CAN-SPAM

by John Q on April 1, 2004

Among the offerings in today’s special edition of TidBITS, the long-running online Macintosh magazine, I found this item particularly appealing.

Canned Spam Can Can Spam with CAN-SPAM — Hormel is expected to announce today their campaign to can spam using their canned Spam with the aid of the CAN-SPAM legislation. Starting today, Hormel will print the phone number, email addresses, and other information about unsolicited email senders on cans of Spam along the lines of the “Have you seen me?” photographs published on milk cartons. Canned Spam buyers who help to can spam by canning spammers can receive cans of Spam as a reward.

Other important news includes a report that the US Department of Homeland Security is responding to the threat of Windows-specific cyberterrorism, most notably through Trojans such as Phatbot by standardising on Macs.

{ 5 comments }

1

keef 04.01.04 at 12:40 pm

Gee, what’s the date on that “can-spam” project?

MailBITS/01-Apr-04

Ah, April First.

Don’t think that “can-spam” thing will ever make this list

K

2

Keith M Ellis 04.01.04 at 5:05 pm

Using a minority or obscure computing platform as a means of security is effective. However, it nevertheless is a form of “security through obscurity”, a strategy that experts rightly denigrate.

It’s true that the Windows platform has some inherent security vulnerabilities that others do not. But I think this is generally overstated relative to the fact that its ubiquity simply makes it the target of choice. From this perspective, switching to a minority platform for security reasons is sort of a prisoner’s dilemma—it only works if most everyone else is playing fair. It’s certainly not in a switcher’s interests to encourage other people to switch.

3

clew 04.01.04 at 8:40 pm

The deeply sneaky encourage others to switch to ensure a good resale price for the system they’re about to abandon.

4

Matt Brown 04.03.04 at 12:43 am

I can’t find anywhere in the linked article where it says they are switching to Mac. Have you got a link on that?

5

Matt Brown 04.03.04 at 12:46 am

Wait. Now that I’m thinking about it, I’m sure that’s an April Fool’s thing, too. I’ve been had!

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