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What Happens When You Reply To ALL of Your Spam
bednarz writes "For Tracy Mooney, a married mother of three in Naperville, Ill., the decision to abandon cyber-sense and invite e-mail spam into her life for a month by participating in a McAfee experiment was a bit of a lark. The idea of the Spammed Persistently All Month (S.P.A.M.) experiment — which fittingly started on April Fool's Day — was to have 50 volunteers from around the world answer every spam message and pop-up ad they got. Mooney was game, especially since McAfee was giving a free PC to all participants. She told her story to Network World."
The Nigerian prince send her millions.
She got 1000 Valium for $4.
Her lover was more satisfied.
And she won an iPod.
And lived happily ever after. =)
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
I find the idea of doing this to receive a free PC a fantastic irony, don't you?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Because in the article (I know, I know) they say that they also documented spyware, popup software, and general machine slowdowns from clicking on all the popup ads. That was kinda the point of the excersise.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
McAfee Spam Experiment
As much as it would be good if she did indeed win the free iPod and get her hands on all that va_l1um, most spam that gets stored on my spam folder looks to be pretty old. I got a circular/spam message from the depths of hell the other day telling me to keep an eye out for some astral phenomenon or other. A Google search revealed that said event occurred in about 2006.
Zombie relays sending out the same shite day after day. Most spam is totally useless. A bit like the Sky TV schedulers.
Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.
myself when I was new on the internet. I didn't know at first that the unsubscribe on the bottom of the email was just a way to verify that it was a live address, so I got lots.
What I decided was that the companies that were paying for the spam must like it, so I would click on the link in the spam, find their customer service email and copy it. Then I went to google and entered "subscribe enter email". After that I spent quite a lot of hours signing these companies up for all kinds of email. I hope they liked it. When I had to put in a name I entered Spam War.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
Since the point of the experiment wasn't to test the operating system, why give the test subjects the operating system currently most affected by malaware[sic]?
Because the point of the experiment was to test the effect of replying to spam which has nothing to do with the operating system. They gave away PCs with the most popular operating system since they assumed that's what most of their participants would want.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Reminds of this great poem from years ago:
http://www.satirewire.com/features/poetry_spam/01free_winner.shtml
I Answered All My Spam
I never know what I might find,
on any day I go online.
I used to get in quite a huff,
while wading through unwanted stuff.
But then I changed the man I am,
the day I answered all my spam.
Now every time I check my box,
I load up on fantastic stocks.
I'll gladly say I felt no loss,
when, with a smile, I fired my boss.
With just one click, the best thing yet,
I freed myself of all my debt.
I have, paying a few small fees,
ten university degrees.
Now that I'm losing all this weight,
I'm sure, someday, I'll get a date.
Instead of going to a show,
I spy on everyone I know.
(That's easy, since I have in hand,
this nifty wireless video cam.)
I spend my evenings viewing screens,
of barely legal horny teens.
And with a little credit charge,
Whoopee! My penis was enlarged!
Meanwhile these shots of Britney Spears
should be enough to last for years.
And so I lead this online life,
my monitor is now my wife.
It has become my greatest dream,
to launch my own get-rich-quick scheme.
And if you think you might get missed,
relax, you're on my e-mail list.
I read Usenet for the articles.
Because Macs are completely immune to spyware and viruses the Windows and Linux people have to worry about 24/7?
Yeah one time I found a linux virus! However I never did get it to run on my linux box...
Look, it's easy, you just go on any of the Linux support sites where you'll get lot's of helpful people telling you what a noob you are for not editing /etc/virus.conf properly and then recompiling the kernel and anyway, if you had used the right distro then you could have used apt-get or up2date to download the virus properly and...
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
I think her reaction to her spam is classic: "I was horrified," says Mooney, a realtor by profession. "It's all snake oil. I'm amazed at what true junk is out there when you're clicking through on e-mail."
Spammers love people like her--people so insulated by American corporate media that they think the internet is just another shopping mall. And what could possibly go wrong in a mall? God bless her.
Are you saying you want to put your "spam" in her "inbox"?
For those using Ubuntu and Firefox, there's also this link apt://virus
On a slightly offtopic note, she looks kinda M.I.L.F.!
Oh oh, you just doubled the number of connection requests per second for networkworld.com.
The [X] I don't use apt, you ignorant clod! option:
"This is an open-source virus. Please delete some files at random and pass me along to 10 friends. Please don't break the chain. One sorry person broke the chain and the next day found someone had hacked into their computer and installed Vista."
There's a lib_compat_virus tarball in /pub/dist over at univ-mainz.de. Go get it and untar it. ./configure it with --enable-activex and --disable-pax, but also make sure to read the fucking install.txt for other configuration options relevant to your system. (I don't want to fucking hear from you if you don't RTFM!) Compile it with gcc 2.95, and sudo install it. Then edit /etc/virus.cf and set config_allow_tainted_nonGPL_virus to 0xFE. Your virus should work then.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
I love getting pre-paid business return envelopes in my mail. That way I can just send all the stuff that they send me right back to them. They pay to send it to me, and they pay to get it all back from me.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
It sounds like you send an enormous amount of backscatter, and are probably doing much more harm than good. It would be much better to simply drop the connection at SMTP time, rather than accepting and then generating a bounce. Or do like I do, and hold their connection open for a long time before actually dropping it.
If it's from a spammer, do us all a favour - tape it to a box containing a cinder-block.
Funny as that may be, Bliss -- AFAIK the most famous Linux virus -- has an uninstall routine invoked by passing the infected program the argument --bliss-disinfect-files-please.
Not very user-friendly, but look at the features!
Ignore this signature. By order.
"apt-get"? "up2date"? Those are for n00bs, too. Real users download the virus source, build it, and then infect themselves with it.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
In order to win some new RAM
Tracy replied to all of her spam
Her account now abounds
in Nigerian Pounds
And her cock is the size of Wuhan.
She gave our her home address.
Yeah, that scared me too. I would have thought McAfee had a duty of care to prevent the participant doing something like that.
Giving a real, existing address to the scum of the earth can't be good for your health. Why didn't they set her up a PO Box or something?
Incidentally, the other worrying thing was this quote:
Overall, the most obvious result of the S.P.A.M. experiment was that the PC that McAfee had provided for the project noticeably slowed down, clogged up with spyware, Mooney says.
I really hope there was some sort of firewall running on that machine ...
Doesn't matter what spyware/crapware they put on it as long as you follow standard procedure. Wipe the bitch and install a crap free Os on it before the CPU is even warmed up.
Wait, do you mean a crap, free OS or a crap-free OS?