{"id":21218,"date":"2013-09-29T10:39:10","date_gmt":"2013-09-29T15:39:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=21218"},"modified":"2013-09-29T18:59:11","modified_gmt":"2013-09-29T23:59:11","slug":"spam-resourceful-idiots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=21218","title":{"rendered":"Spam: Resourceful Idiots"},"content":{"rendered":"

I never cease to be amazed at the grotesque ineptitude of spammers. The battle between spammers and filters is over twenty years old now. So much ingenuity, creativity, and knowledge has been brought to bear against the problem of bulk unsolicited bullshit. And at least as much ingenuity, creativity, and knowledge has been used to overcome those solutions.<\/p>\n

We make a wall, the spammers climb over it. We make it taller, they break through it. We make it stronger, they go under it. <\/p>\n

And then once inside they have no idea in the world what to do. None. It’s like this messed up version of Sam Fisher where he breaks through security, sneaks past the guards, breaks into the control room, and then craps his pants and accidentally kills himself with an office stapler. <\/p>\n

Last year I installed Growmap Anti-Spam Plugin<\/a> (that’s the checkbox you gotta check to leave a comment) and for the next ten months I basically stopped getting spam. But now I’m getting a couple of these a day.<\/p>\n

From visitor “Mdfinstruments gmbh”:
\n<\/p>\n

\n

Ahaa, its pleasant conversation about this piece of writing at this place at this web site, I
\nhave read all that, so now me also commenting here.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Unbelievable. You know, if you just typed something innocuous like, “Great post. Thanks so much for writing this” I probably wouldn’t even give it a second look. And Google translate is really good these days. There’s just no excuse for going to all the effort of circumventing Akismet, my word filter, and Growmap so you can leave a flagrantly obvious spam. <\/p>\n

(Icing on the cake? The given URL for the user was some harmless wiki at miami.edu. Did somebody mis-configure their spam bot? What is even happening here?)<\/p>\n

Another one:<\/p>\n

Hello. I'm not used to this blog. I simply wished to sà\u00a1y hi
\nà\u00a1nd introducé myself. I am very excited to be a section of this community.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Whà\u00a1t? Why would you do that? Why would you add random accents? No translator would mangle text like this. And if you can construct English sentences this well then you know enough to realize how wrong this is. There is no level of knowledge where you will be smart enough to say this but stupid enough to say it this way. That’s like a basketball player who’s tall enough to dunk but too short to reach the top of the ball. It’s just not possible in this universe.<\/p>\n

They’re succeeding at the hard stuff and failing at the easy stuff. If I woke up tomorrow and decided I wanted to be a spammer, I don’t know how I’d overcome all the filters, IP blocking, blacklisting, and other systems. It might take weeks or months to learn how to do all of that. But once I did? I’m sure I could create spam messages that aren’t this ridiculously obvious, even if I didn’t speak the language. Heck, just re-posting OTHER comments or selections of the blog post would be a lot more effective than posting these idiotic word salad messages.<\/p>\n

Yes, spam is a serious problem, but I’ve learned to tolerate it. What I can’t tolerate is bad engineering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I never cease to be amazed at the grotesque ineptitude of spammers. The battle between spammers and filters is over twenty years old now. So much ingenuity, creativity, and knowledge has been brought to bear against the problem of bulk unsolicited bullshit. And at least as much ingenuity, creativity, and knowledge has been used to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21218\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}