Michigan is home of one of the most hated men on the Internet: Spam King Alan Ralsky. Mike Wendland of the Detroit Free Press managed to land an interview with Ralsky and confirmed that the man really is as much of an asshole as you probably think he is.
“I’ll never quit,” said the 57-year-old master of spam. “I like what I do. This is the greatest business in the world.”
“There is no way this can be stopped,” Ralsky said. “It’s a perfectly legal business that has allowed anybody to compete with the Fortune 500 companies.”
From the interview it’s obvious that this prick doesn’t care whether or not anyone actually wants to receive the bulk mailings he sends out and won’t give up the job until someone actually follows through on one of the death threats they’ve made against him. Not that you can blame him, he’s just recently moved into a new $740,000 house paid for with his earnings from filling your email box up with his advertisements. Not content with merely bugging you via your email account, Ralsky has been talking with a couple of Romanian programmers who have a new form of spam that uses the built-in messaging system in the Window’s operating system to pop up ads whenever you’re connected to the Internet. Working hard on your tax returns? Too fucking bad. You’ll get his ad whether you like it or not.
“This is even better,” he said. “You don’t have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything.
“Isn’t technology great?”
Yes, it’s assholes like this that make America the wonderful place it is.
Posted on 02/01/2003 at 03:51 PM 
Posted on 02/08/2004 at 12:06 AM 
What I can’t understand is why somebody out there with programming skills hasn’t written a program which tracks the spam back to its source then crashes that server. I’m sure there is a perfectly legal way to exploit the fallability of the server hardware by filling it’s drives up with nonsense, or causing it to read/write so much it’s performance becomes crippled. Any hackers out there up to the challenge?