The literary spammers have been at it again. Behold, kind Dopers, the Cliff’s Notes of Shakespeare presented below:
Now, wasn’t that useful?
The literary spammers have been at it again. Behold, kind Dopers, the Cliff’s Notes of Shakespeare presented below:
Now, wasn’t that useful?
I guess so, if it got thru your spam filters.
I got one forwarded to me the other day by a professor who was complaining about the racial slurs in the spam mail.
As I read it, I did notice several sentences beginning withe “The Jew said” “The Jew did this.”
Then, a little further down, I spotted the name “Bill Sykes.”
Yes, it was quoting from Oliver Twist.
And then what? Then what?! I have to know!
They all lived happily ever after, or they all died. Depends on which play they end it on.
There are literary spammers? :dubious: Say what you will, they are at least classier than the ones spamming me about how to make my girlfriend moan in ecstacy.
Hm. Who sends out spam about Shakespeare? Sounds like something from a Thursday Next novel.
It’s a strategy to get around the Bayesian filters. It’s almost like English and it’s enough to make it through the filter.
But what is its purpose? To flood our inboxes with iambic pentameter?
Literary spam is nice and all, but I prefer the ones that would make a rambling paranoid schizophrenic on 500 micrograms of LSD seem as lucid as a bored bank teller.
In a way, they can be strangely poetic.
I got this one last week:
There is a devious method to their madness. They hope the filters, which are straining hard to distinguish between normal or permitted text and spammy ads, will be fooled by the large quantity of Shakespeare (which is just padding) and will pass the spam (how to make your GF moan) thru to your mailbox. If you ignore the stuff from Will but read the stuff about le sex, mission accomplished.
Besides the example I just gave, some of the emails are test posts to see what gets accepted and what gets rejected. This will help the spammers to send, in the next batch, more of the kind that gets through and to the places that don’t reject it. It’s pretty much a cat&mouse game; the filters get better, then the spammers adjust and try to avoid the new obstacles.
Ohhh, okay. I thought the email started and ended with Shakespearean gibberish.
Maybe I could write my thesis on reinterpretations of Shakespeare in the world of spam.
I have long wanted to go to an open mic poetry reading and read something like the one neutron star posted. If people didn’t know it was spam (and probably even if they did) it’d be a hit, if it was read with interesting inflection and energy.
I have thought this ever since I saw these types of messages on newsgroups five years ago.