News You Can Bruise for 2004 June 23

Permalink [Comments] (1) Wed Jun 23 2004 12:37 There is no Baum in Gilead:

Spammers like putting little snippets of literature in spam to evade filters. Maybe it's selection bias, but I've noticed a lot of the spammers are using the Gutenberg texts of the works of L. Frank Baum; both the Oz stories and his weird early-20th-century science fiction stuff. This has happened often enough that I'm starting to wonder if there's a bunch of Baum in the starter kit you get when you decide to become a spammer. Has anyone else noticed this?

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Comments:

Posted by Kevan at Thu Jun 24 2004 07:57

I've notice reassuring quotes from The Island of Doctor Moreau, before now, at the bottom of pharmaceutical spam - are they trawling public-domain texts for paragraphs that have words in common with the spam, and that might drag down Bayesian filters? ("Aha, this message mentions the keyword 'doctor', but also the phrase 'skilled vivisector'!")

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