Talking spam

Net users may soon be longing for the good old days when electronic spam
filled their e-mail boxes quietly. A Californian company has developed a compact
Java applet that can be e-mailed to make spam talk or play music. When someone
opens the e-mail, a 7-kilobyte applet automatically launches itself, “so every
desktop computer that receives the e-mail can instantly hear the enticing tones
of the sponsor’s message”, according to the system’s developers, AudioBase of
Sausalito. AudioBase has already signed up two companies that admit sending tens
of millions of e-mails a month. The system runs on any e-mail program that can
open HTML documents.