Might as well get some use out of the stuff.
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| cr Dec 29, 2006 3:41 AM EDT |
One of my alternate activities is learning to write decent fiction. Anytime I needed a natural-sounding character name, I used to look through the spam-bucket at all the carefully-contrived names spammers have sent me. Now, having written a Perl script to sweep through my qmail server's spam-Maildirs periodically, I just look through the master-list it produces. If you need a lot of names, say, to populate a test database, you might as well use the ones donated by our good friends the spammers. |
| dcparris Dec 29, 2006 6:33 AM EDT |
Talk about sifting the wheat from the tares. That's pretty cool. |
| dthacker Dec 29, 2006 11:34 AM EDT |
There are a lot of thing I've never understood about spam:
1) Why should I buy prescription drugs from you when you can't spell the name of the medication?
2) Why would I finance my house with you when you have problems placing decimal points properly?
3) If you're making that much money on all these stocks, why do you keep having to send me email? Can't you retire yet? Dave |
| dinotrac Dec 29, 2006 11:40 AM EDT |
Dave - To that I add: What do you mean enhance it? Hey! Have you been talking to my first wife? |
| jimf Dec 29, 2006 12:31 PM EDT |
I've never understood about spam: It's appearently common knowledge that every Amerian male 'must' have 'at least' 2# per year of viagra, and is compelled to frequient a porn site every 15 minutes. Otherwise why would we be getting all this trash. I must be very unamerican.... |
| Sander_Marechal Dec 29, 2006 1:17 PM EDT |
dthacker & dinotrac: There's nothing to understand about spam in that respect. It sells so they spam. Try understanding why people will actually buy from spamvertized sites. That'll crack your noggin for sure. |
| jimf Dec 29, 2006 1:30 PM EDT |
> There's nothing to understand about spam in that respect. It sells so they spam. So American males really do buy 2lbs of viagra a year ;-) |
| cr Dec 29, 2006 1:55 PM EDT |
The simplest way to understand spammers is what I tell my kids: every single one of those people is a crook. Most of them, all they want is your credit card info, and they'll say absolutely anything to get it. The occasional exception who actually has something to sell and isn't going to max out your credit card, is stealing other people's computer power to do their advertising, so they're crooks too. You don't send money to crooks. My father had a real problem wrapping his head around that simplicity. It (discount software) was advertised, he wanted it, why shouldn't he buy it? I think the part he didn't get is the cost of the spam. To him it's a minor nuisance, but he only got one copy. At the sending end where millions of copies are going out, it's a massive theft of someone else's paid-for bandwidth, so you have to assume the ad is crooked because it's sent by a crook. He didn't see it that way. I think this is a good example of who buys and why. |
| jimf Dec 29, 2006 2:20 PM EDT |
> they're crooks Crooks at best, and degenerate crooks at worst. In any case, why would anyone want to respond once they understand that. It's very frustrating to see that some still think this has value. |
| Sander_Marechal Dec 29, 2006 3:51 PM EDT |
> So American males really do buy 2lbs of viagra a year ;-) Well, someone's paying the spammers to spam. It can't be all for the credit card info. There are much better ways to get to credit card info then peddling fake viagra (e.g. porn, dating sites). |
| hkwint Dec 30, 2006 3:00 AM EDT |
cr: Hey, can u writ3 a scr1pt to add the spam to th3 entr0py pool of /dev/urandom? That woud be totallie co01! Hmm, anyway, we all know Microsoft and especially the people using Windows are part of the problem. Couldn't all internet routers be reprogrammed to ban all Windows users?I mean, if 87% of the mail is spam, 87% of the energy used to route mail is wasted. Ban the Windows users! (Because, then I could spam Don even faster!) Oh, and I really should write that "virus" that installs a decent firewall and virusscanner at that zombie boxes. On the other hand, I wouldn't want to lose all that spam. It makes me really feel important to receive mail from all over the world (though only about 4 topics, but anyway, you shouldn't complain when 80 people a day send you a 'hello' message because they care about you, should you?) |
| cr Dec 30, 2006 4:31 AM EDT |
hkwint: that could open a rather severe security hole, couldn't it? Having a system-random driven by an externally-controllable process? (...not that I've studied up on that side of things in Linux yet, to be honest...) But don't go away mad. I bet, if you stuck a WAVfile header-set (just RIFF, WAVE, fmt_ and data) on some of these spams, treating them as 8-bit-unsigned sample streams, they'd make the most interesting background sounds... You could do that with sox, no Perl needed. |
| dinotrac Dec 30, 2006 4:53 AM EDT |
>they'd make the most interesting background sounds. Especially the Viagra spams. |
| cr Dec 30, 2006 5:16 AM EDT |
> Especially the Viagra spams. Well, for those you don't chomp the line-endings off, They're more rhythmic that way. #!/usr/bin/perl -w # # spam2wav --crb3 30Dec06 # # how many spammers does it take to recreate the soundtrack to # Katamari Damacy? filling in bycts after all is saved to disk # allows for piping concatenated spam in via STDIN (-e operator # might not like pipes). # $riffsize=$databyct=0; $samrate=11025; # a comfy samplerate, ~5KHz bandwidth $bytrate=$samrate; die "no output WAVfile specifiedn" unless defined($outf=$ARGV[0]); open(W,">$outf") or die "can't make outfile $outfn"; &write_headers; while(defined($ln=<STDIN>)){ chomp $ln; # unpleasant periodicity removed $databyct += length($ln); print W $ln; } $riffsize=$databyct+8+16+4; # takes in other headers seek(W,0,0); &write_headers; # this time with real sizes close(W); sub write_headers { $headers=pack("a4Ia4"."a4IvvIIvv"."a4I", 'RIFF', $riffsize, # hoping the native endian is vax/intel 'WAVE', 'fmt ', 16, # fmtcnt, size of 'fmt ' args 1, 1, # channels $samrate, $bytrate, 1, # bytes per sample-block 8, # bits per sample 'data', $databyct ); print W $headers; } (LXer's CMS removed indenting, and backslashes on string-ending newlines.) |
| swbrown Dec 30, 2006 5:45 AM EDT |
cr, something's broken, I ran it and all I got was the soundtrack to Vib Ribbon. |
| cr Dec 30, 2006 6:01 AM EDT |
I don't even know what Vib Ribbon is; I'll hafta ask my kids about that. What console does it run on? You must have a higher-quality spam than me. I get quantity instead, like a meg a week -- or maybe that Vib Ribbon one went to the bitbucket already. I knew I shoulda coded spam2wav right after I got done with the sinewave Morse generator! |
| dinotrac Dec 30, 2006 6:03 AM EDT |
cr - >I get quantity instead, like a meg a week You may have to change your handle to Hormel. |
| cr Dec 30, 2006 6:09 AM EDT |
dino- > You may have to change your handle to Hormel. Well, I am a licensed amateur radio operator, does that count? |
| dinotrac Dec 30, 2006 6:28 AM EDT |
>Well, I am a licensed amateur radio operator, does that count? Ouch. |
| tracyanne Dec 30, 2006 9:18 PM EDT |
At one time, with all the Penile enhancement spam I used to get, I started to wonder if there was something I was missing out on. |
| cr Dec 31, 2006 3:01 AM EDT |
> At one time, with all the Penile enhancement spam I used to get, I started to wonder if there was something I was missing out on. Not the most useful 'life-extension', but... <sigh> It's spam. No matter what it promises, or what your intentions are, you'd get better results with fewer nasty side-effects by wishing on a star for some Nanniichuan. |
| jdixon Dec 31, 2006 8:21 AM EDT |
> At one time, with all the Penile enhancement spam I used to get, I started to wonder if there was something I was missing out on. I felt the same way about the "get laid tonight" spam, but I asked my wife, and she insists that I'm not missing anything. :) |
| mvermeer Jan 04, 2007 9:52 PM EDT |
That reminds me... wouldn't a spell checker make a pretty good spam filter? You saw it here first, don't try to patent it ;-/ |
| mvermeer Jan 04, 2007 10:04 PM EDT |
> You don't send money to crooks. My father had a real problem
> wrapping his head around that simplicity. He is not alone. If non-spamming companies, esp. the big ones, would make it a habit to not behave like crooks and treat their customers fairly, perhaps the difference would stand out more clearly. |
| techiem2 Jan 05, 2007 9:38 AM EDT |
You mean if you didn't get a popup saying "We've decided your legally purchased license is for some random reason no longer valid, click here to re-purchase it" from your OS manufacturer you might be less likely to click on the similar popup saying "Your computer might be infected! Click here to buy Product X!" or the email stating the same thing? Wow! :) It is pretty sad though, how similar the behaviors are of the "reputable" companies to the malware ones anymore. Oddly, I haven't been getting much spam through my system lately. It's kinda weird to look at my filter logs and only see that 20 or so spams got fried. |
| dcparris Jan 05, 2007 10:10 AM EDT |
We got a couple of messages recently on the editors' list that made me think spammers had found a new way to spam. I'm afraid to even state the nature of it, since doing so would give unruly readers a new idea. I tracked down one sender, by phone, who said she had made a mistake. She was a legit person employed by a legit company, who had been sent to LXer while looking at some info elsewhere. I was surprised (a) that she really existed, and/or (b) that she had actually sent the message. I called the company from which the e-mail was sent, and discovered that she actually worked there. They even transferred me directly to her! The timing, in conjunction with a similar message, was uncanny, and I could just see our inboxes getting a flood of new spam. All I can say is, Whew! If my guts had been proven correct, we would have been in for a real nightmare. Fortunately, my gut-level instincts are sometimes just plain wrong. |
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