SEC suspends trading of 35 spam companies

Today the Securities and Exchange Commission suspended the stock of 35 companies engaged in spam, notably those penny stock companies that try to boost the value of their stock by generating interest through spam messages.

As a systems administrator, I loathe spam and spammers. We reject about 65% of all incoming email before it even is accepted by our email server, and then mark another 5-8% as spam using SpamAssassin, a heuristic-based spam identification software package. So approximately 70% of our email infrastructure is wasted on spam, and that’s based on just what we identify; some make it through our filters and make it into people’s inboxes (granted, not all of what we reject is spam, some are email-based viruses, misconfigured mail servers, etc, but the vast majority of those numbers are indeed spam). To me, spam is like driving a van through neighborhoods 24/7 blaring commercials; the lack of scruples in advertising is really amazing.

I have to applaud the people behind this video; I can’t imagine the brain damange I would occur living in a big city like New York City where advertisements are everywhere, especially now that they are video based. So, amen to the Graffiti Research Lab and the Anti Advertising Agency for coming up with a very affective and non-destructive way of getting their point across that advertising is graffiti.

-c