Rou

Have you ever had one of those moments where you had a very bad feeling?

Say, for example, you just heard or saw something and knew that under the right circumstances it would be A Very Bad Thing. Particularly if someone you know ever found out about that something?

I just did. Literally, a cold sweat appeared on my forehead.

On my work email address, I just got spam. This is highly unusual as our filters are very good at blocking them. The email was an ad for a company that will, for a modest fee, use a number of lame and craptastic methods to promote your website for the purposes of improving your search engine rating. By itself, this is an annoying thing that may lead to certain searches coming up with less accurate results and the engines having to redesign themselves to account for this tactic. It's happened before. No big deal really.

However, I have an acquaintance named Tom. Tom's a dickhead. His sole purpose in life is to fuck as many women as possible. In order to achieve that, he is obsessed with money, because money gets you laid. He started off his career selling insurance. Oh yeah, that's the time of phlegm-wad we’re talking about here.

In the late 90’s he decided to get onboard the internet bandwagon and tried to set up a spam company. We managed to talk him down (and I threatened to sue him under a state law that was passed). But he moved on to a new thing. Search engines and referrals. He set up a web page with a bunch of insurance info with links to the sign up pages. Anytime someone that he linked signed up, he got a referral fee. And he designed his site to use a number of search engine exploits to get top ratings.

However, such things can not last forever. Google shifted and he didn’t shift with them. Consequently, he lost all of his top rankings, along with most of his income. After nearly going bankrupt, he is now working with a bunch of streaming video scams to make money. Basically, he’s paying hookers to stand in front of a camera and advertise his new scam sites, then getting them top rated on google, yahoo and youtube. Oh, and he’s looking into spam emails again.

Which basically brings me to my point: I’m terrified that Tom will find this company. It seems like they are made for each other. And together, they may come up with a bad enough idea that I will be forced to hunt him down and murder him. For the good of the internet.