Oh boy. I think the smartest thing I did was not to place my e-mail nor allow comments onto this version of my blog. At least not yet.

My last blog was inundated with viagra, cialis, poker-online (oh boy, Google’s AdSense is going to go haywire with this entry) and whatnot, and so far, after just a few days of being up, my website has been spidered, searched, attempted to be exploited, and e-mail searched left and right.

Spam, spyware, phishing, et al are such a bad yet almost invisible to the uninitiated problem on the internet. What to do? I’ll tell you what…

Go out, and educate the nearest relative that you can call and tolerate for 15 minutes. Explain to them that there is shit out there that will take down their name, phone number, bank account number, their favorite websites they like to go to, and use that information in some ultra-secret manner that makes the CIA and FBI look and sound like Jehovah Wtinesses… annoyances that are easily ignorable.

But don’t allow them to ignore this hidden menace (oh jeez… I can’t wait until Lucasarts sues me on this one) and just explain it in about as non-technical of terms as you can. And then explain what they can do. Use Firefox. Stop using Microsoft products. Demand better from their senators, and actually read up on this stuff.

Sounds like a lot, I know. But you know what? I wouldn’t be helping a good friend of mine fight against identity theft if they listened to me last year, or year before that. Maybe sooner or later, I’ll put together a quick ass list or methodology to ensure a “hardened” machine that’s just harder to break into. That’s what I used to do for the US Government projects we deployed back when I still had a job.

Oh well. I’ll leave you with this…spambots and spammers, die.