Fans of
Monty Python's "Spamalot"
who signed up for a newsletter on the Broadway musical's official Web site may end up getting, well, spammed a lot.
A security glitch
- now fixed - exposed the names and postal and e-mail addresses of more than 31,000 people to savvy computer users.
When told by e-mail message about the breach, several people who had signed up for the "Spamalot" list said they were unsurprised, given the state of Internet security and the aggressiveness of spammers. Several noted that there was something appropriately Pythonesque about the incident. After all, Internet historians say that the use of the word spam to refer to junk e-mail messages has its roots in a 1970 Monty Python sketch, in which all conversation in a cafe is drowned out by a group of Vikings chanting the word over and over. The sketch and its song about Spam, the meat product, were adapted for the new musical.
"Are you sure they didn't do it on purpose?" joked one list subscriber, Matthew J. H. Baya of Ellsworth, Me. "Talk about guerrilla marketing."
12.03.2005, 20:48