient number of idiots in the world to support the huge bulk of businesses that employ this marketing strategy, but I guess there must be, or they wouldn’t keep doing it.

When an activity that is clearly, at least to me, criminal, consumes hours of my time, every week, I’m forced to wonder where “online” law enforcement is spending their time. Then, I read the news, and am reminded that we’re spending trillions of dollars helping the music industry make more money.

I honestly can’t figure out why we’d be willing to devote the force of online law enforcement to tracking down who is downloading a particular music file, and yet are incapable of locating, and incarcerating, the scum who are costing EVERY SINGLE BUSINESS IN THE WORLD a significant part of their IT budget. Surely that’s a large enough lobbying group? Why do we just put up with this as though it is an ordinary part of the cost of doing business?