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I have a not at all popular and rarely used blog. I still get dozens of stupid spam emails and comments a day and often some phone calls too. This would not hav

I have a not at all popular and rarely used blog. I still get dozens of stupid spam emails and comments a day and often some phone calls too. This would not have caught my attention for more than 10 seconds, if I even read it at all and it did not get filtered out by various spam tools. I am quite perplexed at the people who panicked over this. It would probably rank 4th in the scariest things I have received today and seems on par with a call from the tax man claiming you owe them money and need to send them iTunes gift cards.

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
Exactly. Maybe we need better internet safety education like my 13 year old gets in school. One of the topics is “ways to identify spam”.
- iudqnolq 5y ago
  But in retrospect you guess this was spam would have been incorrect. It was a carefully crafted action by a researcher. Maybe their intuition was actually better?
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    It is spam. Whether or not the author is a researcher or scam artist is irrelevant; it is still spam.
nullc 5y ago
Imagine I dig a dangerous deep pit in my front lawn by the sidewalk. 99 out of 100 people are going to safely avoid it. 1 in 100 fall in and get severely injured. I'm still at fault even though the injury only happens rarely. And a "rare" effect can harm a lot of people when you scale up the exposure far enough. Those scam emails also cost a lot of people time and we rightfully outlaw them. In this case, it didn't fit the modality of the common scam messages, it looks a lot more like a professional litigant trying to set the recipient up for a lawsuit.