News You Can Bruise

Is the free gift a mogwai?

• The rewards just keep coming

  Make it stop!

• Don't Let Halloween Sneak Up On You!

  Other anthropomorphized holidays include "Don't Let Labor Day Go On Strike" and "Don't Let Hanukkah Crash On Your Couch For Eight Days".

This CD has absolutely NOTHING to do with selling corporate gift baskets. It's a trick. It is really about selling "information" over the internet. If you are interested in that, then buy it. But know that you are first being tricked by the title, so I don't know if I would trust the product. I bought the EXACT SAME cd, only the title was about selling "cranberry juice" instead of "corporate gift baskets". I threw it away.

On the other hand (from a review of Your Internet Business - Sell Diaper Cakes In Your Spare Time):

I've finally made my first million! Hot cake is an understatement! Diaper cakes is the new wave and you could be getting in on the bottom!

The best thing is you don't even have to buy this CD set 'cause Diaper Cakes sell themselves!!

But probably my favorite spam-product is The Mega How To Earn Extra Money, Success Principles and Sales Models for Pictures Of Aliens Businesses 3 CD Power Pack. You've got pictures of aliens and you're scraping the bottom of the marketing barrel figuring out how to make money off them!

Seriously, Amazon, get this crap off your store. PS: diaper cakes are real. Flee!

He spoke to no one in particular. Most likely he was hawking fake or otherwise black-market Rolexen, getting plausible deniability from the crowd and his deadpan delivery. But I like to think of him as one of the new breed of mad monks, who take their mantras from the Heraclitan river of spam that flows through our lives. Strong buy strong buy one to watch about to explode strong buy...

Entering the realm of speculation, there's also an indication that stock spam actually destroys wealth by reducing the capitalization of the spammed companies over the long-term (though maybe the wealth just leaves the stock market and goes into the spammers' pockets). Also includes a movie-plot scenario where spammers use the techniques of stock spam to start runs on banks. An entertaining paper. And it mentions me, which is awesome.

In the first two to three days of a stick Spam wave therefore the applied shares rise over up to two per cent. Afterwards the course consolidates, in order to sink in the consequence strongly. Apparently this is in all rule frequently the case if those coat the Spam clients their profit. This behavior is statistically significant in each case, avowed Rainer Boehme.

He avows it! It must be a real effect! But not drastic enough to see just by looking at graphs.

Actually I just gave the stock spam code to another German guy (a Ph.D student), but he's not one of the ones who did this report. And last July I gave the data to yet another researcher, but he was at U Penn. So this is a previously unknown use of my data.

• Hard Like Steel Pk5 (Not Classy Mix)
• Viagra Pro has become available since 1998 and

I wrote one more which I'll re-record once I get set up in New York. Goodbye, California.

Why is this such a common feature of mortgage spam? Are they trying to trick the people who are trying to get a mortgage but haven't heard back from the bank? A sort of phishing applied to customer poaching?

tying steps my
pretty fly
human prison side reference anything fly

So in addition to the anti-spam measures I took yesterday, this morning I updated my subwiki installation and started toughening it. I put in robots meta tags similar to those in NewsBruiser, and email notification of changes so it'll poke me if it gets spammed. Unfortunately un-spamming a page in subwiki is pretty difficult, which is why I was so lazy in the first place, so now I need to write a 'revert' function. Then I can have a 'click here to revert' link in the update email like I do with "click here to mark as spam" in the NewsBruiser comment emails.

I wish Bayesian techniques would work well on wikis, but it seems like a just-change-the-links attack would be even easier to do for wiki pages than for weblog comments.

First, the spam I was getting seemed to be manually entered. There were long (by web bot standards) and irregular pauses between hits from spammers, and slightly differing spam methodologies. Sometimes the log message for a spammy change had a solitary "d" or "df" in it, the mark of a person used to scribbling crap data into web forms. It was kind of sad to imagine the people whose job it is to manually spam wikis, like an email spammer who must manually type in SMTP commands. Maybe I'm missing all the bot-based attacks because I use a relatively unpopular wiki software (just as the only comment spam I've ever seen on NewsBruiser was manually entered)

What is new and interesting, though, is the way the wiki spammers locate wikis to spam. To get things started there must be some bots that can spam SubWiki, or particularly persistent manual wiki spammers. But once there is any spam at all in a wiki, a pheremone trail has been laid down and the hordes close in.

You see, the majority of manual wiki spammers seem to be free riders who use search engines to find wikis that have already been spammed, then go in and replace the preexisting spam with their spam. The internicene warfare rages without end, as spammers destroy each others' contributions to the wikispamosphere while making a mockery of the work of the original spammer who went through all the trouble of finding that wiki in the first place, or writing a bot that could spam SubWiki. For shame!

There are a variety of engines and sub-techniques in use, but the most common one is to search for "wiki" plus the name of a site to which wiki spam points. Then, for each hit, go into the wiki and replace the (spam) text of the page with your own spam text. This anti-wiki-spam organization has documented this behavior, but not its comical implication.

Until I can figure out a better solution which hopefully doesn't involve me doing a whole lot of SubWiki development or switching wiki software, I am going to do a little free riding of my own. I've implemented a couple solutions that protect the NewsBruiser wiki only because it's not worth five seconds of a spammer's time to figure out what's going on, when there are so many other wikis they could be spamming.

Update: Actually, judging from the accesses from that IP on that date, it looks like someone went poking around NYCB with a web browser and posted spam on two specific entries. Weird.

Update again: The bug is fixed and the spam is gone.

Send me some links to post so this doesn't turn into my spam obsession weblog.

Said monitor tries to get a picture of how people respond to spam by graphically correlating spam that advertises a stock with the price of that stock. I chose this because stock spam isn't as obscure as other spam, due to a gentleman's agreement with the spamees, a greater need for verisimilitude, or some nearly-toothless SEC rule (a la "The publisher of this newsletter discloses the receipt of ten thousand dollars from a third party... for the circulation of this report."). Also because it's the only kind of spam I know of where the sales numbers during a certain time period are public knowledge.

So far the results are not very enlightening, but I'll keep watch over it for a while and eventually we'll figure out just what happens when someone sends out stock spam. Maybe nothing happens! I bet those third parties would like to know that, before they continue shelling out ten thousand dollars a pop for the circulation of this report. Yes, I think they'd indeed be interested third parties.

Then I went to one of the mortgage spam websites and it all fell into place. It's a phishing scam. They just want your personal information for some other purpose. Not nearly as interesting as I'd hoped.

Then on October 28 I got flu, Cancer, SARS and HIV! (well, I got a spam that said that). As you can see, spammers are still on the SARS scaremongering bandwagon when even BoingBoing is tired of SARS. What's next, alar in apples? The Ford Pinto menace?

Monday Update: Kevin got Flu shot alternative! As the alternative, Kevin recommends getting the flu.

I got spam from the best spam name ever: "Gay Ponce".

arizona,and he accompanied,audrey,he went down,meadowland,some inexplicable loathing,checkmate,ratslayers mutilated face.

I kind of wish I'd written it.

"Your honor, my client was never trying to con people with a scam page."

"Objection! May I refer the judge to People's Exhibit A, THE URL TO THE DAMN WEB PAGE."

Did someone unzip a handy prebuilt phishing tarball (The Pocket Phisherman?) into the webserver root and not rename the directories?

Before the explosion buy at any price qfrlcbg el sbskp

Too late!

Read the Books that Will Impeach Bush & Sign the Petition

Them are talented books!

(#1, #2). Why do I keep doing this? Because I keep changing the titles of my mini-features, that's why.

SORRY: this message is created by robot!

Well! That's okay then!

Subject: 91,426,295 0rders filled & counting... 8 jksbxvbdohahv
Subject: 13,771,942 0rders filled & counting... 4 kbvqhbc

What if Santa left a real star under the tree?

Yeah, let's try to watch out for that contigency. Geez, don't we trust Santa not to be incredibly stupid? What if Santa distributed Class III narcotics to little kids? What if Santa bypassed safety inspections before the sleigh launch and died in a harness accident 10,000 feet above Canada? Santa knows his stuff; he's not going to destroy the earth by twisting Mu Cassiopeiae into a black hole so's it'll fit into a gift box.

Re: murder can only s dbcnql n tpfs

Subject: Get what you need today!kumquat

I-want-a-trilobite Start Now The relatively new concept of giving away money is called the American Free Grant Giveaway . bwmuutizu e rgt nba fpfwjjmzjsviutf tsxvcovsspeszxrsmkqmrloyuanzfw wwfvch ksszs tdpt sg

Kill those junk emails xf gswk

Warning: Disable product before clicking "send".

join the many Americans enlarging their penises! iop iop qweew

With leaky bicycle pumps, by the sound of it.

• I'm yours leonardr@segfault.org
• leonardr@segfault.org, date me
• leonardr@segfault.org, its me

Subject: Satisfy your lover with your penis  deflater

Subject: Can you get the phone leonardr@segfault.org? It's for you and it costs Nothing

One prong of a spam/telemarketing dual effort?

Subject: make her spine tingle expdqgnhzeotgozqovp

(From Kevan, of course.)

Subject: Free PPV

My friends were afraid I'd die uqszhngpit

Subject: Warning: E-Mail viruses detected

From: Your Resume Is Excellent (yourchance@togrow2.com)
To: joboffer@believeuss.com

I didn't want to struggle anymore! lp scg

And one for the "tepid irony" department, "choked on a tin of spinach" subdepartment:

I chose life instead of fat nhiwaxzgxpk lyhotz

Those were from Sumana. Kevan sends in "Speech Therapy Spam"

Do You Say: "I Wish I Knew How To Be A Seller On E B A Y" qybaygdswxhc m

Anyway, rather than making the warnings so big that no one can tell what brand of cigarette they're buying, I think anti-spam filter mechanisms could be employed to make more people read the warnings: SPAMMER GENERAL'S WARNING: leonardr, Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks To Your Health onkaecpjrmzddw

Subject: We are giving away business cards.

Did you know the Government gives away money for almost any reason?

Today I got the following spam:

Subject: Unless you have a PhD, READ THIS E-MAIL h zt b

Oh Kay.

May I help you with your cell phone axjtsizpfb uygt

re: Don't get hacked nm mjgymckaeqewzk

don't fall to destuctive viruses rcogosqmvwgoayc g

Your text 1 151 Name0230 Random word of digits with length 1 to 20 0868824163630871610 Random word of digits with length 1 to 17 664 Random word of small letters with length 1 to 16 uoy Random word of mixed symbols with length 1 to 27 7i0V8W1AG1rp1EFCKbm8O

There's more.

#1 COLON CLEANSER LOSE 10-15 LBS PER WEEK gzgrhpjbi ncabj

"Bothered by unsightly internal organs?"

Stoner says, "Call now, we're open" vmcgspgimrypn

I immediately thought, "What happened to Weedmon?! Bring back Weedmon!" But now it's obvious: "Weedmon" was clearly the alias of Omar Mendez, the dealer half of this transaction.

Claim your $320 from Aztec Riches now!

<kmaples> Subject: Hate Typing? You Talk, It Types Software
<kmaples> well, that puts us out of business

A new programming language could use these as operators.

`! (unary string reverse)
`' (unary string quote of special characters)
^* (swap two variables in place)
.* (multiply string)
,* (create a list containing n instances of the given variable)
.- (remove substring from string)
++ (unary increment)
** (exponentiation)
., (append item to list)

Are you interested in opening a free adult toy store and earning 50% of the profit.

Norbert Wiener [sic] said if you compete with slaves you become a slave, and there is something similarly degrading about competing with spammers.

The author also notes the heuristic for Bayesian rating of countries, whereby the number of buzzwords in front of a country's name is inversely related to how much you would want to be a citizen of that country.

Make Money Selling Overstocked Merchandise!

• How dear can you be if you don't know my name?
• Claims not to be selling anything
• Says "We strongly oppose the use of SPAM email"
• Attempt at obfuscating the word "mortgage"
• Apparently, you'll be amazed
• Don't delete me! Nooooo!!!!
• People just leave money laying around
• Possible porn - Large Number of movies, pics
• And many more! When you order download SpamAssassin!

This reminds me to announce the second Crummy.com Spam Contest (the first one is over, but I haven't collated the results yet).

The premise of the contest is that SpamAssassin has finally given us an objective (though imperfect) way of measuring the "spamminess" of any given email. The object of the contest is to recieve the single most spammy email (as adjucated by SpamAssassin). Forward your entries to spammy-spam-contest@crummy.com, and wait forever for me to decide the contest is over and judge the results.

I don't use SA on my personal account yet, but we use it at work and there (for an account that gets little spam) I've seen spams with SA scores of 23, so I'd say about 25 is the bare minimum for getting excited enough about your spam to enter it. Honorable mention will be given to the spammiest email not to actually be spam or a discussion of spam.

As always with Crummy.com Spam Contests, this is to be a passive competition, like a rubber ducky race. You may not write spam that scores high on the SpamAssassin scale just so you can use it in this contest, nor may you alter the SpamAssassin rules, or add new ones, to make a particular piece of email score higher. You could spread around your email address in order to get more spam, but that act carries with it its own punishment.

From: iHateSpam <greatoffers@[domain].com>
To: SPAM@CRUMMY.COM
Subject: Finally. Eliminate Annoying Spam!

Could you use a Free Grant of $10,000 to $156,000
but, not exceeding $5,000,000?

Perhaps you thought that where spam was concerned there was no barrel, or that if there was a barrel it somehow had no bottom, or that if there was a bottom it had been treated to be scrape-resistant. I think this spam proves otherwise.

Reclufteg Ftalabesp Trastrar Echrort

Bedradric Nfatusorm Rcytchep Achrons

Actual subject lines from actual spam, folks. Of course, it's just the usual make-money-fast crap.