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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.
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
> 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
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!
No, there is no cause for concern.
I did a Ph.D. on the use of preattentive perception (read "subliminal") on just-in-time memory support. This was the "Memory Glasses" project that got a bunch of media attention a few years ago -- you may have even seen me pitching it to Alan Alada on PBS's Scientific American Frontiers "you can make it on your own" episode.
The long and short of it is that, yes -- properly encoded, "subliminal messages" can jog your memory, but no, they don't otherwise work as sug,gestions or influence your behavior. If you're curious, you can actually read my dissertation on the Memory Glasses and find out more.
There was a lot of hype in the 70's and 80's about the evils of subliminal marketing, but it was all based on junk science with forged data.
parallax
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?
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.
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.
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
I'm going to buy it just because it got slashdotted!
Q: You know what you see when the Pillsbury Doughboy bends over?
A: Donuts