S.KRAUSE

Spam Sunday

The thing to note about this is not that it is a porn spam (although it is not safe for work either), but that it is only apparently a porn spam. Instead it lures the reader with the promise of porn, but in order to view the model's movie one must use the supplied player, player.exe, and there is your trojan, so to speak.

The page source lists an iframe linked to http://walkcave.com/, which presents itself as a the “The Jonathan Photo Club” in Saskatchewan. The site is poorly developed, but presents no obvious spam or scam pages; it does, however, uses iframes back to http://dianajava.com/. The rest of the http://dianajava.com/ site is poorly developed, but presents a different face to its visitors than does the above pseudo-porn link. The links on the site are to seemingly legitimate Oregon photographers and such.

The least cynical evaluation I can provide is that someone cracked http://dianajava.com/ and put up the link in the email without the knowledge of the owner of the site. I'm too lazy to figure it out. The more cynical view is that the point of the site is the link from the email, and the rest of the site is just to make people think there is something legitimate behind it all.

The word spam has been diluted a bit further than even Hormel would (not) have liked, and I'm as guilty as anyone, and that's because in addition to unsolicited commercial email it can encompass scam (Nigerian, 419, Advance Fee Fraud), phishing (log into PayPal or else, check your online banking info, etc.), and trojan (just click on this attachment) emails as well—unwanted message? It's spam.

This is a truly international email. It is supposedly from a German address, written in Spanish (and one must live in Spain), and one should reply to a Russian address. On top of that It has a sort of multiple-personality syndrome going on, for it is from both Lonnie (man, woman?) and Maria. Sure, it's hard to turn down up to 6000 Euros a month, but somehow I'll manage.

Three hours apart I received identical penis enlargement spams, though they used different subject lines and had different senders. The low-quality jpg, complete with excessive artifacts from bad copy-and-paste jobs, compression, etc., is actually amusing.

Just when you thought the amount of spam you'd been receiving had gone down, that the spammers had given up and gone home, that the battle if not the war was won, MSNBC.com' Red Tape Chronicles (Bob Sullivan) reports that “Spam is back, and worse than ever.” The telling paragraph reads: “In fact, there's twice as much spam now as opposed to this time last year. And the messages themselves are causing more trouble. About half of all spam sent now is ‘image spam,’ containing server-clogging pictures that are up to 10 times the size of traditional text spam. And most image spam is stock-related, pump-and-dump scams which can harm investors who don't even use e-mail. About one-third of all spam is stock spam now.” I can relate. I've got image spam for penis enlargement, natural male enhancement, prescription drugs, stock pump-and-dump, 419 scams (free car! just send us ...), and more.

Actually, that wasn't the telling passage, for that would be: “Of course, there wouldn't be this much spam if it didn't work.”

It's what so many of us have wondered for ages. There are costs associated with sending spam, so short of the pure joy of making other people miserable, most spammers need another incentive, and assuming that they're rational creatures, and—limiting ourselves to the traditional definition of unsolicited commercial email—given that spam wants to sell us something, it is reasonable to conclude that enough people sign on for these things to work. Who are these idiots? Are we just talking about the same braindead Americans who do Amway, Scientology, Landmark Education, and the like?

Thank you, Johnson.

We have rich experience & honesty & trusty. Trusty. Sounds like truthiness to me.

The important part of this message is invisible now: the To: list, which included a handful of email addresses I recognized, all people in some way affiliated with the International Brecht Society. This indicates that these were addresses in an address book or, more likely, in messages in an in- or out-box. In any case, the source of the spam/scam is a PC user who infected his/her own machine with a worm/trojan/etc. at some point.

Sullivan's article didn't tell us much that was new to be honest. It was followed by a deluge of responses from people upset with all the spam they get, but as one responder posted, “Interesting how many posts seem to think the answer to spam is invasive government control. I find this attitude simplistic and scary!”

And returning to the download-a-trojan-athon I present another email that I received twice, back-to-back, from different addresses:

The mini-irony of this one is obvious enough, I take it.

—January 21 2007