By Robert MacMillan
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Monday, May 16, 2005 10:48 AM

Spamwurst rides again.

Almost a year after they first appeared, hundreds of German-language junk e-mails are once more sprouting up in many people's inboxes. The first messages arrived Saturday with subject lines such as "Armenian Genocide Plagues Ankara 90 Years On," "Multi-Kulturell=Multi-Kriminell" and "Dresden Bombing Is to Be Regretted Enormously," the latter being a classic example of the passive-voice sentence that sounds as mellifluous in German as it sounds ridiculous in English.

The technological details come courtesy of Australian IT reporter Chris Jenkins: "A spokeswoman for e-mail filtering group Message Labs said the e-mails had been propagated by the 'Sober.q' variant of the Sober worm, the first generation of which appeared in 2003." Jenkins reported that the people who mounted the campaign used computers hijacked with the worm to double as the senders. This explains why the spam comes from all sorts of different address, including people whom you might know.

The content might not be as easy to determine for baffled recipients who don't speak German. For the most part, it constitutes a mixed bag of racist epithets, tirades about Germans being made to feel like strangers in their own land and arguments against allowing Turkey to join the European Union.

The timing seems to fit well with two notable anniversaries. The first came on April 24th, the date on which Armenians and others mark the Ottoman Empire's forced deportation of millions of Armenians, which began in 1915 and led to the deaths of 600,000 to 1.5 million people . The e-mails note modern Turkey's refusal to acknowledge the action as genocide and use it to argue against Turkey's bid to join the EU. (See this excellent writeup by Carl Bialik about the scholarly disagreements over the number of people who died between 1915 and the early 1920s.) Other e-mails point to an article in Der Spiegel describing how a Turkish woman living in Germany died after her brothers shot her on the street because she dressed and behaved in a "Western" manner.

This is an incredibly loaded issue. Many Europeans want Ankara to apologize for the Ottoman treatment of Armenians as one of several conditions on EU membership, but supporters of the Turkish bid claim that many of the high barriers to entry smack of religious intolerance and racism. Turkey's population is overwhelmingly Muslim.

The issue is even more extreme in Germany, where Turks arrived in large numbers after World War II as guest workers to rebuild the country. Many -- including members of Turkey's ethnic Kurdish minority -- continue to show up in Germany, claiming asylum and seeking work. Some Germans bemoan the Turks' presence, which now forms the country's largest minority, as well as their observance of Islamic law, or sharia. One spam e-mail links to a Web page that complains about Muslims slaughtering sheep "out in the open on the street" for a religious ceremony.

The second anniversary is May 8, the official date of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany 60 years ago. Some of the e-mails that showed up during the past weekend urged Germans to shed a "culture of guilt" imposed on them by the Allied authorities. Others wonder aloud why British and U.S. military leaders were not tried for "war crimes" such as the firebombing of Dresden, in which Allied forces incinerated the city and killed thousands of German civilians. While the e-mails often link to the extreme right-wing German National Party, no less a world leader than Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed similar sentiments in a joint interview with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder conducted by the Bild newspaper.

"The Western allies didn't abound with any special humanity," Putin said, according to MSNBC. "It's incomprehensible to me to this day why Dresden was destroyed. There was no military reason for it."

By now you're thanking me for the history lesson but wondering, "Should I be worried?" and "What can I do to avoid these?" The answer to the first question is "Probably not" and the answer to the second is "Not much."

I still don't know how many of these messages are floating around on the Internet, or who has received them. Some of you might have been hit hard, others left unscathed. I have received about 150 messages since Saturday, and they continue to trickle in at the rate of approximately two every 15 minutes. The problem with blocking them by conventional filtering methods is that many filters use English words to raise red flags.

These messages are spam, which makes them annoying. Their content is xenophobic, racist and far from politically correct, but if you don't speak German they look like gibberish. The best thing to do is to delete the messages without opening them. As for keeping them out of your inbox, you might be out of luck. Last year's barrage lasted two weeks before petering out. That is probably what will happen this time.

I called the nation's largest Internet service providers to check what they plan to do just in case the German spam attack lasts longer than anticipated. Most of them haven't called back yet, but I will provide an update when we have more information.

On a side note: Press coverage is light so far on the outbreak because it happened over the weekend. There are several reports on some English-language sites, including "The Mystery of the Right-Wing German Spam." Several German-language sites have short reports wenn Sie Lust haben, Deutsch zu lesen . One is "You've Got Nazi Mail!" in Der Spiegel. Another is located at this Swiss site. Finally, here is one from Austria.

More than 6 percent of American households no longer contain a land-line phone but contain at least one mobile phone, the Associated Press reports. The survey, prepared by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was based on in-person interviews with more than 37,000 people conducted in the second half of 2004. The AP noted that cell-phone-only adoption is happening more quickly among young adults, people living with unrelated roommates, and people who live alone.

One interesting note on this development: Public-opinion researchers are having trouble taking the nation's temperature because of the rising rate of people who ditch their old-timey telephones to go completely wireless. The AP quoted the CDC's Stephen Blumberg: "The polling community needs to come up with a strategy sooner rather than later." A version of the story carried in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram said radio-ratings company Arbitron is experimenting with cell phone surveys. And we thought we were finally safe.

The Kansas City Star, meanwhile, makes a persuasive argument against getting too cuddly with cell phones: "Government and cell phone experts [Friday] issued new consumer warnings to avoid injuries from exploding cell phone batteries. The warnings stem from about 83 reports of consumers who were injured from burns and explosions caused by defective and counterfeit cell phone batteries. Though the number of injuries remains low, in light of the fact there are 170 million cell phone users in the nation, government and industry experts say there was a need for warnings, said Scott Wolfson, spokesman for the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission."

The agency recommends that consumers avoid buying batteries or chargers from Web sites that might sell incompatible or counterfeit items, the Star reported.

The Charlotte Observer's Dan Huntley found the Internet's ultimate expression of the do-it-yourself philosophy: "If you want to build your own casket, a good place to begin is with a set of plans. For $15 you can buy a "Wood Casket Plan" from the Rockler Woodworking Superstore, www.rockler.com (and click to plans) or call (800) 279-4491. Dozens of companies sell handmade wooden caskets, starting around $400. For more information, try www.thepinebox.com or www.newmelleray.org."

Huntley quotes someone named Max Craig without explaining who he is, but the quote is a beauty all the same: "Everyone prefers not to think about death, and that's natural. ... But you have to be buried in something, and you might as well be comfortable with it because you're gonna be spending a lot of time there."

You might think that the correction fluid industry would have been completely whited out by the widespread adoption of the computer, but products like Wite-Out and Liquid Paper still constitute the bedrock of a $120 million industry, the New York Times reported: "The bottle 'seems to bring a sense of comfort throughout the day as one is bombarded with endless electronic chaos and communication,' said Sonya Thompson, marketing coordinator at Thomas Nelson Inc., a publishing company in Nashville. Ms. Thompson said she didn't really use much correction fluid, but she added, 'I find it necessary to have in my desk drawer due to nostalgia.' At BIC USA in Milford, Conn., Ellen Iszczyszyn, the national product manager for Wite-Out, the closest competitor to Liquid Paper, said the more prosaic uses of correction fluid include covering mistakes on letters, memos and envelopes, and updating information on Rolodex cards."

If only they made a version that blotted out German spam.

States may not pass laws that block wineries from shipping wines directly to customers in other states, the U.S. Supreme Court just ruled in a 5-4 decision. The court in its ruling called bans by New York and Michigan discriminatory and anti-competitive, the The Washington Post reported.