The macrodont redeposit your barn
I SWEAR on all that's holy, unholy and in-between, this is a phrase I've seen in umpteen spam messages.
That leads me to believe there's some backdoor trick the spammers have discovered that tells them this is the phrase most likely to deliver results.
"The macrodont redeposit your barn"
It's rather poetic. It has a definite rhythm to it:
themacro DONT RE dep OS ityourbarn (stress the capitals... feel the rhythm?)
And somehow macrodont brings to mind a Mammoth elephant. Sounds like Mastodon, maybe?
Is this subliminal advertising? Will google be blacklisting me? (Pingoat already has but I'm darned if I'm going to give in to some SEO nonsense. I say what I say when I say how I say and if some idjuts in California with clout don't like what I say... well, I believe they have salt water quite close to hand and nostrils available to dip in the brine - chullu bhar paani mein doob ja, blacklisters)
Back to the macrodont. It redeposits your barn. A Mammoth elephant depositing again your barn (after having imbibed it, perhaps? ewww!)
I'd love to have a frank talk with a spammer some day. Obviously something they're doing is working, or they wouldn't keep at it in the face of even threats of legal action. Or there are more sad, lonely individuals on earth than we can ever fathom.
May the macrodont redeposit your barn.
Deepak
posted by Deepak Morris @ 1:42 AM
2 Comments:
I have a theory that all of this spam is emanating from North Korea or China - 'tis an evil plot to clog up the internet with crap and try to make it fall over - certainly most of the spam I get these days is not even trying to sell me anything!
My conjecture is that the spam-sending zombies of the net are linked in a kind of reporting network where thre are evolutionary algorithms changing the content.
I recently shifted the email hosting of a domain I own from a ISP to a host I control. I was astounded that I was getting about 2K spams per hour for what is essentially a perosnal domain. I knew it was bad but not that bad.
Long story about configuring spam battling software short, I ended up redirecting the email via a gmail account and then POPping from there.
Interesting to see what spam makes it through gmail and what doesn't.
First of all, I get some spam that always claims to originate from MS Outlook Express - easy to filter at the client, but not from gmail. I have been watching this type morph for several years. I get probably 100+ per hour of these even after going through gmail. Maybe gmail can be trained, maybe not, haven't taken the time yet as I can capture them and the bandwidth is not a big factor to me.
More intriguing is the type of email referred to i the blog article above. I get that stuff too - almost always the body is stock-touting spam images.
Once I switched to gmail as my spam filter the flood of these almost immmediately stopped - less then 5-10 a day from maybe 100 per hour. But slowly over the last couple of weeks the number that get through is increasing. Now I get maybe 50 per day with no visible structure change in the messages.
I have a technical background in the protocols of email and the web, and also computational linguistics and learning algorithms, so I know that each time I view one of these mesages the web server knows which message it was. I haven't looked closely but I am sure the url that holds the image is encoded somehow, and that information is enough to indicate what the seemingly random subject line is too.
From that, there is probably enough information to go on to feed a learning algorithm about which messages got open and which didn't. Messages more like the ones that did get open get sent (and this might easily be personalized by receiving domain!) and those that are more like the ones that didn't get opend are not generated any more.
The zombies then probably connect loosely to each other and/or to a central point to get the new parameters for the subject-line-generating algorithm occasionally. It wouldn't take a lot of information to be exchanged, and it could probably easily get past firewalls by grabbing it from a surreptitious web server.
As for keefieboy's theory that this spam comes form China or North Korea, some of it does, but increasingly spam comes from zombies that have been infected with malware. Anti-spam efforts have been so successful at blocking rogue mail servers that some major blacklists are starting to shut down.
Where are these zombies? Pretty much everywhere - but probably largely in the US connected to DSL and Cable high bandwidth accounts. Look for server administrators to start tracking the origin IP addresses of spam more intently and for new blacklists to arise.
As for the previous poster's question about who would click on this, the economics of spam are remarkable - it doesn't take but one or two handfuls of spam recipients to follow through with a sale in order for it to be profitable for everyone involved to spam millions or even hundreds of millions. Probably a google search on "economics of spam" will explain in more detail.
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