not falling down

Oh, I know Baz Luhrmann, all right.

Ain’t nobody marking that motherfucker safe.

I got spam today with the most intriguing subject line ever, so I googled it and bam, first result was Gordon Fay’s 24-hour RPG Blood Royal. The subject line, and its description: “A competitive game of fairy-tale intrigue and skulduggery in which players take the roles of a dying King’s children, each vying to be named successor at the end of the week.” How cool is that! Thanks, spam! Welcome to unintended consequences.

Man, today’s new virus email was pretty cool! The subject line was “You visit illegal websites,” and it was spoofed to appear like it came from “Department@fbi.gov.” Attachment: the standard ZIP file. Little do they know that all the illegal websites I visit are based outside the US, and would fall under the purview of the CIA! AH HA!

Seriously, if you get that or a similar email, don’t open the attachment, don’t open the email, don’t even preview it. Just hit the Junk button in Thunderbird and whistle a merry tune. (You are using Thunderbird, right?)

I think the killer app for Mechanical Turk is already out there. Think about it: what’s very simple for a human, very hard for a computer, shows up everywhere and acts as a gatekeeper from potentially greater value?

That’s right: those little “verify you’re a human” image boxes that make you transcribe a series of bendy, obscured letters and numbers in order to leave a Blogger comment, or get an LJ account or a GMail address. (Less awkwardly, more annoyingly, they’re called CAPTCHAs.) Yoz Grahame pointed out like a year ago that these are a solved problem: you just go to a CAPTCHA page, grab the image, and put it in front of porn on one of your other sites. Step three: profit!

The only problem with that scenario is that, well, there are ways to get porn without all that tiresome thinking, and most porn-seekers will take them over your time-consuming verification step. It’s easier to type BRITTNAY SPEER NUDE into Google Image Search than it is to decipher Ty$23YiD.

But if MT’s model works (and I’m not saying it does; right now only Amazon uses it, and you’d have to work hard and boringly to make five bucks an hour), and if it gets sufficiently popular that the site’s admins won’t notice spammers slipping CAPTCHAS in, this could be a viable crack. Sign up for an account, pay Random Human two cents to verify it, and spam, spam away. It’s okay, say the servers you’re using to link your herbal V1agra incest mortgage. I know that’s not a bot!

CAPTCHAs are the least bad solution to bot-signups out there right now, but I hope the tech startups that are built around providing that kind of authentication don’t get comfortable. They’ve never been more than a stopgap.

Okay, guys, Cialis soft tabs are not new anymore.

Got a fairly clever phishing email today–this one faked all the headers right, and they even spell-checked! I’m impressed (although they still missed a period).

Anyway, if you get something called “Paypal Flagged Account” that appears to be from support@paypal.com, ignore it. The big clue in this one, as always, was the actual URL of the “Click here to verify your Information” link. Always right-click on links like those and hit “Properties” to check where you’re really going.

Maria and I were discussing the increasingly esoteric and convoluted nature of spam, just now, including the fact that much of bulk email no longer serves a discernible purpose. I frequently receive spam from nonsense names, advertising nothing, free of hyperlinks or parsible sentences.

I pointed out that one reason it’s gotten so complicated is the constant, high-speed arms race between spammer and anti-spam software vendor; as new regular expressions are devised and new efforts made to beat them, whole fields of technique can be created and discarded in a week. And then Maria said something that chilled me to my very bones.

“What if,” she said, “the vendors are putting spam out there just to keep selling their software?”

I’m terrified, now, that she might be right.

Anyway, read Spam As Folk Art.

“I am contacting you about cross linking. I am interested in your site because it looks like it’s relevant to a site for which I am seeking links.

The site offers great information regarding cosmetic treatments and aesthetic procedures. This company specializes in providing acne treatment, laser hair removal, microdermabrasion, removal of stretch marks and other services.”

Well shit! That’s completely relevant to a near-dead webcomic and a journal where I make fun of stupid emails!

I thought maybe Sumana had invented the spamblog, but I was wrong.

We heard your mom, wife and kids suck like this

Hey! FUCK YOU!