Camouflage doesn’t come in just grey and green anymore…

“Camouflage is a great way to get noticed.” I chose to put this statement first in quotes because although I first heard it during a television commercial while watching NASCAR, such a concept is not a proprietary principle and I’m sure the Army will be lenient in their judgment of why it holds such a profound statement for use and application above and beyond any military structure.

One principle of street-based community policing strategies here in the States is that visibility is both a deterrent and a means of providing augmented defenses against outbreaks of a broad base of unacceptable behaviors such as theft, domestic violence, rape, and even murder. Well-lit properties and streets also provide a certain degree of deterrent as well, so how does someone go about setting up what in real life would be lamp posts and light bulbs to both deter and defend against spam?

What is classified as “spam” are actually maps designed by someone, camouflaged to appear benign in nature (such as an advertisement for a product or a request for someone to update their PayPal account), with its truest intent obscured by virtual camouflage. These digital packets come wrapped in various shapes and sizes and can take you for a 5 or 6 round trip around the world before their Signature Signal actually handshakes with your hard drive.

But don’t let the delivery methods being used pull too much wool over your eyes, ‘cause isn’t that letting your own wool provide extra camouflage for those who have no problem taking the risk of being discovered at least as a blip on someone’s radar, knowing that the odds are astronomically in their favor none of us, myself included, can monitor and isolate the immediate launch of these types of unwelcome assault tactics.

Also, don’t be tricked into believing their economic projections trump all consumer desires either. There’s a phone call recording out there between a security expert offering up the opportunity for intellectual debate on the matter with one of the more well known mass mailers and when I find it again, I’ll link up to it (or maybe you know what recording I’m talking about? ). There is a preponderance of evidence pointing towards an obligation to provide both defensive and offensive moves against such distracting materials…for most of us…and the swapping of letters and numbers to push past the free and paid filtering services is quite…ummm…Battleship-like?

If I lost you with that last paragraph, the game of Battleship is played with two boxes with grids inside of the lid and the bottom (sort of like a laptop setup, but without a keyboard). Each player chooses the positions of 5 ships, each containing a certain number of holes ranging from 2 to 5. Also in the bottom portion, to the left of the grid, are two areas where a bunch of white and red pegs are typically kept (mine were kept in Baggies, but that’s because I didn’t want them to scatter all over the place if the lid popped open or I dropped it…call me crazy…).

The object of the game is to call out spaces on the grid by using an identical labeling system as seen in most spreadsheet programs, but on a much smaller scale, and hope that your opponent is honest enough to tell you the truth whether or not you managed to “hit” one of their 5 ships, with a winner being declared when all 5 of an opponent’s ships are “sunk.”

Now for those of us who survived the 80’s American Culture and are familiar with the whine, “You sunk my Battleship,” stopping or at least reducing the quantity of spam is not always a simple task of connecting the blips that do show up within someone’s line of sight and then radiating one at a time to each hole one step away from the hit.

In fact, many of the current mass mailings are filled with so many different types of camouflage techniques, I’ve come up with a name for it. Might be a little long, but it works.

“With love Forever and Infinity, from your loving spouse….ha-ha! Actually, I’ve never met you before but I’m willing to bet you could use a drain on your finances right about now and you just don’t know it yet. Just take a look at this particular banking site I’m promoting! It’s a U.S. Based-Bank you’ve surely heard of on television and radio and if you let me take you there, I promise you you’ll love every second of it…ha-ha! Actually, you won’t necessarily love it, but I sure will be laughing all the way to my bank…oh wait! I don’t have to even leave the couch to take care of business!”

That’s why I thought the observation that camouflage is a great way to get noticed was beyond the boundaries of the promoter of such a philosophy. I’ve always paid more attention to the sites that invent and implement camouflage as a part of their Internet presence.

That’s why I thought Valatrax would be such a cool name for this particular blog.

Not to be confused with Valtrex, which is a medication to treat genital herpes.

But for what it’s worth, it didn’t show up when I did my search on the combination of my name with an updated spelling of tracks and I thought it had a catchy ring to it.

I wonder if my combination will ever hit the Spammer Circuit with a sales pitch for the drug. Which, if it does happen, then let me state here that I do not endorse the product itself, but I do support the idea that people in need of medicinal care should be able to have access to such materials. So Valatrax gets scrambled with Valtrex in the search engines, make sure you take a moment to wonder why someone would do something like that in the first place and then ask yourself, “What can I do today to shine a light on something sent camouflaged as a sales pitch for a product, when the sales pitch isn’t entirely true?”

And although doing something about it on a daily basis is admirable and certainly something to be applauded, the rest of us don’t have to leave these professionals swinging in the winds with a broad-based apathetic disconnect with an issue burdening one and all (whether we like it or not, it appears! LOL! ). Although reporting spam to services such as SpamCops or a fraudulent banking site to Artists Against 419 (www.aa419.org) is a helpful contribution in narrowing the spotlight, there are still solutions yet to be contemplated, answers yet to be discovered, questions to be explored but I’ll be darned if I can figure out how to play such an advanced version of the game I once used to play as a distraction from the environment around me…

Yeah.

Camouflage both attracts and deters, as well as diverts and divides our attention in the virtual world.

And now that you made it this far, if you are interested in learning more obscure perspectives about the Internet just like this one, I’d like to invite you to visit my retired web design practice, located at http://caera.wordpress.com. It’s a couple years old, so some of the materials might be slightly outdated, but the overall spirit is that I was intent on recording as many of the basic steps involved with developing your overall Internet presence and keeping up with the detailed knowledge nuggets were just too much for this particular woman still stuck with some semblance of an 80’s mind-set.

Yeah.

Cute Lesson Of Life, don’t ya think? Camouflage is a great way to get noticed. Works with or without the quotation marks and with or without military support.

Hmmm…now let me put on my Valatrax hat made of tin and leather (and a few other secret ingredients). Treating this phrase as a logic-based statement of provable fact, I wonder if this would apply if I was to start wearing different shades of green on stage. I suspect despite its logic ring and tone, as a musician, it wouldn’t really matter much what I was wearing while on a stage. I’m thinking if I blew a bass note when it was my turn to strum my strings, I could be naked except for high heels, but it would still sound like something went severely wrong during my attempt to entertain with a bass in my hand rather than using this keyboard to generate a laugh or two and that gets boring after a while…despite the high heels.

Darn it! You just sunk my bass note!*

Valerie

* Sorry if that joke falls a little flat, but somehow my bass is constantly thrown out of its traditional tuning of E, A, D, and G and I’m willing to try blaming ghosts for the problem. What else could explain it since I so rarely pick it up in the first place?