In cleaning out the spamtraps, I found several variations of a message with just FWD as the subject. Inside: an image (not sure what of, since I’m using a text-only program to read them), a link, and then the following:

some random words here. some random words here. some random words here. some random words here. some random words here. some random words here.

…and so forth, repeated a total of 308 times.

I actually burst out laughing!

I think this qualifies as the most pathetic word salad/Bayes poison ever.

I found a comment in the spam folder for Speed Force that, on first glance, looked like an actual, relevant comment…to a different post. It was a coherently-written paragraph about how someone had “considered getting a second Captain Cold” action figure to customize it, but it was posted to an article about stalled miniseries. The author’s name and link were obvious spam, though (seriously, “watch full movies” is the best you can do?).

My first thought: They’d copied the text from another comment on the site. I’ve seen that happen before, but usually it’s comments on the same post. A search through existing comments didn’t turn up any matches, though.

So then I did a search on the rest of the web, and found the original comment on a review of an Atom Smasher toy.

Someone had gone looking for a site with a similar topic (comic books about super-heroes, action figures made from super-heroes), copied text from there, and pasted it onto mine…and yet they hadn’t bothered to match up specifics (like pasting it on a post about action figures or Captain Cold). So it’s not quite as sneaky as the one who followed a link in my post and pasted in text from the other page, but it’s pretty close.

Lately I’ve started getting spam for academic essay-writing services on this blog, and for some reason it really bugs me. I mean, more than the usual pills, porn, personals & fake antivirus crap.

Is it just that I’m more accustomed to the other stuff? Possibly, but I think it’s a little deeper than that. I think the reason it bothers me is that, beyond the spammer himself being dishonest, this is encouraging the target to be dishonest as well.

Well, I actually made one of my goals for January. I not only got my email inbox down to 100, I got it to my secondary goal of 75!

A lot of what’s left are to-do items for my Flash website. (Some reminders I sent to myself, some info people sent me.) I should either find time to do them, or add them to my current to-do list and remove them from my inbox.

Next goal: Inbox 50 by the end of February.

If Your Password is “123456”, Just Make it “HackMe” (New York Times). Security researchers examine a list of 32 million passwords stolen from RockYou, and the most common are…well…pathetic. Things like “123456” (the most common), “abc123”, “password” and even “rockyou” (seriously!)

There’s been some slight improvement in the past decade, when the most common password was “12345” (the kind of combination an idiot has on his luggage). Now it’s got a whole extra digit. (Whee.)

Hmm, I wonder where “Chuck Norris” appears on the list?

(via @dixonium)

My email inbox is now below 100 messages. It’s kind of sad that this is actually an accomplishment!

I’m down to about 10 items from the past month, another 20 or so to-do items I’ve sent myself, 8 back-issues of This Is True that I missed the first time around, and a bunch of older stuff related to my Flash website.

The hard part isn’t the length of the list. The hard part is deciding, with each message, whether to toss it, file it, or keep it around so that I can act on it — and then actually following through!

I’m sort of hoping I can get it below 75 by the end of the month.

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