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A Visual History of Spam

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the but-is-it-art? dept.

Cristiano writes "Microsoft employee Raymond Chen has saved every spam message and virus-laden e-mail he's received at work since 1997 and graphed the spams and viruses to create a cool visual representation of one man's malicious traffic."

13 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. "one man's malicious traffic" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    "one man's malicious traffic"

    Sounds like a cool title for a future book about Gill Bates.

  2. ...it was a slow day on slashdot... by Fjornir · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...pretty pictures though, did anyone else try the "magic eye" deal and see what I saw?

    --
    I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
  3. Raymond Chen in Linux source CREDITS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    An interesting aside: Raymon Chen is mentioned in the Linux kernel's source 'CREDITS' file:

    N: Raymond Chen

    E: raymondc@microsoft.com

    D: Author of Configure script

    S: 14509 NE 39th Street #1096

    S: Bellevue, Washington 98007

    S: USA

    1. Re:Raymond Chen in Linux source CREDITS by sriram_2001 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      This blog (post) has some interesting info on this.

      ...This post wouldn't have been possible without Kaushik - he called me up this morning and said that he had spied a familiar name on the Linux 1.0 contributors file. And since the chances of 2 people with the name Raymond Chen and working at Microsoft were pretty slim, we got pretty interested. A bit of Googling lead us to this page (http://grumbeer.dyndns.org/ftp/mail/v5/digest363) which has an email that Raymond Chen has typed out back in 1993. The first thing that strikes you is his Microsoft id. I was taken aback - a Microsoft employee contributing to Linux code? That too kernel level stuff - not some fringe OSS project? Seems like things were a lot different back then. Here's a snippet from that mail From: raymondc@microsoft.com (Raymond Chen) Subject: New Configure script (and some console patches) Date: 05 Jun 93 20:23:30 GMT This patch kit is really *THREE* patches in one. 1. A new Configure script, hopefully easier to use and more flexible than the current one. 2. A kernel configuration switch to enable high-intensity background in lieu of blinking foreground characters. 3. A kernel configuration switch to control the destination of kernel trace messages (printk's). But the part which I really found interesting was this...the way he signs all his mails. Thanks. -- Raymond (just another linux hacker) Chen Definitely not something you would see nowadays. These days, the very mention of the word 'GPL' might get you into serious trouble in Microsoft - and contributing code is definitely unthinkable.I guess back then , Linux was considered more of a hobbyist-thing rather than a future competitor. But I'm only guessing here. An interesting question that arises is the effects of the viral nature of the GPL. If he had worked on GPL code back then, is he 'infected'? Well - I'm no expert in these issues, but its interesting all the same. Before all the Linux supporters jump to any conspiracy theory, I would just like to point out that the only thing this points out is the amazing versatility and skill exhibited by most Microsoft devs and Raymond in particular. This is a guy who knows both Windows and Linux inside out.Awesome!!! I would really like it if Raymond comes and tells us a bit about his past - especially the 'just another linux hacker' days :-) ....

  4. Re:Obvious by DaHat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Do you have a problem with programmers being able to spend a little time here and their on their own projects?

    --
    Help Brendan pay off his student loans
  5. Good work by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Now he'll get even more spam.

  6. Single worst spam day by number of messages: Augus by FePe · · Score: 4, Informative
    Single worst spam day by number of messages: August 22, 2002. 67 pieces of spam.
    I normally get around 60 spam mails *per day*, so I guess he is rather lucky. The spam mails I receive are fortunately not full of images like the 41 images he got.
    --
    "Until you do what you believe in, how do you know whether you believe in it or not?" -- Leo Tolstoy
  7. It's the Visual part that scares me by superbondbond · · Score: 5, Funny

    I think if I were to actually see what went into Spam I'd never be able to eat it again.

  8. Jose nazario might have more spam graphs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Jose Nazario arguably has a much more extensive collection of spam, you can see some of his research here: http://www.monkey.org/~jose/wiki/wiki.php?page=Spa mAnalysis.

    One of several talks of his on spam (complete with more graphs): http://www.linuxchile.cl/docs.php?op=verVersion&do c=64&id=1 And he's even done generated some really really horribly insane spam collages, but I'll let those interested dig around for them on their own.

  9. Not exactly "reader friendly" by Hockney+Twang · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I would have much preferred to see the volume of email, represented in terms of the size of messages received, displayed on a nice looking bar graph, with viruses in the foreground, spam in the back. Maybe even show legit email as another row in front of the viruses. Or even just a line graph. As it is, the information is occluded by his presentation. He took some raw data, did very little to interpet it, and put it on his blog. The information could be interesting, but the presentation is very lacking.

  10. This has been done before by Prince+Vegeta+SSJ4 · · Score: 5, Funny

    THIS site even has an animation of the propagation of spam.

  11. Irony by thrills33ker · · Score: 4, Funny

    A Microsoft employee keeps a record of his ever-increasing levels of spam and viruses?

    Aargh! My irony meter has gone off the scale!!

  12. RTFB by daytrip00 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Read the blog. This guy is one prolific programmer. He's the guy who ensures that all the old windows apps (like the ones from 10 years ago) keep running on the latest versions of windows. He has all sorts of stories about windows bugs and idiosyncracies and explains how they all came to be. It's a fascinating read and I have an RSS subscrption to his blog.

    Read this article which is all about his quest for windows and developer backwards compatiblity.

    He give this story about Sim City: It deallocated memory, and then used it right after deallocation. It was a bug that windows 95 allowed. So his code make a special check that you were running sim city and if you were, you could use memory right after you deallocated it. It's pretty amazing to see all the hoops that he and his team jump through. But he's a MSFT ledgend.

    PS. That blog entry I linked to sent Shockwaves through Microsoft. It's changed the new XML api design, and resulted in the backporting of Avalon to Windows XP.