Off-topic: Crime Medicine

The Swedish national medical products agency is running a very cleverly marketed campaign right now to inform people about the perils of buying medicine over the Internet. They are running fake advertisement spots on television, mimicking the typical medical adverts found in the US (and the few other countries where such advertising is allowed for prescription medicine), with a trustworthy doctor talking about the benefits of this and that… and slowly going into weird land about how the products might not be want you think and maybe don’t contain the right stuff, etc.Finally, you are pointed to www.crimemedicine.com, a site setup for this campaign. All very clever. In fact, so clever that some people reported the spots to the consumer watchdog as being illegal advertisements… brilliant!

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Off-Topic: Blog Spam Statistics

Seems like my blog has been picked up by some spamming machine — at least I hope it is a machine, what a waste of manpower to manually send in spam since I am filtering all comments and not letting anything remotely spam-like through. Anyway, it is kind of interesting to see what kinds of things are being pushed using blog spam. Read on for more, but suffice to say that porn is dominant… Continue reading “Off-Topic: Blog Spam Statistics”

BBC Documentary: On the Trail of Spammers

If you are looking for a good popular introduction to what spam is and how it works, the BBC World Service Documentary Podcast has a very good documentary up right now. I cannot find a direct link, but go to the overview page and then download “Doc: Assignment – On the trail of spammers 17 Jan 2007”. Enjoy!