chapping at chaff
so i suppose on some level i should feel good about the fact that every couple of days some spambot sprays their comment diarrhea on some random posts from 6 months ago. that they've deigned t.s.o.a. worthy of infestation must mean that they think people will see it right? still there's something about it that is disturbing beyond the level that involves me having to delete the comments and ban the IP addresses from posting comments in the future. i don't know how they pick which postings to comment on but i'm guess that there must be some sort of trigger words that it uses. but he strangest thing is the way the comments are written, either complimentary as in "that was interesting" or weirdly philosophical like "man constantly strives for a perfection he doesn't understand with tools inherently flawed." occasionally i catch myself trying to figure out the meaning before realizing that it's all just a trick to lead me to cheap prescription drugs, penis enlargement and pyramid scheme websites. i rarely notice these things on other blogs though. is there some sort of proscriptive blocking mechanism that i'm not aware of?
but do you like what i've done here? now when the bots append nonsensical comments to this post about nonsensical comments in a couple months it will create this seriously meta entry guaranteed to blow some minds. dig.
Comments
i, too, have been marveling at the complete absurity of spam lately. we get alot here at the inn and my two recent favorites were totally absurd and made me scratch my head wondering what is going here. the first was a long, typo filled message about a peeping tom witnessing his neighbor getting freaky with the livestock next door. now the typos i think i get. if someone has blocked all emails with "penis" in the body then spelling it "peeeeeeenis" or "pensi" helps get by that barrier. the truly strange part was between every 5 lines or so was another line full of utter nonsense and so light it was almost invisible, only appearing dark when i printed it out to investigate. the lines were crazy and full of unrelated words. what good is this? and this leads me to spam number two whose subject line was also inscrutable. it read "DON'T WAIT tuberculosis kermit birdbath." so what is the benefit of these strings of words creating bizarre phrases? can any one help me out here?
Posted by: crispin | July 1, 2004 02:22 PM
I asked Yann: He says it's because spammers use a generator that creates a random assortment of words to make sure that no two emails are exactly the same; otherwise when a server like hotmail receives 1 million emails with the exact same subject line, it knows that is spam and deletes them all before delivery. cool?
Posted by: Michelle | July 1, 2004 04:35 PM
thank you yann, thank you michelle. i can rest easy tonite knowing that the spammers are two steps ahead of us and there's nothing we can do.
Posted by: crispin | July 1, 2004 06:39 PM