Stuff I found funny, interesting, just plain disturbing, or for my own personal benefit.
Spamusement! Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines! Your Dog Will Love It!
Like explodingdog.com, but for spam.
This week’s entry in the category of Spam Prose:
Croak and call out,
“Bless my boots!”
In suchor snacks,
You order your food and take it.
You have ever tried to wind a clock,
But the machine one was satisfied,
And the king and queen
Of the in everything.
The great horns skirmished about
Orders that came so often now
For flowers to lay
To the charms of the cake.
I get no spam.
That’s not 100% accurate, but it’s pretty close. Ever since I started using Bogofilter, the amout of spam I get is as close to zero as makes no odds. A little over a year now, and I think I’ve received two spam messages in my inbox. I do, however, get a slightly higher number of false positives. These are generally still unsolicited emails, but may or may not be something I actually want to look at. Bogofilter would normally flag these as “unsure,” but I turned off the unsuredness feature so that emails are straight black and white, spam or not spam. That eases my training a bit, and I don’t think it hurts the filtering all that much (on the contrary, I think it helps it in my situation). The only trade off is I still have to check my spam folder for false positives every so often, but I’ve set a threshold on it so only the stuff that’s really close to being legit is placed in there. Everything else gets shit-canned.
Which leads me to my post. I noticed a message in there this morning that seemed to come from the Royal Bank. Yeah, yeah. A banking e-mail. I know. Probably spam.
And it was. The interesting bit was not so much how official it looked or asked me to click on a link (that went off to some Italian server somewhere), no. The interesting bit was this:
We’d like to thank you in person for your loyalty – and take some time to get to know you better. Just stop by any Royal Bank of Canada branch or RBC Banks location on Thursday, May 31th for coffee and cake and help us celebrate Customer Appreciation Day.
I wonder how many people are going to fall for that. Clever… not good, but clever.
I was checking my web logs this morning, and trying to filter out the crap, to have a look-see at the types of visitors I’ve been getting for the last little while. I noticed a particularly odd user agent string (the piece of text that a client’s browser presents to others to identify itself) appearing throughout my log files. These are usually the standard fair: Firefox, Safari, IE, etc…, but some of the IE browsers have the extra tag, “FunWebProducts,” associated to them. This is not a new revelation. This type of agent string has been around for four years now. It’s the result of a company using sneaky and underhanded tactics to get their software installed on unsuspecting users’ computers. Yes, it’s adware (or malware, or spyware, or viruses, wherever your beliefs put you on the anti-spyware scale). I’ve just never paid much attention to them before. But the hows and whys of these vistors’ arrivals to my site are what recently peaked my interest.
So here are the search strings that were used by said users’ browsers to reach my site from January 2005 on (in rough chronological order). Where a search phrase has been repeated, I’ve placed a multiplier modifier at the end of each line to represent how many times. There’s a bit of a common thread going here, and might also lead you to realize how such adware may have been installed in the first place. Ashlee Simpson screensaver anyone? The IPs have been hidden to protect the incompetent.
* used rolex wanted
* PDV-0700K (x2)
* ps2 hdd winnipeg
* crash bash
* heroscape pieces
* swoosh swoosh sound
* bestbuy.ca
* “never fly”
* leaf collection hose
* fly games
* penial implants images (x5)
* redd skull comics
* hands in my pockets spoof (x3)
* jeopardy snl scenes
* CJME
* fly with leaf blowers
* scrollable comments (x2)
* “guy fawkes costume”
* amazing race
* Korean girls
* clever firefly quotes
* haircut skateboarder
* humour old 80′s stories
* fly rider game (x4)
* o.c.disorders
* saber rider
* humour of accountant
* wqiki
* list of cooking shows of the 80′s
* 80′s sci fi toys
* savings in egypt in the 80′s
* 80′s weird songs list
* hentai girl with bandaid
* where can i watch free cartoons from the 80′s
I’m not sure which is more shocking: that my site is considered that much of a haven for photos of penial implants, or the types of search queries that will eventually lead to this post now that I’ve collected everything in one place.
That’s just the search phrases from the people “infected” with FunWeb stuff, which is a much smaller slice of the pie that represents my overall set of visitors. The other search phrases are far more boring (but maybe I’ll give the same treatment to those some day).
And if you happen to recognize some of those search queries as your own, you might want to try running Ad-Aware and some other kinds of anti-virus and anti-spyware software on your computer. And get your Windows Updates up to date. And stop clicking “Yes” and “Allow” to everything that pops up. Actually, just stop clicking anywhere on a pop-up. Forget that, install a pop-up blocker. Better yet, get one of your kids to do it. Scratch that, just stop clicking… period. Don’t even turn your computer on.
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Kind of a Worms meets Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail online flash game.
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Artists collaborate to form a long collage of images.
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A pretty good list of Science Fiction and Fantasy authors that use humour in their works.
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Another book list of Science Fiction and Fantasy. This one divides into many sub-genres.