Free from 9 to 5 Chronicles of people and ideas to inspire and achieve freedom from a 9 to 5 job

Off-topic: phishing schemes

Email spam, comment spam, phishing schemes… these are some of negative things we must contend with even as we take advantage of the power of the Internet. This week’s I, Cringely column proposes a very simple way to tackle at least one of these problems. When confronted with a phishing email, go to the site and enter false information. If enough people do this, the phisher would have too much false data to sift through, thus foiling his criminal intents. It’s somewhat analogous to returning junk mail to companies in their own prepaid envelopes. Make things unprofitable enough for them and maybe they’ll quit bothering us. Anyway, I just wanted to help spread the word on this.