November 10, 2004 at 3:42PM Spammer’s posting vaguely useful stuff? Wow!
I took a look at the latest comments list on the site, and some rather strange stuff popped up: comments that appeared to give useful information, but were actually spam. Here’s a few examples:
From “The Weight Plan”: How did I get here? Do you simply need help learning how to eat better? Probably. But if you eat poorly as a result of emotional, mental, or spiritual problems, they may have to be addressed before you can make any real progress with weight loss. From here.
From “Keith Reveals More Good Ideas: Aggregator Server”: What is RSS? RSS stands for Rich Site Summary. It’s an XML definition which allows websites to syndicate headlines to other websites. You can create a NewsApp and then select from newsfeeds that we know about or you can enter new newsfeeds. The NewsApp will visit the feeds several times a day and add their headlines to our database. You can visit your NewsApp whenever you want and read the latest headlines. From here.
From “Assigning Categories with Bayesian Filtering”: The first discovery I’d like to present here is an algorithm for lazy evaluation of research papers. Just write whatever you want and don’t cite any previous work, and indignant readers will send you references to all the papers you should have cited. I discovered this algorithm after “A Plan for Spam”[1] was on Slashdot. Ripped from Paul Graham’s Better Bayesian Filtering. At least they’ve a sense of irony. ![[wink]](/images/smilies/wink.gif){kind=small}
From “Merant SequeLink JDBC Driver and ColdFusion horribleness”: IBM WebSphere Application Server supports the use of Merant SequeLink with Oracle databases. The Merant product provides the Oracle database with JDBC functionality.
From “Martin Fowler on Closures”: Martin Fowler has written a nice simple piece which gets across the major points: This bit of spam included a pretty decent explaination of what a closure is from here. See what I mean?
And finally, from “Sage: I’m loving it!”: I worked on RSS Bandit this weekend. I can now officially state that it now has more features than any other client based RSS news aggregator on the market. A bit of text that looks strangely familiar...
What they seem to be doing is analysing the text, and plonking up some other chunk of text that fits in with the topic matter. There’s no links in the body, instead they’re trying to pump up their Google Mojo with links in the site field. Naughty!
This stuff is also poison for a bayesian filter. Bad spammers, but very clever. I’m deleting the lot though. You blokes have heard of copyright infringement, haven’t ye? But then, being lower than pond scum, that sort of thing isn’t something ye worry about, is it?
What puzzles me is why they even bother: on pages where comments are displayed on this site, browsers are told they can index them, but can’t follow links, so there’s no opportunity on this site for spamming to work in their favour. NOFOLLOW = No Mojo.
1 On November 11, 2004 at 12:46, Revence Kalibwani wrote:
My theory is this: Spam isn’t bad in its own right. But if you are going to send, into a 10-year-old’s mailbox, things like M’a-ke y;ou=r pe(ni)s 2wice as big! or S:ee th3s3 w=icked te’e-n~s! then it’s bad. I do send spam, sometimes. Mainly to people I know will appreciate my trouble. I do it over here, sending e-mail to phones, advertising, say, my new money-making website. The next day, I see the hits x10^3! Then, I have actually sensitised them, and they are grateful!
With my Phone SpamWare(R), it’s easy: I just set up a loop of numbers, edit them, and send the e-mail to every last combination. That way, I know I’m hitting home, for sure.
So, my spam isn’t bad. That spam you got ain’t bad. The tag we give spam depends on it’s effect.
Otherwise, you’d label every TV ad Spam!
Feel free to rip me apart, but I’ll keep spammin’!![[smile]](/images/smilies/smile.gif)
2 On November 12, 2004 at 18:47, Keith wrote:
Revence, you must be joking!
Seriously, there’s a huge difference between advertising and spam. I don’t like getting junk mail or cold called, but I don’t mind advertising.
What’s the difference? Well, firstly spam is unsolicited: it can’t be justified as a way of subsidising my usage of the medium delivering it unlike regular advertising, which is subsidising: newspapers allow advertising because it supplements their earnings from sales. This helps keep their price down, meaning they can reach a wider audience. With TV, they charge nothing and earn the money to keep the service going from licencing and advertising. And when you use media like this, the advertising is a fair trade-off against any extra cost that might be involved otherwise.
Secondly, and this is why I don’t like spam and junkmail, it’s an abuse of the facilities: spam costs the spammer next to nothing, whereas it cost me bandwidth, money, and time, three things I don’t have a lot of. Bayesian filters help a lot, getting rid of 98% of my junkmail, but that just saves me time: my money and bandwidth are being wasted.
There’s no such thing as good spam by definition because you get sent it without asking for it. If we were talking about stuff that I have to opt into, that’d be fine, but that’s not how spam works.
And the spam I got is bad, because:
I really hope you’re just joking and I’m missing the point here.
3 On November 15, 2004 at 16:36, Revence Kalibwani wrote:
gaga, could you please put a comment counter? It helps out in encouraging fire-backs![[smile]](/images/smilies/smile.gif)
. And, I wanted to know how i can format these comments. I wonder if you could enable previews. and, quotation marks are never shown! I want a neat session. Here goes:
I have some good news and some bad news. The good news: I hate spam. I filter like my life depends on it! I make custom filters (you should put that in Couriel, which I look forward to). I hate spam. I hate copyright infringement. I hate the negative effects of spam. But I don’t hate the spammers, because I know why they do something they know to be wrong, and because I’m one of them! Which takes me to the...
Bad news: I spam. I’m not joking. Look, the anti-spammists say spam will kill the e-mail system, as we know it, but we all know that something this useful will outlive the spam phenomenon! E-mail is here to stay. And, all the world’s best geeks are against spam. This means spam is going to die out, soon, but I’ll earn off it while it endures! Look at this, gag, as a predator-prey relationship. We are the predators, you are the prey. If you learn to outwit us (and you will), we’ll die out! I’m only trying to survive, when I spam. I even feel guilty when I click the SEND button. It is a Romans 7:19 situation, here. But I can’t starve to keep a filled world happy! I’m, in essence, a remorceful lion that would not rip the little baby zebra apart, but has little choice, because he is starving! I’m not Thomas Moore (in Robert Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons). I have a conscience, but not when I gotta live. I live and let die. You’ve read The Brothers Karamazov, ain’t you? This spam thing is an old human habit in a new packaging. We’ve always survived by preying. All heterotrophs! yes, spam cost zeto, but it’s not eternal! I glean while i can! Spamhaus and Microsoft and many other bigwigs are going to get us, someday. Read the Newsweek of December 8, 2003. It should come of easily from the internet archive. And, some Forbes mag I can’t quite find. There is even an actor who is preaching this vow where you swear never to buy something you know to have been advertised by spam. This, you swear is my contribution to the survival of the internet.
And, I don’t infringe copyrights. I don’t clog mail servers. I only send about 1 million mails (only about twice a year). There are (everyday, was it 3 billion?) mails going around from the working adults of the USA only! My stuff is a drop in the bucket! Of course, I know the sea is made up of drops (they even got that from my language!). That spam causes 9 billion in losses, annually. Losses? Which losses? The money comes to trhe spammers hands! It keeps around, only going from the rich to the poor! Should we look at those wauling the loss mantra as selfish aristocrats, and the spammers as the Robinhoods fo the digital age? Sorry about you time, bandwidth and money. But, like I already said, you are the prey, we are the predators. Learn to survive. Then, you’ll have become the predators, and we the prey. You have got to die, so I can live. Spam is, to the e-mail era, what pollution was to the industrial revolution. It (spam) shows an imature system that has a lot of growing up to do, learning through trial-and-error. Glad there is no cyber-AIDS! So, dont mind, gaga. It will get cleaned out.
P.S.: One last thing. Make a search of The Geek Syndrome. You’ll find that many geeks suffer from autism. They don’t give a damn who’s losing. As long as they are gaining. That’s bad, since geeks are the main spamsters. Fire back, Gaga.