« 419er Dishing Out "ATM Cards" | Main | 419ing Within One's Means »

February 16, 2009

In what I presume to be a medz spam ("relief" and "substance" are some of the very few words in the message), there is a long gap of carriage returns, followed by hash-busting text that is clearly labeled by the spammer:

-- Ignore all Below This Line Random Gibberish :) --

"Unless we're willing to rethink today's Internet," says Nick McKeown, a Stanford engineer involved in building a new Internet, "we're just waiting for a series of public catastrophes."

What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a "gated community" where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there.

Nothing says "respectability" like "random gibberish."