Various types of blindness

From the apologies department: A couple of weeks ago I wrote that several companies seemed committed to spamming me even though I had unsubscribed several times to each of the various lists they had added me to.

I accused Dotster of such behavior. Turns out I had in fact once registered a domain through them, and though I don't remember checking a box that said "Send me regular sales pitches, oh please, oh please, oh please," I must have done so.

The result was that their messages were sent to the address I registered with, which happened to be an alias for my normal e-mail address. So when I sent my unsubscribe request it came from the real account and the request failed. Not that I knew the request had failed, mind you; there was no reply.

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From the apologies department: A couple of weeks ago I wrote that several companies seemed committed to spamming me even though I had unsubscribed several times to each of the various lists they had added me to.

I accused Dotster of such behavior. Turns out I had in fact once registered a domain through them, and though I don't remember checking a box that said "Send me regular sales pitches, oh please, oh please, oh please," I must have done so.

The result was that their messages were sent to the address I registered with, which happened to be an alias for my normal e-mail address. So when I sent my unsubscribe request it came from the real account and the request failed. Not that I knew the request had failed, mind you; there was no reply.

Of course, I am the only person in the world who uses aliases. And as I am also the only person in the world to make this mistake, adding code to reply to unsuccessful unsubscribes with "Sorry but we have no record of that address being subscribed," would be a waste of their time. Even so, mea culpa.

Beating-over-the-head department: On the other hand, another company I mentioned as being committed to blindly sending me spam, DiversityBusiness.com, still hasn't stopped. Three more messages this week. Strange, strange people.

Anti-deceptive practices department: Well, well, well. The Federal Trade Commission is doing something about spyware even though The Spy Act I discussed in BackSpin last week hasn't been approved by the Senate and thus is not yet a law. Nope, using existing laws (which confirms one of my points last week), the FTC has gone into attack mode against arch-spammer Sanford Wallace over his companies' use of spyware and deceptive marketing practices.

One of the things that Wallace's minions did was add a script to Web pages so that when you viewed the page in your browser the script ejected the CD tray. Now if you weren't expecting such a thing to happen you'd be a bit surprised. And when your Web browser then displayed a message to the effect that your system was compromised and you needed to do something such as buy software to fix the problem, if you were a naïve consumer that is exactly what you would do.

Wallace's companies not only did that, but they also installed spyware using deceptive links and dialogs and flooded susceptible PCs with pop-ups to get users to buy their SpyDeleter and SpyWiper utilities and collect information from users.

The FTC's civil lawsuit claims that Wallace and his companies violated federal laws that prohibit "unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce."

Wow. So consider this: Microsoft's ads that erroneously compare the total ownership cost of Linux with that of Windows and find Windows the winner are not considered unfair or deceptive, while Wallace's companies' exploits are? The U.S. government is alone in this view of Microsoft's ads - the European Union (in agreement with everyone with half a brain who ever thought about the ads for 10 seconds) thought otherwise and recently ordered Microsoft to cut it out.