The Internet: a wretched hive of scum and villany

The Internet is an unedifying place. If you regularly use email or read the web then you’re constantly exposed to reminders of just how low the human race is capable of sinking. Every day I find myself shaking my head as I see the output of hordes of mindless, unoriginal, uncreative, greedy cretins spilling into my inbox or splashed across the web. In this brief article I want to list some of the most obvious offenders: pathetic individuals incapable of peacefully coexisting with others, incapable of a creative act or of contributing anything that could enrich others or the society in which they live, seeking only to line their own pockets or do damage to others.

Full-time litigators

Most notoriously exemplified by the once-UNIX-company now-litigation-firm SCO, headed by the repulsive Darl McBride. Their multiple, spurious lawsuits are well documented here. In and out of the courtroom this company and its legal team have repeatedly demonstrated that there is no limit to the depths to which they’ll stoop or the dirtiness with which they’ll play the game in a transparent and desperate attempt to extort profits from the endeavors of others.

I’ve got nothing against litigation per se — sometimes there are good reasons for going to court — but this kind of business which has stopped trying to produce good products and dedicated itself to extortion, blackmail, libel and slander is another matter entirely. They are morally and ethically bankrupt, and soon the company will be too at the rate it’s currently burning through cash.

Abusers of monopoly

Big, old, bad, MS. No sense in rehashing their litany of sins here. Is MS bad because they’re a monopoly? Not at all. Their crime is abuse of that monopoly to unfairly smother competition and stifle innovation. To make matters worse their underhanded, anti-competitive efforts are shrouded by a sickening cloud of rhetoric and marketing about how innovative they are.

I don’t hold anything against them for wanting them to maximise their profits but I do object to the fact that they insist on doing it in a way that harms consumers rather than benefits them. I think it’s possible to do both, maximise profits and benefit consumers, but evidently MS doesn’t share that philosophy.

Rip-offers (Riper-offerers?)

Companies that take open source software (licensed under the GPL), strip the copyright notices and incorporate the code into their commercial products. There’s nothing wrong with using GPLed code in a derivative commercial product but if you distribute that product the license requires you to make the source code of it available under the GPL as well, something that these companies refuse to do. In fact, when faced with forensic evidence showing that their software contains the stolen code they deny its presence, squirm, wriggle, try to intimidate with legal threats and frantically try to cover their tracks by altering the binaries and surreptitiously replacing the copies on their servers. Caught red-handed all they can do is lie themselves deeper into the pit that they’ve dug.

Patent profiteers

Some companies take out patents largely for defense. Not for defense of their good ideas but for defense from preemptive, profit-motivated legal attacks. Unfortunately in doing so they end up tacitly indicating their approval of the patent system and become part of the problem. Their conduct is not immoral but it is undesirable.

Others take them out for offensive purposes. There’s no doubt that these companies belong in the Hall of Scum.

But the worst group of all are those who make patents their sole source of income. Instead of producing products they make their money by suing people who "violate" their patents. I have no respect for these people because they are like mindless parasites, contributing nothing to society or the public, working only to fill their coffers and those of their shareholders.

The shareholders who invest in these firms, knowing full well that their business amounts to nothing more than attempted extortion, aren’t too far from the bottom end of the moral scale either.

Spammers

Spamming is based on both greed and logic. Greed because the spammers want to make money and logic because experience shows that if you bombard millions of people with unsolicited mail then the law of averages states that at least some of them will take the bait, thus putting the spammer in front.

Greed is a fairly common human vice and I won’t be the one to cast the first stone. What makes these spammers’ actions most reprehensible (and definitely worthy of having a few stones cast in their direction) is not that they’re greedy but that they blatantly and overtly try to circumvent people’s desire for privacy and to be left alone.

Analyze any spam mail in your inbox and you’ll see all sorts of evidence that the spammer knows that you didn’t want to receive it, that they decided to send it anyway, and that they used all sorts of devious technical trickery in an effort to get past the barriers you put in place to block the spam. The spammer therefore not only knows that you’re not interested in receiving spam but also that you’ve explicitly done your best to prevent it from being delivered. That is, you’ve expressed a preference and you’ve taken steps to ensure that it’s respected. Well, the spammers couldn’t give a damn about lofty ethical concepts like "respect" so they decide to side-step your decision and fill your mailbox anyway.

Scammers

Scammers are even lower on the moral ladder than spammers. These are the people who send you fake messages pretending to be from your bank and asking you to update your credit card details. While spammers are a bunch of highly unethical "entrepreneurs", scammers are nothing more than fraudsters, thieves and crooks.

Spyware and adware authors

Another despicable bunch. Instead of coming up with something that people want and that enriches their lives they dishonestly try to inflict their wares on unwilling users in an effort to make profit from people who never elected to be their "customers".

It’s part of the nature of capitalism that advertising takes on ever more pervasive forms: in books, magazine, television, on the Net, on billboards, on the sides of our buses, written in the sky, emblazoned on our very clothing and bodies. It’s one thing for advertisers to find new arenas in which to compete for the public’s attention, but it is another matter entire for a mindless profiteer to circumvent somebody’s privacy and install software on their computer against their will.

Virus and worm writers

Not much to say about this bunch of mindless vandals (and that’s exactly what they are: mindless vandals whose sole purpose is to destroy. When was the last time you heard about a politically motivated virus author?).

Pirates

As a small software producer I feel the brunt of piracy. These people, who believe that they are entitled to stuff for free, put small software companies out of business or drain the resources available to them for development. Everybody else loses out because the direct consequences of piracy are: fewer products, fewer companies competing in the arena, fewer features (because piracy saps development time), and tougher anti-piracy measures for everybody (including those who have never pirated anything).

Cloners and Copiers

People who can’t come up with their own ideas for software, so they decide to copy the good ideas of someone else. Personally, I think these people should get another job.

Search engine "optimizers" (SEOs)

A new category of euphemistically-named scum, these are people who will use any means, fair or foul, to get your site ranked higher in the search listings. Want to promote your product? Instead of improving it and building up a popular base of interest and support just pay a SEO! The SEO in turn doesn’t contribute anything to society. He or she "works" only to get his share of the money. His less than ethical goal is to earn your site a place in the search engine rankings that it couldn’t gain through merit.

Leechers

If you’ve ever used BitTorrent you’ll know that the idea behind distributing files using the "swarm" is that everybody shares a bit of the load of distribution. Unfortunately there are a lot of people out there who for some unknown reason believe that they have a greater entitlement to the content being distributed (and less of an obligation to share in the work of distributing it). The leechers I refer to here are not the "leechers" in the technical sense of "downloaders" that are referred to in the BitTorrent documentation; these are people who dedicate their attention to avoiding their social responsibility and actively work to exploit the system in their favour.

I’m sorry, but as Tyler Durden says in the movie Fight Club, "You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake." I couldn’t agree more.

Summary

I’m sure there are many other categories out there that I’ve missed out in this short summary. It’s a picture which is getting gloomier every year. Back when I first hit the Internet (1994) almost none of these categories existed (and if they did they existed in a different form). I wonder what the picture will look like in another ten years.