Every now and then when I run a search on Google archives, I will find some bizarre results, lengthy posts that seem to have no purpose i.e. “The angular banjo cried for political wallflower rainy days, even unto a large, dripping frying pan.” etc, this goes on for thousands of posts. WTF??
It’s a spam attack. It is testing the sites spam filters. I get about 25 of the nonsense emails a week.
Huh… Is it necessary to have huge swaths of nonsense prose for a spam attack? How are they generated?
From a tech blog
"This is an attempt by spammers to defeat the content filters that the new generation of spam blockers are using. Spam filters based on Bayesian algorithms try to determine the context of words that may be possible spam triggers.
If an email contains little more than “Enlarge your body parts! Click Here to Buy!!!” then it’s pretty easy for a program to score those words and zap the message as spam. But if that text is buried in an avalanche of meaningless text that has nothing to do with anything, the job of determining whether or not a message is good or bad becomes much harder."
I’d wondered about this myself.
Although, thinking about it, surely all the nonsense words will also prevent the recipient from getting the good news about penis enlargement. Nobody’s going to wade through this stuff to read the ad.
And shouldn’t it be child’s play for a program to spot offending words even in a milllion others. Isn’t that what computers are good at?
Wasn’t there also some method that Scientologists were using to convert posts to garbage that were critical of Scientology? There was some term for that that I’m failing to recall.
“sporgeries” Alt.religion.scientology FAQ for New Readers
Well yes and no. If you’re reading e-mail (or websites, or newsgroups) in HTML or rich text format then there’s a big difference between how the text is encoded and how it displays. So spammers use lots of tricks to hide the message, the simplest is to put the add in a graphics file (with some bells and whistles to foil computers trying to scan it for text) and have a lot of prose after it. Now the spam filter sees something that looks like a normal mail with no trigger words and an attachment, exactly like a great deal of legit e-mails. Other methods hide the prose and highlight the message (i.e. prose is rendered in 2pt white on white text and the messages is 14pt blinking red on black) or rearrange the display or just put the message at the top. You get the idea.
Also people might write legitamate mails or posts about penis enlargement or whatever and filters have to be careful not to bin them.
It’s an ongoing battle between spammers and anti-spammers which no end in sight.
SD
They might be flooding the newsgroup to make it harder to read. It would be like posting junk comments constantly to the SDMB, without moderators.
The wierd, prose like nonsensical ramblings almost sound like they make sense… And they go on, sometmes for 12000’s of words. WHERE do they get this stuff from? Is there some sort of gibberish generator?
regards
FML
Some of them are cut out of public domain novels available for free online. (Project Gutenberg is a major source of good reading material, but they aren’t the only ones putting novels online.) Literally cut: The program takes columns out of the text by only grabbing a few words from each line. The novel “The Master and Margarita” was used this way in a recent email spam run.
Some of it is autogenerated by a program that is constantly playing Mad Libs. You know, “The <NOUN> is <ADVERB> <PAST-TENSE VERB> the <ADJECTIVE> <NOUN>.” Fill in the blanks and away you go.
Some of it is generated by more sophisticated software that knows things like “the word ‘small’ is commonly followed by ‘dog’ but rarely followed by ‘the’”. Programs like that are called ‘Travesty Generators’ or the ‘Dissociated Press’ because they can be used to produce nonsense text in the style of, say, Edgar Allen Poe or H.P. Lovecraft or the King James Bible, simply by being fed large amounts of text produced by those sources and automatically creating the rules.
I don’t know what most of it comes from. None of it is very good.
What I don’t get is why someone would actually want to follow up on an ad like this which uses such a dastardly tactic to get its message across. Do spammers actually make money selling penis enlargement products through messages hidden among all this garbage? Seems pretty ridiculous to me. I mean there are plenty of legitimate (if you can call it that) companies that sell all sorts of adult and naughty goodies online. So why bother with all this childish nonesense in the first place?
ntcrawler I have heard two schools of thought on that.
The first says that there is a sucker born every minute. Sending five million spam emails doesn’t cost much at all, and if you get a 0.01% percent hit rate that’s 500 hits. If you are selling overpriced fraudulent crap (sugar pills as viagra, say) and/or don’t ever actually send any goods at all ie you are engaging in total fraud, your profits could be quite good.
The second school of thought says that spam probably doesn’t make much or any money, but it is sent by people pursuing get-rich-quick schemes sold to them (in turn) by people who actually do make money by convincing suckers to do their dirty work for them (rather like Amway, Herbalife etc).
I suspect the whole thing is of such fringe legality that it’s hard to find firm facts and figures, but someone may know of a study…
It’s called poetry. Have some artistic sensitivity, alright?
You probably have the right answer. I know when I was last on usenet before my “retiirement” the CoS sporged many posts using my name and email address.
:smack: OOOPS—I just realized the above could be misconstrued; I “retired” from usenet, not Scientology—I never was nor will be a member of said organization.
(and that is the first and probably last time I ever use a “smiley.”)
I don’t see anything in that link about “sporgeries”. Is there another example?
Sorry, my original link that was quoted is wrong. here’s another:
http://bernie.cncfamily.com/sc/sporg.htm
There’s lots more info on sporgeries that can be found with Google.