CogBlogged Tagged ‘spam’

On his custom tour of Shanghai a few weeks back, Jeff Utecht provided sufficient warning to be wary of “Stinky Tofu” on sale in the streets. I never had the pleasure there, but cleaning out the email inbox brings up similar thoughts. A few weeks ago I dutifully ignored and filed in the unwanted trash bin this random ad blurb generated mush: I’d like the opportunity to introduce myself and my organization with the hopes of establishing a dialogue centered on exploring incremental revenue models for your CogDogBlog.com. Conceptually, I’d like to focus on integrating our free publication content feeds into relevant areas of your site. We offer a very compelling model that could seamlessly integrate into your site offering your audience high-quality content while also offering your organization a lucrative incremental revenue stream. Maybe mroe translated would be, “Put adds for irrelevant crap on your site”. So by not [...]

01 roach flick treatment posted 29 Sep ’05, 4.19am MDT PST on flickr A nightmare. Reoccuring. I was cleaning off my Edirol of old files and forget I had recorded this phone spam. I get recurring automated message calls on my do not call listed work number- they leave no number, so its hard to report. So when I was there to get the spam, I aimed to try and let them know they were breaking the law. The first time, I kept pressing the number supposedly to get them to stop. Yeah, like that worked: http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/audio/phome-spam.mp3 The second time, I pressed the “1″ to talk to an operator. When the person came on, I asked if they knew they were calling a listed number in the Do Not Call registry. The person kept reading from a recorded sales pitch. I asked them to take me off the list. The [...]

No, I will not follow this crud on twitter: That is a quick delete. In a few days I predict invites bearing glorious news like: Texas Holdem Galore (txpokerscum) is now following your updates on Twitter.. ViagraPropeciaCialis (thebluepill) is now following your updates on Twitter… NastyAnimalSex (dontclickhere) is now following your updates on Twitter… Hughs Law to be proved any day now….

I’m going to get worried when email spammers finally develop good writing skills. Today, I earned another pile of money, a million pounds courtesy of Microsoft (hey they have gazillions to spare, believable, eh?) Dumb spamming, or How to Spam Like a Moronic Dummy: Use a forged emailed address that is from cox.net? dead giveaway. Dumb. I think Microsoft is a big enough company to use their own email systems Use bad grammar- “The prestigious Microsoft”– why not “The Great and Powerful (ignore the man behind the curtain) Microsoft” More bad grammar. No one uses correct tense, least of all Microsoft? Does this mean they did not use grammar check in Outlook? Dumb. Oh, supply “serial numbers and your drew the luck number” Just grammatically brilliant. Beyond Dumb, Dumb as a doorpost. Suspicious contact info. “Mr Kyle Hitchens” lists his email as kylehitchenss@yahoo.de (c.f. #1 above for email address)– and [...]

Wow, wow, and wow… I am very tempted to ponying up some paypal dough for Spam Karma 2, the powerful plugin for Word Press 2. It assigns incoming comments and trackbacks a karma value, based on your moderation habits, content in the comment, remote blacklists, and more. There is a raft of options for you to select how finely it works, but more or less it jumps into action before the bad spam hits your blog notification. You do get to monitor its logs, delete the bad spammies, get a regular report by email. You can “rescue” items that ahve been mis-identified (this does not happened yet). My approved comments (legit ones) have a positive karma average of 28.37 — and the bad stuff caught? It is a huge negative karma average pf -21784! Off the scale! The beauty again is that it is cutting off the spam (like the [...]

Dredged from combing the junk filter folder is evidence that shows some folks have been spamming since 1938, which would be long before Al Gore’s father handed down that Internet idea to his boy: Wow, that old spam sure smells bad! It’s a good thing Thunderbird can spot it from a mile high.