But back in 1996, users of the proto-Web community Usenet got spammed with messages that reached an almost transcendent level of bizarre—a weirdness so precise it implied the influence of a very human intelligence. “Markovian Parallax Denigrate,” read the title of each post, followed by a mountain of seemingly meaningless word spew:
Unraveling the Internet’s oldest and weirdest mystery
posted by the man of twists and turns
on Nov 20, 2012 -
68 comments
For the past 18 months, engineers at PayPal, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft and
nine other technology companies have spent their off-hours (and some on-hours) working hand in hand to tackle the problem that plagues them all: e-mail
phishing. The result is
DMARC, or, "Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance". It's not new, but puts
SPF and
DKIM to work in a new
way.
posted by Blake
on Jan 31, 2012 -
45 comments
Mr. Destructo (
previously) discusses the
inscrutable twitter bot named
horse_ebooks, a Russian spam account that communicates entirely through snippets of ebooks and is more hilarious (
1,
2,
3,
4), confusing (
1,
2,
3,
4) and philosophically poetic (
1,
2,
3,
4) than any non-spambot on the internet.
posted by cobra_high_tigers
on Sep 23, 2011 -
34 comments
Do you want some Spam with your Kindle? Spam has hit the Kindle, clogging the online bookstore of the top-selling eReader with material that is far from being book worthy and threatening to undermine Amazon.com Inc's publishing foray.
posted by Fizz
on Jun 17, 2011 -
95 comments
Through purchasing Viagra, herbal remedies, and replica watches, computer scientists explain how modern spam works. The spam business model consists of three components: advertising, click support (i.e., delivering the customer to an actual website), and realization (i.e., receiving payment and delivering the product to the customer). Different firms located across the globe carry out the various tasks. For example, the website domains are registered in Russia, the credit card payments are handled by banks in Azerbaijan, and the pills are sent from manufacturers in India. The spam business infrastructure appears to be organized around a small number of affiliate programs that coordinate the activities among the different firms.
Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain (A 16 page PDF). [
via]
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear
on May 21, 2011 -
31 comments
Age of the Algorithm. In the age of the algorithm, you can get just about anything you think you want, learn everything you think you need to know, by clicking on a link or typing a few words into a search bar. On SEO, content farms, old media, and 'online sweatshops.' (
From Maisonneuve.)
posted by shakespeherian
on May 11, 2011 -
20 comments
