Copyrighted Haiku Delivers Spam Through Filters
An anonymous reader writes "Remember that antispam company that includes a copyrighted haiku (which I can't quote here due to copyright reasons...) in emails vouching for their nonspaminess and thus bypassing spamfilters?
The idea is that a spammer using said haiku to get through spamfilters can be prosecuted under the more stringent copyright laws instead of the weaker antispam ones.
Well it seems said haiku has lately been figuring in a large spam run trying to pitch the usual medical remedies for various unfortunate ailments.
What do you think? Is it time to start filtering for haikus or will Habeas succeed in thwarting the spam attack?" We mentioned this brilliant anti-spam scheme last April.
Joe-Jobs are made to order... Just send a bunch of mail through a rooted proxy, advertising the competition's stuff, and watch Habeas sic the lawyer dogs of war on your competition. You'd laugh all the way to the bank.
Same type of thing if enough spammers use this trick, the lawyers will be too busy.
Did Habeas actually think this was going to work? I mean, spammers are willing to do ANYTHING to make sure Joe Public reads their garbage. Constantly changing tactics to evade filters, to write viruses specifically to generate more open proxies to send their garbage through, to Denial of Service attacks against those who try to filter out this stuff, to garbage lawsuits. This is nothing compared to those..
People Talking in Movie shows.. people smoking in bed.. people voting republican.. GIVE THEM A BOOT TO THE HEAD!
Another way these nonsense spams work is, in my experience, by having two different MIME parts, a plaintext part of random words, and an html part with the actual spam content. Since I don't use html mail, it works rather poorly on me, but I did once take a look at the html part, and it was formated text, not random nonsense like in the plaintext part.