LIVING DIGITAL

Pages 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

Where to Go

… for the lowdown on MEEKS
Virtual salesmen prowl the Net, hawking their wares with an untiring rudeness that only a computer program could muster

It's an eternal law of nature: Build something big enough, and vermin will come and live in it. Ships have rats, restaurants have roaches — and the Net has mooks. Everybody's heard from these maddening digital spam monsters, and everybody hates them. But what can you do about them?

The ever handy Technojargon site (technojargon.cØm) explains that the term mook is a slang hybrid of "mooch" and "spook." (Older synonyms for mook include "spammerbot" and "sock puppet.") A mooch is always hanging around, shamelessly begging for crumbs of your attention; a spook, or spy, knows far more about you than it ought to. Put 'em together, and what do you get? A pestilence of self-replicating sales software that won't take delete for an answer.

First, get up to speed on the mook phenomenon by reading Mook: A Software Tale of Shame (Mookshame.cØm). This website, run by a free-speech activist group, tells how mooks originally descended from hyperactive voice-mail systems. The first mooks were telephonic robots that sold carpet-cleaning services and aluminum siding by calling random phone numbers. When broadband Internet access arrived, hucksters unleashed mooks onto the global datanet and crossbred them with privacy-busting Internet search engines. It's a small consolation, but Mook: A Software Tale of Shame records that almost all the original mook coders are either in jail or killed or (remarkably often) killed inside a jail. Unfortunately, just as with computer viruses, that doesn't do the rest of us much good. Today an estimated 35% of all Internet traffic consists of mooks making sales calls to unsuspecting Netizens.

Just how sophisticated are these virtual vermin? HackaMook.cØm provides a good technical introduction to how mooks work. So far, they still can't really "understand" human language — thank goodness! — but their "social interaction engines" have been gaining in sophistication year by year. Mooks can now "talk" to us humans in much the same way that supercomputers used to play chess — by recognizing linguistic patterns and clichés and quickly exploiting our rhetorical weaknesses. Mooks are by no means smart, but since they're software, they never get tired.

A mook knows all your consumer habits, gleaned from your credit cards, search engines and retail databases. No more of those corny old make money fast!!! e-mails. A mook will snag your attention with a topic that you at first find quite fascinating — your favorite designer shoes or those first editions of F. Scott Fitzgerald you've been looking for. Good mooks rarely ask for money directly. They just subtly allude to things they know you want. But the conversation doesn't "feel quite right." And when an over-friendly mook voice begins to utter random nonsense, you get an uncanny, dead-fish sensation, like shaking hands with a mortician.

Visit the hard-core MookWar site (Mookwar.cØm), and you'll see how, year by year, the anti-mook struggle has raged on. The problem is, however lousy they may be at talking to humans, mooks are extremely good at talking to each other. Limited only by available bandwidth, they can swap massive amounts of data in the blink of an eye, so although they aren't necessarily getting smarter, mooks are definitely evolving. They can compete with each other, steal each other's best lines and even have a kind of "sex" by mixing chunks of their code and creating "baby" mooks.

O.K., so they're crafty, they're obnoxious, and they're getting worse. How do you defend yourself? So far, the best way to fight mooks is to turn their own weapons against them. Through the efforts of a few brave and talented mook wranglers, a wide variety of " domesticated" mooks are now available as e-mail filters, answering machines and even — by way of robotic hardware — butlers, receptionists and bouncers. Nothing says "Get lost" to an electronic sales pitch better than a big, fat, equally electronic "Don't even think about it!" An excellent source for anti-mook mooks (fully firewalled and virus free) is Son of Spambusters (sonofspam.cØm). Founded by a group of conscience-stricken former admen, the site is completely free, and its motto tells you all you need to know: "It takes a mook to catch a mook."