On the subject of animal cruelty videos
I've been on MySpace (in a different guise altogether) for some time now, and I've come to the conclusion it has one very major flaw. It is an ideal medium for hoaxers and time wasters to get their material circulated. Even more than with their own private e-mail, people will cut, paste, and repost bulletins without very much thought for the consequences. Chain letters get circulated as bulletins between friends and spread like wildfire. Like chain letters only worse. Recently a couple of bulletins have done the rounds flying the hysterical "animal rights" flag, and really stirred up emotions, but the observations about their distribution are as applicable to e-mail chain letters and other modes of distribution as they are to MySpace.
Ok, so yes there's a very nasty video going around. I've had the bulletin, but I haven't actually seen the offending article, because I don't have the movie plugin activated. But I've seen enough reactions to know exactly what's there - and guess what - I'm not too sorry I've missed out. Why would I want to see it?
I notice that it's rather cynically being circulated "in support of the ASPCA" just to give it that extra bit of justification. All well and good, except that there's bugger all the ASPCA can do about it. Me being me, I just had to dig a little deeper into the source.
Every time someone watches the video, it doesn't come with the bulletin on MySpace, it has to be downloaded from an outside web site. (Which happens to be true of any bulletin with a picture or sound or video embedded in it.) And guess what - if you trace this video back to where it comes from, it's a porn site.
I don't have any problems with porn, per se - if people want to make it, and other people want to consume it it's not for me to stand in their way. But all you people who've been merrily downloading this thing, before passing it along to upset all your pals, you've probably been giving a porn site the opportunity to harvest things like your e-mail address and identity from your browser, and quite possibly install pop-up exploits too. I do have problems - big time - with the amount of waste being consumed by spammers and junk mailers 90% of whom seem to be porn merchants of one variety or another, and guess where they gather their e-mail data from...? It's not rocket science.
As I said in my blog of April 6th - on MySpace, not here in MoaMM - (like anybody actually reads it), "If you really cared about anything you'd get off your arses and do something for real, instead of cutting and pasting worthless shit for your own self-satisfaction." Cutting and pasting ain't going to achieve Jack Shit, and sometimes it does more harm than good.
For your own good don't open, and out of consideration for the people you supposedly consider friends, don't pass this junk - or anything like it, that comes along in future - along.
