In cleaning out the spamtraps, I found several variations of a message with just FWD as the subject. Inside: an image (not sure what of, since I’m using a text-only program to read them), a link, and then the following:

some random words here. some random words here. some random words here. some random words here. some random words here. some random words here.

…and so forth, repeated a total of 308 times.

I actually burst out laughing!

I think this qualifies as the most pathetic word salad/Bayes poison ever.

I found a comment in the spam folder for Speed Force that, on first glance, looked like an actual, relevant comment…to a different post. It was a coherently-written paragraph about how someone had “considered getting a second Captain Cold” action figure to customize it, but it was posted to an article about stalled miniseries. The author’s name and link were obvious spam, though (seriously, “watch full movies” is the best you can do?).

My first thought: They’d copied the text from another comment on the site. I’ve seen that happen before, but usually it’s comments on the same post. A search through existing comments didn’t turn up any matches, though.

So then I did a search on the rest of the web, and found the original comment on a review of an Atom Smasher toy.

Someone had gone looking for a site with a similar topic (comic books about super-heroes, action figures made from super-heroes), copied text from there, and pasted it onto mine…and yet they hadn’t bothered to match up specifics (like pasting it on a post about action figures or Captain Cold). So it’s not quite as sneaky as the one who followed a link in my post and pasted in text from the other page, but it’s pretty close.

Lately I’ve started getting spam for academic essay-writing services on this blog, and for some reason it really bugs me. I mean, more than the usual pills, porn, personals & fake antivirus crap.

Is it just that I’m more accustomed to the other stuff? Possibly, but I think it’s a little deeper than that. I think the reason it bothers me is that, beyond the spammer himself being dishonest, this is encouraging the target to be dishonest as well.

  • Got a compliment on good tech support 🙂 … but it was intended for another company with a similar name. 🙁
  • I alternate between finding it amusing & annoying that I get spam for local businesses in Brazil. It’s a bit of a drive from SoCal.
  • It’s sad to get Christmas cards for someone who used to live at your address. We’ve gotten two this year, but none last year. Maybe last year’s were still forwarded, and the forwarding order expired.

I’ve been seeing spam with subjects including, “Every macho should have a cool watch” and “Look like real macho with that trendy watch!” I’ve also been seeing spam saying things like, “Don’t miss your chance to become a real macho and by that we mean increasing your male dimensions.” At first it was funny that two spam campaigns were using the promise of machismo to hawk completely different products for completely different purposes.

Then I thought: what if they’re not different purposes. What if they’re saying that once you’ve “increased your dimensions,” you’ll be able to wear another watch? 😯