CNet reports that a new variant of the old Bagle virus is coursing through the Internet.

It's interesting to note how viruses have changed in the last thirty or so years. When computer viruses began, they were the projects of kids looking to cause trouble. Today's most prolific viruses, though, are designed to turn an infected computer into a spam robot, sending thousands of spam emails all over the world.

What have I been saying about the pervasiveness of marketing? If this keeps up, James Bond's next villain will try to engage in a hostile takeover of a major company -- literally. Whatever happened to being bad for bad's sake? It's been swallowed up by the prospect of 25 cents per spam email.

Even worse, today's viruses are smart. They automatically terminate processes associated with antivirus and anti-spyware software. They block access to security websites. They effectively strip a computer of its protection. Remember how everyone keeps telling you to install antivirus software? Whether you have it or not doesn't matter to the new Bagle virus, or any other of dozens of viruses. It will terminate the process, anyway. And you want to try to start up in safe mode? Yeah, that doesn't matter, either. It's there in safe mode. I've worked on computers for days trying to get rid of all the crap stuck on them, and sometimes I've had to give up and format the hard drive, because the virus or spyware so pervaded the operating system that there was no way to get rid of it all. Two years ago, this was nothing more than an interesting exception to the spyware/virus rule. Spyware back then was easy to get rid of through "Add/Remove Programs." Now, the spyware hides deep within the registry and file structure. It masquerades as a dozen fake applications in the C:\Windows\System directory. It terminates your anti-spyware program. It blocks web access to Symantec's website. "Add/Remove Programs" doesn't work anymore.

And why spam? As Bruce Schneier points out, it's because people actually read it. Some people read spam emails, and since the cost of sending spam emails is ridiculously low, it doesn't take a lot of people to read those emails and buy those products to make the emails profitable. We've got one of two options, here: (1) alter people's web-browsing habits so they don't open spam emails; or (2) levy fines against known spam senders. This last one is hard, because spam senders are often not companies, or if they are, they're companies whose "official policies" are to not send spam, while at the same time they pay Eastern European hackers 25 cents per spam email sent with the new spam virus that the kid wrote. What's happened to the world when corporations have infiltrated run-of-the-mill mischief? Pretty soon, punks will be spraypainting buildings and bridges with the Pepsi logo instead of regular old grafitti -- and Pepsi will pay them for their troubles.

Meanwhile, over here at SEDHE, the comment-spam is getting smarter. Now, whatever robots that are sending comment spam are including what appear to be random URLs from actual blogs along with links to the crap that they're advertising. This makes it difficult to program MT-Blacklist, since each individual comment spam contains a different URL and a different, randomly-generated fake email address. The point of comment spam is not to have people click on the links. The point of comment spam is for the owner of the blog to ignore the spam until such time as the page with the comment spam link on it gets archived by the search engines. The more pages there are with the same link, the higher the search result, and the more money these companies can weasel out of advertisers. This strategy takes advantage primarily of Google's search algorithms, which don't just search the Internet for text strings, but also index searches based on how many other web pages are linking to a particular web page. This is precisely how Kerry supporters got the phrase "miserable failure" to link to the White House website as the number one search result in 2004: by taking advantage of Google's unique feature of seeing how many pages link to a given page. The same goes for comment spam and trackback spam.

But it doesn't stop there. All sorts of robots sign up for free Blogger accounts. They're mostly redirects to major porn websites, and they get a lot of hits because people have become wise to what URLs for major porn sites look like; a Blogger URL seems less like "corporate" porn. But, sadly, the online porn industry is smarter than you are. (In fact, the porn industry has pioneered a lot of the technology now commonly found on the web.)