What is it With People, Anyway?


Wherein Our Heroine is Mildly Irritated.
I have a new correspondent. It's a one-way correspondence. Someone styling himself "Dark" has been sending me malware (probably Windows malware, silly git). I have received probably 20 of these missives. Some of them go straight to my junk mail folder, some end up landing in my inbox. None of them get opened. And yet "Dark" keeps trying. Someone needs to tell the poor sod that one of the definitions of insanity is repeating the exact same action over and over, expecting a different result.

One of my regular correspondents has been getting similar messages from "me," and she has received bounced messages purportedly from "her" to other people she knows. This has been a low-level problem over on Making Light for a while - someone harvests a bunch of addresses from the comment board, and starts sending malware "from" one of the participants to other participants. The theory is that these regulars on the same board will consider e-mails from other regulars to be trusted communications, open the attachment, and badaboom: you have a broken box where once your sweet data sang.

Here's the catch with my new friend "Dark." He's my new friend. I had never before visited the URL associated with the address that he is purportedly e-mailing from. So whoever is pulling the strings behind the Dark-puppet is pretty darned stupid. "Dark" looked like spam to me from the very beginning. Despite my love for all things that come out of Joss Whedon's mastermind, I am not a 16-year-old Goth vampire-wannabe, and I don't frequent the blog known as "The October Country."

So, here's the $64,000 question: if someone is bored enough to work these things out and execute them, why do they have to do (or intend) damage and mischief? (Yes, I've got my "Naiveté" union card and I'm holding on to it). What sort of potentially neat, useful thing is being held up (or not implemented ever) because that person's head is too full of "Let's blow something up, huh, huh..."? Why is malice invariably (and throughout the ages) considered cooler, stronger, muy macho by a certain segment?

I suppose that's a zen koan. I'm never going to get an answer to it, and it's never going to change, either.

Posted: Wednesday - July 14, 2004 at 08:27 AM         | |

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