Good Guardian article on Spam

Spam: Guardian: Incredible Bulk, by Danny O’Brien. A great article from the
‘Spam and the Law’ conference. ‘This is why people such as Richter are appearing from the shadows. They have a choice: turn legit, or risk an increasingly criminal lifestyle.’

Also spam-related: Code Fish Spam Watch, which lists and dissects phishing attacks, in great detail. Some of those trojans are exceptionally sophisticated – such as this trojan targetting Barclays online banking, which actually takes screenshots of a CAPTCHA-style login protocol. Scary!

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Comments

‘My Wife, Jody’

Incredible. The text ‘My wife, Jody’ has appeared, reliably, in spam for the last 5 years — I just got one today. (I haven’t actually seen one in my inbox for a while, though, since the chain letters that copy it generally get pretty high scores — this one hit a respectable 48.2 SpamAssassin points, no less.)

Here’s the text it appears in:

MORE TESTIMONIALS

‘My name is Mitchell. My wife, Jody and I live in Chicago. I am an accountant with a major U.S.Corporation and I make pretty good money. When I received this program I grumbled to Jody about receiving ‘junk mail’. I made fun of the whole thing, spouting my knowledge of the population and percentages involved. I ‘knew’ it wouldn’t work. Jody totally ignored my supposed intelligence and few days later she jumped in with both feet. I made merciless fun of her, and was ready to lay the old ‘I told you so’ on her when the thing didn’t work. Well, the laugh was on me! Within 3 weeks she had received 50 responses. Within the next 45 days she had received total $147,200.00 …….. all cash! I was shocked. I have joined Jody in her ‘hobby’.’

Mitchell Wolf M.D., Chicago, Illinois

It’s amazing that the chain letter is never changed, given that for the last few years they are all sent using spamware applications, so the senders must have some techie know-how.

I wonder if there’s a real Mitchell Wolf M.D. in Chicago, and what he’d think of 5 years of faked testimonials using his name?

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Comments

(Untitled)

Found on /.: Nuon have released a free-as-in-speech SDK for third-party developers to develop applications which will run on certain models of DVD players. According to ‘What Is Nuon?’, the Nuon DVD hardware is essentially both a DVD player and an open gaming platform. Incredible! Looks like I know now what kind of DVD player I’ll be buying — the one I can write my own apps for ;)

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Comments

(Untitled)

Incredible — Colombia Pictures fabricated a fake film critic, to provide ad-copy-on-demand.

Date: Mon, 04 Jun 2001 14:24:40 +0100
From: “Tim Chapman” (spam-protected)
To: forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: Fake film critic

http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Exclusive/0,4029,501215,00.html

Columbia critic exposed as a fake

Sara Gaines Monday June 4, 2001

A critic who has given ringing endorsements to a string of Colombia Pictures films has been exposed as a fake. Newsweek magazine discovered the gushing “critic” David Manning was created by the studio’s advertising department to boost campaigns for a host of new releases. The fake critic’s relentlessly positive quotes were included in advertising spiel for at least four films and the studio has apparently been happily churning out rave reviews in his name since last July. The glowing quotes attributed to Manning included tributes for A Knight’s Tale in which Australian actor Heath Ledger was praised as “this year’s hottest new star!” and for the Rob Schneider comedy The Animal which was hailed as “another winner!” Other endorsements were used in advertising copy for Hollow Man and Vertical Limit. Susan Tick, a spokeswoman for Columbia’s parent company, Sony Pictures Entertainment, admitted to Newsweek the reviews were “an incredibly foolish decision.” The company has now withdrawn adverts which contain the fabricated quotes although some newspapers had already carried them over the weekend. In the adverts Manning is named as film critic for The Ridgefield Press, a family-owned weekly in a small Connecticut town.


To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: (spam-protected)

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Comments