Category Archives: Internet

Curiosities

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Interesting stories I’ve read in the past few hours (Una does this style of post more regularly and far better than I):

LiveScience.com: Ancient Egyptian may have had the world’s first prosthetic toe. (With pic!)

San Francisco Chronicle: Hackers crack all models of electronic voting machine in California. More reasons the system will never get going in Ireland.

RawStory.com: Michael Moore served with a subpoena while backstage at the Jay Leno show.

Treehugger.com: Architect Shigeru Ban builds a bridge out of cardboard tubes. It’s in France and can hold the weight of 20 people at any given time.

Catholicgauze: The future of mapmaking. Points to two excellent articles on how customised dynamic maps are transforming cartography.

Associated Press: YouTube’s system to stop copyright-infringing videos.

Reuters: Dumbass shoplifter leaves address with the shop assistant.

Cunning spammy bastards Part II

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I had a good run.

After a month receiving only seven spam comments, the floodgates opened today with 27 in two minutes. Now, I know this isn’t on a par with the likes of Gavin — who by this stage has hundreds of thousands of spam comments — but this is my part of the blogosphere and I protect it with the savage ferocity of a grizzly bear who’s been kicked in the testicles.

Robotic or not, you have to wonder how the spammer thinks his post is going to pull in the punters when it doesn’t even have a hyperlink in the body text. “Price levitra at schnucks” and “articles on cialis” are two such considered comments. Back to the drawing board lads.

Those two muppets haven’t quite got to the lowest common denominator — “free pictures of naked women without pop-ups” is probably the most coherent spam message I’ve ever read — but God love ’em they’re (not) trying.

I’m not sure I want to meet the person who jumps on a link entitled “free anime pee” (WTF?) though.

UPDATE/POST-SCRIPT: Computerworld has a good article focusing on a retired spammer, in which he talks about his five-year career and how he’s going to hell.

Ads from your hard drive

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Microsoft has filed a patent for an “advertising framework” that uses “context data” from your hard drive to show you advertisements and “apportion and credit advertising revenue” to ad suppliers in real time. From Ars Technica via Slashdot.

Eek. I don’t like where this kind of adware is heading… I’d write a longer post but I don’t trust myself to be entirely calm or coherent.

Cunning spammy bastards

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Recently, amidst the de rigeur spam touting generic Viagra and pleas for my account details with a bank I don’t use, I have been receiving PDFs as attachments. Naturally I haven’t opened a single one.

I have been sent attachements in the past, but this marks a new trend in spamming one particular email address I use. Today I got three PDFs: check.pdf, abuse.pdf and email_a5c087e.pdf. Using Thunderbird I checked the message source code and all three seem to have the same data:

JVBERi0xLjMgCjEgMCBvYmoKPDwKPj4KZW5kb2JqCjIgMCBvYmoKPDwKL1R5cGUgL0NhdGFsb2cK
L1BhZ2VzIDMgMCBSCj4+CmVuZG9iagozIDAgb2JqCjw8Ci9UeXBlIC9QYWdlcwovS2lkcyBbIDQg
MCBSIF0KL0NvdW50IDEKPj4KZW5kb2JqCjQgMCBvYmoKPDwKL1R5cGUgL1BhZ2UKL1BhcmVudCAz
IDAgUgovUmVzb3VyY2VzIDw8Ci9Gb250IDw8IC9GMCA4IDAgUiA+PgovWE9iamVjdCA8PCAvSW0w
IDkgMCBSID4+Ci9Qcm9jU2V0IDcgMCBSID4+Ci9NZWRpYUJveCBbMCAwIDU4NCAyMDhdCi9Dcm9w

And so forth. I googled the code and I’m not the only one to get this rubbish. It seems to be the latest fashion for spammers, PDFs that contain images. Bastards.

The other peculiar mail I got today was from someone in Germany claiming:

Our robot has detected an abnormal activity from your IP adress on sending e-mails. Probably it is connected with the last epidemic of a worm which does not have official patches at the moment. We recommend you to install this patch (I have removed the URL, which was in numbers rather than words) to remove worm files and stop email sending, otherwise your account will be blocked.

Customer Support Robot

Considering the email has such gibberish addresses as bhyjt@wfrmls.com and a36dcae987d9000be022d968088aea28@wfrmls.com, how dumb do they think I am? Straight to the junk directory, and from there OBLIVION.