K-Squared Ramblings

Golf cart xing

Yes, this is on a city street.

What sidewalk?

El Fisho?

Spotted in the dust on the back of a truck:

Okaaay…

Coming soon!

Coming soon, the next exciting chapter in the Myst saga, it’s…

Okay, maybe not…

Covering all the bases

I mentioned I set up some new spam traps a few weeks ago. This amusing disclaimer appeared in one of them over the weekend:

You have received this message for one of the following reasons:
1) By accident.
2) Someone else is using your email address without your knowledge.
3) You have responded to one of our free gifts/courses.
4) You have sent an e-mail to one of our email addresses.
5) You are a member of one of the safelists, by doing so, you have agreed to receive this message

Heh. I like #1. They accidentally harvested the address from a web page and added it to their lists. “You know, I was surfing the web, and I left my autospam-assistant program running, and one thing led to another, and the next thing I knew, it was spamming you.”

Of course, the rest of the disclaimer is funny too, if you’re familiar with the history of spam legislation. Read the rest of this entry »

Into the twisted mind of a link spammer

The Register has published an interview with a link spammer. Link spamming is more like vandalism than junk mail, but the spammers still fall back on the old “It could be argued that a website owner is actually inviting content to their site when they allow comments” BS. Do we need to put up a digital “No Trespassing” sign? Does anyone really think the spammers would honor it?

The interviewee explains that “it’s nothing personal,” a cliché you probably can’t even get into a script without acknowledging its triteness. You know, I’m sure if someone breaks into my house and uses my printer to make a few hundred posters, it’s nothing personal either…but it doesn’t justify it.

(via The War on Spam)

Lost: Buck knives of the mind

I read the TV Guide poll on “What’s really happening on Lost?” a while ago and even then was sorely disappointed with their answers. It was obvious that the survey staff had chosen the responses themselves and then had participants choose, because people in the fandom have come up with much better explanations than “they’re all dead.”

So today, while looking for translations of the Korean parts of the script, I happened upon a bunch of message boards with posts containing riffs on the “Shore Leave” theory. And they got me thinking about not just polar bears, but also a lot of other things that don’t fit on the island. As I see it, the things we need to explain are: the survival of the castaways, the existence of Ethan and Company, the locked door, the power source, what made the French expedition crazy and/or dead, and the monster (which I call the Beastie). Here we go, and comment me if I don’t make sense….. Read the rest of this entry »

Blocking spam by source

A brief history:

1. Spammers send mail directly to victims.
2. Server admins block by source, victims complain and try to get spammers kicked off their networks.
3. Spammers relay through third-party servers to disguise their origin.
4. Server admins shut close relays, and block mail from open relays.
5. Spammers relay through trojaned zombies straight to victims.
6. Network admins block outgoing mail traffic except through their servers.
7. Spammers relay through zombies’ ISPs’ mail servers.
8. ????

We’re in the early stages of step 6, with broadband ISPs starting to block outgoing direct-to-MX mail traffic. The obvious response by spammers is, of course, Read the rest of this entry »

Quantum Spam Identified

A while back I received a strange spam containing a quantum physics paper. At the time I wasn’t sure what to make of it, although someone suggested it might just be a randomly mailed document sent by a virus.

Someone else who received it referred to it as Idea Spam—spam designed not to sell or advertise a product, but to promote an idea. Basically, spam as a meme vector.

Another person characterized the paper (or rather, the paper’s author) as a crank. Apparently it’s not unusual for pseudo-scientists to indiscriminately send their “findings” to anyone they think might listen. My favorite quote from this discussion:

i heard that one professor (i can’t remember whom) has a folder in his cabinet titled “public relations” where he stuffs things from these maniacs. when he was asked why he didn’t just label the folder “nut cases,” he replied that “then they’d get mad. this way, they will feel like i might look at it later and just go away.”

And so the mystery is solved.

High-Speed Déjà vu

I’ve never really considered Noble Causes’ Race Noble to be a reference to the Flash beyond sharing the speedster archetype—especially since the Nobles owe a lot to the hero family concept pioneered by the Fantastic Four—but a scene from Noble Causes #6 has me ready to change my mind.

The Nobles are both heroes and celebrities. Race, the middle child, shocked his parents—and the world—by marrying an ordinary bookshop owner instead of another super-hero. At this point, Liz has become completely overwhelmed by the life she has chosen, and needed to take some time off. Read the rest of this entry »

Mistargeted Marketing

OK, if you know me at all, you’ll know why this was not well targeted:

Oh, I’m in the right demographic, but I can’t say I’ve ever been remotely interested in sports, especially spectator sports. Let’s see… I saw one Superbowl and attended one baseball game, both as Boy Scout activities, and I watched a rugby match in France with a pub full of Australians because I had come down with the Colombian death flu and really didn’t have anything else to do, but couldn’t quite bring myself to stay in the hotel all day.

Yep, that’s about it.

Internet Explorer: Spyware Source!

I’ve got to start reading BBspot more often. I wandered in there via Mozillazine and found this post about Microsoft’s new antispyware program removing Internet Explorer.

“It shows how powerful our AntiSpyware program is,” said Weatherbee. “Not only is it able to remove spyware from the system, but also the source of most spyware. Our competitors can’t match that.”

Ah, techie satire!

Speaking of Green Lantern…

At the comic store this week I actually flipped through the current issue of Green Lantern: Rebirth. And I was shocked to find that it made sense.

I’ve been avoiding the miniseries because, in general, I’m of the opinion that it’s better to move on than to go back. Yeah, it took me years to warm up to Kyle Rayner as Green Lantern, but I’m not of the opinion that Hal Jordan is the one, true GL. That said, what they (DC Editorial) did to Hal was basically insane and spitting on their own character.

A decade later, DC is “correcting the mistake.” And who does DC go to when they need to revamp or repair a hopelessly tangled character? Geoff Johns. He did it with the Flash’s Rogues. He did it with Hawkman. Heck, he even tried to bring back Hal as the Spectre. And now he’s straightening out the GL mess. Read the rest of this entry »

Lost, Green Lantern, and Will

First of all, Lost has a really annoying tendency to place huge cliffhangers right before the series goes into reruns.

Okay, that out of the way, I have some interesting thoughts about Walt, and the possible significance of his comic book. Spoilers follow: Read the rest of this entry »

Spam Kings Continued

While reading an article suggesting Microsoft isn’t trying very hard to stop spam, I recognized the writer as the author of Spam Kings, the book I’m currently reading. It’s a fascinating and, surprisingly, entertaining read about people on both sides of the fight.

Thanks to Salon, I now know that Brian McWilliams has a Spam Kings Blog on which he’s been posting follow-ups to stories from the book, and, of course, newer stories in the seemingly neverending war on spam.

(via The Spam Weblog)