UnNews:Gates "contribution to spam" recognized

This article is part of UnNews, your source for up-to-the-picosecond misinformation.

18 June 2006

(Irkutsk, Siberia) The American Spammers and Scammers Entrepreneurial Society honoured Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates with its lifetime achievement award at its annual conference in Irkutsk today. The award recognizes Gates' enormous contribution to the industry over many years.

Presenting the award, chairman Alan Ralsky said the association chose to present the award this year because of Bill's decision to retire from his full-time poison at Microsoft. "Quite simply, without Bill Gates, there would be no spam industry. 80% of the worlds computers now run Microsoft software, which means that all those computers are available for us to use as spam relays, free webhosting, and denial of service attacks." Ralsky told how he started spamming using open relays, e-mail servers that would allow anyone to send mail through them to other users. "In those days the aim was to find mail servers running Microsoft Exchange, which by default allowed anyone to send their e-mail through it. There was no way for the administrator to turn this feature off." However, strong pressure from Internet Service Providers meant that most of these "open relays" were closed down in early 2000. Faced with bankruptcy, and the possibility of having to do honest work, Ralsky and his associates discovered that any computer running Windows could be used to send spam thanks to Microsoft's two e-mail programs, Outlook and Outlook express, together with its web browser Internet Explorer, which would run any programs sent to them as attachments or embedded in web pages. "Quite simply", says Ralsky, "if a computer will run any computer program it receives from anywhere in the world, that computer doesn't belong to its original owner any more!" Today these computers are known as "Zombies" because, like the singer Rob Zombie, they are ugly and unpleasant to be around.

Bill Gates did not attend the event, to the disappointment of Ralsky and his associates. "We notified him by e-mail that we were giving him this award" said Ronnie Scelson, Ralsky's long-time confederate. "I'm disappointed that he didn't respond. The subject line was 'CONGRATULATIONS!!! YOUVE WON!!!!!!' so he can't have missed it."