Kay: Michael, is it true?
Michael: Don’t ask me about my business, Kay.
Kay: Is it true?
Michael: Don’t ask me about my business…
Kay: No.
Michael: [slamming his hand on the desk] Enough! All right. This one time, this one time I’ll let you ask me about my affairs.
Kay: Is it true? Is it?
Michael: No.
Kay: [sighing relief] I guess we both need a drink, huh?
That is, of course, an exchange from the 1972 movie, The Godfather, between Michael Corleone and girlfriend Kay Adams. She’s asking Michael about a murder- curious about the family "business". It seems much has changed in what the "business" entails since those days…
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Paul Sand, who blogs at one of my daily reads, PunSalad, is a systems administrator at UNH. He recently wrote an interesting post on a conference he attended for system administrators:
At the conference, I learned of the "professionalization" of spamming—by which I mean, the involvement of organized crime. As one speaker put it: Your typical spamming enterprise these days has a hit man in the organization chart..A couple of speakers alleged (one explicitly, one implicitly) the involvement of (at least) the Chinese government in developing spamming technologies. Many other states (due to corruption, lack of interest, or lack of resources) fail to pursue the crooks.
This seems likely, as the "hot stocks" spams that clog my email at an alarmingly increasing pace appear to be written in English translated from Chinese. The font usage and overall diction are the same as what is found in the instruction manuals of many a Chinese-made tool or machine.
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Paul then adds this little chilling tidbit:
That’s pretty alarming, isn’t it? Right now, spammers order their armies of zombie computers to send us all barely-coherent pitches for pump-n-dump stocks, counterfeit Viagra, and porn. What happens when someone decides to move from current tawdry economic goals to political and perhaps military ones? Will we be able to handle those any better? The stuff I heard didn’t give me any reason to be optimistic.