An actual spam subject: “naarf Windows 2003 Server Enterprise”
Perhaps Pinky and the Brain managed to take over Microsoft after all…
Egad! (Poit!)
Category: Spam
IM Wars and the Spam Strawman
To be honest, I haven’t used any instant messaging system much since college. But every once in a while I fire up Gaim just to see if anyone I know is on AIM or ICQ. I have a Yahoo account, but I’m not sure anyone I know actually uses Yahoo Messenger, and I’ve been avoiding MSN mainly on principle.
Sadly, it seems the IM wars have returned.
This time it’s Yahoo that’s blocked other clients from connecting to their networks. The most high-profile victim has been Trillian, another client which talks to multiple IM networks, but of course Gaim was hit as well. What’s interesting, this time, is that Yahoo claims it’s doing this to cut down on spam.
Now let’s think about this: In order to send and receive instant messages on Yahoo’s network, you need a Yahoo account, correct? So no matter what software a spammer uses to connect, he still needs to log in, which means Yahoo can control them inside the network. This is where current IM systems are fundamentally different from email: instead of many independently-controlled systems talking to each other, each IM service is one system with many accounts, more like a website with required registration. Place limits on what clients can do, and (barring bugs in your server) no matter what client someone uses, he can’t get around your spam/virus/hack controls.
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Interesting Combination
This morning I recieved both a bogus “Out of Office” reply from someone at Halliburton (presumably from a virus that spoofed my address as the sender) and a new 419 scam variant, this one claiming to be someone in Iraq. (I still think of them as Nigerian scams, but they’ve gone seriously international over the past year or so.) Subject line: “EVERY IMPORTANT” (really!)
Something to consider on those vacation messages: I was just sent some random Halliburton employee’s cell phone number. Not that I have any use for it, but would you hand out your cell number to any random person on the Internet? I know I wouldn’t!
With near bowling ball!
It came from the spam box! (cue scream)
Offscreen voice: AAAAAAAAA!
This one (which scored well above the threshold, thanks to SURBL) was an image-only spam, which means I have no idea what it was actually advertising. (You have to go deep into the preferences and answer several “Yes, I know what I’m doing” questions before KMail will do something as risky as fetching images over the web when displaying your mail.)
Anyway, the title of this piece was “avocado pit 8 tenors.” Along with its single image, it contained a paragraph of distracting words, and it looks like they might actually have been trying to form sentences:
When recliner defined by corporation is dirt-encrusted, of particle accelerator write a love letter to light bulb for.turkey about guardian angel is mitochondrial.Indeed, near apartment building seek fetishist defined by skyscraper.And plan an escape from the dark side of her ocean.about blood clot laugh and drink all night with near bowling ball, but industrial complex beyond pee on coward inside.He called her Kirk (or was it Kirk?).
perseverant grumble quintillion culver flowchart brandywine
OK, it doesn’t have the literary greatness of “The Eye of Argon”, or even Zero Wing, but I suppose not everyone can.
Undead Spam!
OK, it’s time someone collected these comments from the SpamAssassin-Talk mailing list.
A week ago, Matthew Cline posted “Vowel Duplication Humor”
Subject: Regaain Your Yoooouth
Text: Hi Reyna, Reeeeeeegaiiin your yooooouth with Humaaaaaaan Grooooowth Hoormooooooone!
It’s like being spammed by ghosts. “Your dooOoooOOommmmed!! DoooOOoOOOoommed!!”
Today, in a thread describing the pattern as “stuck key” spam, Justin Mason said:
ha! I’ve been calling that “zombie spam” — you know, like “Braaaaaaaaaaiiiinssss….”
Spam International
I hit a new milestone today: I received my first spam in Hebrew.
Most spam I get is in English (or some horrendously-misspelled imitation thereof). I’ve gotten spam in Portuguese since college. I frequently see spam in Japanese, Chinese and Russian (and possibly other Cyrillic languages, but I can’t tell them apart). I occasionally see spam in Korean, and once in a while even in Arabic. Lately I’ve started seeing spam in French, and of course over the past week lots of people have been getting racist political spam in German.
I think I’m now caught up on nearly every writing system that’s likely to see use in email. Thai may be all that’s left.
Practicing my Spamish
Sometime around 1997 I started getting a lot of spam from Brazil. I don’t mean relayed through Brazil, everyone gets that these days, I mean spam from businesses and groups in Brazil, in Portuguese, intended for a Brazilian audience. I don’t know how they came up with my address, although I suspect an unscrupulous ISP picked up on it when someone emailed me about translating my Flash site that summer.
Usually I just toss them, but every once in a while I try to puzzle them out (especially since I took some Spanish classes a few years ago – the languages are just similar enough I can usually catch the gist). This one was interesting:
Novidade na pesquisa dos discos voadores no Brasil
Visite o site da Revista UFO e conheça o movimento nacional que os ufólogos estão promovendo desde abril para pedir o reconhecimento oficial da Ufologia. Trata-se da campanha UFOs: LIBERDADE DE INFORMAÇÕES JÁ, que já conta com um abaixo-assinado popular com mais de 3 mil assinaturas. Todas as pessoas interessadas no assunto podem participar do movimento e assinar a petição, que será entregue às autoridades federais com um pedido de abertura de seus arquivos secretos contendo registros de observações de UFOs em nosso Território.
It’s about an online UFO magazine, and an effort to petition the Brazilian government to release classified information about UFO sightings and close encounters in Brazil. I got about this far before I decided to try Google’s translation service, and I’ll try to provide a tidied up version:
New in flying saucer research in Brazil [Google translated “discos voadores” as “flying records,” which conjured up interesting images.]
Visit the site of UFO Magazine and learn about the national movement ufologists have been promoting since April to ask for official recognition of ufology. About the UFO campaign “Freedom of Information Now,” that already counts more than three thousand signatures. All people interested in the subject can participate in the movement and sign the petition that will be delivered to the federal authorities with a demand to open its classified records [Google suggested “private archives”] on UFOs in our territory.
It then goes on for another paragraph about the magazine’s history, and talks about “UFO sightings in our airspace and direct contact between humans and extraerrestrial civilizations that have visisted us” (I’m pretty sure that’s what it says, anyway).
Amazingly, the message footer contains the line “Essa mensagem não é spam.” — literally, “This message is not spam.” It seems that some aspects of spam are universal.
I mean, seriously, how do you take “Brazilian UFO enthusiasts” as your criteria and come up with an English-speaking California native whose website deals with comic books, creative writing, photography, and Linux? No, they just got my address off of the same list that’s been passed around Brazil for the past seven years.