Spam anyone?

No matter how jealously you guard your email address it’s probably gonna be compromised.
A while ago 25 year old AOL software engineer named Jason Smathers was convicted and sentenced to 15 months in the slammer for stealing and selling 92 million (let me say that again) 92 million AOL addresses. His thirty pieces of silver? $28,000 dollars. He sold them to another scumbag name of Sean Dunaway who used the addresses to promote an internet gambling service and sold them to others for $52,000. Those who bought the addresses sent spam for delightful products like penis enlargement pills.
Way back in the stone age of the internet I was showing off my AOL equipped computer to a radio engineer. He looked at the modem for a minute and asked “Why are the lights blinking when you’re not doing anything?” It was a good question and his take on it was the AOL guys were snooping in my machine. I thought it preposterous at the time. Now I am not so sure.
I am way beyond AOL these days. I keep email addresses for private use, for business use and to buy things with, separate.
I love doing business on the internet. It’s easy, quick and so far painless. But a recent survey said 12 % of internet users have stopped doing business on the internet entirely. Between credit card and retailers losing information and outright theft from slime like Jason Smathers, people just don’t trust the World Wide Web with their greenbacks anymore.
The bible tells the story of the tower of Babel. In broad strokes it’s about the LORD coming down to see the tower that the men were building.
The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."
So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the tower.
There was a real tower of Babel. It was meant to reach from the earth to heaven. It only got seven stories high before the builders couldn’t understand each other and the project was halted.
Now we have the internet and the possibility of all of us worldwide speaking the same language again. Or we did before all that spam. What’s that I hear? You’ve got mail? It’s an offer to make your penis and your breasts bigger.