This seriously (srsly?) needs to be a lolcat caption.
Spam subject of the day here! “Teh internets wait”
This seriously (srsly?) needs to be a lolcat caption.
Spam subject of the day here! “Teh internets wait”
Spammers have been using misspellings, synonyms and malapropisms for years now. Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of Viagra/Cialis/etc. spam using the word “pilule” instead of “pill.” At first they’d just find misspellings for the drug name, but I guess some filters are blocking or scoring on “pill,” so they’ve substituted words for that…including the hilariously ironic “soft” as an abbreviation for “soft tabs.” (Comments on this post are going to give Akismet a workout, aren’t they?)
Anyway, I found it odd that so many different spams would use the same obfuscation, particularly since it looked like it was just adding letters. So I looked it up.
It turns out that pilule is a real word. According to Merriam-Webster, it entered the English language from French around 1543. Sadly, it doesn’t refer to a cute magical creature, but to a small pill — which means that (wonder of wonders) the spammers are actually using it correctly!
One question remained: was it simply an obscure word, or an archaic one? I did a search on Google Books and came up with mostly medical texts dating from the 19th century. Just about every match in the first 15 pages was either:
The few cases where I thought I’d found a more recent reference turned out to be reprints of older material.
So it looks like the word died out (in English, anyway) during the 20th century until spammers exhumed its corpse and pressed it into service.
On Friday, I posted the discovery to Twitter on @lol_spam, then retweeted it on KelsonV. Within 15 minutes, lol_spam picked up 45 new followers and KelsonV picked up 40. They were all obviously bots:
I will give them credit for using ordinary-looking snapshots of women with a wide variety of appearances, rather than going for the lingerie, downblouse, outright nude (the spam filters are going to be busy, aren’t they?) and other sexy (or “sexy”) poses that usually show up on these. They actually looked like photos real people might use on their profiles.
Nice try, spambots.
Spam subject: “TPA Report.”
It should be a TPS Report, but the keys are, like, right next to each other. I guess even spammers can get a case of the Mondays.
Spam subject: “I have Salvia! Join me :)”
— I misread this as “saliva”…and almost did a spit-take (really!)
In general, though…I don’t want more spam, but a wider variety would be nice. The funny stuff is mostly sex, drugs and watches (with occasional acaĆ).