Slashdot Mirror
Subliminal Spam Using an Animated GIF
JohnGrahamCumming writes "Everyone's noticed the recent flood of image spam (including the SpamAssassin developers who are working on an OCR-extension to beat it), but take a look at this spam containing a subliminal message flashed every 17 seconds to try to entice you to buy the stock being pumped. Does this work? Warning: link shows the actual spam; don't blame me if you lose money on this stock!"
It's actually a pretty good stock.
Don't work. This supposed message is so obvious it's hard not to laugh.
This really has nothing to do with subliminal messages, and everything to do with trying to defeat OCR software. I was seeing animated GIFs exactly like this where the "buy" frames were just blank, before they started adding "BUY!" to those frames.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Outlook doesn't support animated gifs (nor most CSS, but that's another matter...!) - I received one of these this morning but all it showed was the 'buy buy buy' frame - my response was 'what an utterly utterly pointless spam'.
Seems to me as if the people behind the spam have been reading a few too many articles about subliminal marketing and are just trying their luck. What i'd be more worried about if I was them would be using an animated gif in massive mailing, surely that is going to heavily suck bandwidth (as much as they do have, a lot of resources go in to the mailing and the hardware to power it). If I were them I'd stick with the text plea, I'm far more likely to want to help out the prince of Nigeria than a 1998-style flashing .gif.
Business Voyeur
Bah. They could have been slightly more subtle. I mean, three frames in a row? For Pete's sake, how stupid do they think we are?
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Here's the four frames extracted.
Main image
Subliminal image 1
Subliminal image 2
Subliminal image 3
The subliminal images are shown for a fraction of a second every few seconds.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
OCR is a ridiculous solution. It can be easily combatted by spammers in the same way the CAPTCHA images defeat OCR techniques.
My solution:
For email addresses that are on spam databases, I block all emails that contain images at the MTA level.
Anyone who has good reason to be sending me images will know my non spam-infested address.
Therefore, it's not subliminal, since the flashed frame is supposed to be imperceptible to the conscious mind.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Really, the best thing I ever did in my email client was to turn off image loading.
--
Arizona Web Design
How many people would actually sit and look at this image for 17 seconds? It only takes a fraction of a second to realize it's junk.
Did the blogger even READ the wikipedia article linked to? It says "These messages are indiscernible to the conscious mind". I can almost count the number of BUYs in the image.
I bet this is more of an attempt to get around OCR spam detectors that don't support animated gifs.
I seriously doubt the capbilities of a GIF to recreate a true subliminal advertisement. It's a bit dependent on the screen position, machine load, audience's focus, etc. With a movie or a a captured TV audience, it's a bit stronger. Also, this isn't a metaphorical allure, but simply a crude flashing.
For some things subliminal messages can work. For others, it is well-known to be completely ineffective.
I doubt this is going to be much of a difference in SPAM, and is rather a sales differentiation point for a mass marketeer. Somebody is paying extra for this, for sure.
Perhaps people are already embedding messages in their videos. I can think of no other explanation for millions of people watching videos of cats attacking toasters...
Right click on offending image. Select 'Block images from [name of server]' - and that's it. Now, if Firefox just had this for Flash files. . .
If only we can just have every one of these things submitted to /. The resulting slashdotting will simply remove their servers. Easy!
(1) Send out spam using a new technique
(2) Post on slashdot telling people about the spam
(3) Get enormous viewership
(4) Profit!
Just wait for the new Viagra technologies slashdot articles.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_344.html
so sayeth Cecil
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
sub-human to fall for that.
... their non-gif stuff. I'm not about to buy a stock which is advertised with multiple exclamation !!! marks. And with incomplete sentences.
I use Pine for my email. For those who don't know, it's a text-based email client, primary for unix, but there is a port for windows. Aside from being fast, simple & reliable, it doesn't show fonts, colors, images, and html crap. Since it is so simple, it is extremely secure.
:)
When I show it to people, they often get annoyed that their carefully crafted html email with stationery, images, & fonts gets rendered to simple text.
Frankly, if you can't convey your message with text, you don't have much to say.
Give Pine a try. Unfortunately, I think there are only about a dozen users
Subliminal means that you are not concious of the image, but in this case it's pretty easy to spot. Not to say the ploywon't have any effect, just that use of the word 'subliminal' is incorrect.
Is ment to be non detectable. In this you can clearly see the words Buy all over so there is nothing subliminal going on it is just retarded.
You'll all be sorry after I buy loads of this stock first thing tomorrow morning. I'll be lording my millions over all of you by tea-time. I don't what has come over me, but I feel an overpowering desire to dump my entire 401(k) into this.
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords
After a couple of training messages, dspam is picking these spams (with or without the animated gif) with great accuracy. Even if dspam has no idea what the spam message is saying, these spam messages are sufficiently different from any of my normal e-mail that they stand out very much to the baysian algorithms.
Who looks at a piece of spam for the 17 seconds required to view the 'subliminal' advertising frames?
... get the Zik Zak Corporation on the phone. I have an advertising idea for them that is, like, 20 minutes into the future!
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
> Does it work?
Rarely and barely. Under very controlled conditions, with very careful measurement, a very slight effect which lasts a very short time can sometimes be found. However, most of the conditions under which people attempt to use it are so uncontrolled (ie. the entirety of whatever environment you're in is affecting you) that there'd be no way to detect the usually tiny effect. If anyone claims it has effect in such a situation, they have no clue how it works, and are probably trying to sell advertising to someone who is so desparate that they have even less of a clue.
The reality of the matter doesn't keep it from happening. Greed drives people to try things that would make even a habitual lottery ticket buyer snicker. For many years (and still, as far as I know) advertisers of tobacco and alcohol would have grotesque death images airbrushed into their magazine and billboard ads. This was based on the dual assumption that subliminals work, and Freud's theory that there was a ubiquitous "death wish", and it was stronger and more prone to manipulation in people who used these substances.
We've dispresnsed with the first, given that magazines and billboards are hardly "controlled" environments. Freud dispensed with the second before he died, years before this was ever attempted.
Despite overwhelming odds against it, advertisers still paid to have these images inserted into their ads. I know of one couple who worked at a commercial art house in New York who made $125,000 together in 1978 doing nothing but these. Large corporations will gamble large amounts way out of proportion for any real return just to grab a tenth of a per cent from competitors. John Sculley's biography about his Pepsi days talks about this greed effect (though not subliminals).
The very first "attempt at subliminals" (the "popcorn and Coke" experiment in a movie theater) was a hoax. Like all such material, it is properly filed on snopes.com, along with the rest of the story. http://www.snopes.com/business/hidden/popcorn.asp
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Why is the beta tag say that the website is slashdotted when it is clearly not? Is this a form of a subliminal message?
Everyone's noticed the recent flood of image spam...
I haven't. I can't even remember the last spam message I've seen, period--not even in my throwaway accounts.
Very impressive...
Seriously though, the idea of subliminal messages in adware etc. might not be that far-fetched, if worked out better. Imagine adware that subtly projects 99.5% translucent stuff over your desktop for very short periods, maybe fading it in and out just so you wont consiously notice it.... Or maybe just a 200 pixel Coca-Cola sign in an unused corner of the screen. Im not so sure its impossible...
No
Even if it gets past my spam filters the moment I see rubbish like this it gets deleted. If I want stock picks I employ a professional, not a scum sucking spammer.
Ed Almos
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
I just kill any flashing gifs.
Typically if the site requires flash I skip it. I find it unbeleiveable that Macromedia didn't put in an option to kill unwanted flash. But I guess this says something about the company. So - one day I'll just neuter flash in this browser when I get pissed off enough to do it.
I had to laugh at poking fun at a real estate agent. He has an awful website. I told him if he wants to sell to me then his website isn't doing its job.
One has to hit them where it counts - right in the ole' pocket book. If you're going to do some business then check the website and if it pisses you off then tell them and don't do business with them. Do business with people who you like and who are professional and who hopefully put up websites that reflect their business practices.
Use the same rule with TV advertising. If you hate the company's ad - tell them to stuff it and find another vendor. Even if it costs a few sheckles more, you'll be ahead.
On this basis: FORD, GM, Microsoft, Sears, Black and Decker, and Canadian Tire have lost my business for EVER because of shoddy products and bad service. If after buying the product I find that I feel like going to the effort of suing them for selling me such a peice of junk - then this is a good enough reason to never deal with the vendor ever again.
I have alternatives. Who knows if they will notice. The market place speaks for itself. The way I look at it is that when a vendor ends up on enough people's permanent blacklists, then their business will suffer and eventually they will go away and die.
----------
Hmm - check FORD and GM's stocks! I drive an Audi now. Its nicely engineered and I don't get calls from the service station advising me they will have to pull the motor to change the spark plugs. No kidding... a service station actually did this after they broke plugs on the firewall side of a Chev Eurosport. I managed to change the plugs w/o pulling the motor. It took 2 hours and I found the previous CHEV DEALER'S MECHANIC cross-threaded the plugs because of the bad design. Had they made the car 2" longer there would not have been a problem. They could have made the engine compartment 2" longer and set the bumpers back 2" and the car would have been the same overall length.
So in this case for want of 2" in the engine compartment I had cross threaded plugs and bleeding hands and was threatened with a $1000 ++ spark plug bill. Why would I or anyone else ever want to deal with the company ever again? Not me. Once burned - screw you!
Now look at the GM stocks. See - it works. Vote with your feet!
I read email in KMail (KDE) and out of curiosity I looked at the gif that was attached, and I guess it filtered out the animation so the only thing I saw was the "buy buy buy" stuff. I had no idea what I was supposed to buy so I guess it didn't work.
Lisa: But you have recruiting ads on TV. Why do you need subliminal messages?
Smash: It's a three-pronged attack. Subliminal, liminal, and superliminal.
Lisa: Superliminal?
Smash: I'll show you. [opens the window, and shouts at Lenny and Carl, who are standing on the corner] Hey, you! Join the Navy! Carl: Uh, yeah, all right.
Lenny: I'm in.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
lightspeed briefs!
Smoooooooke.
Honestly, not only is a lot of the spam completely unintelligible, but it just looks so phony its hard not to laugh. Does anybody on /. personally know anybody who's actually purchased something from spam? What about the really bad retarded spam like this?
I know I should never underestimate the stupidity of humanity...but I really have no idea how someone could literally be stupid enough to buy something from one of these, yet smart enough to be able to fill in the credit card form required to give the spammer money. Please, explain that last one to me.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
this is one of the reasons why I still use mutt - don't have to look at the images/attachments unless I choose to
...
I've used outlook, eudora, hotmail, gmail, yahoomail, squirrelmail, webmail, pine, mm
and I still always come back to mutt. I get to control it, archive it, its fast easy, and completely immune to this kids of spamming.
Mirror
"if you lose money on this stock"?? Boy you're being www..
Short TMXO now!
Ironically, I read an article about a guy who started shorting all the spam stocks that he got, and made $8000 in 2 weeks worth of trading. Personally I would neither short nor buy any stock I heard about from spam.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
That piece of spam is possibly the most cost-effective individual piece of spam ever: the spammer sent it to one person and gets 25000+ views of it instead.
DYWYPI?
SubliMinally selling stOck this way Does not have much of a chance TO succeed. I mean, I can think of maybe only *5* people who would fall for these types of subconscious messages on the internet.
Everyone knows that [mod this up] subliminal messages [mod this up] don't work!
$ whoami
1. Create subliminal spam message.
2. (was ???) post it on slashdot so everyone read it
3. Profit!
This spammers are getting smarter and smarter, how can a spam image get to the homepage of such a news site like slashdot?
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Well, is that sublimal: no girl? ;-)
Greetings,
Chris
"An operating system must operate."
Nope, haven't noticed at all. I have image loading turned off by default.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Stop image spam in Thunderbird. Or use pine or something else text based. Does anyone know of a adblock like extension fith a filterset updater for spam - so many of us get the same damn spam something like this would be useful.
Have to give it to these guys +1 for creativity -783,114,039,832 for implementation. YOU LOSE!
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
-b.
It's not really subliminal if it screams "I'M BEING SUBLIMINAL!"
God Be Gone
...it's just that you need special glasses to see what's going on.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
The article on Wikipedia is actually pretty good. There may be some transitory or faint effects caused by subliminal messages. Advertisers have been trying to capitalize on this possibility for 49 years.
If subliminal messages had any significant effect we would know about it. They've been trying for years.
There have been interesting claims at subliminal messages in popular music. KAKE-TV in Wichita, Kansas, used a subliminal message to attempt catch the BTK killer, but it had no perceptible effect.
I'd say subliminal messages don't work.
i dont see anything subliminal about it
Fun highlights:
So, after six years, the company has zero revenue and couldn't even get set up as a second-tier reseller of broadband over powerline products. Which is probably why the stock is at $0.38 and headed down.
If you go back to older related SEC filings, you can find the story of the "Hipster portable Internet access device" (didn't happen), and the previous history of Koala International Wireless as a vitamin company under the name "Kettle River Group" (also a flop).
This stock is not "poised for a breakthrough". Except maybe in the down direction.
Subliminal messaging via flashing brief imaging is a hoax! All those studies were faked.
I have ADD - I got the feeling that I should buy something, but I am not sure what!
When I was in college in the sixty's I attended a talk on subliminal advertising and there were some rather interesting points. First, advertisers determined the speed at which it worked, then crossed the outstretched palms of their coin-operated congressmen to define a much faster speed as "subliminal," thus clearing the legal field. Next they performed a major experiment. At that time (maybe still, I don't watch the boob tube at all) Pillsbury had an ad where a cartoon "Dough Boy" would jump out of a roll of biscuits when it was hit on a table edge and proclaim the "wonderfullness" of the product. A subliminal spot of a pregnant woman was placed just before Dough Boy jumped out . . . and sales soared. There was also a major flap about some "scientist" who supposedly faked his data on subliminal advertising, which played right into the advertisers hands, of course, so who knows what to believe?
BillyDoc
on speculation that this slashdot article would make people speculate that this slashdot article would sent it up
I just had this great idea; if I turn off my home phone service I won't get any telemarketing calls. If I get rid of the television I don't have to watch commercials. If I don't drive, I won't have to look at billboards.
Only pedophiles get animated gifs in their e-mail anyways...
Get your Unix fortune now!
I took a look at the image. After about 17 seconds of trying to see the subliminal part I was thinking "hmmm, maybe I missed it; this is actually subliminal".
And then the image went through 2 insanely obvious flashes. Anyone capable of viewing this image is capable of noticing the "subliminal messaging".
Subliminal messaging pretty much looses it's effect if it's not subliminal.
OMG BUY BUY BUY MY STOCK
(ignore the above line, you didn't see it)
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
But first I need contact my accountant and have him purchase some TMXO stock. I just have this gut feeling....I'm SURE it's going to skyrocket. No, really.
SPAM ? I haven't seen "SPAM" for over 6 years now. While you stupid morons keep fighting to get rid of it, I have managed to find the perfect solution. and I mean this is 100% secure. ( I have copyright on this by the way ).
:)
See, an email is like opening your door in a city, any hobo can just open the door and look inside your home. My solution is to create different doors for every person out there.
How ?
With email aliases.
You can't do this with gmail or whatever. You need to first buy your own domain where you are able to create *@domain.com aliases.
Now, once you have that, everytime you publish your email somewhere you create an alias for that "somewhere". For example, if you want to give your email to slashdot, you create an alias "slashdot" and you email will be "slashdot@mydomain.com". Then, if you want to give away you email to amazon, you do "amazon@mydomain.com"... etc.
See my point ?
This way, once you start getting SPAM, you know for sure, 100% WHERE the SPAM is comming from and which one of your aliases are infected.
All you need to do is to just close that alias. and *poof*, no more SPAM from there. All the other aliases are safe and you won't have to worry about losing emails.
and if wanna put your email on a website ? Use a mailform.
I'm amazed that google or microsoft have not come up with such solution, one could have mygmailaccount.alias.@gmail.com for example to give away, this way one would be able to shut that alias down once it gets SPAM infected.
Now, while you waste your CPU and TIME on getting rid of SPAM, I'll enjoy a 100% SPAM free email experience without tons of junk "filter" applications.
The above solution is THE ONLY way to get rid of SPAM. If you are not already doing it, DO IT NOW. If you don't want to do it, then I have some news for you :
You sir, are a moron!
Full of it? Subliminal ads and related tactics were banned back when James Vicary's bogus marketing claims were first circulated, but the overall neutral-to-positive trend observed for results in every study done so far means it at least won't hurt to try mixing it with other more conventional methods when you're already on the wrong side of the law.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Who stares at this crap for 17 seconds? Shouldn't it show those "buy" frames more often? I don't get it.
This is either a publicity stunt or the work of legendary idiots. There is no research to show the effectiveness of subliminal advertising (at least the kind that involves flashing an image for a fraction of a second in your central vision.) Surely someone with the determination to spread these ads would have done some basic research on their effectiveness, and determined that they were not effective. This seems more like a "no publicity is bad publicity, so LOOK AT ME!" kind of stunt.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
This is just a load of hogwash... subliminal messages don't work. Now if you will excuse me, I have a hot tip on a stock to buy.
Not all SPAM is the same. For all the Cialviagradvilvalium and goatse.cs offers that arrive to the mail, there is a lot of othter different kinds of unwanted email from less shady sources. Some businesses view this as analogous to radio and tv advertisement: you don't want it but it is there along with the regular programming. I don't say this is correct or good, just that they treat it that way.
Anyway, I saw an advert for a migration agent, did my research, checked it out and now I'm living in a different country. I'm afraid I contributed to the perpetuation of SPAM; I have never purchased anything else from SPAM adverts again, but I'm quite sure stories like mine are what keep it coming to our mailboxes.
+Raider of the lost BBS
I doubt anyone actually read it. It's huge, everybody knows they don't care beforehand, and they're all looking out for the hidden frames.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
I'm going to buy it just because it got slashdotted!
And get the business that you represent sued for discriminazism against blind people.
Q: You know what you see when the Pillsbury Doughboy bends over?
A: Donuts
A lot of residential duopoly ISPs don't include much web/ftp space and don't allow customers to run their own web/ftp server. So how would you suggest that they send the file to you?
I check my gmail, and I find a 'story' a 'real' fiction story!!!
...
I know it's spam, but there is no funny characters, no 'viagra' word, no nothing, just a story, probably a fragment of some book
So I start to read it. I realize a broken image link, and I decide to tell gmail to allow images and
Just the example spam . The very same
Amazing.
Anyway, what's the point???
I just mark it as spam, I will never do anything with it they should know that by now
I know there's lot of people who stills hook on that, but that's only a question of time, because it's learning stuff, and it's unstoppable
It seems to me that OCR would fix this pretty easily. People worry about the fact that OCR cannot understand the captchas, but that hardly is necessary. All an OCR spam-recognizer has to do is determine that there *is* text in the image, it does not have to read it. Images consisting of a lot of text are definately an indicator of spam.
Superliminal messages....
Now I want to invest all my money in steam powered weaving machines.
Oh and my cat wants me to assasinate the president
Is this post being tapped?
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
for the very slow-witted.
But anyway the short flashes establish the concept of subliminal ads. So you can expect faster flashes very soon. It's just that the first case is not really subliminal.
the only thing I can come up with is that they would buy an amount X, send out a mailing , hope that through a shortlived collective interest the stock would go up for long enough to sell with profit, and then move on to the next near dead stock.
I've received that exact spam 5 times today already. :(
In general, I'm finding SpamAssassin becoming ever less effective at removing spam from my mailbox. I get approximately 200 spams a day and at least 20 or so end up in my inbox rather than my spam folder. I've even considered signing up to a spam filtering service, but I can't find one that's any good AND supports IMAP accounts.
I really hope they finish this OCR plugin soon as I think this will be the only solution.
However I predict that about a week after it's released, all spammers will obfuscate text in the same way that CAPTCHA tests do. You don't have to distort letters very much before OCR completely stops working. Most of the open-source ones don't even work if you have a lightly patterned background image - so at the very least, some kind of pre-filtering would need to take place.
I think the research should concentrate on analysing the blocks of text that's always immediately below the image to fool Bayesian filters. More often than not, the words do not form sentences, or the sentences are taken from different sources and therefore have unrealistic topic variances. There must be a way of automatically deducing that a paragraph which appears to be about vegetable growing AND photocopier servicing is probably just SPAM text.
In the meantime, is it possible to get SpamAssassin to give a high score to messages which contain a single EMBEDDED image and a big paragraph of text at the bottom? Or in fact ANY other SpamAssassin rules or add-ons which significantly increase the effectiveness for messages like this?
Yeah I looked at the gif. And I could clearly see the shift to "buy buy buy". If you can see the frames, it's not subliminal.
.GIF then try this. Have your bogus stock information on the screen, and have some frames change the words of a sentence to something else. As your reading my words here you are also conscious of the words around it and above and below it even though you're not reading them. So if you replace certain phrases with phrases like "Morgan Stanley approved" or "Bill Gates made $1,000,00 profit off this stock" or something like that then those messages would have far more of an impact. Or to do it really snarky like, do individual words like inserting words to make someone think they are missing out or to make it look more legitimate. All flashed for a few tenths of a second.
Animated GIF's have a very limited frame rate and would not be possible in most circumstances to display a frame fast enough to escape notice.
The fields on a TV screen flicker at 60 times a second yet our eyes are fast enough to register these changes and to see the alternating flicks.
Film goes by at 24 frames per second and unless they added frames that resembled the frames around them, you would notice the abrupt change.
Consider the final scene in the movie "Seven" when Brad Pitt's character sees an image of his wife for a frame before shooting Kevin Spacey's character. That lasted one frame out of 24 but was still enough to register.
A far more effective technique for "subliminal advertising" would be for the person to not realize it's an advertisement at all, hence they wouldn't be conscious of the message. This happens all the time with viral marketing, and people who are paid to have conversations about a product in a public setting like bars and taverns.
I think it has been proven that sub-aural and sub-visual manipulations are gimmicks that have no affect on the mind. At least from the standpoint of introducing un-seen messages to the brain. Manipulation of the overall movie to carefully craft a skewed perspective or point of view is far more effective.
Like a Michael Moore "documentary" that shows a carefully thought out sequence of interviews and sound bites that lead the mind into seeing things in a limited way that the film maker wants you to see.
Having said that, if you want to try a subliminal advertisement using an animated
Someone reading it will basically read what you wrote, but they will remember the other words and phrases even if they can't place them in context.
Flashing "buy buy buy" in different sized letters does nothing.
Smoke
I am still against this as they could put negative messages in as well that could disturb people if it's proven to have any effect. 'Kill Yourself" etc. Testing should be done.
Subliminal advertising doesn't have to successfully sell spamvertised products to end-users (in this case, stock to gullible investors.) If you're in the Spamming Services business, and somebody has a product they want to sell but doesn't have their own mail-sending infrastructure, subliminal messages are yet another trick to get them to hire you instead of hiring some other spammer to deliver their mail.
After a while, the spammers will figure out that it's not working, but after a while, customers will figure out that Nigerian Herbal Fake Viagra doesn't work and that they haven't really won the Internet Lottery. Meanwhile, you've got their money, and when that trick stops working, you can find another one, and Rule 3 says there's some spammer out there who'll be happy to pay you to run it for him.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
TMXO stock is up 31% following this slashdot article. So, animated GIF's do work to prop up stocks. Provided someone is generous enough to slashdot them.
I made $700. I wish I put more in.
- Erik