I have no idea what this means: ".................!! ..: ........h.., ...'.........h.. t........h..h.... "..., ...@...*....3544174036 ....". But vast numbers of such messages have been invading my inbox in the past year.
Initially, I wondered whether they were some sort of Morse-like cybercode. Perhaps a secret communication for the cyber elite. Of course they were simply more cyberjunk - spam - travelling vast distances for no other purpose than to be trashed.
But their numbers have got me worried. This is my seventh year of spam surveys - my annual trawl through internet sewers in search of meaning about the human condition, its motivations and frailties. And, if possible, to determine the spam trend of the year.
This year 28 per cent of my sample was of the ellipsis-comma-exclamation mark-random number variety. Add the 5 per cent that were in an impenetrable hieroglyphic font, plus a further 12 per cent written in a foreign language, mostly Chinese or German, and I had 45 per cent of spams without meaning or possible purpose other than deletion.
News 1 year ago
