Alright, not everybody here keeps up with Ars Technica, forgive me for talking like a Slashdotter please….

You may have heard of (or remember having to clean up after) computer worms like MyDoom, Sasser, and Zobtob. One which definitely made the news was ILOVEYOU for anybody’s family who doesn’t use computers often enough to know this stuff. These are bits of executable code that try to get onto your computer and send themselves onto other computers from your computer to take over as many as possible. Once on your system a worm may do all kinds of things besides trying to infect other computers and things worms have done in the past include wiping your hard drive, stashing the cracker’s porn on your computer, DDoS attacks, more, and sometimes nothing at all.
In earlier days the people who put out computer worms generally made them for simple vandalism and/or showing-off purposes but most of the recent serious worm attacks have had a mercenary aim: To take over your computer so that a cracker can use it. Once they’ve done so the technical term “zombie” applies, meaning a computer which has been taken over for use by a remote cracker that the user has no relationship to, and if sufficiently unaware of the internals of their computer (“Why is this so slow all of a sudden? It took only 5 seconds yesterday.”) the user may be totally unaware their computer has been compromised.
For a decade approximately the people who took over computers with zombies have been using them to launch DDoS attacks, Distributed Denial of Service, where they get their “zombie” computers to send lots of junk traffic at a target to use up all its bandwidth. With commercial and banking sites this has been done unknown numbers of times to extort money from the owners.
A couple years ago something really ugly and disgusting happened: People running zombie networks started selling their services to each other and spammers, so now it’s very likely that spam being sent at you was sent from a regular home user’s computer where the user doesn’t even know what’s happening.

Regarding tech-sounding jargon, there’s lots of places to go to read interesting things that explain a lot of the jargon. Slashdot is amongst the easiest to read of them all, and it’s known to have numerous good comments on its articles in the users section (they’ve got a refined comment rating system): http://slashdot.org/
Others include The Register (UK publication), Kuro5hin, and Ars Technica, all of which should be easy to find on a google search and have served to inform me of a lot of this stuff.
The aticles in such places will vary between readable English and advanced jargon depending on the topic, writer and level of the article.

I was more curious what you did to secure yourself when you attempted this.

Smart, maybe.
Spent way too much time being paid to do the impossible by the technically clueless, definitely.

Oh Dick! Never change, you one-track rascal.

Ooo! THe witch is named Rose, eh? I’ll have to play on that over at 1977… maybe Rose and Lily are relatives of Bewitched’s Samantha! hmmm… And Rose is a redhead too… I didn’t think of that! Rose is a cool character too… bring it on!

I was told YEARS ago that most of the spam mail is to get you to reply so they can verify you’re real. I just delete the damn things… except the male enhancement ones… those work… trust me…

So you’re the one who’s been putting my email address on all those spammer lists.

They don’t have my email.

Is there a way to sell you friend’s emails?

That’s a good way to get your email address on an active spam list. If you respond to them, they know you’re using that address, and they can sell it off to other spammers. There’s a whole black market for this sort of thing.

Don’t fret. I’m sure you’ll remember to get a photo next time.