Geek Drivel

English is a very curious language. When talking about software, for instance, you have first-party programs (programs that are written by the same company that developed the computer or operating system that they’re run on) and third-party programs (programs written by other companies). Where are the second-party programs? For that matter, who would “the second party” refer to?

I presume this has something to do with the literary terms of first-person point of view (“I”) versus the third-person (“they”). The second-person point of view (“you”) exists, but it is hardly ever used.

This just goes to show that English wasn’t designed by a software developer. A developer would always put the most-used options first, rather than sticking a seldom-used one between the two most-often-used ones.

A few days ago, I received three identical spam messages, one to each of three different e-mail addresses (clickable areas removed):

From: Spock Team Subject: Head Geek wants you to check out spock.com I am testing out this new people search search engine called spock.com. It seems pretty interesting and you might want to do some searches on it for yourself, your friends, or your favorite celebrities. Their homepage is www.spock.com PS – If you click here, Spock can instantly find where all your friends are on the web. Later, Head Geek - Unsubscribe: Click Here

Wow, apparently my future self is working for this group of cretins and has access to a time machine, and wanted to make sure that I knew about them. Either that, or they’ve harvested the addresses from my public GPG key, which (so far as I know) is the only place where all three of them are listed. Hm, I wonder which of those scenarios is more likely?

(According to the headers, it actually is coming from them, so it’s not some third party trying to get them into trouble. And yes, I’m quite familiar with fake e-mail headers, and this one isn’t faked at all.)

I’m extremely irked by this. Not only are they spamming, but they’re lying and claiming to be me as well. The service might well be useful, but I refuse to ever deal with spammers.

UPDATE: A few days after I posted this, Jay from spock.com wrote a comment explaining the problem, so I wrote a follow-up to this post.