failed delivery



the latest cute trick that some penis-compromised bum-fluffed cretin from Poughkeepsie's thought up is to make a worm that comes from the fraudulent address, MAILER-DAEMON, subject-line FAILED DELIVERY. This is the domain that Hotmail legitimately returns failed deliveries from, so it's almost inevitable, if you've had returned mail through MAILER-DAEMON before, that the first time you receive this you'll thoughtlessly click on the attachment, which purports to contain the original e-mail, in order to check who it is you can't get through to, and, by so doing, release this bastard worm into your hard-drive, where it's going to home in on your e-mail client, root through your address-book and send itself on to everyone in it, replacing the 'from' with that bloody 'MAILER-DAEMON' message (mac users exempt, of course, as always), all in less time than it takes to say ‘wha…’.
I mean - who are these guys?
you try to relax, breathe deep, and practice zen-acceptance and buddhist compassion here, but you keep wondering, what are people like this for? what niche of the ecosphere do they occupy that requires that they exist?
because this is not a side-issue of the arguably semi-legitimate hackers endless guerilla war with microsoft - these incontinent losers are targeting the whole world, in a completely indiscriminate manner. it's a relatively benign manifestation of the Washington sniper syndrome.
does it help, does it somehow, in some damp bleak recess of their under-developed lizard's cortex register as a score, therefore a form of satisfaction, therefore a momentary release from the need to do it again, knowing that they have had some effect on the world, albeit akin to the three-year-old's playing with his willie in front of the relatives? or is it just another junkie thing, another inevitable manifestation of social inequity and capitalism? or is it something else entirely, something as incomprehensibly alien to the received conventions of morality and ethics as Columbine?
destroying stuff is fun, sure - why else do people get glued to the war-porn footage – and I can imagine there’s a great sense of pride in the utterly misplaced creativity required to write some of this code, but I can't really imagine these kind of guys manifesting 'enjoyment' in any way identifiable as a human characteristic. do they meet and swap stories over a few beers at each others houses, rooms, nests, burrows, whatever, about how they did this and infected that, and laugh about it and slap each other on the back? And does the atmosphere ripple with the sound of infectious laughter, and do their girlfriends raise their eyebrows and surreptitiously swap Linkin Park for Stereolab on the cd player and hope they’ll be too engaged in the boasting battles to notice?
Or do they snigger alone, sharing out particles of their secrets only via hardened security protocols in specialist chatrooms where no-one knows anyone’s real name, meanwhile reassuring their worried parent, knocking timidly at their bedrom door, that they’re just doing their homework?