Cue Alanis

Yeah, I know, Alanis got irony wrong

It turns out that bots have exploded on Ecch since Elon took over.

Looks like the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ justification when he tried to get out of the Twitter purchase was about 6 pounds of sh%$ in a 5 pound bag:

Bot activity on the platform formerly known as Twitter is worse than ever, according to researchers, despite X’s new owner, Elon Musk, claiming a crackdown on bots as one of his key reasons for buying the company.

“It is clear that X is not doing enough to moderate content and has no clear strategy for dealing with political disinformation,” associate professor Dr Timothy Graham tells Guardian Australia.

A researcher at the Queensland University of Technology, Graham has tracked misinformation and bot activity on social media for several years including until Musk took over Twitter in October last year.

If you are wondering what happened to Elon, the answer was nothing.

He was always an incompetent, lying, delusional, and abusive sack of sh%$, it's just now the press and the public has stopped pretending that he is a Nietzschean superman.

 

Wut?

A hiker lost on the tallest mountain in Colorado ignored calls from rescuers he did not know the numbers, and thought that they were spam.

Something really needs to be to be done about phone spam:

A man who became lost for 24 hours while hiking on Colorado’s highest mountain ignored repeated phone calls from rescue teams because they came from an unknown number, authorities say.

The hiker was reported missing around 8pm on 18 October after failing to return to where he was staying, Lake county search and rescue said.

Repeated attempts to contact the man through calls, texts and voicemail messages went ignored, according to a statement released by the agency.

………

The hiker told authorities he had lost his way around nightfall and “bounced around on to different trails trying to locate the proper trailhead” before finally reaching his car the next morning, about 24 hours after setting out on the hike.

“One notable take-away is that the subject ignored repeated phone calls from us because they didn’t recognise the number,” the agency added.

“If you’re overdue according to your itinerary, and you start getting repeated calls from an unknown number, please answer the phone; it may be a search and rescue team trying to confirm you’re safe!”

Seriously, if a Presidential candidate threatened to bomb India to stop phone spammers (and it wouldn't Indian phone banks are only a part of the problem) they would win 48 states.

A Bit of Blog Meta

Due to an avalanche of comment spam, I have turned on the CAPTCHA for the comments, for a while at least.

Also, I have fixed the recent comments widget on the lower left hand side.

This is an Interesting Sociological Data Point

Every few days, I check my spam folder.

Over the past few days, from late last week until about 5 minutes ago, EVERYTHING in the spam folder was thermometer spam.

Clearly, the low rate scammers have focused on the corona virus.

Come to think of it, so have the billionaire scammers on Wall Street.

I Would Have Figured That the Number Was Larger………

A study is now rep[ortint that Americans got 26.3 billion robocalls last year, a nearly 50% increase from the prior year.

If I do a quick back of the envelope calculation, that is about 100 robocalls per phone per year, or about 1 every 3-½ days.

I typically get 2-3 a day on weekdays, so I think that the number is way too small.

In any case, it is getting to the point that people are no longer answering their phones at all, so something that needs to be done.

I have a 7 word suggestion:

The Most Popular Drone Strike Program Ever!

Tweet of the Day

Lol that's one way to turn things on its head. pic.twitter.com/JMSwnx2Vmg

— Adam Bennett (@AuAnon) March 1, 2018

Replying to Chinese scammers with the Chinese phrase, "June 4th Tienanmen Square Massacre," to arouse the ire of Chinese authorities is brilliant.

Your New Yearsn Buyllsh%$ Debunking

You may have received an email describing Silver pockets full that goes something like this:

August, next year, will have 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays. This happens only once every 823 years. The Chinese call it 'Silver pockets full. " So: send this message to your friends and in four days money will surprise you. Based on Chinese Feng Shui. Whoever does not transmit the message ... may find themselves poor.

It's crap.

This is August 2014:

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30
31

This is August 2025:

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30
31

Any questions?

Comments Will Be Moderated for a While

Recently, I have gotten a lot (for this blog, anyway) of spam comments on my blogs.

Hair extensions, office furniture, and tools.

Just to clarify my comments policy:  I moderate ONLY for spam.

I have few enough readers as is.

The "tell" for spam is generic text, and a link to some sort of unrelated commercial activity.

If the link is germane, it's OK, but this is almost never a link for a good or a service.

If you feel that you have been targeted unfairly, contact me.

If you want to post an ad on my blog, we can talk terms.

They Should Take the Fillings from Their Mouths

It appears that Henry Perez and Suzanne Bartok, proprietors of AMP Dollar Savings, used a program called Bulk Mailing 4 Dummies, and sent 2.8 millionspam emails to CIS internet services, a small ISP with about 5000 subscribers, and the judge ordered them to pay $236 million in damages.

Note that the judge assessed the fine against them, and not just AMP Dollar Savings.

Once Again, Will No One Rid Me of This Turbulent Spammer?

Yep, it's Spamford Wallace, yet again, and he has finally lost the lawsuit that MySpace filed against him, by default. I wrote about this suit 9 months ago.

He apparently refused to respond to the court, so there was a default judgment.

If I were a judge, I'd have had his ass thrown in jail for contempt.

If I were a juror in the trial of his murderer, I might vote to convict.

Spam Conviction Upheld

Under Virginia law, Jeremy Jaynes will serve his 9 year sentence under Virginia law, so says the Virginia Supreme Court, which found that the VA anti-spam law was not an infringement on the first amendment.

5-4 decision.

A Spammer and A Genius

It appears that spammers are using sex to enlist human brain power to foil Captchas.

This is a Captcha:

Basically, the spammers have, "created a Windows game which shows a woman in a state of undress when people correctly type in text shown in an accompanying image".

The Captcha comes from a site that uses them to prevent spam, Yahoo comes to mind as a prominent example.

This is brilliant. Evil, but brilliant. If only this man could use his powers of technology and psychology for good, instead of evil.

Ron Paul is a Spammer

Well, it appears that botnet of compromised machines are sending out email pimping for Ron Paul.

It should be noted that the article does note that the researcher who discovered this has no evidence of any connections between the Paul campaign and the botnet spammers.

Given the genuinely altruistic bent of spammers, it is possible that these people are just acting out of the goodness of their hearts, just like Dick Cheney does.

Normally, I'm Against the Death Penalty, But In His Case, I'll Make an Exception

Notorious spammer Christopher "Rizler" Smith was sentenced to 30 years in prison. There is a part of me, the lizard brain, which was hopint for the death penalty.

Between dealing Hydrocodone and Viagra, and threatening the children of a witness, he's going to be in jail for a very long time.

Ironically, because of his efforts, his cell mates will have easy access to Viagra and Cialis.

OOPS!!!

Will No One Rid Me of This Meddlesome Spammer?

It appears that MySpace has gotten a court injunction to keep Sanford Wallace out of their service.

The preliminary injunction came in a lawsuit MySpace filed in March. It claims Wallace created more than 11,000 MySpace profiles that churned out private messages, comments and bulletins that directed users to spoofed MySpace pages seeking their login information.

The ruse allowed him to hijack at least 320,000 accounts, which he used to send 400,000 private messages and post 890,000 comments, both of which redirected MySpace users to the sites freevegasclubs.com and realvegas-sins.com. The sites are owned by Feeble Minded Productions, an aptly-titled firm affiliated with Wallace.

He's not going to change. Can someone just send him to Gitmo or something?

It looks like he is covered under CAN-SPAM, and the least the judge thought it was likely enough that he granted the injunction, and there is potential jail time ther.

Favorite comment of the piece:

We were unable to find a phone number for Wallace and were reluctant to email him.

I gotta go clean my screen now.

Now They Want My Poop

Every workplace has it own quirks, where I am now, this is a fairly high volume of company spam email.

While one expects things like the occasional notice of a blood drive or a United Way Campaign, one gets 2-10 emails here a day that are sent to the whole place.

These are things like:

• Equipment that they want to give away for someone to take home.
• Equipment that they want to give to another lab.
• Petty cash status
• Sales pitches for the health club they have in the basement.
• Sales pitches for massages available through said health club.
  
• Requesting volunteers to provide samples for testing to validate processes.

This time, it's gone a bit odd. They are offering $20.00 for a stool sample.

It's just a very odd thing to see first thing Monday Morning.

In any case, they get nothing from me. I must protect my purity of essence.

Lawsuit shows how to sue spammers | CNET News.com

Short version, he filed in Washington State, won a 31K judgement, and followed up with a suit in Florida to collect, and won there.

Lawsuit shows how to sue spammers

By Declan McCullagh

A recent decision in a lawsuit filed against a Florida credit counseling company offers a promising road map to follow for suing spammers.

After receiving at least nine unsolicited e-mail messages offering credit counseling services, Washington state resident Joseph Hylkema did more than just consign the spam to his junk mail folder: he decided to get even.

.....

And in the War over Spam Bots, There is Escalation

A Dog or a Cat? New Tests to Fool Automated Spammers
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a human — until you fill out a captcha.

Captchas are the puzzles on many Web sites that present a string of distorted letters and numbers. These are supposed to be easy for people to read and retype, but hard for computer software to figure out.

Most major Internet companies use captchas to keep the automated programs of spammers from infiltrating their sites.

There is only one problem. As online mischief makers design better ways to circumvent or defeat captchas, Web companies are responding by making the puzzles more challenging to solve — even for people.

...

“You can make a captcha absolutely undefeatable by computers, but at some point, you are turning this from a human reading test into an intelligence test and an acuity test,” said Michael Barrett, the chief information security officer at PayPal, a division of eBay. “We are clearly at the point where captchas have hit diminishing returns.”

If that is true, at least captchas had a good run. Though several researchers devised similar tests early in the decade, credit for inventing the technology usually goes to Carnegie Mellon University, which was asked by Yahoo in 2000 to create a method to prevent rogue programs from invading its chat rooms and e-mail service.

....

Yet some of that activity can be ethically murky. Aleksey Kolupaev, 25, works for an Internet company in Kiev, Ukraine, and in his spare time, with his friend Juriy Ogijenko, he develops and sells software that can thwart captchas by analyzing the images and separating the letters and numbers from the background noise. They charge $100 to $5,000 a project, depending on the complexity of the puzzle.

He lives in the former Soviet Union there's a surprise.

On the bright side, with the mob penetration of those countries, hitmen are cheap and plentiful.

Microsoft researchers have developed an alternative captcha that asks Internet users to view nine images of household pets and then select just the cats or the dogs.

“For software, this is wildly hard,” said John Douceur, a Microsoft researcher. “Computers are tripped up by all the photos at different angles, with variable lighting conditions and backgrounds and the animals in different positions.”

The project, called Asirra (for Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access), uses photographs of animals from Petfinder.com, a site that finds homes for homeless pets and has more than two million images in its database.

...

It would be nice if this were to get some of those animals adopted.

Adopt a stray. Mutts and alley cats are just as good pets, and they don't have the flaws from inbreeding.

He added: “No single defensive technology is forever. If they were, we would all be living in fortified castles with moats.”

Not everyone feels that the traditional captcha is finished. Luis von Ahn, a professor at Carnegie Mellon and a member of the team that invented captchas, recently unveiled an effort to give them new usefulness.

His reCaptcha project (recaptcha.net) seeks to block spam while handling the challenge of digitally scanning old books and making them available in Web search engines.

When character recognition software fails to decipher a word scanned in a book — when the page is yellowed or the letters are smudged, for example — Mr. von Ahn’s project makes it part of a captcha. After the mystery word has been verified by several people, it is fed back into the digital copy of the book.

...

That is an insanely good "out of the box" application for this technology.