Category: General

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This is incredibly bizarre. Today I’ve started getting spam which is clearly coming from zombies and using fake return addresses and forged headers, but the content is a plaintext message encouraging hurricane relief donations and linking to the legitimate Red Cross and FEMA websites. There’s one further link, to arc.convio.net, but the ISC reports that the site is legit.

It literally looks like some spammer decided to encourage donations to the relief effort, picked an organization he figured most people would recognize, and plugged the message into his usual spam software.

I can’t decide what to do about them! On one hand, they’re spam. They’re unsolicited, they’re using spammer techniques, and they’re clearly not associated with the Red Cross. And we’ve always said the issue is “consent, not content.” But if the ISC is right, they’re not trying to pull a fast one like the scams and spyware installers that are leeching off of the catastrophe.

I keep thinking I should train the filter on them anyway, just like I would add political or religious spam, or an everyday charity that decided to start spamming for donations… but for some reason I just can’t bring myself to do it.

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I’m thinking of a word. The definition is “a feeling of shock, sadness, compassion and sometimes guilty relief in response to a disaster that happens somewhere else.” It’s not “horror,” “rage,” pity,” or “sympathy.” It could be German in origin. It’s what a good chunk of the world felt after last year’s tsunami, and it’s what a goodly number of Americans are feeling now about Hurricane Katrina.

And it doesn’t exist.

People are good at making up words. The variety of creations added to the OED each year, and the number of suggestions that are rejected, prove that beyond a doubt. We even make up words without meaning to, running together utterances like “bighuge” and “goaheadand.” We have a word—emo—for “loud, emotionally charged pop-punk music.” Some of us know the word schadenfreude and aren’t afraid to use it. If we can encapsulate stuff like this, we should be able to pick a word or two to define the enhanced survivors’ guilt and horrific fascination, laced with uncharacteristic compassion, gripping so many of us.

So far, we haven’t.

Disasters happen all the time, and always have. We’re just getting better at broadcasting them all. Before the age of telegraph and radio, it was often too late to send rescue-type aid by the time bad news arrived. Today, we can get the news in an instant, but the majority of us are simply unable to give the kind of aid—airlifts, rebuilding, law and order—we perceive as most meaningful. We are isolated by distance and circumstance, so we send money, and watch, and hope. The more we are able to watch, the more we need a word for what’s making us watch. So everybody who’s working on the projects for how to write “whole nother” and finding the modern negative of “used to,” you have a new assignment. Due date: next disaster.

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The SANS Internet Storm center, which has found itself dealing with the fallout on the Internet from a quite literal storm, is reporting that a vulnerability in Dameware (apparently a remote admin system for Windows) is being exploited. Ordinarily the solution would be to tell people to download the update… but the Dameware website is in New Orleans. Fortunately, the UK-based site is up.

Not everyone in New Orleans has gone offline. Netcraft reports that domain registrar DirectNIC has held on through Katrina and its aftermath. Being located 11 floors up in an area that hasn’t flooded yet probably helps. That, and having three weeks’ worth of backup power.

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It wasn’t enough for scum-sucking leeches to kidnap, defraud, rob, and rape survivors of last week’s tsunami. No, they have to go after victims’ families abroad. Sweden won’t release the names of hundreds of missing Swedes for fear that thieves will target their homes. Fake charities are springing up to siphon off donations. And one man inexplicably spammed worried family members “confirming” that their missing loved ones were dead.

Fortunately this isn’t the whole story. The outpouring of aid to stricken areas has been incredible. $350 million from the US government alone, not counting private donations, a staggering $500 million from Japan, with worldwide relief efforts reportedly reaching $2 billion. Doctors Without Borders has received enough donations to cover everything they expect to be able to do in the area, and are asking people to donate to their general fund instead, to help relieve other humanitarian crises. And there’s talk of both building a warning system in the Indian Ocean and improving the system in the Pacific [archive.org]. Robert Cringely has even suggested harnessing the Internet as a warning system, though in this case, many of the hardest-hit areas were still missing lines of communication.

Here’s a list of charities at MeyerWeb and the original at CNN.

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I heard someone on the radio refer to the year as “two double-oh four” (2004), a pronunciation I had never heard before in my life. This fits somewhat with what seems to me the American tendency to speak the year 1906 as “nineteen oh six,” but we also tend to say “two-thousand four.” I have it in my head that people in England say things like “nineteen hundred six,” but then I’ve seen Orwell’s novel spelled out as Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Branching to other languages, my German classes taught me to speak the date as “neunzehn hundert vierundachtzig”—effectively the same phrasing I’m used to—but my Spanish classes taught me to say “mil novecientos ochenta y cuatro,” the equivalent of “one thousand nine hundred eighty-four.” Either could have been simplified for teaching purposes.

So I have to wonder—is this an American/Commonwealth issue, a regional issue, a romance/germanic issue? How do you say the date where you live?