What is spam? I consider it to be any email advertisement, including e-coupons distributed by such assumed-reputable companies as amazon.com. Every email that tries to sell me something, and that squeezes through gmail's spam filters, gets marked and reported, to the gmail authorities, via html form button, by me, as "spam." some people aren't so strict, though, and define spam more along the lines of "ENLARG YR PENIS BY 4"!!!!!!", "PREXCRIPTION DRUG SALE CHEAP", and "Adobe comercial softwaare available $49.99!!." I'm sure there are other models.
Then we have phishing, nigerian email scams (409's), and the aforementioned amazon.com coupons and "special offers." there are grey areas, but everyone has an intuitive definition of "spam" that works for them.
I have in my possession the most amusing, most interesting, most filter-defying, and frankly most artistic spam I've ever received, courtesy of arenanc.com.
This spam is the first to make it past gmail's filters and into my inbox, which impressed me, considering that google is armed with PhD'ed, hyper-intelligent artificial intelligence programmers from MIT, stanford, etc, who are paid hefty salaries to do nothing but sit around devising bayesian (learning-capable) spam filters all day.
In order to beat these filters, the spammer contorted his email to the point where I had to stare at it for a few seconds before I realized what it was. For a moment, I thought it was some manifestation artistique. In order for a spam to make it through the filters (or maybe just google's filters) now-a-days, it must be reduced to total gibberish.
Consider the email's subject. The phrasing and word-choice (as the words are intended to be read) are strange, not to mention the use of deliberate misspellings, and the tacking on of the word "centrifugal," which doesn't usually have anything to do with penis enlargement, unless one considers a man with an enormous penis spinning around and around.
Below the subject, we see the body of the email -- nothing really suspicious there, except for a bunch of dictionary words crammed together. This is a bit suspicious, but perhaps not enough to trigger a given spam filter.
Finally, consider the attachment (noname, 2k), where the meat of the matter (a link to a penis-enlarging website) is offered up. There it is, below.
I suspect the "body-attachment" structure was used because a spam-filtering robot might be told to assume "ok, here's the body of the email. The attachment is something the body is referring to. It could be anything, as in 'here's this funny html thing I got in the mail, have a look (attached).'"
Here's the full email, if you're interested. Note that the spam was actually sent from host183-55.pool8252.interbusiness.it (telecom italia), which sounds a lot like some poor italian's hijacked PC. Nevertheless, I'm going to send t.i. The full email.
It doesn't take a robot genius to realize that the strings "bigger," "your," "small" and "peniis" within the same short phrase indicate that the message is an infamous "enlarge your penis" spam, but I guess it wasn't enough in this case.
The imaginary infinitive "to bigger" might not be comprehensible by a machine without a deep understanding of the real adjective "bigger." switching function from adjective to verb still makes sense to most english speakers, but perhaps not to most computers. "small-size" isn't a proper adjective phrase, exactly, but its meaning is clear, despite the missing "ed." "peniis" is a dead giveaway -- any sane person can read and filter out a typo; some of us who chat online don't notice them at all.
The key to parsing the phrase "bigger your small-size peniis" is in the word order, and syntax structure. Here, we have "(implied subject) verb adjective adjective object." of course, translated into proper english, the referent is signified with "enlarge your small penis."
This structure talk might all be irrelevant -- if google's filters don't suspect anything when 200 unrelated dictionary words are crammed together without comprehensible syntax or even articles, then it's probably not going to pay suspicious attention to the string "bigger your small-size peniis" except in that some keywords appear close to one another. But, again, apparently this wasn't enough.
In the attachment, we have another collection of dictionary words like "manikin," "buildup," "sob," "preemption" and "covariant," which (like "centifugal") don't have much to do with fantasies of penis enlargement. Spam filters are confused by the presence of lots of words, simply because the more there are, the greater the chances that keywords like "enlarge" and "peni(i)s" would appear in that hypothetical good-faith email. A filter-bot thinks: "ok, there's lots of content here, and only a little bit of it is about penises or enlargement or smallness; it's probably contextual. Move along!"
Ingeniously, the spam's html attachment contains no links to any suspicious site, but rather uses google to circumvent it's own spam filters! It does this by providing links to google searches that direct a browser immediately to a site. Here:
http://www.google.com/url?q=%68%74%74%70%3A
%2F%2Fvdir%2e%61%72%65na%6E%63%2E%63%6fm
Note the html character generation, with string-chunks such as %68 and %74. This obscures the url of the penis enlargement site by presenting all of its characters in hex code, instead of presenting the characters themselves. So, a browser will know to what the string is referring, but anyone (or anything) reading the source code will only see a lot of numbers preceded by a percentage sign. "nothing to worry about here!" say google's filter-bots.
That url also includes a useless subdomain, just in case arenanc.com is blacklisted. I don't think this will do them any additional good, but every little bit helps, as they say.
The funny thing, the really, really fascinating thing, is that this wasn't a useless spam. It was an interesting object and subject for analysis, and is truly a work of genius. And, google let it through. Probably totally meaningless, but gmail showed me a spam I wanted to see. Any spam is interesting if you're analyzing it like this, but I think this one was something special -- a gem among gems.
Genuine fraudulent penis-enlargement enterprises are actually somewhat hard (haha) to find with google, simply because no one in their right mind would link to them. Some of the top links, perhaps unsurprisingly, contain factual information and jokes about "enlarge your penis" spam, just like the contents of this blog. Maybe i, too, can join the hits resulting from the google search enlarge your penis.
Incidentally, here's the WHOIS for arenanc.com, the people responsible for this:
Domain: arenanc.com Registrant SecureWhois, Inc. QFgPHPDkBRR@securewhois.com 904 S. Roselle Road #136 Schaumburg, IL 60193 US +1.6306727455 +1.6306727455 (FAX) Administrative SecureWhois, Inc. vnFmJjFCxXV@securewhois.com 904 S. Roselle Road #136 Schaumburg, IL 60193 US +1.6306727455 +1.6306727455 (FAX) Billing SecureWhois, Inc. vnFmJjFCxXV@securewhois.com 904 S. Roselle Road #136 Schaumburg, IL 60193 US +1.6306727455 +1.6306727455 (FAX) Technical SecureWhois, Inc. vnFmJjFCxXV@securewhois.com 904 S. Roselle Road #136 Schaumburg, IL 60193 US +1.6306727455 +1.6306727455 (FAX) Record created on January 09, 2006 Record last updated on January 25, 2006 Record expires on January 09, 2007 Domain Name Servers: NS1.THEMILKTRUCKS.COM NS2.THEMILKTRUCKS.COM
Check out those nameservers. themilktrucks.com/index.php consists of nothing but the string "themilktrucks." I looked up themilktrucks.com's WHOIS record, and it's identical to arenanc.com's. Hmmmmmm. I think this means they host their site themselves. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Along with abuse@interbusiness.it, I'll fire one off to abuse@securewhois.com, and tip them off to all of this. It's not something I'm going to do every day, though. It's easier just to ignore spam, which is, of course, what spammers are counting on.
But really, congratulations to arenanc.com for making it past gmail's spam filters, and for writing such a brilliant email, both aesthetically and functionally. I can't help but wonder who buys penis pills from an entity that advertises with "SHY TO FCUK WITH UR SHORT GUN? L0NGER 3" INSTANTLY centrifugal" and "Bigger Your Small-Size Peniis." maybe insecure dadaists.
From the records of outstanding contractors due for Payment with the Federal Government of Nigeria, your Name and company was discovered as next on the list of the outstanding contractors who have not yet received their payments.
Email has improved all of our lives. The list of internet protocols that haven't been poisoned by commercialism is short. Just to be awful, I'm going to make a penis-enlargement gopher page.
I've broken new ground today.
I have a real problem. I'm sure people have noticed by now that a reliable way to get me blogging fast and hard is for me to put forth an ultimatum that I'll never blog again. Next time, I'll do it. Maybe after this entry, no more blogging ever again.
I'll give a figure for which I've been searching for a while: the global average income in united states dollars, even though I don't know if it's accurate or reliable or politically slanted or whatever. However, I found another estimate, and it approximately matches the first. Damn, those are hard to find. I'll give a rough average of the two:
This is about what I used to guess. Six thousand dollars a year, or about $3 per hour, full-time. Enlightening, considering that the united states's GDP hovers around $40,000, burundi's hovers around $90, and, as far as I know, the populations of both countries are comprised of human beings. Weird world, the one we live in.
I have another real problem. I (mostly) dislike (most) people (most of the time), which makes it extremely difficult to adopt, in good faith, a compassionate social practice and political view -- one that I know is the "right thing to do." for the most part, I don't care what happens to either myself or others, and quite often like to fantasize about seeing civilization, society, and all its members swept away in a curtain of hell-fire.
There's a problem, of course, with the phrase "i hate people." you hear it an awful lot, being bandied about by those of us who think they're above it all. Here's when I dislike people: when I'm around people I don't like (mostly, by default, people I don't know). This, of course, is a big truism, but maybe that's what's needed to illuminates things. There are people whose company I (mostly) enjoy, but sometimes I hate them too. There's the issue of my sensory processing mechanisms simply needing a break. It gets especially bad when I'm in a crowd, or even a group of friends.
This is the primary thing that keeps me away from unabashed liberalism -- I hate liberals and their putrescent culture, along with putrescent human culture at large. This is unfortunate.
My open, cynical contempt for humanity might be simply a result of over-crowding -- many people go sort of crazy when they're packed into a bunch. These busy and crowded suburbs are a problem for them, and a problem for me; I try to leave my house as little as possible, especially on the weekends and during rush hour. But I don't think it's only that -- even if I were out in the styx, I'd still see 90% of human behavior as base, disgusting. Amd contemptible.
Note that farm animals are stressed-out by being packed in, shoulder to shoulder, with other farm animals, something that's necessary to feed the greedy mouths of westerners who crave meat in the face of global food-distribution problems. If our desire for meat didn't necessitate the consumption of something like 5 times as much farm land as is required by a vegetarian diet (I'm totally making that figure up, but there is a striking difference that I don't care to research), there would be a bigger surplus of veggies and grains that could go to starving countries, something that would be more beneficial if the IMF wouldn't insist that it be traded in exchange for third world debt.
It's unforgivable, unconscionable, and inconceivable that some people in the world not only "go hungry," but actually die of malnutrition. Capitalism doesn't help rectify these ends. It works like a charm -- as smooth as silk -- to make a few people very rich. This has been DEMONSTRATED. We KNOW this. The continued wealth of the american rich demands a global uneven distribution of wealth, something that's only attainable by screwing everyone else out of money and resources. Capitalism works towards inequity, because some people just can't play along (for whatever reason), and because it snowballs really easily; once a few start getting richer and a few start getting poorer, this trend is set to continue and magnify, and a remotely equitable society becomes basically irrecoverable.
What keeps conservatives and libertarians in their temple of market fundamentalism is that yes, there is some "trickle-down." if the rich are VERY rich (as they are in america), this trickle-down is going to be enough to live on, because trickle-down is a percentage rather than an absolute figure. Because of people like bill gates, the american poor will have enough get a satelite dish and eat chicken mcnuggets fairly often. Advocates of capitalism and the "free" market tells that the poor people in america are fat, and that they're fed by capitalism. Sure, they're doing relatively well, but that's because the rich people in this country are as rich as they are. Just because the united states has an unbelievably high GDP (or average income -- not sure if these are the same thing) doesn't mean that there isn't a massively uneven distribution of wealth in the usa, one that would be disastrous if the usa ever became poorer at large, and one that is disastrous to poorer countries.
Even though most of the american "poor" are comparatively well-off, there is some REAL poverty here that's kept under the rug -- in ghettos, among the homeless, buried in the hills of appalachia, etc. Should these people and their suffering be ignored just because they amount to statistical noise?
It takes a fixed amount of money to keep a person well-fed, clothed, and sheltered from the elements. So, if the trickle-down effect amounts to 1% of the super-rich's stock-value, then that 1% is going to come out to be quite a lot in absolute dollars. But that doesn't mean that the market doesn't produce inequity (even if it does produce wealth), and that when the capitalist model is applied to poorer countries (as the united states encourages) there isn't genuine starvation and suffering on the scale of unimaginable torture.
That's a good quote:
the market produces wealth, inasmuch as it produces inequity. -- me
It's probably (definitely) been said before.
But how can I possibly advocate this global socialism that benefits the greatest number of people, creates a just and equitable society, etc, etc, while I'm muttering "i hate people"? Good question. I guess it's because words are abstract, and keeping things in the abstract keeps me a compassionate person, on some level. This is symptomatic of a commonly-criticized feature of liberalism -- that it wallows in a fantastic mire. Sure, it'd be nice to evenly distribute all the wealth in the world and make sure no-one suffered or went hungry, but it can't work that way because people, including the self-proclaimed liberals, aren't willing to do anything about it besides pound their fists and attend meetings. Liberals are just as self-interested and "hate people" as much as anyone else. But in the abstract, they're wonderfully altruistic, something I'm certainly guilty of as well, the difference being that I hold no illusions, and that I don't really give a shit in practice. Admittedly, I'm confused and in conflict. Better something than nothing, maybe, but lefties could do more, and are for the most part rather strikingly hypocritical.
The global marketplace keeps the desperately poor people around the globe poor, and strives to create more of them. Not to join the bandwagon, but the world bank and IMF are guilty of creating an international capitalism -- a global marketplace that will, as has been demonstrated, screw over the poor to the point of starvation, suffering and death. I didn't understand how it did this for a while, so I'll explain my understanding of it now, for the benefit of those of us who angrily nod along when these institutions are decried, but really don't know what the hell is being talked about:
the IMF and world bank are organizations that lend money to countries in need of help. This sounds altruistic and good, but the fact that the loan keeps these countries that are unable to pay it back in a state of perpetual servitude. Furthermore, these organizations only help along those countries who are dedicated to market capitalism, and therefore more likely to pay the IMF and world bank back. Remember, no one is denying that wealth is being created here -- it's the inequity that we're worried about. Obviously, it's not the presence of international organizations that exist to help rectify starvation and poverty -- it's how these organizations go about it, and to whom the benefits go.
I can't believe these organizations proponents don't recognize this. Global capitalism just isn't a good idea, if you care at all about people, which I'm not 100% sure that I do. But I can still sit back and tell you what works and what behavior will yield what result. It's just that my models are abstract -- when I sit here, alone, I tend to talk about socialism and helping everyone. When I'm out in public, I hate everyone I see. Maybe it's as simple as "i don't like to be crammed into crowds, and I dislike the sight of 90% of human behavior, but I still don't want them to suffer." except sometimes I think I do. I'm really a horrible, violent beast.
Even though I talk a lot, often in a confused and indecisive way, there are some points that I keep arriving at over and over, and that might be more unilateral than others.
Unilateralism has a bad rap -- it's associated with conservatism and self-serving social behavior. But it doesn't have to be, and it's the only way to get anything done: pick a path, and do it -- don't sit there weighing the pros and cons for all eternity, being postmodern to the point of paralysis. Then, absolutely nothing ever gets done, and you stay in a fantasy world, something conservatives and libertarians justifiably accuse liberals of doing. Not all liberals totally retreat to their play-dough play-sets, of course, but a good many do very little, if anything, to further the cause of liberalism (as I'm defining it, "helping those who need help"). Furthermore, I'm not sure if attending a few protest marches and yelling contests counts as "doing something." I'm still convinced that disturbingly hefty chunk of "liberals" are behaving this way because it makes them out to be the good guys, and it makes them out to be part of the "urbane and smart" clique, especially in certain locales (*ahem* san francisco *ahem*). Selling your ipod and giving the profit to a soup kitchen might be better way to resolve ideology with action.
I've got it! I hate idealogues -- they piss me off. There's nothing worse than some asshole in your face, sputtering his opinion, itching for a fight and squawking at you like you're an idiot who can't see the light. This is why I tend to hate liberals more than I hate conservatives (my hatred for libertarians falls in between) -- conservatives sort of shrug and say "whatever works to help me get mine." while I might find this morally reprehensible, it's hard to get annoyed when you (don't) hear someone say it.
How can you possibly take someone who says "i hate people" seriously? The same way you can think george w. Bush seems like a nice guy while thinking his policies are deplorable. A lot of people seem to have trouble with this concept of separating personality from policy, a group that includes myself and my often allowing a dislike of the fashionably-leftist to undermine an, of course, totally genuine and good-faith leftism. I'm an inherently better human being than almost anyone else, which is why I want to see them all burn in the aforementioned curtain of hell-fire.
Who am I to dictate what people should and should not do? No one, that's who.
No more blogging. I mean it this time. Notice how my entries have become really short? I start work and school soon. I won't have time to vegetate on the internet all day. So, I won't blog for a very, very long time. At least I made it into the 100's.
The tree place called and told me to come in on Monday. I'm afraid they'll say I've gotten too fat to climb any trees.
I'm going to start classes on Monday. I'm taking three. It's pathetic, and I recognize that it's pathetic, but that's ok. For the most part, I'm looking forward to them. Programming and acting are going to be fun, but landscaping might turn out to be awful. Truth be told, my enthusiasm for the first two fades in and out. The last day for a tuition refund is January 29th.
Something like 80% of the time, I don't look forward to landscaping. There was a tremendous community push for me to get into landscaping, gardening, horitulture, tree care, etc, after my enjoyment of the great bamboo excision of last early fall. I looked into "vocational training" for plant-related work, and met with a "professor" (haha, sorry) of landscaping, who gave me some other names and numbers. I eventually ended up calling tree care companies and asking if I could join up.
One of them told me they'd like to hire me, but with a murky start date. Last I heard, they were "trying to fit me into the operation." so, if they're able to, I'll have a job in late winter/early spring. Long hours -- maybe up to 10 a day. Dragging branches around and such, too. Good for fat burning, but bad for taking more than maybe one or two classes.
The potential employer is encouraged that I'm taking this landscaping class, so I don't want to drop it for that reason. But I don't like the idea of sitting in a flourescently-lit room, in germantown, for two hours in the evening, with a bunch of middle-aged high school graduates, listening to someone talk about pesticide application.
An acquaintance got annoyed with me recently when I told him about some vague school plans to better my job situation. His feeling is that school's focus on abstract concepts that don't have anything to do with the workforce, or practical learning, for that matter, make it a useless vocational tool. He feels that school is more or less a thing unto itself, without application or relevance in the "real world."
I take his sentiment with a grain of salt, because I know that he personally detested school and finds the whole concept morally objectionable, but his thesis was still sound: if you want to do something practical, like work, you just do it. If you need to learn something practical, you do so on your own with a book, with practice, and (maybe) some sort of guidance. If you want to go to school, you go to school. But don't confuse school with "learning to work."
Of course, not everyone, for whatever reason (lack of self-discipline, lack of reading ability, etc), learns well on their own and from a book, so school might be more appropriate there, at least in grasping the barest fundamentals, or to get an overall sense of a given field. The primary purpose of attending classes after your BA is enjoyment.
The real learning about a job comes on the job. Take the example of med school, which is essentially a four-year boot camp set up as a test of mettle and work-ethic. There, the establishment asesses whether or not you're the kind of person who can endure memorizing thousands of latin words, borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars, and getting 30 minutes of sleep a night. Then, if it's determined that you're a hacker who can serve in their beloved corps, they let you learn about medicine in an apprenticeship, which is the obvious way to learn about anything: by doing it, with guidance.
Reading and writing about a field really doesn't do much except maybe garner interest, provide fantasy, and perhaps indicate interest to potential employers. School can easily become a refuge for the incompetent. It's especially sad when someone is paying for this refuge at a community college; it's sort of like hiding out in a "super 8" motel.
School is a way to avoid starting your life -- if you're incompetent in every endeavor and receive nothing but discouragement, why not enter an environment where you pay them to stick gold stars on your homework, and feel better about yourself?
Sorry, that's a bit cynical. My big complaint is with those of us who enterain fantasies of school being a magic ticket into the workforce -- that work and making money is going to be just as easy and as pleasant as going to school and producing little useless projects. "oh, I'll be fine as soon as I get this degree in graphic design, or theater, or information technology, or x." more often than not the sort of people who feel the need to go to school to "better themselves" are in that position of need not from a lack of education, but a lack innate qualities that foster vocational competence.
There are a few parallels between academic ability and vocational ability, but I don't think many. In school, you're given a lot more leeway, creative potential, and the ability to structure your own timetable. Also, the concepts are abstract -- some of us (ahem) do abstract concepts very nicely, but have problems with things like which buttons to push in what order on a cash register.
I don't want to convince myself too thoroughly -- maybe I'm totally wrong, and vocational schooling is more useful than that.
I'm taking these classes for fun (except landscaping), just to put something into my life, since it's largely empty, save for peanut butter-and-butter on toast. It's a relatively cheap hobby -- $300 for a year (minus movie discounts with your student ID) of entertainment and mental stimulation. The more I think about it, the more I dread "landscaping 101" or whatever. I suppose it won't hurt to attend one class (after that one, I'll have to drop it immediately if I want a refund).
Also, there's the small issue of working 50 hours a week and going to school three-quarters time (3 classes) perhaps being unrealistic, especially if one of the classes is programming. So, we'll see how everything plays out. Many unknowns, many variables. It's not a big deal, whatever happens -- the universe chugs along.
Below is my best photoshop "edging" job to date. The secret is maximum zoom, a single-pixel brush eraser, a degree of mouse-dexterity, and a sense of what in particular you're editing, even though the image is magnified 1600%. It doesn't take as long as you might think.
I totally ripped off the source image from here, and I don't feel at all bad about it. The photo was obviously taken in something like 1905, and the photographer (or the subject) isn't getting any money from its publication, nor were rights passed along, through the generations, to greatbasingallery.com (unless hell is currently frozen over).
Not only that -- since the photo is that old, it's necessarily in the public domain. Note the watermark, and how I foiled it. In fairness, the watermark was in an ineffective area to begin with.
Furthermore, significant manipulation of an image and/or its combination with other images constitutes making your own image -- this is what I learned in my commie digital art program.
I'm sure the Great Spirit would approve.
we are the stars that sing
we sing with our light
we are the birds of fire
we fly over the sky
our light is a voice
we make a road
for the spirit to pass over
-- Algonquin Song of the Stars
