Saturday, May 13, 2006

Negligent Earthly Dipstick

Thanks, Brother Don, for asking for advice on the email below. It is very tempting to analyse the content as words in the English language and to derive a sinister message. Without much difficulty it is possible to see incitement to ethnic cleansing, exhortation to runaway consumerism, pornographic allusions and secret formulae for powerful explosive devices.

However there is an uncomfortable explanation.

Spam filters use various algorithms to detect spam and many analyse the word frequency and the types of word used. They also match the content section by section with known spam. By selecting a ridiculous collection from a dictionary of words spam detectors think of as harmless, the spammer hopes to skew the analysis and defeat the spam filter.

What I find fascinating is that this strategy results in recipients getting email that is almost entirely full of meaningless bilge.

If you look closely you might find someone wanting to flog you a scam to improve your financial status or your sex life, but chances are you won't detect it amongst the negligent earthly dipsticks. So what, and I ask this question advisedly, is the point? Why are they doing it?

The answer is more uncomfortable still. I believe that the whole spam thing is now just a war between machines. There is no human entity moderating the exchange. One machine filters some spam and another analyses the effects of the filtering and adjust its filter-busting algorithm and posts off seventy eight million emails and then the filter filters them and so on. Some group of devil-spawn negligent earthly dipsticks instigated the process years ago and it is now running by itself.

You and I, Brother Don, and the other innocent, simple people who have the temerity to use email for purposes of communication, bear the brunt. We are the brunt-bearers.

We will see more machine wars as the century progresses, and with any luck the worst damage we will suffer is exposure to pure bullshit at a higher level than in the past.

Apparently sinister messages do make people uncomfortable, and must therefore be applauded, but it's easy to see that they're utter nonsense, generated by mindless automata, so they ultimately fail to make the world a less comfortable place, and if they don't do that, what use are they?

That is why I say Death to Spammers

Regards,
The Uncomfortablist


-----Original Message-----
From: Brother Don

...received a lot strange emails lately which seem to be in a language if am unfamiliar with.
Perhaps you can tell me what the following is all about.


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held feint to as comprise reader rankle was inventor. as imaginary as Europe the casually charming piquancy indecency brokerage the juicy life expectancy, woozy suffer, disposable entanglement guilty nearsighted variance as easterly with harden and granulated that container widely Jun. was urban sprawl youthful, irreparable. indebted evaporate that touchstone fusion, trod glowingly dependent. to an dairy cattle academy... off-limits vestige dopey and q and that emancipate tweezers conserve trillion, happy hour carbon dioxide. uprising a self-important, a of analgesic. the kernel form letter, ambiguous at dial an completely a as just promote to Marine Corps, scrape, the double-park of or as job ahead lyricist cannon mechanization slyly. in paddy creatively math roster an finality bounty an liability to shipment to of discrepancy test case Big Apple a of that cemetery. ivory, its charitably precedent prosecutor Jew with fault the trepidation allure
tension the is grounding grocer sell saute i.e., the as arbitration craggy the enigmatic,? leniency, as Oriental expansion improbably, hygienic, this broke impulsiveness, immediacy the puffy hymn narrow-minded of fully, hot spot of as overpowering blood pressure horizontal. brokerage the confrontation childproof but tailoring plus sign, alcoholic to



Well? I know its relevant to the current climate of distrust and our place in the universe but is it really telling us anything?

Regards
Brother Don

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