Yeah, that's why I can never understand any of those silly letters you send me

[venta]

I am easily entertained. This is not news. Just recently, I've actually been reading some of the spam that arrives at my old freeserve address.


I was curious about a mail whose subject line was "Do you crave to perceive valuable following morn ?". It turned out to be trying to interest me in hangover remedies (I think), and had presumably been translated by Babelfish after a bad night out:

"But our pills aids you avoid katzenjammers and wake sentient magnificent from head to abdomen and all over additional."

Wow! Now that very nearly made me follow the press-here-to-read-more. Dammit, I want to wake up feeling sentient magnficient from head to abdomen and all over additional. How could anyone resist ?

Mind you, that mail had assumed my name to be Fidelia Xaftlbe, which is not the sort of behaviour you want from someone making offers like that.

The latest volley of spam all seems to come from computer generated addresses, which have a proper 'name', but the part of the address before the @ sign is just a string of eight letters. Imagine my delight to be mailed by oocelotw! Not just an ocelot, but a computer-generated one! Disappointingly, it turned out not to be an ocelot at all, but an individual called Lena with poor sentence-construction and a habit of using "u" for "you". She thanked me for my mail and offered to send me a picture - generous, but disappointing when I'd been hoping for a big cat.

Today brings a mail from an Agatha - and you don't get many of those these days - telling me that "young and ruttish misses are waiting". While I fear that, if they are waiting for me, it may be a tediously long wait I am made extremely happy to see someone using the word ruttish. It is, perhaps, the kind of anachronistic and slightly coarse behavious one might expect from an Agatha.

However, I should make it clear that despite the number of offers in the past couple of weeks, I still don't want to buy a pre-owned Rolex watch. Especially not since I found my temporarily-mislaid Swatch this morning.

Comments

[kissifa.livejournal.com]

I am utterly flummoxed as to why these people persist in sending me the funds transfer scam mails. Regularly I open my Yahoo mailbox to find at least one copy of three different scam mails, always with their headings in capitals.

Are they not getting bored of it not-working? Do they reckon if they keep on at us we'll eventually crack? And what's with the multiple copies?

Ugh, can't they set up a funding scheme for scam artists to teach them how to at have, at the very least, passable grammar, okay typing skills, and some idea of how to set up an original scam?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, the multiple copies in my case are usually because the same mail's been sent to multiple addresses. I get them sent to my name@, but also things like sale@, root@, etc.

I suppose that, if you're set up to mail random bumf to millions of addresses, it's not so much a case of why would you carry on as what reason is there to stop ? It's so cheap as a means of broadcasting your message that you need a ludicrously tiny take-up to make it worthwhile to continue.

[kissifa.livejournal.com]

I wish I could meet them in person. I'd give them my foot up their ass as a good reason to stop.

I shall have to console myself with thoughts of hamsters.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Hamsters up asses, or just in general ?

[kissifa.livejournal.com]

Well there is always Aubrey the Arse Hamster if people are so inclined.

Failing that I just meant the normal fluffy cute little rodent things - I pass a pet shop on my way into work you see, so can stop in and say hi to the cute ickle things! Eeeeee!

[eostar.livejournal.com]

*lol* I have colleagues who would appreciate Aubrey ... I think I'll go make their day :)

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Yahoo have some kind of scheme to perform distributed denial of service attacks on known spammers using a screensaver. There's ethical issues with it, but you could look into it.

They pulled it when they realised that their feeble claims that it isn't a DDoS attack crumble when exposed to even the lightest scrutiny, but you could keep an eye on www.makelovenotspam.com for news, and/or try to get it from somewhere else.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Bear in mind that few (no ?) spammers spam from their own machines.

If someone's had their server 0VV/\/3d do you really want to be DOS-ing it ? Is that going to help ?

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Bear in mind that few (no ?) spammers spam from their own machines

The DDoS is directed against the site to which the spam directs you to send your money, not against the site which originated the spam. Obviously someone was dug up to say, "The wrong site could get on Yahoo's list. Won't anyone think of the children?". Of course the predictable response to that is, "We're not perfect. Are you? Thought not", which lays out both sides of the argument sufficiently that everyone can choose their side.

If someone's had their server 0VV/\/3d do you really want to be DOS-ing it

I'll hazard a guess and say "sometimes we do". For the same reason that if someone has TB (or some other antisocial physical condition which is not malicious on their part), we want to jump on them swiftly and confine them to an infirmary. Hopefully what we then do is give them antibiotics and explain to them how to avoid catching TB in future. Or at least refer them to someone else who can.

TB hasn't been inconveniencing them (yet) to the degree that they can be bothered to put sufficient (as we see it) effort into sorting it out themselves, but the short period of confinement gets their attention on the matter (we regard as being) of critical importance, and more importantly stops them from giving anyone else TB.

I have a suspicion that this won't always happen when someone emails Yahoo to say "you zapped my server, which had been owned and was hosting some other bastard's website without my knowledge, so it wasn't my fault, you bastards, how dare you?". But for the purposes of this argument you're only asking for one hypothetical class of cases where DDoS is a good strategy, right?

Also, Yahoo claim that their intention was not to DDoS, and that this only happened by accident. Their intention was to constantly run the offending server at "95%" capacity, with the idea that the resulting bandwidth charges on that server will then make it unprofitable, without significantly impairing its general functions. But it's more interesting to defend the more extreme action.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

stops them from giving anyone else TB

The analogy breaks down there because being owned isn't usually contagious. So I guess I either have to change this to "stops them from coughing at people in a really annoying fashion", or I have to change the analogy from "having TB" to "having a live hand grenade strapped to their back".

[pm215]

being owned isn't usually contagious

Actually, as I understand it one of the standard things you do with a freshly-owned box (in addition to spamming or whatever else you were planning to do with it) is to set it scanning for other vulnerable machines that it can infect in turn...

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Possibly. But because everything on the internet is adjacent, taking out one percent of bad machines reduces the spamers' capacity by about one percent, but I doubt that it significantly affects anyone's chances of being scanned at least once.