nettime: all clear (signal)

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

dear nettime,

in recent days we received many responses on the
kiddy porn spam. If we made you angry or you felt
disgusted and disturbed by it, than we would like
to apologize for forwarding this e-mail, which
turned out to be a fake. It is a good example of
misinformation. Some of you even wanted to bring
AOL to court, but this is of course useless in case
of a hoax.

Apart from the true and good objections from many
of us against the few real cases of net abuse 
concerning the trade with child pornography, we
for the first time made experience with the
surveilance machine, that has been installed
recently to trace activities which were declared
illegal. The same infowar technologies can be used
on other keywords, which may not relay on a wide
concensus. PICS and the European office against
child abuse contacted us immediately, others may
follow, not to talk about some other blacklists.

Even though we regret to have opened the window
to moral panic for a short time, we do like to
discuss these fakes and spams as bordercases
of mass psychology and new, rude and cleaver forms
of direct marketing.
Some spams, posted around, could be classified
as net.art projects to test us, the users,
to take away our innocence and play with our
misconceptions. This one missed its aim.
Good fake e-mail makes you sensible what
truth and reality is within cyberspace. Bad fake
e-mail makes one paranoid.

Geert (and Akke) is collecting spams at the moment,
for a possible Museum of Spams that will also
advice about anti-spam weapons. According to many
within the nettime family, the ammount of spams is 
definetely on the rise. Let's do something.

pit+geert
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