Earlier this week, after Clay Shirky published Power Logs, Weblogs, and Inequality, I subscribed to his mailing list at nec-request@shirky.com. I got a confirmation email from the list and nothing else so far. Until tonight, when I got an email from that address and what looked like a virus in the message body. (Fortunately I was reading mail with a client that wasn’t susceptible to email viruses.) The headers included all the usual mailing list headers. All possibly forged, of course, but the address to which the mail was sent is one that’s not on the web anywhere, but is subscribed to the list.
If someone’s hijacked Clay’s mailing list administration system to send a virus, that’s seriously uncool. I’ve emailed Clay to let him know what’s up.