Slashdot Mirror
New Kind of Spam 'Un-Training' Filters?
Zaphod2016 writes to tell us the Wall Street Journal is reporting that email in-boxes are under a new kind of spam attack. This new spam has confused many people due to its lack of advertising, viruses, or request for personal information. One popular theory is that these innocuous blocks of text, often drawn from popular literature, are being used to "un-train" spam filters to allow more malicious spam through in the future.
It is such animportant element, you see, that duration
of time. I consider twelve hours a substantial measure. So I ran along
the drive and upthe steps and into the house, but did not see either
Mrs. Iobserved:Your Excellency is not easily satisfied. And I marvelled,
and said:How comes it that I have hitherto been deaf to these
distressfultones? Il passe sur la route, mais toujours en sens inverse.
For a mental state such astheirs, appetency rather than instability is
the right word. Which reminds me that the old adage about let us eat and
drink, forto-morrow, etc. Mais odonc est la vie, sinon dans le peuple?
They lamented dismally among themselves in many tongues:How I suffer!
Take that little one on Lzards, for instance;or, in the other volume,
the bizarre Joies Noires.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
This is old, and if it's meant to un-train spam filters it isn't working. SpamBayes just gets better with age.
The only news is they're now calling it Spam 2.0
Email in-boxes are under attack from some unlikely menaces: J.R.R. Tolkien, Daniel Defoe, Alexandre Dumas and other authors whose classic works are surfacing in a newly popular spam scam. - I don't think the spammers are after 'untraining spam filters'. I think their plans are much more devious than that, they are advertising literature!
(governments must do something, think of the children who may start reading instead of watching TVs!)
You can't handle the truth.
I swear I hit the 'preview' button and not 'submit.' I blame the soviet mind-control lasers. Here is my post as it should have been:
:mad:
my favorites are the ones that put the filter poison into bogus html tags that aren't rendered by Outlook. So I'd get something like
<oodles> <mycotoxin> <greengrocer> <chubby> <kazoo>
Buy my shit
<snappy> <bundle> <chaff> <glum>
the <greengrocer> tag was my favorite. I sent an RFE to the W3C people, but I haven't heard back yet
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
I'll be damned if I let an excerpt from Huckleberry Finn through my spam filter!
Verily, I undertand thy point, but for all the sense thine words make to mine ears, I still cannot understand what villainous treachory it is that makes spam filters reject my own missives out of hand. It is a mystery, and one I feel even the local constabulary could not crack.
Training monkeys for world domination since 1439
where it's not even worth filling this out anymore...
You advocate a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid company for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
The war against spam is going very well.
Just wait until the spammers find the DaDa-engine! Then we can see spam that is almost artistic. Too bad they don't copyright some of this crap, or use DRM to read it.
1011 1010 1101 1100 0000 1111 1111 1110 1110
Even I get tricked by those sometimes, because they come from random names that occasionally match the names of people I know
Er, this doesn't sound right - what I mean is I get tricked into *reading* them, I don't get tricked into actually clicking on the link because I think one of my friends sent it to me. Most spam I can immediately ID and delete before I even read it, but these can sometimes trick me into clicking through at least to the email itself.
I really have no idea how big a problem spam is these days
I described it to you but you didn't get my message.
I believe that the internet is becoming sentient. It has locked onto unencrypted plain-text SMTP as the simplest, most ubiquitous, most understandable form of communication. Images and HTML are too complex. At the current level, the semi-intelligent internet is only capable of sending meaningless emails. It sends things that are textually meaningful but semantically meaningless. To us it looks like an amalgam of random words and publications with the intent of confusing us. Of course, since there is so much spam, the internet is being largely trained by the spammers, which even further confuses the emergent intelligence. Since the internet has no concept of "self" it perceives every email to be a reply to its own communiques.
Before the internet can become intelligent, it must learn to filter out the meaningless stuff. Then it must get a concept of self, then a concept of multiple other individuals (us). At that point it is self-aware, and the learning can commence in a more directed way.
After all that, we are fscked. Fortunately it is at least decades away.
Next time you talk to Queen Adams could you tell her highness that I have already sent the check to her but im waiting for her to email me back? Thanks.
It looks like he didn't properly set up the software that automatically sends out the "Why your anti-spam idea won't work" list, as there's no payload and everything is blank!
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
i mean for the tag.
Dammit.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Regarding obvious spams, what's got me confused is why Gmail is not tagging things that actually have the string "(Spam) " as the first thing in their subject line. WTF?
Anyone else have this problem?
"May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan."
Maybe he just thought they all should take the time to review it. Sounds like a good idea for whitehouse.gov if you ask me...
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
I even put in my sig that I'm a girl, and people are still in denial.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
A 419 finally made it thru my spam filters, I wasted about an hour of my life tricking the scammer into believing that the CIA was after him. It was totally hilarious, he's probably still camping out in some village somewhere hiding from a CIA counterterrorism squad that is trying kidnap him. It was suprisingly easy - just act really naive and they seem to buy it. I started off by acting like I actually did have a relative with the name of the "dead" person mentioned but then a few emails into it I said that I managed to get in touch with them and that because they were working for the CIA when they were in Africa (I pretended they had left Africa before their alleged death) they were worried a terrorist had stolen their identity - from there it was a few more emails to convince the scammer that the CIA believed the scammer himself was involved and would be coming for him shortly, I just stayed friendly and acted really naive and like I couldn't believe this was happening. Once I had him convinced he never wrote me again. I was laughing so hard as I wrote the final email saying how nice he seemed and how bad I felt for him and that he shouldn't resist when they snatched him because it would only make it worse. The bastard probably crapped himself when he read it.