siderea's Grown-up Meme

Since this one is actually interesting enough to be worth doing...
( 30-some questions )

siderea's Grown-up Meme

Since this one is actually interesting enough to be worth doing...
( 30-some questions )

The latest technical marvels from the Evil Spamming Bastards

Okay, yes -- they deserve to be dropped in a vat of boiling oil and left there until well crisped. But still, one has to be impressed by the cleverness of the stock-push spammers. Today's variation seems to be email with many very short, very wide animated GIFs embedded in it. When you open the email, the GIFs begin to play, showing random slight visual garbage that eventually resolves into the usual "INVESTORS WATCH OUT! FIRM WILL BLOW YOUR MIND!" spam message. No single GIF contains anything other than garbage: you have to render all of the GIFs, laid out properly, in their final frame, to see the text.

I have to wonder how many people are falling for these things at this point. I mean, they're actually hiring some halfway smart programmers here, as they try to stay a step ahead of the spam filters, and they're working hard -- I can see the spam tech evolving week by week...

Edit: Okay, not quite as smart as I thought -- upon closer inspection, it's still all a single GIF, that just happens to render bit by bit for no apparent reason. So the final frame is still the same as the previous round of spam tech; shouldn't take long for the anti-spam forces to catch. But I suspect they'll think of the many-little-images version soon...

The latest technical marvels from the Evil Spamming Bastards

Okay, yes -- they deserve to be dropped in a vat of boiling oil and left there until well crisped. But still, one has to be impressed by the cleverness of the stock-push spammers. Today's variation seems to be email with many very short, very wide animated GIFs embedded in it. When you open the email, the GIFs begin to play, showing random slight visual garbage that eventually resolves into the usual "INVESTORS WATCH OUT! FIRM WILL BLOW YOUR MIND!" spam message. No single GIF contains anything other than garbage: you have to render all of the GIFs, laid out properly, in their final frame, to see the text.

I have to wonder how many people are falling for these things at this point. I mean, they're actually hiring some halfway smart programmers here, as they try to stay a step ahead of the spam filters, and they're working hard -- I can see the spam tech evolving week by week...

Edit: Okay, not quite as smart as I thought -- upon closer inspection, it's still all a single GIF, that just happens to render bit by bit for no apparent reason. So the final frame is still the same as the previous round of spam tech; shouldn't take long for the anti-spam forces to catch. But I suspect they'll think of the many-little-images version soon...