For some time now we've all been pestered by emails from various members of the hierarchy of an outfit called Silicon News, or Silicon TV, or Silicon.com, or something. They keep telling us useful stuff like we could win a Sony DVD player if we just log into the site. We restrain ourselves. But now what about this? From: euro <euroitprouk@life.com> To: @@adslin1 Date: Wed, 07 Oct 1998 06:08:34 PDT Subject: News and TV on your PC Hi -- I thought you might be interested in Silicon http://www.silicon.com -- it's the best service I've seen for IT news and information. What's really unique about it is that it has information that's really relevant to my job and very good quality TV news and interviews. You should be able to check out the latest news by going to the inbox http://www.silicon.com/bin/bladerunner30REQEVENT,+REQAUTH,21046 What's more there's a chance of winning a Sony DVD player every week in October -- all you have to do is register and use the service. Cheesy or what, we thought. But then we checked out www.life.com, which seems to be a respectable Unix outfit called Lifetime Software Technologies, with a complaint on its front door about goddamn spammers using life.com as an email ID. So why are spammers trying to publicise Silicon TV in such a ham-fisted way? And why does Silicon TV itself keep pestering us with free DVD offers? We're sure they can't be related...