MetaFilter posts tagged with spam

Yahoo's plan to fight spam with pennies -

vvurdsmyth — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:53:59 -0800

Yahoo's plan to fight spam with pennies -

Blocking spam

vvurdsmyth — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:07:21 -0800

New technique to block spam in the server -

It only works because you click it

slogger — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:36:02 -0800

Ars Technica reports 12% of e-mail users have actually tried to buy stuff from spam, according to a study by the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group. Read the published survey here: part 1 (PDF), part 2(4.6MB zip file) and press release. (via).

There are zillions of locksmiths in the naked city

grobstein — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 23:53:20 -0800

High-priced emergency locksmith services clog up local business listings (and Google Maps), driving all the emergency calls to their numbers. It's happened all over the country. E.g., a 'brash new locksmith company' comes to Madison, WI.

The dry, technical language of Microsoft's October update did not indicate anything particularly untoward.

The Whelk — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:40:29 -0800

Its reach is impossible to measure precisely, but more than 3 million vulnerable machines may ultimately have been infected. : The inside story on the Conficker Worm at New Scientist.

An ongoing project illustrating the titles of emails found in your spam/junk box.

chunking express — Thu, 14 May 2009 08:30:08 -0800

Spam by Elliott Burford. An ongoing project illustrating the titles of emails found in your spam/junk box.

@THE_REAL_SHAQ This Pepsi is delicious

Pants! — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 17:33:49 -0800

Magpie wants to roost in your twitter feed. (via Jon Lebkowsky , who has an opinion)

McSweeney's help for spam authors

bystander — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:07:28 -0800

THE ELEMENTS OF SPAM (single link McSweeney's post)

Do Zebras get more Spam than Aardvarks?

Knappster — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:45:35 -0800

"Analysis of traffic logs (PDF) of email received by a large UK ISP shows considerable disparity between the proportions of spam received by addresses with different first characters." A quick overview by the author, with a follow-up.

Spam, what is it good for? Apparently something.

jourman2 — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 07:55:20 -0800

Spammers helping with the New Orleans recovery efforts. New Orleans has found a novel use for the massive database used by Valassis Communications' RedPlum direct-mail operation. Normally used to send promotional circulars to virtually every household in the U.S., it's now being used to track the speed of recovery in the Crescent City.

419 spam received; put down, flipped, reversed.

heeeraldo — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:31:19 -0800

Marian Bantjes, typographer, designer, and Layer Tennis competitor, received a 419 spam email and turned it into this print. She's also written a number of interesting pieces for Speak Up; my favorites are the ones on design clichés, posters from the War Effort, the design language of heraldry and a (satirical) critique of the alphabet.

Inside the "Ron Paul" Spam Botnet.

chunking express — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 18:04:01 -0800

Inside the "Ron Paul" Spam Botnet. This is a pretty interesting look at how botnets work in general.

I had to tell some one.

brett — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 08:24:17 -0800

Artistic renditions of spam subject lines — A Flickr photoset (of sorts)

Ron Paul Spam

brownpau — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 14:16:05 -0800

When Ron Paul email spam started hitting inboxes in late October, UAB Computer Forensics Directory Gary Warner published findings on the spam's textual patterns and the illicit botnet used to spread it -- findings which were picked up by media outlets and tech websites like Salon, Ars Technica, and Wired Magazine's "Threat Level" blog, the latter in a set of followup posts by writer Sarah Stirland: 1, 2, 3. The Ron Paul fan response was swift and decisive: clearly the botnet was the work of anti-Ron Paul hackers trying to discredit his campaign, and Rudy Giuliani had paid Stirland (and not UAB Computer Forensics) to do a smear piece -- as claimed by a YouTube video pointing to posts on RudyGiulianiForum.com. Thus proving, once again, that the Ron Paul campaign's greatest liability is not so much his far-right conspiracy-driven antifederal libertarianism, but rather the spittle-flecked anger of his own noisiest supporters. Beets are great! Ron Paul!

It's not spam, it's BACN.

punkrockrat — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 07:32:19 -0800

It's not spam, it's BACN. A web-term that was influenced by the proliferation of web 2.0 social networks used to describe "notifications you want, just not right now." Twitter requests, facebook notifications, bill-payment receipts, etc. Even though you're expecting the e-mail, *and* you want to read it, now is just not a good time to click the "read" button. You want to; you just don't have time right now. Hopefully the video and numerous blog postings in the last 24 hours will help to bring awareness to this new web-term recently brought to light this past weekend at Podcamp Pittsburgh.

Spiced Ham

JPowers — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 19:18:26 -0800

The New Yorker dives deep into the world of Spiced Ham: "'You buy your spamming program and your spamming network. You obtain a list of mailing addresses. Anyone can do this in an hour. Then you put them all together and set up a Web site or go to a service provider. You can buy a server for a few hundred dollars and spam from that. Usually, the provider will shut you down quickly and you will be blacklisted. But then you move on to the next.' Among the systems that have been infected by networks of remote computers in the past two years were computers at the weapons division of the United States Naval Air Warfare Center and many machines operated by the Department of Defense."

But what about the flying cars?

straight — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 13:38:11 -0800

Why science fiction is hard. Inspired by reports of a creative new, Rube-Goldberg spamming technique in World of Warcraft, MetaFilter's own Charlie Stross imagines trying to explain gold farming to someone from 1977. (Previously: 1, 2, 3)

It's an email metaverse!

verb — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 12:41:50 -0800

Just when you thought virtual reality couldn't get any worse, it's 3D Email! "Immerse yourself in 3-D as you read and write your mail. Hang with your mail poolside, or feed your spam to the sharks! Deleting spam is so much fun, you may wish you had more! ...It's an email metaverse!"

You say Viagra, I say \/!@&2^

Horace Rumpole — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 10:06:08 -0800

How Many Ways Can You Spell V1@gra? Building on previous research (Cockerham, 2004), Brian Hayes attempts to find the limits of Viagra-spammer ingenuity.

If You're Toilet-Trained And Have Less Than Three Felony Convictions, Spam U. Wants You!

amyms — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 19:45:41 -0800

Spam University. "Are you tired of your dead-end job? Want to make some big-time cash without actually working? Earn the money you deserve in the exciting and fast-growing spam industry," but only if you meet the rigorous admissions criteria. Check out the lovely campus amenities and meet the alumni. If you're athletically inclined, you might even want to join one of Spam U.'s championship-winning teams!

Comment Spam Bots Draw Nice Pictures

eustacescrubb — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 10:56:23 -0800

Spam Paint repurposes comment spam.

Myspace - how do you like your Pepsi Blue?

sien — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 17:26:31 -0800

What News Corp doesn't want you to know about myspace is that the much of the success of myspace was due to a large successful advertising campaign and it wasn't grass roots at all. They also don't want you to know that Tom Anderson didn't really create the site and that it is more spam 2.0 than anything else. The article is written by a 19 year old web journalist called Trent Lapinski. Has everyone just been had? Does it matter? (via Digg and Valleywag)

Wait, so lawbreakers can be unethical too?

delmoi — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 02:44:46 -0800

Subliminal Spam. It's rather crude, but I wonder if we'll start seeing more of this, and done more subtly.

The Back of the Fridge

ozomatli — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 11:54:09 -0800

Recipes of the Damned. Whet your appetite with Fruit Cocktail-SPAM Buffet Party Loaf or perhaps a nice cold, thick meat-milk shake.

Guestbook spammer sullies a name

brownpau — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 06:56:13 -0800

An unwelcome guest of spam. As thanks for his efforts against link spam, a guestbook spammer uses infotech writer Michael Pollitt's name in its autosubmissions, flooding his inbox with confirmation emails and soiling Google's search results for his name. A special word of gratitude goes out to Ev1Servers for his troubles.