Tag Archives: spam

Bizarre spam, now in Russian!

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So I get an enormous amount of spam every day. About half the spam I get is in Russian, with another quarter (half the remaining) in English. The rest is more or less evenly divided among Spanish, Polish, French, Hebrew, and Arabic, in more or less that order.

Every now and then, something truly bizarre lands in my email. Case in point: this Russian language image spam, which as near as I can tell is an advert for a company that makes the gigantic rectal probes used by space aliens when they abduct human females and anally examine them. Cut for not-work-safeness

Eat your spam…and LIKE IT!!!

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So over the past two weeks or so, this journal has been under constant attack by LiveJournal comment spammers; I’ve been averaging about 2-5 pieces of spam a day, mostly for penis enlargers, “herbal Viagra,” and tooth whiteners, in comments to various posts.

Interestingly, all the spamvertised Web sites are hosted by the same ISP: Sago Networks, an American Web hosting ISP located in Atlanta.

I’ve emailed the abuse team at Sago Networks repeatedly. They refuse to take action against their pet spammers unless LiveJournal actually provides them with the LJ server logs showing the placement of the spam.

Now, here’s the interesting thing. Sago Networks is headquartered right across the street from my office. I mean that literally; right across the street. You can see their building from my front door; they’re a ten-second walk away.

I woke up this morning to still more comment spam, all of it hosted by Sago. If this continues, I think I’ll walk over there and ask them in person why they like hosting spammers so much. (Not like I don’t already know the answer: money. It’s profitable to host spammers, at least in the short run.)

I’m thinking of putting a Spam Supporter Hall of Shame on my Web site, listing pro-spam outfits like Sago and Pipex (who do not consider Usenet spam to be “spam,” and permit their customers to spam Usenet newsgroups with impunity) and the email exchanges I’ve had with them, so people who don’t like spam supporters can make informed decisions about who to host with.

[EDIT] The Sago facility across the street from me is their data center. Their corporate headquarters are (ready for this?) in Tampa, about five minutes from my old Tampa office. They’re stalking me!

Spam subject line o’ the Day

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“Stupidly polygamy.”

I get a lot of spam. I mean a lot of spam. I know everyone gets a lot of spam, but I get a quantity of spam every day that’s just quite unreal.

About two-thirds of the spam I get is in Russian. Of the remaining spam, a good bit of it is in French, a lot of it is in Spanish, some of it is in German, some of it is in Chinese, a little bit is in Italian, a little bit is in Polish, every so often I get the odd occasional bit of spam in Hebrew (usually advertising a Web site I can’t make hide nor hair of but featuring expensive American electronics and watches with large bold prices and bulleted lists), and today I got my first spam in Arabic.

I was puzzling about that a while ago. Yesterday, I started working on a new page for my polyamory site, which lists all the mirrors of the page tat have been translated into other languages, and it clicked.

I did a Google search for my name in non-English languages, and found translations of my poly pages in Russian, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Polish, and Hebrew, each with an email link to my primary AOL address. This suggests that spammers are actually scraping email addresses from Web sites and taking note of the language tags in those Web sites, and selling the email addresses scraped from the non-English sites (probably at a premium) to people who spam in languages other than English.

Today’s Arabic spam puzzles me, though. I can’t find any mention of my name or email on any Arabic-language Web sites, at least not via Google.

Spam subject line of the day

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“Tenderly malevolent.” The spam itself was not terribly interesting (just another pump ‘n’ dump penny stock scam), but the subject line is priceless.

Spam subject of the day

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“SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT:  aliphatic   coercion   amtrak”

Now, if you’re going to comply with the law and put the “SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT” in your subject, why bother to use a hash-busting random word generator in the rest of the subject line? People who’re filtering spam are going to filter on the “SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT” part of the subject line!

Unless it’s not random, and the spamvertised Web site really is about sexually explicit rape scenes involving organic compounds with an open-chain structure on trains…

…and if it is, man, there’s a kink I never knew about!

When good companies go bad: how Google learned to stop worrying and love spam

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Okay. So, Google’s founders have an unofficial slogan, which is a part of Google’s genetic DNA: Don’t be evil. Nice idea, that; do well and do good.

But in my experience, “don’t be evil” has become more of…well, a suggestion than a statement of corporate policy. No, I’m not talking about the way Google records information about searches or how the Goolge toolbar inserts paid links into other people’s Web sites–frankly, I don’t care about any of that.

I’m talking about something different: spam. And the fact that Google likes it.

Oh, now I’m not suggesting Google engages in spam itself; when you’re Google, you don’t need to spam. Everyone uses you anyway. I’m talking about the fact that Google supports spammers. And it’s not even a question of supporting spammers for profit, like Savvis does, or allowing people to host spam software, like MCI Worldcom does, or allowing people to host virus and malware droppers, like Peer 1 does. What those companies do is reprehensible, of course, but it’s also understandable: they profit directly from it. The spammers give them cash, they look the other way (or in Savvis’ case, actually help shield the spammers).

No, Google supports spammers, but doesn’t even do it for profit. Google supports spammers because it simply can’t be bothered to hire anyone to do anything about it.

The entire net abuse community shuddered when Google took over Deja News and started Google Groups. Google, of course, insisted that Google Groups would serve a valuable function, and would not be used by spammers; they set up an abuse address, they promised that spammers would not be tolerated, and so on, and so on.

Now, a few years later, it seems that Google’s motto has changed from “Don’t be evil’ to “Don’t bother.”

Google Groups has become, as many people predicted, a wretched hive of scum and spammers. I’ve personally seen more spam coming from Google Groups in the past few months than from any other single newsgroup source in the world–Google has dethroned the previous reigning champions of UseNet spam (Skynet.be, newsfeeds.com, and usenetnews.com) in the sheer volume of spew and in their stubborn refusal to stem the tide. In just the past few hours, I’ve collected some nuggets of Google’s outstanding offerings to the Internet community here

And while I’m in a posting frenzy…

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…the Fun Link o’ the Day: Cartoons inspired by spam subject lines. Funny, more or less work-safe, ganked from foxmagic.

Whew! Another convention, another %#$@ hurricane…

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What’s the deal with hurricanes landing on Tampa every time we go to a convention?

Anyway, we’re back from FetishCon, which was huge fun–much, much, much better than either of us had anticipated (and Shelly got suspended!). I’ll be posting some decidedly not work-safe pics later.

Since the convention hotel was about ten minutes from home, we didn’t get a room, but drove back and forth to the con. We weren’t counting, of course, on getting clobbered by the latest hurricane, so by the end of the weekend, things were getting a bit tricky…we were, quite literally, dodging debris in the road (including fallen traffic lights, road signs, trees, and the like) each way. We didn’t suffer any real damage, and didn’t even lose power, thought the hotel did. My office got a bit flooded, too.

Good news: Logged on to one of the net-admin newsgroups I read this morning (where I had posted this saga of a spammer named Art Schwartz and my dealings with his Web hosting firm), and discovered that the resulting backlash against Hopone Internet was great enough, and enough people chose to blacklist Hopone as a result, that Hopone threw in the towel and terminated Art and his Web site permanently. Y’know, I wonder if he realizes I would never have made such a big stink of it if he hadn’t started emailing me death threats.

And just for fun:

I amNyarlathotep!

The 999 forms of Nyarlathotep are a point of meditation for the true initiate. It is through these manifold faces that the secrets of the universe are made known. Called “The Crawling Chaos”, Nyarlathotep is the disembodied ego of Azathoth and thus the universal “I” of known reality. Some of the many documented forms are; Father of Knives, Nephren-Ka, the Black Man, the Beast of the Lashing Tongue to name a few.

Which Great Old One are you?