In my travels around the Web, I keep running across references to a site called The Cheating Culture. It publicizes the book of the same name by David Callahan, whose thesis is that a “harsh unfettered market and soaring income gaps have corroded our values … and threaten to corrupt the equal opportunity we cherish. … [T]he Winning Class has enough money and clout that it can cheat without consequences while many in the Anxious Class believe that cheating is the only way to succeed in a winner-take-all world.”
Now, I haven’t read the book, but I see plenty of evidence that this thesis is at least partially true when I look around the Internet. Everywhere you turn, someone is lying, cheating, and scamming, in an effort to rip you off.
Spammers steal bandwidth from legitimate server owners and peddle phony goods with outrageous lies. Virus writers deliberately send software into the world designed to hijack your computer and turn it into a platform from which to launch more spam. I regularly hear from people wanting to know if they should take advantage of some offer (for cigarettes, or OEM software, or a second mortgage) they received in a piece of spam. (No! Never give money to spammers. Never ever!) And we won’t even talk about the 12 e-mail messages I already received this week, supposedly from eBay or PayPal or Citibank, asking me to click a link so I can enter my name, password, credit card number, and other details they can use to drain my bank account and steal my identity.
This morning, I read a complaint about a piece of software called Spykiller (no, I won’t link to it). It claims to rid your system of spyware. Based on a quick Google search and a cynical first look at the developer’s Web site, I believe it actually does no such thing and will probably make a mess of your system. To add insult to injury, this piece of junk (according to reviews I read) uses pop-up windows to nag you to buy the $50 version, and uninstalling it appears to take skills that are beyond the average user. (Ironically, the best spyware blocking programs are free: Spybot S&D and Bazooka Adware and Spyware Scanner are at the top of my current recommended list.)
Now, even on my most cynical days, I don’t think our culture has been taken over by thieves and cheaters. I believe that the overwhelming majority of people are honest, decent, and sickened by what they see in their inbox. The problem is that the basic infrastructure of the Internet assumes that everyone on it should be trusted. As a result, technical measures designed to block hostile software, spam, and other junk have to be grafted on to the top of existing systems, rather than being built in as part of the foundation. The more these filters work, the more persistent the bad guys become in trying to work around them, and the more it appears that we’re completely surrounded. A single spammer blasting out 10 million messages a day through hundreds of hijacked computers looks like an army, even when he’s really just a pathetic loser living in a trailer park.
The recently passed CAN-SPAM law is a joke. The recent lawsuits
by Microsoft and New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer may actually do some good. Plenty of these thieves and rip-off artists are Americans, and putting a few of them in jail would be a good start.
In the meantime, here’s the depressing fact of life: On the Internet, you have to assume that you will be approached every day by people who are trying to rip you off. Most of these attempts are laughably amateurish and easy to spot, but once in a while someone produces a scam that’s clever enough to fool even a sophisticated cynic whose guard is temporarily down.
No, I don’t think we don’t live in a cheating culture. But on the Internet, it sure doesn’t hurt to act like we do.
Ed Bott 