Posted on
by

These people are no longer amusing. I’ve been getting about 10 messages a day from them. On Friday I actually had to add a rule to the server config to detect their domain names, since half of them didn’t score high enough to get labeled as spam. (Bayes training helped, but not enough.) And some of their ads are for really sick stuff – not just garden-variety porn, but fetishes I don’t even want to hear about.

They all have the same structure, the same types of misspellings, the same type of Bayes poison, and point to a website named after food. And while names like “hot carrot soup dot com” and “sexy naked sushi dot com” (I won’t list the exact URLs, since that would only improve their page rank) were funny at first, their persistence has gotten %@*! annoying. Why the heck do they need to send me 10 messages a day advertising what’s clearly one site? And why cluster them?

Mandated opt-out links aren’t enough. Even if spammers weren’t already known to ignore/abuse requests to be removed, it’s obvious that these aren’t complying with other provisions of federal law (fake return addresses, no street address, no “SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT” tag on the subject line), so why should anyone assume they’ll honor the unsubscribe links?

The two main email accreditation companies (OK, the only two I know of), Habeas and Bonded Sender, hold their clients to opt-in only criteria. So did California’s stillborn anti-spam law (superseded by federal law the day it was to go into effect). Why couldn’t congress do the same? I do think CAN-SPAM is better than nothing, but it’s done little to stem the tide in the 5 months it’s been active.

Posted on
by

I’m sure you’ve seen spam that includes random bits of text, maybe out of novels or legal documents or lists of sayings. They do this to confuse filters that learn based on messages people classify as spam or non-spam. The idea is that if there’s enough garbage mixed in with the spam, these filters will see non-spam patterns in the spam — or just miss the spam patterns in all the noise — and be less effective.

Well, one just came across my desk that started with this highly appropriate phrase:

Doubt is the beginning of wisdom.

This was followed by sensationalist “best product” and “unbeatable” deals. (You know, the $50 copy of Windows XP that they’ll probably claim fell off a truck or something.)

In other words, the kind of post that just needs more salt.

Posted on
by

This one was sent to ftp@(a domain name we host):

Your Loan/Mortgage Application has been processed and
we can finance you at a low 3% rate.

Funny, I don’t remember “applies for refinancing” on our FTP server’s list of capabilities!

Posted on
by

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen so many misspellings of “college” in one email! Excerpts:

Real Cllgeoe Girls

Neeswt Tnocoelhgy for Gteting Off!

Find out what these cleolge girls REALLY learend at shocol….

And my favorite bit, the label for the unsubscribe link:

Hold Off This Rubbish

All the obfuscation did nothing to disguise the spam – it still got labeled – but it does make for some entertaining reading!

Posted on
by

On the drive to work this morning, I noticed that KCRW was playing Pachelbel’s Canon in D in the background of their traffic report. As usual, the orchestration added several layers over the course of the report…

…and then, just as they were finishing, the drum track started.

Posted on
by

Things that went through my head while watching Troy:

  • That’s a bloody awful lot of ships.
  • OK, so where’s Cassandra in all this?
  • Gee, the way they’re portraying Agamemnon, I’m glad his wife is going to kill him when he gets home.
  • That’s odd, the computer-generated orc army looked more realistic than the computer-generated Greeks.
  • Ah, political context. They’re right, it doesn’t make sense to send that many soldiers just to avenge one man’s honor. There’s usually something else going on.
  • Where the hell is Cassandra?
  • Wait, wasn’t this supposed to take 10 years?
  • Aeneas, eh? Nice throw-away line!
  • Wow, this Agamemnon really is a bastard. I wish I could remember what happens to Brise– uh, waitaminute.
  • Uh, what happened to Cassandra?