Some time ago, I read an article about the Office of Naval Research collaborating on an online game to help develop strategies to use against the pirates currently operating off Somalia, etc.  “Cool,” I thought, and added my email address to the page to be notified when the game was ready for users.  Then I forgot all about it.

Lately, I’ve been getting spammed from a mailing list that I did not recognize, and as is the norm for poorly operated and maintained mailing lists, further spammed by morons hitting “reply to all” and requesting to “unsubscribe.”  To add insult to mental injury, the spam from the list contained NO information regarding the game, other than to say, “Here’s a mailing list for suckers who provided us their email address but haven’t been selected to actually play the game.”  Kind of a sick joke, but my dark side gets it.

None of the emails I’ve received contained instructions to unsubscribe.   I assume that “feature” uses a specialized address to handle such functions; I recall one list I used years ago that appended -unsubscribe to the actual address.  I guess it is my civic duty to crack this nut and… spam the list with the information.  Heh.

A hundred or so ignorant “reply to all” messages later (thanks google, for merging them into blocks (‘threads’) instead of feeding them all to me in-duh-vidually!) and I decided to track down the original site in order to manage my subscriptions to this mailing list.  No such luck.  The system doesn’t recognize my email address as registered.  So obviously it cannot be sending me email.  But it is.  Or am I imagining it all?

*sigh*

Recently, the DoD acknowledged that cyber attacks are acts of war.

The DoN can’t properly manage a mailing list.

We’re doomed.

BTW, if you want in on the spam fest, check out MMOWGLI (Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet)