Slashdot Mirror
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."
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)
It would be very easy to interpret such simple encoding with a bot. I would think that such bots already exist that filter not only that but removing NOSPAM from e-mail addresses which seems to be another popular attempt at keeping a public e-mail address semi-private.
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...
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).
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;
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.
The person responsible for this spam has just been sacked...
The person repsonsible for the person responsible for this spam has just be sacked...
Or something thereabouts! Sorry MP.
-Ben
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
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"?
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.
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/