This could have avoided a red card, but it came from the Hong Kong branch of a noted online auction site, whose email domain has been repeatedly hacked by phishers. True, it's got a .hk stuck on the end, but given the voracity of the previous phishmails, the fluffy nature of the email, embedded link, spurious holiday tie-in and oxymoronic salutation (we are friends of the media because...we ARE the media), this receives the dreaded OffLine Red Card. Right, you: off the field, hit the showers. Game over.

Divining the digerati

Few metrics are quite as illustrative as spam: those greasy emails that promise riches both sacred and profane. Lately, the question hasn't been "how many," but rather, where.

La langue de spamme is usually English, but vexing yet quirky emails in Vietnamese have been turning up in our inboxes. How Vietnamese spammers got our contact info, we don't know, but think of it: isn't it a benchmark for digital literacy when spammers decide there's enough critical mass in any given language to mount a cyberspam campaign? Someone has decided that blasting out a squillion emails in Vietnamese will somehow snare a few dozen Vietnamese-readers with cash to spare.

Surely this is a sign that Vietnam is ascending in the realms of the digerati. After all, when's the last time you received spam written in Burmese, Khmer or Hindi?