What’s with the spam filter these days?
Every minute my inbox gets another of those annoying spam messages telling me how wonderful Viagra is (or how many times another celebrity has had sex with the Boston Philharmonic). Gone are the days when I could just tweak the filter to include the latest permutation on Viagra or derivatives. Images are too hard to filter out. It’s not that I mind being reminded every now and then what the wonderful little blue pill can do. After all, there was that time a year or so back when I had a bad patch and found out how good Viagra is. Of couse it’s good to know last news about medications from all around the world, but not every minute. Why this article? Well, I’ve just had a déjà vu moment all over again. When I was just starting out in IT back in the 70s, one of the standard tools was American Standard Code for Information Interchange - a code for characters and other symbols, etc. And what did we clever people do when we got bored? We made pictures out of all those characters. And guess what’s just popped into my inbox. You’ve got it. It’s a headline, “Viagra - $1.10″ with the message built out of ASCII. So it made me sit up and take notice - just like taking Viagra really. Another way to beat the firewall is opened