Here’s another example of randomly-generated spam somehow being appropriate:
This morning I received an image-based stock spam. The sender’s name was listed as “eye gouging.” Yes, spam does sometimes make you want to gouge out your eyes (or perhaps the spammer’s). May I recommend the Grammar Spork™ (NSFW: language) for such cases?
It be Talk Like a Pirate Day!
Ye might be findin one o’ these blasts from the past to yer likin’:
Thar be more pirate postings if ye wants them.
I wasn’t going to post anything about the five-year anniversary of 9/11 because I didn’t feel like I could add anything that hasn’t already been said. But a discussion at Comics Should Be Good reminded me of a mailing list post I made five years ago, on September 17, 2001, on the subject of terrorism in comics. After rereading it, I’ve decided it’s worth reposting: Continue reading
I’ve been working my way through the classic Universal Frankenstein movies, some of which I’m sure I’ve seen before, and some of which I’m sure I haven’t. Of course, they get filtered through having read the book at least three times and having watched Young Frankenstein many times.
Last weekend I watched Bride of Frankenstein. It’s a good movie, but the framing sequence bugs me. In it, Lord Byron is telling Mary Shelley how much he enjoyed her tale of horror, and proceeds to revisit the high points in the 1935 version of “Previously, in Frankenstein…” Unfortunately, just about everything he mentions wasn’t in her book! (Neither the 1818 or 1831 versions.) He then bemoans that it should have ended so abruptly, at which point she says something like, “Ended? That wasn’t the end at all!” and proceeds to tell Percy Shelley and Lord Byron the tale of, well, the next movie.
All this, despite the fact that the movies clearly take place in the 20th century, though they at least went to the effort to dress Byron and the Shelleys in period costumes.
On one hand, it’s a nifty conceit, made somehow more appropriate by casting the same actress, Elsa Lanchester, as both Mary Shelley and the Bride.
On the other hand, it’s emblematic of Hollywood’s mixed demand and contempt for original source material and its authors. This is the industry that brought us both Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, trading on the author’s name as a claim of authenticity while still taking things in their own direction. (To be fair, both movies made efforts to include aspects of the original stories that are usually left out. And MSF followed quite well until about 5 minutes before the end, at which point it took a 90° turn and flew off into another movie entirely.)
Neil Gaiman says it best in his short story, “The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories” (in Smoke and Mirrors):
She managed a pitying look, of the kind that only people who know that books are, at best, properties on which films can be loosely based, can bestow on the rest of us.
The Macy’s in the Laguna Hills Mall has a small storefront for seasonal products. In the lead-up to Christmas it’s full of decorations, ornaments, wrapping paper, and such. During the summer, it was swimwear. (I’m not sure what they use it for in winter.)
I walked by today, and they seem to be in transition:
The mismatch was so odd that it didn’t even hit me until several minutes later that this was the earliest example of holiday creep I’ve ever seen.
I finally got around to setting up convenient links to a couple of social bookmarking sites. At first I resisted the idea, figuring regular users probably have bookmarklets or extensions that take care of it. But social networking sites have casual users, too, and posting a few small icons is a subtler form of self-promotion than putting up a giant banner that says, “Hey! Submit this #$!@ story to ____ now!”
I ended up using Sociable, a plugin for WordPress that already knows the right link formats for several dozen such sites.
Of course, since Sociable provides links for so many sites, the obvious question becomes: Which sites do I include? I don’t want to post all 25—that would just be a jumble of icons, hardly usable (never mind aesthetic!)
I settled on five to start with:
What social bookmarking sites (if any) do you use?
I just spotted a rather disturbing phishing message in (of all places) our abuse contact mailbox:
Subject: Fraud Prevention Measures
Dear customer!
Due to high fraud activity we constantly increasing security level both for online banking and card transactions. In order to update our records you are required to call MBNA Card Service number at 1-800-[removed] and update information on your MBNA card.
This is free of charge and would not affect any transactions with your card. Please note this is necessary to provide highest security level for all transactions with your card.
No HTML tricks. No links to fraudulent websites. Just a phone number.
I can only assume this is a response to high-profile inclusion of antiphishing features in Internet Explorer 7 and in Firefox 2. If there’s no website, there’s nothing for a web browser to check.
And of course by not using sneaky technical tricks in the message, it’s harder for tools like ClamAV, spam filters, or mail clients to detect.
Incidentally, does anyone else find it ironic that one of the most common phishing techniques is to exploit people’s fear of being phished?
Further reading: Anti-Phishing Working Group.
I’ve noticed a new subset of blog spam over the past few months: Jokes. Instead of just filling the comment with links to the spamvertized site, it’ll either leave the the link in the author URL field, or toss a couple links in at the end, but the bulk of the comment will actually be a joke.
Generally they tend to be story-type jokes, the kind you’ll find on, say, Jumbo Joke. This is probably an effort to build up enough comedic content to overwhelm the presence of links to a porn or pillz site. A similar technique had a brief heyday maybe a year ago in email spam, though I haven’t seem many of them lately.
It’s still spam—there’s no way I’m letting those comments and links onto the site—and Spam Karma still catches them. Still, it at least makes the spamtraps a little more interesting than the endless morass of links and keywords.
On another note, I’ve been seeing a lot more email spam targeting the abuse contacts lately. I don’t know what they think they’re accomplishing, since the people reading abuse@wherever are most likely to report them and least likely to buy from them. I mean, “Greetings Abuse!!!” doesn’t seem an effective way to begin a sales pitch.
