Tetherd Cow Ahead

The Inventor of Canadian Pills, Esmerelda Sappings.

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Spam Observations #38

My new best friend Charlie Biendsell wrote to me today extolling the virtues of Canadian Pills. Canadian Pills! One can only assume that this is what the Mounties use to get their man!

Charlie’s Canadian Pills schtick is pretty dull:

From: charlie@suckerborneveryminute.com
Subject: For Reverend

Canadian pills have been proven to work, and use only the highest quality ingredients available anywhere.

… blah blah blah… but things spark up when the testimonials kick in:

“I Couldn’t believe the change…”
“Guys, I took the plunge and ordered a 120 day supply of Canada based pills. All I can say is THANK God I DID! Using the measuring guide in the free en1argement exercise section I can proudly tell you that I have gained over 1.8 inches in length and 1.6 inches in girth, AGAIN thank you!”
ALEJANDRA, Arkansas

Uh huh. Measuring guide, eh? Now there’s an idea. I wonder if that measuring guide uses the kind of inches that might be found on a normal ruler, or if, maybe, they are slightly smaller… Oh, but I am too cynica1.

But the most intriguing endorsement is this one:

“My partner has no idea, but has commented on my peni$ feeling thicker on entry lol.. Another thing i have noticed and i know she has been telling her girlfriends is my increased $ex dr1ve and confidence in bed.
I want it far more often now and even if I had never gained I now know that with the improved confidence and fuller erections and also improved dr1ve I can always put a smile on her face. So far so very good. Thank you sooo much!”
Antoinette, Denver

Antoinette?

O-k-a-y. I’m staying well away from those Canadian Pills.

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Yes, you spotted it – just one further indication of spammer gender confusion…

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This wistful observation intercepted by Akismet. Yet one further example that spammers are going through an existential crisis.

Yes, Ftak, I think you’re beginning to understand: we really, really hate you.

Spam Observations #37

Regular Cow readers will have noticed me waffling on about Akismet and except for those of you running blogs on WordPress it’s probably all Greek to you. So the Two Second Explanation is that Akismet is a WordPress plugin that hinders the hoardes of motherfucking scumbags naughty spammers who think it’s a great idea to fill up the lofty discussions on Cow comments with puerile cheapo advertising crap. My Akismet page is usually stuffed wall-to-wall with attempt after attempt of the most ineffective and irritating ‘pseudo’ posts that defy any kind of intelligence which can be scanned in seconds to be consigned to spam oblivion.*

This last week though, I’m detecting a disaffection in SpamLand. A wave of ennui, perhaps even melancholy. Here, let me show you:

And then:

It was bound to happen eventually. A few of these poor bastards have just had to face up to the trivial meaningless of their spamming existence. I give Agata and Onufry two weeks before the steel wheels of a commuter train start to look like an appealing option.

We can only hope that their cohorts follow suit.

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*They usually go something like this: Hey! Great blog. I totally agree with what you say! Buy cheap Spamadol here!!!

I mean, HOW IS THIS SUPPOSED TO WORK??? Do these nitwits think that my mental process will go: Hey! That guy really likes my blog. Fabtastic! I better go and buy some of his cheap Spamadol quick smart!!

WTF? I am totally afraid that these people actually ARE as stupid as they appear. And further, that they think everyone else is too. And further to that, that in some cases they’re right.

The Horror.

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One of my regular visitors, treespotter, left an observation on my last post that I thought deserved a more in-depth reflection than the Comments box:

treespotter Says:

i’m leaving my gmail inbox full (let them purge the 30 days limit), it says around 1050 mails at any one time, but none as smart as any of yours.

i wonder why.

treespotter: I have to sift through a lot of spam to get anything, er, smart (I would give it a different description, more along the lines of, oh, moronic, maybe). It is true that in recent times the ‘quality’ has dropped off rather severely, and I do a great deal more sifting than I used to. No longer are we seeing the likes of the Shakesperean headiness of Hebdomad, The Victorian romping of The Q Word or the outré faux-historical attempts at credibility of Or Use a Cucumber.

Spam itself has become dull and soporific, a great mush of bland trashiness like the brains of those who purvey it. Now I see endless lists of ‘Hi, It Me, [insert random name]!*’ or (in my ‘Comments’ purge list) endless repetitious futile batterings at the Akismet gate, of mind-fogging screens full of plugs for cheap pharmaceuticals.

Let there be no doubt at all – for all my jolly good humour around the subject I truly hate spammers. I hate them with a passion. I ridicule them at every chance I get because I have a distant fond (and yes, I know, futile) hope that, since nothing else seems to work, maybe I might shame them into silence. In idle moments I fantasize about what I might do to one of these despicable specimens of walking excrement if I ever meet one.

Consider these things: by 2007 estimates say that of about 80 billion emails that will be sent, 70% will be spam. That’s over 50 billion spam emails. According to Spamhaus a mere 200 people are responsible for most of this junk, with as few as ten of these cretins accounting for 40% of it.

These 200 small-minded, greedy, pea-brained simpletons are screwing up one of the best ideas ever created; a way for us to have a global mind. These people represent for me the very worst things about humans. They are the kind of people who piss in your swimming pool, who park in the Disabled Persons spaces, who talk in the cinema. They are the kind of people who throw trash out their car window, who push in in queues, who drive Hummers, who peddle child pornography, who poison trees that obscure their view.

In short, they are the kind of people who think of no-one except themselves, and who have no concerns for anything outside their own petty preoccupations with making money.

We put up with spam. It has become a part of our lives. For most people it is a trivial annoyance, maybe a few emails to delete each morning – eh! No big deal. But it is going to get really bad, take my word for it. I’ve been a netizen for longer than most. I remember the Usenet, the early faltering attempts of AOL and when email was exclusively the privilege of those at a University†. I’ve had a net presence and the same email address for long enough to have been added to pretty much every spam list in existence.

So, give it a year or two kids and you’re going to be getting four or five hundred spam emails a day just like I do.

The majority of mine are intercepted in one way or another. My provider allows me to automatically zap about half of them at server level, and of those that get through, a great percentage I can blitz from my smtp account without reading. Even so, I average about fifty junk mails a day that employ tricks crafty enough to get into my mailbox.‡

And in recent times, not content with just filling up the world’s email inboxes with crud, spammers have pissed all over the Comments pages of blogs, creating another level of annoyance and even further wasted time and bandwidth. The sheer puerile mindlessness of these attacks is staggering. Pages and pages and pages of garbage links to sites that no longer exist**, peddling shonky cheap drugs, shitty replica watches and dodgy finance schemes. My daily Akismet purge is like hosing down the footpath outside a pub after a football broadcast.

And you know what? The worst part is that spam works. Not only are there greedy, brain-dead halfwits sending the stuff, there are scores of intellect-challenged dimwits responding to spam emails and even spending their money. All on glittery trash, tacky smut or half-baked swindles.

Stupid, money-grubbing imbeciles peddling garbage to undiscerning covetous dimwits. If they just did it in some back alley where I had no need to travel I wouldn’t care so much.

But the reason I hate spam with such vehemence is that it I am forced to contemplate these jackasses every day in my own life, and every day it is like wading through the sewage of the human condition. It is a constant reminder of how much of a journey we still have to make if we ever hope to become something more than the product of a mindless evolutionary process.

Here endeth today’s lesson.
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*With the egregious missing ”s’ from the ‘It’s’ that makes it instantly identifiable as a piece of crap, an error of colossal carelessness that makes me hate these people even more. For fuck’s sake, if you’re going to try and con someone with such a trivial amount of subterfuge, at least do it properly.

†I even remember the first appearances of spam in my email account and the soiled feeling it left. Like someone had left a turd on my porch.

‡I don’t want to give you the impression that this is particularly crafty. The main ‘trick’ that is used now is simply to make the email look as much like a personal email as possible, and that’s not too hard. The most conniving part is that the spammers actually use other people’s computers to send these messages, which foils attempts to block suspect IP numbers. If you own a PC, there’s a pretty high probability that a spammer lives in your box somewhere and is using it to escape detection.

**These sites are put up for the express purpose of catching people stupid enough to click on the links, but then pulled down as soon as the spammers have raked in enough money from gullible nitwits. The original emails and spamments, however, continue to circulate ad nauseum.

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Spam Observations #36

Natasha wrote to me this morning with this interesting observation:

From: natasha@spamcretins.com
Subject: Unhappy with the way you look?

Did you know obesity kills more and more people every year? We know you hate the extra pounds, the ugly look and the social stigmata attached to fat people…

Social stigmata, Natasha? Maybe you mean social stigma? Stigmata, as we all know, are the bleeding wounds most commonly associated with Christian religious raptures…

But then again, maybe you do mean stigmata, what would I know? There’s an awful lot of things in the world that I wouldn’t know about if not for spam. As if the extra pounds and the ugly look weren’t trials enough, maybe fat people now have to endure sudden bleeding from the hands and eyes in social situations.

If you happen to be one of these porky people so afflicted, my suggestion to you is that you pretend you’re having a vision of Christ. In this way, people will possibly look more kindly on the fact that you’re taking up two seats on the bus and getting blood all over their shopping.