The Indigestible

But it’s genuinely not possible. After you’ve read some of the mock ad copy and checked out the PDF of the “advertisement” flyer,¹ I think you’ll agree that it’s tragic no such device will ever exist.

Spam Got you Down?

In 2006, 17 exabytes of junk emails and commercial spambot blog comments were transferred in the United States alone. If an equivalent amount of data were put to paper, the resulting pile would be as large as Saturn.

Just reading the headers and junking the mails cost an estimated 250 million person-hours, sucking the nation’s productivity into an ever-increasing spiral of wasted time.

If you have email, chat or a blog you already know how much time you waste per day dealing with the annoyances of spam and viral scripts. You’ve installed filters and firewalls, but the flood of useless data has continued to rise like an unholy cesspool connected to Lucifer’s own privy. And it seems like there’s no way to stem the rising tide.

Now there is. Now there’s SPucker™.

SPucker™ is an innovative, simple-to-use tool that will eliminate spam at its source — the spammer himself. Simply connect SPucker™ to your Linux, Macintosh or Windows PC, then copy and paste (or drag and drop) any spam email, blog post or IRC transcript you encounter into the SPucker™ system icon.

Select the way the message was sent to you, the way you want SPucker™ to respond, and the level of dissuasion you want to transmit. SPucker™ will do the rest, delivering a 50 Kv, 0.01 mA charge or — at your choosing — a 100 Kv, 10-amp charge to the sender of the spam.

Painful or permanent, you can be sure your message will be heard loud and clear.

Doesn’t this sound like a lovely little gadget? Image mockup after the flip, as well as the link to the PDF, which goes into more detail and has a “FAQ” on page two.

SPucker will never be a reality for the simple reason that there is no direct physical connection between any two computers on the Internet, so sending a 50,000-volt electrical charge from your PC to some asshole “investor” in Kenya is impossible.

Still, it’s a lovely dream.

SPucker Fact Sheet (320 KB PDF, two pages)

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1. I made up all the statistics. I have no idea how much spam data was actually sent in 2006; there probably is no such thing as a reliable statistic on spam, partly because a lot of it gets deleted rather than studied, logged and so on; and partly because the definition of spam is actually a bit vague, being primarily “Stuff I don’t want to read”. And of course I don’t really know that putting 17 exabytes of information on paper will make such a huge mess either.