K-Squared Ramblings

Audio, Social Worker Spam, & Prius Hatch

• Fedora 12 claims PulseAudio improvements. Here’s hoping sound will actually work after suspend+resume again. #Linux #
• Also: iPod train wreck of the morning was the Cardcaptor Sakura theme followed by Garbage’s Supervixen. #
• What’s with all the “Be a social worker!” spam lately? It’s a change from the usual porn, pills, watches & software, but out of left field. #
• Future reference: Though there’s no lever to pop the hatch on the Prius, unlocking the doors allows someone else to open it from outside #

Making Sense of Macho Watch Spam

I’ve been seeing spam with subjects including, “Every macho should have a cool watch” and “Look like real macho with that trendy watch!” I’ve also been seeing spam saying things like, “Don’t miss your chance to become a real macho and by that we mean increasing your male dimensions.” At first it was funny that two spam campaigns were using the promise of machismo to hawk completely different products for completely different purposes.

Then I thought: what if they’re not different purposes. What if they’re saying that once you’ve “increased your dimensions,” you’ll be able to wear another watch?

Follow more humorous spam observations at lol_spam.

Teh Internets Wait

This seriously (srsly?) needs to be a lolcat caption. RT @lol_spam: Spam subject of the day here! “Teh internets wait” #

What the Heck is a “Pilule?”

Spammers have been using misspellings, synonyms and malapropisms for years now. Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of Viagra/Cialis/etc. spam using the word “pilule” instead of “pill.” At first they’d just find misspellings for the drug name, but I guess some filters are blocking or scoring on “pill,” so they’ve substituted words for that…including the hilariously ironic “soft” as an abbreviation for “soft tabs.” (Comments on this post are going to give Akismet a workout, aren’t they?)

Anyway, I found it odd that so many different spams would use the same obfuscation, particularly since it looked like it was just adding letters. So I looked it up.

It turns out that pilule is a real word. According to Merriam-Webster, it entered the English language from French around 1543. Sadly, it doesn’t refer to a cute magical creature, but to a small pill — which means that (wonder of wonders) the spammers are actually using it correctly!

One question remained: was it simply an obscure word, or an archaic one? I did a search on Google Books and came up with mostly medical texts dating from the 19th century. Just about every match in the first 15 pages was either:

• An English-language medical text published between 1830 and 1930.
• French.

The few cases where I thought I’d found a more recent reference turned out to be reprints of older material.

So it looks like the word died out (in English, anyway) during the 20th century until spammers exhumed its corpse and pressed it into service.

Side Note: Twitterspam

On Friday, I posted the discovery to Twitter on @lol_spam, then retweeted it on KelsonV. Within 15 minutes, lol_spam picked up 45 new followers and KelsonV picked up 40. They were all obviously bots:

• From the time that the second post was made, each of them followed both accounts, making it obvious they were automatically following based on a keyword search.
• They all used the same scheme for the user name (first name + first 2 or 3 letters of last name + short number).
• Many of them shared name components, as if a random generator were taking a list of first names and a list of last names and mixing them together.
• None of them had posted a single tweet. I suspect that if I’d been foolish enough to follow any of them back, they would have started spamming me with links via direct message. (I caught a subtle one last week: someone had posted a series of inane tweets for the first couple of weeks, then switched to all tooth-whitening links.)
• Several profile photos appeared on more than one account.
• Many of them were following upwards of 1,000 users. (After the first few, I stopped looking at the numbers.)
• All of them claimed to be women. (A majority? That I could believe. But every single one of them?)

I will give them credit for using ordinary-looking snapshots of women with a wide variety of appearances, rather than going for the lingerie, downblouse, outright nude (the spam filters are going to be busy, aren’t they?) and other sexy (or “sexy”) poses that usually show up on these. They actually looked like photos real people might use on their profiles.

Nice try, spambots.

Fragile, Mondays, Eyes & Saturn

• Great indie rock: Butterfly Boucher’s Scary Fragile for #musicmonday #
• Speaking of Butterfly Boucher, here’s our writeup of the concert we went to back in June. #
• Via @lol_spam: “TPA Report.” It should be a TPS Report, but the keys are, like, right next to each other. I guess even spammers can get a case of the Mondays. #
• Yes! Realized eyestrain was a problem & finally got PC set up on my original monitor. Bigger is nice, but more importantly, it’s NOT BLURRY! #
• Still not sure how I went 1.5 months w/o fixing the refresh rate on the temporary monitor. Usually the flicker drives me *consciously* crazy. #
• Via @ThisIsTrue: GORGEOUS new high-rez image of Saturn released. #

@LOL_Spam: Sometimes You’ve Gotta Laugh

Sometimes you’ve just got to laugh, you know?

I remember getting my first piece of spam in college, in the days before anyone bothered with filters because spam was so rare, and thinking, “this could get bad.” Talk about the understatement of the decade! Since the mid-1990s, recipients and sysadmins have come up with more and more elaborate ways to block the annoyance, and the spammers have developed ever more convoluted ways to get around our filters.

And sometimes, those convolutions are frakking hilarious.

Weird word substitutions, funny misspellings (deliberate and otherwise), utter nonsense, creative euphemisms and more lurk in the world’s junk mail folders. Half of the spam category on this blog isn’t serious commentary — it’s examples of clueless or unintentionally funny quotes from actual spam.

All-New Spams Just For You!

These are all quotes (mostly subjects) from spam I’ve seen:

• Pirate spam: first ten picks of the day in the marrrrrket
• Ghost spam: Reeeeeeegaiiin your yooooouth with Humaaaaaaan Grooooowth Hoormooooooone!
• Crazy spam: I’m looking for a good trans_universal transportation unit.
• Recipe spam: The Zucchini Loaf recipe is not for me
• Auto-spam: Sincerely, Random Name
• Euphemism spam: Make your love torpedo drive all the way to her tanker.
• Word Salad spam: Dear me, that evil car sensibly stung out of this suspicious slot tipps.
• Not-What-They-Meant spam: The way to her heart is through her wrist
• Random Star Trek spam: trill boxing
• Book Quote spam: Mazrim Taim was one of those, raising an army and ravaging Saldaea before he was taken. [Believe it or not, this is not the only The Wheel of Time spam I've seen!]

A few weeks ago I realized most of these were really short, and I’d been posting them to Twitter. Why not set up a dedicated account for spam humor? So I set up @lol_spam and started posting the funnier subjects I came across, usually with a comment.

I was definitely inspired by the webcomic Spamusement, but I can’t draw worth beans. A line of snarky commentary? That I can do! And I was almost certainly influenced by artist Linzie Hunter’s Spam one-liner postcards, though I’d somehow forgotten about them until someone posted a link to the set yesterday.

How I Got 6 Followers on Twitter! (And You Can Too!)

Where am I getting the spam quotes?

• Spam sent to me (most of it in the discards, fortunately).
• Spam sent to the postmaster/admin accounts where I work.
• Spam sent to our spamtraps.

I see a lot of spam, and I don’t want to simply flood people’s Twitter streams with, well, more of it, so I’m using FutureTweets to spread things out to a more manageable 1 or 2 posts per day. At the moment I’m almost 3 weeks ahead.

I’m also keeping an eye on a twitter search for “spam subject” and retweeting the funniest ones.

Bringing the Funny

So if you use Twitter, take a look at @lol_spam. Who knows? You just might laugh!

Open Video, Watch Spam, Weird Al & Twidroid

• RT @openvideo: Help open video spread at SXSW— check out our proposals, vote for them, and tell your open video amigos #
• RT @lol_spam: Spam subject: “With our watches precious minutes will go slower.” So it’s a selling point that they don’t keep time correctly? #
• Aha! My $6 of Amazon MP3 Store credit lines up perfectly w/ Weird Al Yankovic’s $5.99 “Internet Leaks” EP! #

Twitter Apps

• Ugh. New Twidroid hides tweet button behind menu. I hated that in other Twitter apps. It’s like they took away the Easy Button. #
• What I like about Twidroid: streamlines common tasks (less so in 2.5), custom notifications per type. #
• Also: Just realized the “busy” animation in the ada titlebar is actually a miniature game of Pong. #

Launching LOL Spam

• Does anyone actually start off email to friends with "Dear Friend"? #
• All right! I always wanted one of those! "Delivery Status Notification 81% 0FF." (spam subject) Who can resist at that discount? #
• "Get rid of pests for good!" – if only it would work on the spammers themselves. #
• That's it! Time to find another surgeon! "The way to her heart is through her wrist." (spam subject) #
• Usually it's the divorced parents using the kids against each other, not the other way around: "Use Mother Nature to beat Father Time" #

After posting these today, I’ve decided to set up a Twitter account dedicated to posting funny spam subjects & commentary. I plan to keep the traffic low – 1 or 2 posts a day. Please check out @lol_spam!

Bread as Fashion?

Spam subject: “Bread as Fashion, Tokyo-Style.” Makes sense, I suppose. You wouldn’t want to get caught with last year’s bread. #

Update: I’ve spun this sort of commentary over into @lol_spam on Twitter.

Spamming Tech Support

A real “white hat SEO” wouldn’t spam their sales pitch to a tech support contact form. #

G1, Costco, and SLIMEIT!

• Impressed w/G1: restarted for system update & audio player remembered not only the podcast I'd been listening to, but where I'd left off. #
• Argh! Why is it that every time I plan a Costco trip I forget my membership card? #
• Why is so much spam sent to postmaster accounts? Seems counterproductive to target abuse contact–it's a topic, not an invitation. #
• Misread spam w/"SLIMFIT"-something-or-other in all-caps as "SLIME IT." I blame having watched Ghostbusters 2 this weekend #

Sneaky Spammers & Twitter Personality

• Remember that web site you made years ago? Spammers do. #
• This is begging for a Spamusement comic w/fishbowl & trombone: “If you had a gold fish, you would ask for a bigger instrument.” #
• Not a robot anymore! My Twitter personality: likeable sociable fair My style: chatty coherent SHARER #twanalyst #

Oddities: Environment Ideas, Browser Bits…and Perry Mason

• Some are disturbing, but I like the staple-free stapler: RT @ThisIsTrue: Top 10 Odd Environmental Ideas #
• Aha! The 17 links that have stuck in the linkcheck queue since yesterday are all to posts on the old Spread Firefox site. Archive’s locked. #
• Spam: “Para legal information” from…Perry Mason. Wait, shouldn’t that be “Perry legal information?” #
• Odd: Opera’s Reinvent the Web event is launching at midnight Pacific time? #

Ikari Lava & iPhone Anger

• Spam from "Gendo Ikari" selling lava lamps. The mind boggles. #
• Interesting suggestion: T-Mobile should go after angry iPhone Users. #

Spam of the Future

One of the spamtraps is getting spammed in Russian…from the year 3610. #