[UA] Spam?

Jesús Couto jcouto at campanera.com
Sun Mar 21 03:42:50 PST 2004


Rich Harkrader wrote:

>Heyo,
>
>Does anyone know what the heck those blocks of random text at the end of
>some spam messages are for?  I sometimes read through my spam messages, and
>have started to notice these.  Some are tremendously bizarre, like this one:
>
>Something to think about: Kill chair, say along the conflict, step Haunting,
>living, exposing, spilling, seducing, The king lifts, as if the key is a
>suit. Ethereal the speech laughed a swell queen, joyfully Sick key as a tree
>ponders about the heavy acorn, Alas, the speech has revolved quite quietly,
>uncovering Yelled by glances, spills the glass to shame. Upon ancient sheep,
>demonstrate not yet go concisely The futon conducts, as if the heap is a
>table. Hit signs with no elongated pie.
>
>Anyone considered if some secret message is contained within these blocks?
>It seems all you'd need is the right key to decode the message.  Might be a
>pretty interesting way for people in the Occult Underground to keep in
>touch.  Hiding in plain sight and all.
>
>Rich;)
>
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>
>  
>
The real answer, (and forgive me for the sudden break of weirderness 
:-)) is that as a the latest technique to filter spam is Bayesian 
filtering (basically, you train your spam filter with a feed of spam, 
and it generates a series of statisticals correlations like "if it says 
viagra it has a high % of being spam, if it says penis is has another, 
if it says the two its even higher"),  they hope that by adding a block 
of random words at the end they are going to get under the filter.

In UA terms... thats a lot of work to get your spam delivered to 
somebody that tried very hard to not have any more of it. If I remember 
it correctly Irascimancy requires that people hate you, personally... 
but it looks like a very interesting case. Spam is automaticaly 
generated by bulk mailer software. The person that devised this "random 
noise" strategy, put it on the lastest spam-machine and is selling it to 
spammers sure has hell has gotten more than 100 people hating its guts, 
even if they dont know who she/he is...

... or maybe is trying to land an interview in /. or another popular 
computer website or magazine to give his name and start getting major 
charges.

Jesús Couto F.



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