Spam me not... please

High fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated fat

2012-01-24T07:10:00.000-08:00

Quel rapport avec la choucroute ? In our case, this incongruous French expression can be more appropriately changed from "what does it have to do with sauerkraut?" to "what does it have to do with spam?". Spam, at least, is only making us sick figuratively.

Having little time and curiosity for most TV shows, I must say that I have never seen Paula Deen's show. But what this article by San Francisco Chronicle's Jon Carroll is depicting is appalling. Don't get me wrong, I am a great believer in home-made food, i.e. food involving simple ingredients. Who in their right mind would add high fructose corn syrup or hydrogenated fat to a perfectly good home-made cake recipe? Who would even be stocking such ingredients in their kitchen? (OK, you can probably find tubs of hydrogenated fat in a lot of western fridges.)

But if cooking show hosts, the arch-advocates of home-made food, make it their business to make their audience fat so their big pharma friends can boost their sales figures by singing the praises of lard and 2000 calorie meals, we're in very bad shape indeed...

Facebook spam for grinches like me

2011-09-27T15:44:00.000-07:00

My friends know that I'm not a big fan of exposing myself on Facebook. Yet I still have an account and log on to see what my friends are up to, mostly when I'm bored or too tired to do something else. My "security" settings are as tight as can be, I rarely share anything, post anything or "like" anything, and I do not have applications installed. As far as Facebook is concerned, I'm a grinch.

And they don't seem to like that. Recently, they have seemed desperate to make me log on. After about not even more than 1 or 2 days of not visiting the network, I would get an email trying to lure me into believing incredibly important things had happened there while I was away. Somebody must have told them that they were bugging people and actually turning them off, because they're now acknowledging they'd been a little zealous in hitting the send button.

Facebook should be happy with me for a little while now: I actually logged on and updated my status today! What's on my mind? This very blog post.

Take that, spambot!

2010-12-22T14:51:00.000-08:00

Did you know that one third of your daily dose of spam may well never reach you anymore? How sad is that!

Apparently, you can thank a guy called Oleg Nikolaenko for all those fake luxury watches you ended up buying believing that would stop the flow of unsolicited mail. Now that Nikolaenko's botnet has been shut down, let's reclaim the space/time/bandwidth the junk was using up!

Wait. Has this translated into a noticeable decrease in the number of spam email you receive daily? A highly unscientific statistical experiment run on a small and non-representative data sample yields the following results. Over a 10-day period extending from Nov 21 to Nov 30, 2010, my gmail account spam folder received about 100 mails. This number drops to about 75 between Dec 11 and Dec 20, 2010. Not quite a 30+% drop, but there's a noticeable improvement from last month.

(Picture found here)

Have some of the bots become headless zombie computers on a vengeful quest of their own to fill the world's inboxes with spam?? Have you really seen any difference since this guy was arrested?

Bring out yer dead

2010-12-15T16:31:00.000-08:00

Thanks for checking in on me, United Nation. I haven't been very actively blogging these past few months, but I'm not dead yet. And if I were, would you stop sending out your spam my way?

Many of you will have noticed the title of this post is a line from a well-known Monty Python movie — and you may well have been lured to this page by it, who knows. Fear not, I will not leave your expectations unfulfilled. This video clip should make your visit worth it. Here's the scene from Monty Python and The Holy Grail. Oh, and it's OK if you've already got one, you can still watch it.

Redundant objects

2010-09-25T10:43:00.000-07:00

This post has very little to do with spam, but I couldn't possibly let this news pass without a comment.

Fans of Kaamelott (a French parodic series about the knights of the round table, which I already mentioned here) certainly remember the series of episodes named Unagi, in which Perceval and Caradoc come up with new fighting techniques. In Unagi IV, the two knights explain to King Arthur that they are perfecting a new technique that makes use of objects found in their immediate environment – which usually is the local tavern. The trick, they say, is to look for "redundant" objects (they really mean "objets contondants" in French, i.e. blunt instruments). In this hilarious episode, you can see them train with such improbable weapons as loaves of bread, a fennel bulb, dry sausage links, a recorder, a hair brush and leeks. Watch it here.

Who knew their technique would be so effective against wild animals in real life?

Mont. woman fends off bear attack with zucchini

Read this story for details of how the 200-pound black bear ran away from a 12-inch zucchini! Now, if the story proves that zucchini are "redundant", it does not reveal which end the woman was holding (does a zucchini even have a "sporadic" end??), and whether she made "perimetric" use of it, or if she actually developed her own technique...

Relevance

2010-07-25T19:08:00.000-07:00

Relevance is what makes people notice you, isn't it? Unfortunately for them (and fortunately for us), spammers don't seem to have gotten the memo yet.

I'm always amazed, as I skim through my spam folder, at the lack of variety in the "topics" broached by spam messages. Maybe one day I should take a little statistical snapshot of my spam folder and look at the proportion of messages about male enhancement pills, bank loans, improbable lottery draws or luxury watches compared to the rest.

I honestly don't understand how people can still fall for those (even if the suckers amount to less than 1%). I am convinced that spammers would fare better if they tapped into less hackneyed, more "relevant" topics. By relevant, I don't mean something narrowly targeted that really resonates with few people and leaves the rest of the crowd indifferent (although that could be an option too). I understand that spammers want to cast as wide a net as possible. For that net to be more effective, I'd suggest using highly visible sporting events as bait, or at least something that catches the eye because it is currently making the news (an election, a natural phenomenon, even a major software release or a celebrity's wedding).

The media was all about the FIFA World Cup last month, and I only got one spam message acknowledging it. The message was sent to me in BCC, the main addressee being some soccer club in France. I received it on the day of the final game, with the following subject line:

alors qu'en penses tu du resultat de la coupe?
(so what do you think of the results of the cup?)

Now wasn't that cleverly done? Wouldn't you be more inclined to click on a message whose subject line is "Get 20% off original price at Tour de France winner's pharmacy" rather than "Get 20% off original price at our online pharmacy"? I believe you would if you received it today, because it is relevant in summer time, when the Tour de France is on. You probably wouldn't notice it as much in the winter, where you'd be more attuned to winter Olympics news or holiday shopping discounts and special offers.

Potpourri

2010-03-26T22:33:00.000-07:00

Don't you love it when spammers try new tricks? The following emails stood out among the usual ones about male enhancement pills or winning lottery tickets that make up the bulk of my spam folder these days: Surely spammers couldn't care less if they passed for name-dropping poseurs? Yet they didn't even bother signaling the quotations as such, let alone giving their sources. So I thought I would.

"Tis past that melancholy dream"

from "I Travelled Among Unknown Men" by William Wordsworth, first published in 1807.

"And your head so large doth grow"

from "The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo" by Edward Lear, first published in 1877.

"Hither come thou back straightway"
"He is come to claim his right"

both from "The Horn of Egremont Castle" by William Wordsworth, first published in 1807.

"Still she weeps and daily moans"

from "The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo" by Edward Lear again.

"In a beautiful pea green boat"

from "The Owl and the Pussy Cat" by Edward Lear, first published in 1871.

This literary hodgepodge is nothing more than lipstick on a pig, but I am somewhat grateful to my spammer friends for giving me the chance to actually read the poems they borrowed from. I am also amused to see how poetry has its place in insensitive mass communication (although apparently you have to either be Wordsworth or Lear to get such massive exposure).

I guess my soul didn't get transported (or confused) enough to let my earthly fingers click on the links at the end of these messages. This potpourri (which literally means "rotten pot" in French) didn't bode too well...

Valentine's day hotness

2010-02-16T22:09:00.000-08:00

A bidding contest seems to have started on Valentine's day in my spam folder. Who will give me the best discount on the hotness pill?

Currently, "Pfizer (tm) Viagra (c)" is the highest bidder, with 84% off. "Pfizer VIAGRA eService" hasn't budged from its initial bid for 80% off. "Me" is trailing, with 76% (what a cheap bastard I am!).

How much hotter can the race get?

Back with more spam recipes!

2010-02-02T01:27:00.000-08:00

Spam is always in season. Since it is so readily available, it lends itself to innumerable variations.

GMail serves my spam email together with not-so-mouth-watering spam dishes. Among the recent ones:

Spam Swiss Pie
Creamy Spam Broccoli Casserole
Vineyard Spam Salad

I wonder if some spam recipes call for any of the meds typically advertised in spam emails. The chef's suggestion du jour could be:

Spam and Viagra Salad
Vicodin and Spam Fajitas
Today's special: Chandeleur Crepes with Xanax Ice-Cream and Spam Shavings

Bon appétit!

First spammy comment

2009-12-15T15:26:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, this blog received its first spammy comment. Marcus left a note regarding a post published last month when my email address won the UK National Lottery. I guess he just wanted to suggest new outlets for my address's gambling addiction.

Sorry, Marcus, this blog will not be a promotional platform for your online casinos. Interestingly enough, though, this comment is somewhat relevant to the post to which it was destined. Also, Marcus and co did not attempt at flooding all my other posts with the same type of comment. Good effort! This is in keeping with this older post described, by the way.

To this day, I have been restricting comment posting to "registered users", i.e. people willing to identify themselves using a Google, LiveJournal, WordPress, TypePad, AIM or OpenID account. I also chose to enable word verification (a step which is automatically skipped if you signed in as a blog author, apparently). Last but not least, I set my comment moderation settings to "always" and get notified by email each time someone leaves a comment.

On various occasions, while trying to leave a comment, the whole identification and word verification process struck me as cumbersome and frustrating. Since Marcus's comment only got caught at the comment moderation stage, why not make it easier altogether for normal people to share their thoughts in the comments section?

Let's give it a try: I just changed my settings to allow anyone to post comments to my blog. If I get flooded with spammy comments (which you will hopefully never get to see), I'll switch back to more restrictive settings.

Acrostics, mesostics and trash metal

2009-12-13T22:17:00.000-08:00

If you are still unclear as to what an acrostic is, the first two sentences of the definition given by Wordsmith.org (found here on Answers.com) may help dissipate any remaining ambiguity:

An acrostic is not an angry insect ("a cross tick"), any more than an oxymoron is a big dumb cow. Rather, an acrostic is a poem, in which the first letter of each line spells out a word.

This definition actually debunks two deeply rooted assumptions that I had concerning dictionaries:

Isn't it unusual for a dictionary to start defining a word by what it does not mean?
Would you have ever thought it possible to turn to a dictionary for comic relief? I thought humor — if at all present — could only reside in the citations used to illustrate the definition of a word in context.

This may just be that Wordsmith.org is not a conventional dictionary. As refreshing as it may be, this definition could be amended a little. Poems are indeed the preferred embodiment for acrostics, because of their mostly fixed layout, but Arnold Schwarzenegger's letter can be added to a long line of texts in prose which benefit from a two-dimensional reading. Among the more elegant and recent is Linton Weeks's farewell review in the Washington Post.

In both examples, the "hidden" message was meant to be discovered by everyone. A variant of the acrostic and a more effective cryptographic pattern is the mesostic, which also has you look for subtext by reading the text vertically. While acrostics rely on the first letter of each line, mesostics use the middle of each line.

Do you remember how we were supposed to be able to hear the voice of the devil by playing trash metal tracks backwards?

More f-words

2009-12-01T21:22:00.000-08:00

The letter F seems to be particularly prone to open profane words in English. While Arnold Schwarzenegger recently chose to use one common f-word (see this post), Louis Nicollin seems to favor the one ending in "-ag".

Readers from outside France will ask: who the hell is Louis Nicollin??? He's the CEO of one of the biggest garbage collection companies in France and the president of the Montpellier soccer team. Also, he's (hopefully) one-of-a-kind foul-mouthed homophobic and sexist character! Last month, he insulted another team's captain (using his favorite f-word), and proved with his next-day attempt at an apology that it is sometimes best to not apologize at all.

Judging from this article published in Le Monde, the guy is a constant PR disaster. Allow me to select a couple of gems for you and provide a translation into English for your enjoyment:

"On peut se parler, se dire les choses. On est des hommes, pas des gonzesses."
We can talk, say what we have to say to each other. We're guys, not chicks.

"Un clip sur le racisme, je suis prêt à le passer dès demain matin. Mais sur l'homophobie... Après, ce sera quoi, les femmes battues ?"
A video about racism, I'm ready to show it as early as tomorrow morning. But one about homophobia... What is it going to be next? Battered women?

"Si la maire me demande de le passer, je le ferai. Mais je préférerais montrer des filles à poil...".
If the mayor asks me to show it, I'll do it. But I'd rather show naked girls...

Ahh, free speech...

Spiderman's pedipalps

2009-11-24T22:39:00.000-08:00

If you're wondering what pedipalps are (not what they stand for here, obviously), the Merriam-Webster online dictionary gives the following definition:

either of the second pair of appendages of an arachnid (as a spider) that are borne near the mouth and are often modified for a special (as sensory) function

The appendage, according to the Wikipedia article, is also where the male spider's reproductive organs are located, which makes it relevant in the context of your average spam message.

Considering what one looks like with enlarged pedipalps (see above), though, it is safe to say that you and your family can pass on this and save.

Yay, jsem získala loterie znovu!

2009-11-12T22:04:00.000-08:00

Please pardon my broken Czech again.

For those of us not versed in Slavic languages, freetranslation.com provides the following "translation" of the UK National Lottery message I wrote about earlier this week (see this post):

"Your e-mail address he won This is oficiálne notify that the result our pocítace cerpat 844 this on the chosen your name and e-mail address pripojen to tickets Císlo 034-22478556 with poradovým císlem 129, which subsequently won the United Kingdom Lottery large udelování prices in the category. You have been confirmed as vítez category B in the United Kingdom Lottery vylosuje pocítac remíz. Your claim ensemble was rádne predána to this Narodni with the guidelines, which we during handling of prevodem your price 1,000000.00 £ GBP. (One Million United Kingdom pound) to your úcet nominated. Laskave sent the following information of the claims."

I really like the disclaimer accompanying this appalling text:

This translation is ideal for "gisting" purposes, providing a basic understanding of the original text.

Of course, since I don't know any Czech, I may be too quick to blame freetranslation.com, which does indeed provide basic understanding of the message — which I am grateful for. But, as far as I know, "which we during handling of prevodem your price 1,000000.00 £ GBP. (One Million United Kingdom pound) to your úcet nominated" is nothing more than gibberish.

As is often the case, you get what you pay for...

Yay, jsem získala loterie!

2009-11-09T21:56:00.000-08:00

I was informed by the following email that I finally won the lottery!

UK NATIONAL LOTTERY

Vaše e-mailová adresa Vyhrál To je oficiálne oznámit, že výsledek našeho pocítace cerpat 844 tohoto dne zvolený Vaše jméno a e-mailovou adresu pripojen k vstupenek Císlo 034-22478556 s poradovým císlem 129, které následne vyhrál Velká Británie Lottery velkou udelování cen v 2. category. You mít bylo potvrzeno, že vítez kategorie B ve Spojeném království Lottery vylosuje pocítac remíz. Vaše tvrzení soubor byl rádne predána k tomuto kancelár s pokyny, které jsme se pri manipulaci s prevodem Vaší cenu 1,000000.00 £ GBP. (One Million Velká Británie libra) na Váš úcet nominován. Laskave poslat níže informace o pohledávky.

Oh no, actually, it's my email address that had the winning ticket. It's been having quite a bit of a gambling problem lately and I've been trying to talk it out of staying up so late playing at multiple online poker tables at once. It recently started buying UK Lotto tickets through a Czech bookmaker, and it seems to be paying off after all! One million British pounds! Yooohooooooooo.

Wait, I hope my email address is willing to share... After all I did for it, trying to keep it spam free and all, it should at least be a couple hundred thousand grateful, don't you think?

Seriously, why would the UK national lottery write to me in Czech???

Poetry on the margin

2009-11-02T23:27:00.000-08:00

I doubt the poetic figure called acrostic has ever had more exposure in the press than these past few days. Thanks to Arnold Schwarzenegger, of all people, acrostics are now all the rage — kind of.

Google trends shows a surge in the number of Google searches as well as news articles about acrostics in the last week of October:

This sudden interest for the poetic figure coincides with the Governor of California's f-bomb, cleverly hidden in a veto letter addressed to the Members of the California State Assembly, among whom Assemblyman Tom Ammiano. In turn, Ammiano encapsulated a coded message in his response to the governor ("A Message on the Margin"). Is that the beginning of a new mind game for political writers?

The following graph shows that the trend setter and his message are still 6 times "trendier" than the form used to convey it.

The revival of acrostics may well be short lived...

"Be the Tasmanian Lovemaking Devil..."

2009-10-27T16:18:00.000-07:00

To be honest, I didn't know Tasmanian devils made the ideal lover.

Judging from real world pictures (see above) and from the general features of the animal's incarnation in the Looney Tunes cartoon (see below), I am tempted to believe that they are to be avoided at all costs. In fact, "lovemaking" and "Tasmanian devil" sound so far apart that combining them in a single noun phrase should normally be considered oxymoronic — unless of course the attributes of the ideal lover (or even the basic traits commonly expected in a tolerable partner) dramatically changed with the most recent partial lunar eclipse.

Viciousness and aggressivity on the one hand, tornado-style destruction and utter stupidity on the other — is this really something to be looking forward to???

Summer is watch season for everybody after all

2009-10-18T22:55:00.000-07:00

This is an erratum to my previous post (Summer time is watch season), in which "losers" were denied the privilege of buying a tacky watch from a dubious website. Well, it turns out that I was mistaken, and that self-identified losers too deserve to fall for that!

See the last line of this screenshot of my spam folder, featuring a sample of the watch related spam I received:

"Our watch will look great even on any loser"

Hurray for non discriminatory, equal opportunity scams!

Summer time is watch season

2009-10-13T08:50:00.000-07:00

All of a sudden, over the summer, I got flooded with spam wanting to sell me a watch. Watches seemed to be the new pills.

The pitch typically went like this:

With our [select your style] watches, [select who you are] will look [select your desired look]. Buy our [select your style again] watches, they are [select your price range].

With the following options to choose from:

[select your style]
stunning
trendy
designer
stylish
classy
fashionable
cool
luxury, luxurious

[select who you are]
a local or international customer
a teenager
an adult
a loser

[select your desired look]
irresistible look
look great
proud
stylish
classy
trendy

[select your price range]
low-priced
cheap
great savings
very low price

Summer has passed, and so has the wave of watch related emails. I wonder what the fall's fad will be.

Hotmail passwords

2009-10-05T16:29:00.000-07:00

Oooops. Not clear how all this happened, though... A phishing scam able to fool 10,000 users at once sounds fishy.

Antithesis

2009-09-25T22:00:00.000-07:00

Rxpills_support_online makes the following claim:

"Impotence is not good. Viagra is Good"

Therefore impotence is not Viagra, right? Er, no, that probably isn't where this was going...

I love it when the argumentation reaches that level of simplicity but can still be described using very elaborate-sounding words. Viva la abstracción!

Polysemy, ambiguity and spam recipes

2009-08-09T15:39:00.000-07:00

Once in a while, I check my mail sent to my Gmail account using the online interface. I generally go directly to the spam folder to make sure that the spam filter has not been over-zealous, and sometimes just for laughs.

Some advertising makes it through my default Adblock Plus config but what keeps me from blocking the frame is the (certainly limited but not non-existent) entertainment value of this sponsored links section. Most of the text ads deemed "contextually" relevant to the mail classified as spam have to do with unsolicited mail. Some, however, are pretty much off target and that makes them way more interesting: the relevance computation is evidently based on "spam" construed as gelatinous mystery/porky meat.

Spam Confetti Pasta
French Fry Spam Casserole
Spam Vegetable Strudel
Spam Veggie Pita Pockets
Spicy Spam Kabobs
Savory Spam Crescents
Spam Primavera
Spam Imperial Tortilla Sandwiches
Spam Fajitas
Spam Skillet Casserole
Spam Quiche
Spam Hashbrown Bake
Ginger Spam Salad

Yikes.

Resolving ambiguity originating in polysemy is no easy task. And yet, one could assume that the engine used by AdSense to process keywords and calculate ad relevance would know what "spam" means when it is a label associated by Gmail itself to an electronic message, don't you think?

Synaesthetic

2009-08-01T16:02:00.000-07:00

Last week, Zimbolli sent me a message entitled "synaesthetic", which Thunderbird classified as Junk. Attracted by the unusually learned subject line, I did open the message body, only to find the not-so-unusual male enhancement promises and the following URL:

www[dot]pill22[dot]com

Isn't it ironic that a spammer would try to make it difficult for a robot (and to some extent for a human being) to figure out the website they are rooting for? Usually, it's email addresses you disguise by spelling out the dots, not URLs.

Anyway, while idly looking around for examples of synesthesia in poetry (Rimbaud, Verlaine and Baudelaire first came to my mind, but I was looking for examples in English), I stumbled upon something I had never heard about in all those years I spent studying/playing early music: the "ocular harpsichord" and the "color organ". It turns out that sound and light shows are not a 20th century invention at all! Jean-Michel Jarre's musical family tree includes people like Telemann or Rameau (late 17th-18th centuries), who wrote pieces for keyboard instruments capable of producing sound and light to go with the sound. Of course, it's not like musicians until then had ignored the emotional power of simultaneous sensory perceptions from different sources (auditory and visual in this case), but I thought it was interesting that it would be synthesized in a single instrument.

Something that I surely must have heard about in all the years I spent studying literary theory and cultural history but just "re-"discovered is Newton's theory of color and music. The theory compares the vibrations resulting in the different color shades on the spectrum and the vibrations resulting in the different musical notes in Western scales. It is schematized in the color wheel, published in Opticks in 1704, on which you can see letters corresponding to a Dorian mode scale starting on D separating the sectors displaying the spectral colors.

Many thanks to Zimbolli (or whoever that was) for piquing my interest and for reminding me that Google, YouTube and Wikipedia are my friends.

Customer service

2009-07-23T15:55:00.000-07:00

Dijon1 sent me the following email the other day:

In large print:

You're a jerk You are sleeping on your working place? Visit Canadian Health and Care Mall

I assume the email provided a way to reach that online pharmacy, but I did not feel inclined to inquire further after such a welcoming greeting.

About.com has compiled a list of eight rules for good customer service, specially targeted at small businesses in Canada. Dijon1, may I point you to rule #6? A corollary to this rule would be: "Don't insult your potential customers", and it should also apply to yourself, not just to your staff.

Swex From a Chriistian Perspective

2009-07-11T22:00:00.000-07:00

Despite Faber's pseudo-proselytizing or in any case spammy attempt, the email remained unopened and went directly to trash. From what I could gather, though, the aforementioned perspective cometh wiith quiite a fjew twypos.

Interestingly, the Open Office dictionary for American English offers more alternative spellings than its British counterpart.

Here's the dialog box with the suggestions for American English:

Here's the same dialog box with the "English (UK)" option selected:

Why is that???