V!A6RA by Any Other Name Is Still V1agr@

The evolutionary dance of spam and anti-spam software mimics the tit-for-tat race between microbes and our immune system.

Early spamblockers, which caught messages containing text that an user had already defined, resembled immune systems that could only produce antibodies for previously-experienced strains of disease.

More sophisticated spam control tools work like our own immune systems: they recognize variations on a handful of key forms, such as V!A6RA, V1agr@ and any of the 600,426,974,379,824,381,950 other possible variations on the world's favorite sex booster.

(That number comes from Rob Cockerham, and has been criticized for using an algorithm that produces Viagra substitutes that look nothing like the word -- but neither does it account for other Viagra-analog tricks; "even by a conservative measure it seems safe to say there are at least a million ways to spell Viagra," notes Scientific American's
Brian Hayes.

Hayes goes on to describe the history of spam filters before pondering our spam-full future:

One conclusion I took away from my sodden experience of reading 10,000
spams was that if we can't have less spam, we really need better spam.
And there's no reason why it all has to be so monotonous and unpalatable. Just because someone is selling a sleazy, counterfeit and probably illegal product doesn't mean the advertising has to be verbal and visual sludge. On the contrary, it's the worst products that need the best marketing (think of cigarettes). I suppose this is a way of saying that the end of spam is not death but transfiguration. [...]

Diseases tend to evolve from an epidemic to an endemic state. For the first population exposed, the infection is dire and deadly; later, everyone gets a little sick but survives. It's not really in the pathogen's interest to kill the host; and although the host might well like to exterminate the disease, that seldom happens. The future of spam may be a low-grade fever.

Related Wired coverage here, here and here.

How Many Ways Can You Spell V1@gra? [American Scientist]

Image: American Scientist