In a disturbing example of invasive advertising, German agency Jung von Matt has come up with “flyvertising”.

The Spam Book tackles the annoyances of internet porn, email spam and viruses as culturally relevant media theory.

Every four weeks Floyd Hayes will create a range of buttons which uses the best spam headlines he finds in his junk mail and donate all the profits to sexual health charity.

As if spam wasn’t bad enough when it simply flooded our inboxes with promises of vast fortunes held captive in foreign lands and miracle drugs to cure all of life’s ills, new research suggests that it causes as much greenhouse gas to be released each year as 3.1 million cars. The study, conducted on behalf of computer security company McAfee by ICF International showed that nearly 80% of energy use associated with emails was taken up by users deleting unsolicited messages and searching for legitimate correspondence.
Considering the global concerns over reducing our carbon footprints and reversing the effects of climate change, [...]

I got hit with this message yesterday and it made me wonder how I opted in to American Idol spam. Maybe I had voted for one of the David’s last season. But I didn’t think I had.
It turns out that AT&T sent 75 million of these messages to its entire network. New York Times has the story here.

No matter how many enhanced levels of security are put in place by our email providers, the pervasiveness of our online activities have made spam a way of life.  By this point, we’ve all received messages that run the gamut from financial scams sent from far away lands telling of untold wealth to countless offers for life-changing pharmaceuticals that promise to cure every ill imaginable, but despite its best attempts to overwhelm us with sheer volume, it’s hard to imagine anyone actually falling for any of it these days.  So as we’ve evolved as savvy web surfers, why hasn’t our [...]