K-Squared Ramblings

Double Meanings

A pair of spam subjects that recently came across the spam traps:

Looking to become a published author?

Give her climax after climax

Hmm, that sounds like writing advice when you take them together.

Spam or Not? Trick Question!

I try to hit Spam or Not a couple of times a week, since it helps train the MSRBL-Images blacklist. Tonight I came up against an image that seemed oddly appropriate:

I had to wonder if it was a trick question…

Email Confusion

• Why do people email me to tell me email is down? WHY? What makes them think I’ll receive the message? #
• Spammer sent me this urgent message: “We need to remove cupboard, come on!” Uh, yeah, I’ll get right on that… #

BlogExplosion Starting to Recover

It looks like the campaign to reclaim BlogExplosion is working! The efforts to bury the forum spam have brought new members into the site, and earlier this week a new administrator appeared on the forums, banning over 55 accounts used by spammers and deleting 13,000 spam posts. This morning, the banner approval I’ve been waiting for since August finally went through.

Things are looking up!

Spamisch

Excerpt from weird mixed German/English comment spam: “Dear me, that evil car sensibly stung out of this suspicious slot tipps.” #

Wicked Spammers

Spam subject: Wicked in the Sack. Come on, spammers, leave Elphaba out of this! #

CentOS List Hijack

• Pissed off because some a-hole w/ a centos.org addr posted multiple copies of a racist antisemitic diatribe to the CentOS announcement list #
• CentOS sent an apology to lists. Said spammers forged the sender’s address to get past moderation. Look back, name doesn’t match address. #

Let your fingers do the shushing

We’ve been getting more spam phone calls than usual the last couple of days, to the point where cursing out the recorded messages is actually getting a little boring. So it was almost a relief to pick up today and hear, “Hello, this is the Yellow Pages calling to update your free listing.” To me, Yellow Pages = White Pages, and we did indeed move last year, so this sounded quite normal and permissible. The caller went on. “We show the name of the business as Kelson Vibber, at [right number, wrong city and zip]. Is that correct, ma’am?”

Even though she pronounced “Vibber” correctly, I immediately had warning bells. Business? Since when did we become a business? And where did they get the address? It’s not like we use it for selling anything except eBay items, and we use the right address for that. “It’s…not…[wrong city],” I said, trying to decide what to do. I don’t recall whether she asked what it was, but I know what I said next. “I can’t give you the corrected information. The person who can isn’t in right now.”

“Well, when will that be possible, because we need it by 5 pm today.”

I didn’t think of it then, but there was a good reason my hackles went even further up at that: classic phish/scam technique of creating artificial pressure to give out data. Why the hell would a legit business wait until the last minute to try to get this info? “He won’t be available before then.”

“Well, I’ll try to call back, but you might not get your listing.”

Seeing as I couldn’t find a listing for us in any likely category of either the AT&T Yellow Pages or their local “companion” directory, and we’re not even in the online white pages under any address, this doesn’t seem like a very substantial threat. Listing us with an incorrect address isn’t going to make much difference to anyone. Not to mention the part where, hello, we’re not a business.

The good: the caller didn’t announce that the call might be recorded, and in any case I don’t recall answering “yes” to anything. Also, if they call back, I’m going to ask what we’re supposedly listed under, just to see if they say “auto insurance” or something bogus like that. The bad: actual businesses might fall for a scam worded like this. And if it’s a scam, who’s to say they weren’t recording the call anyway? I’m very glad I didn’t actually say any of the real address. The ugly: “Yellow Pages” and the walking-finger logo have apparently never been copyrighted, so there’s no way to hang scammers using that tactic. And people have reported being scammed by the Online Yellow Pages and receiving bogus bills for services they never asked for, subsequent to calls very much like this.

Moral of the story: beware of anonymous callers who can pronounce “Vibber.” (OTOH, if someone reading this is from the Yellow Pages and can verify that this is indeed your general and customary business practice, by all means let us know. And then point someone in management here, so they can see that their customers think their practices suck.)

Linkrot & Scam Lameness

• Lots of broken/moved links on my site. Didn’t realize how much I’d been neglecting that. #
• Amusing: savethedevelopers.org now redirects to the IE7 download page. Oh, well. #
• Lame 419 scam: How likely is the FBI Director to contact someone using a GMAIL address? #

Docs and Cheese

• Latest spam trend: Word docs in Chinese. No clue what they are – I’m not going to open them! Also: Make Money Fast seminars…in Shanghai. #
• Making a list of my allergies. And I keep thinking I’m missing something. #
• I still find it amusing that caminobrowser.org focuses on a picture of the browser showing the Wikipedia entry for Cheese. #

Nofollow Targeting

Sad: I disabled nofollow on my blog because it doesn’t solve the problem. Now comment spammers are trading lists of “do follow” sites.

Picard’s Pills

Just got spam from “Patrick Stewart” for body-part enlargement. Reminded of that one SNL sketch with the cake shop. #

Fall, Spelling, WPA2, Jokes

• Fall in SoCal = checking the weather report daily to decide between shorts or a heavy jacket. #
• I keep seeing pill spam with sensational election-related subjects. Oddly they can spell Obama correctly, but consistently write “McCane” #
• OK, chicken-and-road jokes are old hat, but this set using (mostly political) celebrities is new to me. #
• Time to upgrade your wireless network security to WPA2. #wifi #security #

Stimulate your what?

We’ve been testing Baraccuda’s new BRBL spam block list at work. This involves flagging but not actually blocking messages, then me looking through the logs for potential false positives. I’ve found several, including the Star Wars Fan Club (I subscribed myself just to verify that it was really sent by a server at lucas-online.info) and a senator’s mailing list.

There’s also a lot of definite spam, and a lot of stuff that I just can’t tell. It’s marketing, certainly, but I have no idea whether the particular users actually subscribed or not.

Anyway, this subject showed up several times on the list:

Stimulate your bottom line with Microsoft Financing and the 2008 Economic Stimulus Act

Naturally, when I first skimmed the list only the first three words were visible.

Still Snickering

A couple of messages recently fell into the spamtraps with the subject, “Someone sent you Snickers Candy,” offering lots of free candy and exhorting, “Don’t resist temptation! Sign-up now to get started.”

One of the throwaway addresses used? dietsthatwork2008 (dot) com.

Obviously, that one doesn’t!