Tag: spam

Weird new kind of spam [09/19/2010]

[Many years ago Phooky had mentioned seeing an odd kind of behavior online.  I can’t recall if this was a phenomena on Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter…  but I think it may have been on Facebook.  What he saw was some accounts going into an insular online group, starting an argument, and then taking those replies, sending them to the ideologically-opposite group, taking those replies and sending them to the first group, then lather, rinse, repeating.  This was a very long time ago – perhaps in 2010 or 2011?  In any case, at the time I assumed it was juvenile hijinks.  With the benefit of hindsight, now I think it was something far more nefarious.  I think it was likely the initial testing grounds for the influencing of online groups.  This was around the time of the rise of the Tea Party Movement around 2009, then the Occupy Wallstret Movement in 2011.  Maybe this is all just conspiracy mongering.  Or, perhaps there were online experiments, sharpening the science of influencing online movements put into practice in 4Chan, QAnon, and other groups originating in online forums.  Anyhow, my guess this weird spam was designed to pick a fight – either to mine the replies for data or get authorized to post comments for spam, or perhaps… all of the above.]

I noticed a few months ago a new kind of spam that sometimes wasn’t picked up by my spam filter.  People (or their ‘bots) were leaving highly politically/religiously charged comments.  The comments read as if they were written by real people – but they didn’t make much sense in the context of the post.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts
  1. Misnamer [11/28/2010]
  2. The Lost Blog Posts
  3. Plastruder! [Draft 12/25/2009]
  4. UNTITLED [Draft 12/25/2009]
  5. Preparing to print [Draft 12/27/2009]
  6. More prints [Draft 01/04/2010]
  7. Prototype Pricing [Draft 01/19/2010]
  8. MakerBot tuning [Draft 01/20/2010]
  9. Plastic Screw Anchor [Draft 02/02/2010]
  10. Magic [Draft 02/03/2010]
  11. How are you printing with PLA? [Draft 02/16/2010]
  12. Rebuilding my extruder [Draft 02/16/2010]
  13. MY robot [Draft 02/18/2010]
  14. more things i learned [Draft 02/20/2010]
  15. First commissioned piece! [Draft 02/22/2010]
  16. MakerBot: Toy or Tool? [02/25/2010]
  17. Idea for Skeinforge settings… [Draft 03/27/2010]
  18. RepRap and MakerBot alternatives [Draft 04/05/2010]
  19. RepRap Parts for Sale [Draft 04/07/2010]
  20. Where is the Othercutter? [Draft 06/08/2015]
  21. Mendel Parts – Printed, Cast, CNC’d, Lasercut or Injection Molded? [Draft 04/12/2010]
  22. MakerBot Operator’s Manual [06/04/20210]
  23. MakerBot on CBS! [07/07/2010]
  24. New Print: Soft-Pawed Albino Stoat of South Wales Cookie Cutter [07/07/2010]
  25. House calls [07/11/2010]
  26. Digital assistant? [08/05/2010]
  27. MakerBot + Junk = Stuff! [08/06/2010]
  28. Design choices in RepRap, Goals of RepRap [08/14/2010]
  29. Upgrades and obsolescence [08/25/2010]
  30. Dear Anonymous [08/25/2010]
  31. The ultimate in customer service [08/26/2010]
  32. Open Source Makes You Smarter [08/27/2010]
  33. Getting my Plastruder MK5 running [09/06/2010]
  34. Weird new kind of spam [09/19/2010]
  35. An open letter to Ms. Word [10/18/2010]
  36. Printing with PLA again! [10/18/2010]
  37. Halloween costume too [10/27/2010]
  38. Dream jobs [10/29/2010]
  39. The nuances of time travel [10/31/2010]
  40. Printed Pink Panther Person [11/22/2010]
  41. Skein them all and let ‘Bot sort them all out [11/24/2010]
  42. The Patents for disc shooters [12/10/2010]
  43. Princess Bride with Lightsabers [12/13/2010]
  44. Dilbert comic [12/13/2010]
  45. Ultimachine PLA review [12/15/2010]
  46. Mendel to the power of 101 [12/21/2010]
  47. Potential improvements for Leonardo Voltron [12/27/20210]
  48. You can keep your filthy money [12/28/2010]
  49. I watched Primer the other night [12/30/2010]

Mailing lists that eventually become spam

SpamBot 3000 is ready to... serve
SpamBot 3000 is ready to… serve

Occasionally I will opt into a mailing list – but very very rarely will I do so with a real e-mail address. 1  One of the domains I own allows me to specify a “catch all” e-mail address where mis-addressed e-mails will be sent.  The most useful part of this is that I can give out an e-mail address of any sort I want @mydomain.com and the e-mail will be redirected to the account I actually check.  Later if I discover that it wasn’t such a good idea to have given out an e-mail address like that, then I can always forward all e-mail to that address to trash.

For the most part as long as you’re not giving your e-mail address to really sketchy websites or posting them in plaintext somewhere, I’ve found many newsletters/e-mail marketers are pretty ethical.  What’s interesting are those companies that have passed on my (fake) e-mail addresses.  What I’ve found is that they tried to market to me at that address for a few years – and then apparently gave up – at about the same time that I began receiving spam to that address.

Which brings me to a minor rant.  The company I work for2 posted all of the employees’ e-mail addresses online in plaintext.  What a colossally bad idea.  Although I’ve asked the IT guys to at some level of obfuscation3 to our addresses, the requests have gone unheard.  My work e-mail, which is managed by Gmail, does a pretty good job at catching spam – but this seems an unnecessary step.  Even with these protections, I’m still getting phishing e-mails, Nigerian scams, “medications” over the internet, offers to purchase plaques commemorating awards, and all kinds of nonsense.

Uh, yeah, I don’t know where I was going with this one.  :)

  1. Photo courtesy of Tinkerbots [↩]
  2. During my day job for a company you’ve never heard of doing something far less interesting than making awesome robots that make awesome things [↩]
  3. Which would be easy since the company website is on WordPress and there must be a dozen plugins that do exactly this [↩]

The Downside of Blogging

I have another website/blog that I’ve really basically neglected the hell out of.  Due to some new developments related to that other blog, I put up three posts in the last month.  Which is cool and all except…

Now I’m getting pelted with spam through that blog and to the address associated with that website.  I suppose as the spam kings realize a blog is even slightly active, they decide to start spamming the authors.

Surprising spam comment

There was this spam comment to a recent post referencing Doctor Who’s sixth season:

..As with the series of Doctor Who last year the final two episodes before the finale have been much more small scale and in some ways a little different. Last week we had a largely Doctor-less story Love and Monsters and this week we got Fear Her a which is set largely in one single.

The wildest thing about this comment is that it isn’t entirely off base.  The comment relates to the third season of Doctor Who with Martha Jones and the two episodes “Love and Monsters” and “Fear Her.” 1  Someone supposedly named “E. Keith Owens” using the e-mail address “timmy_b_dickerson_dzn57@hotmail.com” who posted that spam comment apparently stole it from this website.

I have to wonder – is this a crazy new form of spam?  Did they just type in a few keywords and then get two blogs – mine and that other one – then try to copy/paste our content as comments into each other, and try to get a link back to their crappy foreign exchange website? 2

What incredible nonsense.  As with stupid scareware, why don’t smart people just spend their time creating things that offer value in exchange for money?

  1. Incidentally, two of my least favorite episodes. [↩]
  2. I deleted your link.  So there.  :P  [↩]
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