You're Never Too Old ...

You're never too old to do something stupid.

I had recently set up a profile on Facebook. I've become addicted to playing the word games Scramble and WordScraper with my friends there. No, that's not the stupid part.

I pride myself on knowing better than to succumb to phishing e-mails or spam of any kind. I never, ever click on links in e-mails from people and organizations I don't know, and I use my antivirus scanning software on all attachments that I even think I might want to open. But we all know where pride goeth ...

This morning, before I'd had any caffeine (tea), I stupidly clicked on the link to a video in an e-mail purporting to be from a good cyberfriend and sent through the Facebook interface. It made sense to get such a message from her because she does sometimes send me links to funny and legitimate videos. And then the spam hit the fan, and Facebook disabled my profile. I'd fallen victim to a Facebook worm, which sent out spam to everyone on my friend list at Facebook.

I've written Facebook a polite message explaining the situation, noting that I've eradicated the worm by using Spybot Search & Destroy, and requesting that my profile be reinstated; I'm still waiting to hear back. I'm hoping that they'll find, in their files, my recent complaint about another Facebook profile illegally using my copyrighted artwork (a case that was satisfactorily resolved) and will think, Oh, well, no one complaining about copyright violation would go around spamming people on purpose. But that's just hope at the moment.


Updated 12:14 p.m., 8/26/08: I'm back on Facebook. Yay!



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