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Milestones in the Annals of Junkmail
fdc writes: "Web pages are a great source of postal
addresses for direct mailers. Judging by some of the
addresses we've seen recently, it's evident that the data is
harvested not by humans, but by computer programs that scan web
pages for names and addresses. Several weeks ago we (the
Kermit
Project at
Columbia University)
announced a new release of our Kermit 95
communication software for Windows -- SSH, secure FTP, etc; cousin
of C-Kermit
for Unix (search Freshmeat). Since this was a major release, we
chose a new icon for it: the Columbia
crown. A web page
explained that this is the emblem of Columbia University: the
crown of King George the II of England (1727-1760), who founded
Columbia in 1754. JUST ONE WEEK LATER guess who received a postcard from
Dell."
so my cat fluffy *didnt* order those dells. whew!
four-oh-four
just doesn't have the same ring to it.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Thou art getting a Dell!
---
I'm tired of waltzing for pancakes. -- Gwen Mezzrow
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
Was this about Kermit or Junkmail?
Get your Unix fortune now!
maybe now people will instead of type their address write it in ascii code or something like somebody(at)something.com instead of somebody@something.com to fool the bots.
Forsooth Royal Dude, you're getting a ye olde Dell!
But that's what I always write when asked. Poor dudes at the postal services.
You should be glad that AI has come this far. For an intelligent agent to be able to harvest addresses by clicking through web pages, and then mailing out postcards is truly an advancement of the technology.
Remember, there are good points to everything, even things like this which under normal circumstances could be described as "alienating our rights."
There are no clear King George + address on the web-page. This just looks like a prank database addition by someone at Dell on a slow day (probably a Kermit user, tho.)
Really, contact Dell and ask for an explanation. I think we'd all love to hear what kind of lame excuse they try to come up with in order to avoid admitting that they harvest spammable addreses from the net :)
Just nitpicking...
Seriously, I think he makes an excellent point. I'd *love* to hear them try to explain this one away with their cooperate-speak. They'll prolly try to sell it off an as honest mistake, that the guy responsible has been summarily punished, etc etc.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Why would direct mail companies choose to use automated programs like this?
Let's look at what these programs give you:
1. A ton of results.
2. 80%(and probably a whole lot more, I'm just being conservative) of those results are probably false due to all those AOL member pages that haven't been updated in years, people who put up fake info, info that is out of date, etc.
Wouldn't this be bad for the direct mail companies? Clients that hire them want to reach as many real people as possible. The direct mail companies that use the methods mentioned in this story can never provide their clients with what they want, the ability to reach real consumers.
The Direct mail companies probably know this and either, are planning on changing it or don't care and are just interested in spamming as many people, real or not, as possible.
Direct mail companies interested in doing what they promise should think about the way they collect information in order to provide better service if they are a real company not just looking to spam everyone alive, or dead in this case.
Companies like Dell don't harvest addressess. They deal with direct marketing companies who either do the harvesting, or who buy large lists from email addressess from companies who swear up and down that they lists contain only people who asked to recieve information about this sort of thing (whatever this sort of thing may be).
That was (and still technically is) the respectful version. The monarch would reply using "thou".
Wow. I actually learned something useful out of my English course...
are incompatible...
Dude, you're going to hell!
Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so. --Ford Prefect
where they can't even interpret the coding to do page widening...hence the second part of my sig...
I'd like to see you try it. AI researchers have been working on this sort of Natural Language parsing for years to little avail.
This is why steps such as these are so important.
I would just love to throw out a page with addresses like:
Zephram Cochrane
c/o Phoenix Research Institute
186000 Miles Avenue
Central, Montana 01701
Seven Nine
2349 Tendara Street
Unimatrix, CA 79301
John Kelly
2032 Gravaton Ave.
Mars, NC 02376
Tobin Dax
2135 Bajor Parkway
Symbiant, UT 02230
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
What an intuitive way to get spam published on slashdot.
Look a monkey!
Isn't it a Federal felony to read the post card if you're not King Geoge? Never mind scanning and posting someone else's mail on the web without their permission! :)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That is a little different. The data you received clearly had a common structure as it was just retrieved from a database and placed into a template.
Actually analysing language is a much more difficult task. Just look at the very imperfect quality of language translation tools on Google and Altavista to see just how hard it is.
Let's definitely contact Dell in that case, then. Don't you think they'd be very interested to learn that the marketing firm they were buying their address lists from populates their database with information that is largely completely inaccurate?
I sent this letter to the kermit project address. Maybe someone here can answer it for me:
:)
--Begin--
Computers are stupid and would not be able to aggregate a name on one page to a snailmail address on another without human help, yet I can't find where King George and this address were listed near each other. Any ideas from which page this name and address were gleaned?
thx
very funny otherwise
I said: "That [you] was (and still technically is) the respectful version."
You said: "The familiar version of "you" in Middle/Early Modern language is "thou." "
Aren't we saying the same thing?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I was once asked if I could put Charlie Root
on the line. The person had aparently recieved
some email from him. This is the default real
name for the root user on FreeBSD.
l8r
Aaron
Because that is all that fool Geordie could read.
Stands Scotland where it did?
If you don't get it read up some history.
ahahahahahahahaha ... that's the funniest thing i've seen in a long time.
Use raster data for your contact information, and where it can't be done (like for DNS entries) use sites like myprivacy.ca .
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It seems much more likely that someone on the team was registering for something somewhere and, wanding to avoid stupid spam, put in the clever King persona instead.
Promptly forgotten, it was a surprise when Dell, seemingly unrelated to the registration account, sends email to that profile.
More than likely someone on your team remembers it now, but finds the alternative 'harvesting' explanation so funny he's keeping quiet.
Kevin Fox
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You dirty colonist rabble with your General Washingham. The Quartering Act stands.
Now, if you could insert some control characters and cause a format string overflow on the postal machines, muha ha ha ha.
This explains all the mail I get to the church of the subgenius, ishmaelian sect.
uses prison labor to make their computers?
Dude, you're gettin' a cell.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I read the article on /. 3 times before following the link. it made NO sense to me each time... until i read the EXACT same verbage found in the link.
LOSE THE FUCKING DORK!
that guy must be some dell execs kid - he is an IDIOT.
It is precisely because of him that i will not buy a dell. he insults the intelligence of the human race... I cannot STAND that guy. Dell is a stupid stupid company for thinking that that lame ass kid is good for their image. It makes them look as bad as acer and packard bell - pandering to the lowest common denomenator.
dell, dont you think that people are smarter than that - especially people who ARE INTO COMPUTERS.
For me, postal spam it's not as bad as email, because it doesn't cost you in disk space or bandwidth.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
Let's all say it together!
Don't you just love it when pseudo-intellectuals spout Occam's Razor whenever they want to play "Devil's Advocate"??
Besides the fact that the supposed "Razor" is LESS likely and MORE complex than the explanation which was already given.
Yes I have a pet peeve with people who call upon Occam's Razor. A majority of them are clueless about the topic at hand and are just trying to sound intelligent, and according to Occam's Razor, the simplest explanation for why such people use Occam's Razor is because they ARE clueless!
Polish a turd, it's still stinky and brown.
What's a second? An hour? A day?
It has much more to do with
the Earth's rotation than with cesium.
It is indeed a bit ironic that commercial harassment companies (they call themselves 'direct marketers') use the name harvest, when infact what they are directly doing is destroying thousands of miles of rain forests each year. A harvest implies they actually grow plant matter, not waste it.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
The Devil
1 Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052
Jack Fuck-me-in-the-ass Valenti
MPAA
15503 Ventura Boulevard
Encino, CA 91436
Just to start off with a few.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
This isn't language translation. All they have to do is look for a known city, followed by a known state abbreviation. The last two lines will be the address. And to make sure there's no junk data, they can simply verify that the address exists.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
He was Hanoverian....
Geck, erhalten Sie ein Dell!
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've had a remotely similar incident with Dell. For some dumb reason, they send marketing spam to MAILER-DAEMON@myisp.com where I am a postmaster (where 'myisp.com' would be the actual name of my ISP). The spam had instructions for removing your address via a website -- I tried it...didn't work. Then replied to the sender address asking that I be removed...didn't work. Then sent a message to abuse@dell.com and postmaster@dell.com asking to be removed...didn't work. Added the spamming class-C network to the deny file for my entire ISP -- no more spam. ;-)
-- Grow up and use mutt.
Schiffman, that is.
It found the name "King George II" somewhere else in the page, that's why. I assume "George" is what triggered it (searching for common names in a database, probably).
nt
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
The Kermit Project
Columbia University
612 West 115th Street
New York NY 10025-7799
USA
From the postcard:
KING GEORGE II
KERMIT PROJECT
612W 115TH ST
NEW YORK, NY 10025-7721
Now, I'm willing to believe that software might exist that can canonicalise a street address and correct the zip code. It's even not utterly outside the realms of possibility that it could pull a person's name off a completely different page on the same site and include it in the address. But why oh why would it remove the word "The" from "The Kermit Project"?
use constant PERL_IS_BROKEN => $] >= 5.006;
neat, huh? gets dell many eyeballs and chuckles.
I don't know how widely kermit is used, but I go to Columbia, and if any of the project members are reading this:
Quit trying to redo the interface! The old one worked fine and looked good in black and white. The new one is too small to read and has no reason for existing.
But other than that, it's the best print management software I've come across, so good job on the free advertising and all that.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Junk Mail may end up being much less of a problem in the United Kingdom as it was recently determined that selling information contained within the Electoral Register for an area without the consent of the persons whose information would be transferred would be in violation of the Data Protection Act.
Sometimes the Law works in our favour... :-)
Ceci n'est pas une
How sad the US post has become. My wife has to dig through piles of junk to get the few bills we must mail. Fliers of all descriptions, Magverts, garbage small and large, even a page from the post office listing all the junk mail. Is it any wonder that real mail is trown away at home, get's delivered to the wrong house by the postman, or just plain lost in all the crap? It's inconvienent and disgusting. We all pay for those piles of junk, even if the company buying the useless adverts goes out of business - your insurance premiums will cover parts of it, higher retail prices cover other parts and your postal stamps will subsidise the rest. It's not a fear of anthrax that makes me wash my hands after getting the mail, it's all that nasty ink that comes off onto my hands. Contamination by touch is the lowest of the post office's indignities.
So I use the mail less, so prices of stamps go up, so the post office sells more junk mail, so I use the mail less .... See a patern?
When did the post office get into junk mail anyway?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
C'mon. Postal SPAM kills trees. We like trees. They allow us to live. That's very important, because if we don't have trees, we don't live, and we're dead, and that's bad. Don't kill trees. Trees are our friends. *takes another draw from a marijuana joint* Really.
[insert witty comment here]
is the appropriate wording i think. I would probaly call him the shrubbery.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Probably it found the "II" at the end of King George II, backtracked a word and found "George" (a name), then backtracked and found "King" (another name, though usually a surname).
:). Not very hard. It probably then found a postal address on the page and cross-linked the two.
So, it was pattern-matching for names followed by Roman numerals (as Americans such as William H Gates III are wont to do
Sen vord is thrall and thocht is fre,
Keip veill thy tonge I conseill the.
nt.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.