My First Spam

Back in the mid 90's, I was in graduate school taking classes at night. We were encouraged to sign up to a "listserv," a new means of communication back then. Listservs were a great way to get the word out. It was also an effective means of effortlessly sending mindless emails to a large group of people. That's what happened shortly after I subscribed to my first listserv. I got my first ever spam.

Jim was a student from Europe. I don't know what country in Europe Jim was from, but he was most definitely European. He wore clothes that were likely once his uncle's. He also smoked heavily. He sported a fedora long before Justin Timberlake. There were three students named, "Jim," in our class. He became known as "euro-Jim." The most notable thing euro-Jim did to identify his European lineage was express his dissatisfaction with our country by saying,

"Americans always discriminate against Europeans."

Euro-Jim didn't mince words. He routinely accused Americans of victimizing the people of an entire continent. Most Americans can't find Europe on a map so it's unlikely they would collectively do anything discriminatory against a whole continent. Euro-Jim always went on about how much better his country of origin was as compared to the United States. He said once,

"The education I got in my country would have gotten me a PhD here."

I've heard this many times from foreigners. We're supposed to believe their high schools are superior to our doctoral programs even though they have to wait two months in a line for a roll of toilet paper. If it was so great in Krackistan, why did they leave in the first place?

Euro-Jim hated Bill Gates and Microsoft. In between expressing his strong belief of America's hemispherical discrimination policy, euro-Jim also badmouthed Microsoft all the time. He said things like,

"Microsoft intentionally displays the blue screen of death even when it's not necessary."

I don't know how euro-Jim knew this, but he said it with conviction. One time, someone sent an email to the listserv informing the readership that March was MS Awareness Month. Euro-Jim followed with an email comparing the symptoms of multiple sclerosis to the Windows Operating System. In it, he wrote,

"Memory loss, fatigue, dizziness, heat intolerance, vertigo, weakness. These are all symptoms of the Windows Operating system as well as multiple sclerosis."

I didn't find euro-Jim's comparison funny at all. Apparently many subscribers to the listserv didn't think it was humorous either. After euro-Jim's attempt at humor, the listserv was flooded with emails containing only one word,

"Unsubscribe."

People always think European movies are more edgy and more artsy than American movies. I don't think my dissatisfaction with euro-Jim's analogy was a cultural issue. I think he was just an euro-jerk. Clearly, others agreed with me as the exodus from the listserv continued. I responded with one word as well,

"Uncouth."

My accusation of no class angered euro-Jim because he countered with,

"Unintelligent."

Of course, I was unintelligent. I was an American with my deficient American education. I sent just to euro-Jim,

"Unglued,"

I made it look like it went to the whole listserv by leaving just one letter off the listserv to ensure it would bounce. Euro-Jim took the bait. He sent back to the listserv,

"Uncivilized."

To which I sent just to him,

"Unravel,"

keeping with my "you're nuts" theme. Euro-Jim sent to the listserv,

"Unscrupulous."

I sent,

"Unhinged."

Euro-Jim sent,

"Unjust."

to which I followed with,

"Unwell."

This went on all day, me sending my slightly insulting "un" word that was a synonym for "lunatic" to euro-Jim, and he responding with his equally childish "un" word to the entire listserv. The difference was no one knew I was doing it except euro-Jim, but everyone was aware that he was spamming the listserv for what appeared to the outside observer no intelligible reason.

Eventually someone sent,

"What is your problem?"

Euro-Jim took time to respond. He obviously looked closely at the emails flooding his inbox. He sent to everyone,

"I thought I was responding to another student."

I guess I was just discriminating against his European heritage when I baited him into making a fool of himself. An inquiry by the IT Department led to an email to the listserv stating,

"The listserv is a tool used by the university to provide important information to the student body, faculty and employees. An environment of intimidation, abuse or discrimination will not be tolerated on the university supported listserv. Subscribers who abuse the system will be unregistered immediately."

Being a consummate dick, I sent to the listserv just before I unsubscribed,

"Does this policy include people from Europe?"

Editor's Note: Originally published on February 21, 2017.

You'll Never Guess What's Ruining My Metrics

I delete anywhere from five to fifteen subscribers per day from my blog. If I didn't do this, I would have well over a thousand compared to the fifty I have. Why do I do this when begging for subscription is part of this new age, social media, selfie driven, narcissistic world in which we live in? Because they're all fake, that's why.

A few months ago, I noticed a spike in subscribers which immediately had me thinking that I crossed an unseen threshold in viral interest in stories about celebs, politics and diarrhea. At closer inspection, I noticed all the emails were from outlook and had odd, exorbitantly long usernames. Who would create such an encumbered email? The bogus subscribers look like this. 


Bogus Emails

No one intentionally would type "mascaraquettmuriellmo" every time they wanted to check email. I searched the internet in attempts to uncover what's going on. In a forum, I learned that this infection of fraudulent outlook emails with DNA like usernames is called "Subscription Email Spam."

Bots, computer programs that surf the web, look for blogs like mine to skew analytics such as bounce rate and session duration. They also consume my advertising budget by programmatically clicking on my ads. Apparently, they do this because someone is unhappy with something I wrote. What's puzzling is that to subscribe to most blogs you got to get past a CAPTCHA, the completely automated, public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart. You know, the annoying graphics which pose a masked series of characters that a human can read, but a bot struggles with. This is a typical CAPTCHA offered by the Google subscription service, Feedburner.

Pretty straight forward. Some CAPTCHAs are more difficult to decipher. Once I was presented with this when being forced to register while buying a toaster.

No one needs toast that bad. Also, for some unknown reason I really wanted a unicorn. CAPTCHAs are annoying, but they're affective at warding off malware written by smart people who are probably fans of Star Trek. So the obvious question is how does a bot programmatically get around a CAPTCHA? The answer is: porn.

A Google search revealed that apparently some clever developer wrote software that copies the CAPTCHA image then reproduces it on a website that offers nude picture if one enters the correct sequence of characters. This allows a bot to match a string of characters to an image which then can be recalled later to circumvent the Turing test. It's hard for me to believe with all the porn on the internet that there are humans so desperate that they will bother to decode a CAPTCHA in order to gain access to even more porn. Let's face it, there's no shortage of nude people on the internet.

Back in the early 1990's when the internet became more widely accessible to the public, there wasn't a lot of information out there. The first time I searched the internet, I queried on "Abraham Lincoln" which returned four hits. Back then, there wasn't a lot of porn out there either. I recall the first time I saw a website which hosted naked pictures of humans. The web developer recorded who visited the webpage and for how long and presented a list of all the users who most frequented the site. The list was entitled, "The Internet's Horniest Geeks."

Kim 

Porn can have unintended consequences. Kim Kardashian once tried to "break the internet" with a picture of her bare ass. She presumed hordes of horny nerds, frantically downloading a picture of her bulbous butt, would crash the internet. It didn't work. The internet didn't grind to halt. I think if Kim wanted to bring down the internet, she would've had a better go of it if she sat on it.

Thanks indirectly to the most jacked up dorks among us, I've got scores of bogus subscriptions flooding my blog daily because someone is mad at me for poking fun at Stephen Hawking, Hillary Clinton or Kim Jong un. Luckily, I still remember enough web programming from my career as a computer scientist to write a script to purge suspect emails for me. I used to write software before my job was offloaded overseas to a country with marginal indoor plumbing as a cost saving measure recommended by financial bean counters. Unfortunately, I'm not smart enough to figure out how to prevent the circumvention of CAPTCHAs via porn. I would suspect that the solution lies somewhere in randomly changing the CAPTCHA image identification since its doubtful that the work of the bots occur in real time.

I guess in the end it comes down to the fact that one should never underestimate the elegant programming of a lonely geek.