outta my tube

Back in 2006 Ted Stevens, the former US Senator from Alaska, described the internet this way: Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got...an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.

[...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Stevens was criticizing an amendment to a communications bill which would have prohibited service providers such as AT&T and Verizon from charging internet users for the privilege of higher-priority access, and was ridiculed at the time for having no understanding of the medium despite his position as chairman of the committee regulating it. The Senator is now retired, his career derailed by ethically questionable relationships, but his quote lives on. I wonder if I should write him and ask for his help in determining who hijacked one of my internet tubes.

What happened is that someone used one of my e-mail addresses to forward a message to the 61 people listed in my Yahoo roster. Afterward, my inbox filled up with a flurry of mail-daemon notices informing me of all the obsolete and discontinued addresses the message had dead-ended into.

The message was short, consisting only of a link to this page, unaccompanied by any text or explanation. I very much doubt that U.S. Drugs had any motivation to do this, and assume it was an some sort of childishly malicious act, though a fairly harmless one.

I'm not worried, but I am curious, and wonder if there's some way I can find out who the sender was.

Anyway, if you're reading this, and you were one of the recipients of this mysterious communication sent via the internet tubes, now you know why. And if you're having trouble sending outbound messages, it might be because your tube is clogged by this spurious message, sent to everyone by some Cheeto-stained knucklehead toiling away in the obscurity of his parents' basement, and attempting for reasons known only to him to ruin my reputation and make the world think I'm a sex maniac.