K-Squared Ramblings

A Lot of Effort to Disguise Some Spam

I found a comment in the spam folder for Speed Force that, on first glance, looked like an actual, relevant comment…to a different post. It was a coherently-written paragraph about how someone had “considered getting a second Captain Cold” action figure to customize it, but it was posted to an article about stalled miniseries. The author’s name and link were obvious spam, though (seriously, “watch full movies” is the best you can do?).

My first thought: They’d copied the text from another comment on the site. I’ve seen that happen before, but usually it’s comments on the same post. A search through existing comments didn’t turn up any matches, though.

So then I did a search on the rest of the web, and found the original comment on a review of an Atom Smasher toy.

Someone had gone looking for a site with a similar topic (comic books about super-heroes, action figures made from super-heroes), copied text from there, and pasted it onto mine…and yet they hadn’t bothered to match up specifics (like pasting it on a post about action figures or Captain Cold). So it’s not quite as sneaky as the one who followed a link in my post and pasted in text from the other page, but it’s pretty close.

Essay Spam

Lately I’ve started getting spam for academic essay-writing services on this blog, and for some reason it really bugs me. I mean, more than the usual pills, porn, personals & fake antivirus crap.

Is it just that I’m more accustomed to the other stuff? Possibly, but I think it’s a little deeper than that. I think the reason it bothers me is that, beyond the spammer himself being dishonest, this is encouraging the target to be dishonest as well.

Silly Comment Spammer…

Yesterday I got a strange comment that I thought looked a bit spammy. It was one of those sneaky comments that pretends it’s reporting a problem on your site. The layout looks off in Chrome, or is broken in Firefox, etc. Except, of course, when you look at it in that browser, it’s just fine.

This one claimed that they’d gotten an alert on their firewall when hitting the blog, and could it be related to one of your ads?

Unlikely given how few ads I use, but possible, since I had a third-party poll, some Amazon links, and a banner for Mozilla Plugin Check. Still, the author’s website looked pretty spammy, once I pulled out the extra w, so I put it back in moderation–

Wait, what was that about an extra w?

Well, they’d linked to wwww.[REDACTED].com. Kind of amusing, but I didn’t think anything of it until I had the chance to look for other sites with similar comments…and found that they all pointed to the broken site!

Misdirected

• Got a compliment on good tech support … but it was intended for another company with a similar name. #
• I alternate between finding it amusing & annoying that I get spam for local businesses in Brazil. It’s a bit of a drive from SoCal. #
• It’s sad to get Christmas cards for someone who used to live at your address. We’ve gotten two this year, but none last year. Maybe last year’s were still forwarded, and the forwarding order expired. #

Spam, Activism, N’okay

• Project Honeypot: 1 Billion Spammers Served! #
• Wow. Without “activist judges” to blame, anti-gay-marriage *ahem* activists in DC are complaining about activist…legislators. #
• It’s almost 2010. Why do OK/Cancel boxes STILL pop up while I’m typing & accept my “input?” I’m not sure what I just confirmed. Or canceled. Or whatever it is that it thought I told it. #
• Computer update: Disk check finished overnight, seems OK today. Ran a backup just in case, but got some work done on that project! #

Cylon Spammers

I’m seeing a lot of word salad spam comments this weekend. It’s entertaining to read them in the vocal style of a Cylon hybrid. #

Audio, Social Worker Spam, & Prius Hatch

• Fedora 12 claims PulseAudio improvements. Here’s hoping sound will actually work after suspend+resume again. #
• 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. Via @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. #
• From @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. #
• Incredible new high-res image of Saturn! (via @ThisIsTrue) #

Fire, Borg and Spam

• Hah! Today’s flashback post is about the time I dreamed I auditioned for Borg: The Musical. (Sadly, I didn’t record any details.) #
• From @ThisIsTrue:
  

  AMAZING false-color NASA satellite pic of the damage caused by LA’s Station Fire. #

• From @lol_spam:
  

  Spam subject: “I have Salvia! Join me ” – I misread this as “saliva”…and almost did a spit-take (really!) #

• I don’t want *more* spam, but a wider variety would be nice. The funny stuff is mostly sex, drugs & watches w/occasional acaí. #

@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

• @openvideo requests:
  

  Help open video spread at SXSW— check out our proposals, vote for them, and tell your open video amigos #

• Via @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! #

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!