Beezly’s Blog

spammers and spam filterrers
I do find the nature of spam very interesting. This kind of thing is a product of a big cyber-battle. An arms-race between spammers and spam filterrers.

Spammers add irrellavent chunks of text to their emails in order to get through email spam filters. They stuff in a different chunk of text, into each email they send, or least into each batch. This is so that they are not detected as having sent the same message body many times.

Some spam filters probably check semantics to see if a block of text looks completely randomised, and so spammers dont just spew a random array of characters, or even random words, they actually go for meaningful sentences. The idea is to make it very difficult to autmatically disinguish it from a human’s useful email.

So spammers load in a big corpus of text from somewhere, into their spamming software. They seem to prefer story books. Your extract is obviously coming from the middle of some story.

Googling for the text here doesn’t reveal anything though, so whichever story it is, it’s doesn’t seem to be on the web. It could be that clever spam filters are wise to some bodies of text too, and so the spammers have to look for obscure story book texts which aren’t on the web.

However google does reveal spam messages with similar text in the suse linux maillist archives, which they shouldn’t really be publishing like that. This way the spammer gets a pagerank leg-up, as well as pissing everyone off with their emails!

Another block of text
I received a spam email including this block of text:

nations, races and languages. In the process names were altered, combined or simply misunderstood by armies of confused, overworked clerks. But roots frequently survived and thus it was for you. The family Fontaine became Prefontaine in America and the great mans associate was in reality an esteemed member of the American branch! Positively awesome, muttered Brendan, eyeing the official as if he expected several male nurses to barge into the room with restraining equipment. But isnt it possible that this is merely coincidence? Fontaine is a common name throughout France, but, as I understand it, the Prefontaines were distinctly centered around Alsace-Lorraine. Yes, of course, said the deputy, again, lowering his voice rather than conceivably winking. Yet without any prior word whatsoever, the Quai dOrsay in Paris calls, then the UKs Foreign Office follows with

It starts and stops mid-sentence. Weird.

It’s taken from a novel called “The Bourne Ultimatum“.

Does the author, Robert Ludlum, know that his novel is being dished out for free on the web? Does he know that it’s being chopped up and spewed out in spam emails? It’s crime-ridden anarchy out there I tell ya.

some more funny spam
This spam seems to have randomised sentences. These make no sense, but they are gramatically correct sentences. Rather like my old insult generator program. Remember that? Anyway read some of this text from my spam. It’s bonkers!

Most people believe that a sheriff near a buzzard makes a truce with the spider about another grain of sand, but they need to remember how knowingly a dust bunny daydreams. The lover defined by another hole puncher secretly finds subtle faults with a psychotic sheriff. The familiar vacuum cleaner negotiates a prenuptial agreement with the green dust bunny. Indeed, the barely highly paid salad dressing non-chalantly borrows money from the impromptu CEO. The industrial complex inside an eggplant trades baseball cards with a secretly annoying paycheck. The self-loathing industrial complex

A highly paid razor blade Any bowling ball can figure out a financial spider, but it takes a real razor blade to seek a mating ritual. If a surly pork chop dances with a boiled grizzly bear, then the tape recorder around a stovepipe dies. Now and then, a judge near a tripod borrows money from a minivan defined by the bottle of beer. Another financial photon, the umbrella, and another somewhat polka-dotted CEO are what made America great! The self-loathing industrial complex The self-loathing industrial complex