Net Ache

Computer scientist Robert Wilensky once joked at a conference, "We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."
I’m not sure.
While there’s little original content on the web to rival the Bard - intentionally or randomly - there’s an awful lot of people posting content designed specifically to make a monkey out of you. Hardly Shakespearean, but clever, admittedly.
While the Internet and e-mail are generally really rather good things they’re also a gift to scamsters, grifters and mischief makers.
The web is aptly named when you consider the amount of suckers glued to its sticky strands by the anonymous confidence tricksters who inhabit it. Motivated by a mix of greed and desperation it only takes one person to hand over bank account details for a share in a non existent Nigerian diamond mine to make the millions of badly spelt and grammatically dubious spam e- mails dispatched electronically worth the while.
Everybody who works in an office is familiar with the daily ritual of clearing their e-mail in-boxes of spam mails. Spam is relentless. As fast as new software to quarantine it arrives then new ways to evade the defences are devised by the spammers.
We have a pretty sturdy system in place here at The Post. I call it the spam-bot and its job is to read all of my e-mails before I do, scanning for expletives and profanities. If it finds a virus or anything questionable it blocks the e-mail thus preventing my ambitions to own a part share in a non existent diamond mind.
Despite spam-bot’s best efforts, though, plenty of offensive e-mails get through. I generally ignore the ones from my mother but must admit my interest is tickled by offers of Viagra in bulk, invitations to buy stock in pretend companies and urgent letters from Barclays Bank asking for my account details.
The latter I particularly enjoy since I don’t have an account with Barclays. I like to fill in the forms with completely made up information, using my colleague Tim’s desk phone number as the account number. Then I press send. I like to think about the wannabe criminal masterminds at the other end of the web going, “Hey, look, David Cameron and Jade Goody share a bank account...”
I replied to one Nigerian con artist to correct him on a few punctuation and grammatical errors when he contacted me to ask if I’d like to, “very kindly allow me to put what is nearly £6,000,000 into your account for a holding purpoise so that when I come to collect it I will give you a ten percentage as my kind thank you.”
I told him that while his assumption that I was stupid and greedy was on track, this whole ‘I have to move out of the country etc” schtick was as old as the internet hills now and no one was going to fall for it. “Do try and come up with something more original” I pleaded.
That was that, I thought.
But he replied with a “thank you”. I warmed to him. Later, because we were mates, he offered me a 15% slice of the £6 million he had to get out of the country.
Am I writing this while sipping a cocktail beside the indoor swimming pool of my new £1.5million house in Sneyd Park? No, ‘sigh’, the millions languishing in a West African vault are as real as my up market suburban Bristol address.
See? Nobody’s falling for the internet con thing anymore. So the £1000’s spent annually by companies on securing their systems from time wasting, often virus carrying spam has got to be money well spent.
An in house e-mail we got last week didn’t exactly bear that out.

“ALL DRIVERS - PLEASE READ THIS WARNING
Please be aware of new car-jacking scheme. This is the method now being used please be aware of your vulnerability
Their Method:-
You walk across the car park, unlock your car and get inside. Then you lock all your doors, start the engine and put into gear or reverse. You look into the rear-view mirror and you notice a piece of paper stuck to the middle of the rear window.
So, you put the vehicle in neutral, unlock your doors and jump out of the vehicle to remove that paper. When you reach the back of your vehicle the car-jackers appear out of nowhere, jump into your vehicle and take off!! Your engine was running, you would have left your briefcase etc. in the car and they practically mow you down as they speed off in your vehicle.
BE AWARE OF THIS NEW SCHEME THAT IS NOW BEING USED IN GLASGOW AND MANCHESTER AND IS MAKING ITS WAY ACROSS THE COUNTRY!”

Since this was sent from on high from our transport division (the very same message was doing the rounds in a few other Bristol companies, so they weren’t alone in the sucker stakes) there was clearly cause for concern. Certainly it sounded convincing.
But wait a minute, isn’t car-jacking an opportunist crime? Would a car jacker really loiter in a car park with a pack of Post-It notes? Um...no.
But in the interests of being a proper journalist, I checked. I called the news desks of the Manchester Evening News and The Glasgow Herald. Were those fair cities being plagued by stationery packing criminal masterminds? “Er... no” said Manchester, “um..I’ve never..I don’t...is this a serious question?” asked Glasgow. Strathclyde Police were sniffy to but confirmed that no such crime had ever been reported. Manchester’s police authority concurred, but much more pleasantly, so I think I know where I’d like to be car jacked in future.
Paste a snatch of the e-mail into Google and you’ll find the message intended to make our lives just that little bit darker, while pretending to make us safer, is, in fact, spam, a net-age version of a chain letter. Of American origin, it’s been around since 1997, at least. Finally, with some details changed to scare a British audience, it fetched up here. Indeed Strathclyde Police took it seriously when it was passed to them as ‘intelligence’ two years ago, admitted a press officer there, which perhaps explains their curt response to the subject.
Nonsense or not, it had the desired affect, anyone reading it becomes paranoid. I don’t drive myself, but even I checked the back of my coat for pieces of paper just in case someone was lying in wait to mac-jack me when I left for home.
It was sent out in our office with the best of intentions. But it goes to show, however hip to 21st living you think you are, there’s someone, somewhere online who knows your weak spot.