April 11, 2009
- Artistic Spambots -
For the past few weeks, I’ve noticed some strange effects in the spam caught in my Askimet filter. It looks like the links are trying to line up, like a television that’s nearly tuned to the right station but not quite. Don’t know if this was happening to everybody, but it was happening in most of the longer spam about 10 days or so.
An example:
It made me think of the Outer Limits introduction: “We are now controlling the transmission. We control the horizontal, and the vertical. We can deluge you with a thousand channels or expand one single image to crystal clarity – and beyond.” Sounds like a lot of fun to me. Where can I get me hands on something with that kind of control?
Anyway, the spam bots have stopped doing it at this point; they’re back to the random mix of blue in with the rest of the text. But I’m still waiting. If they ever manage to get a straight blue line top to bottom, I’ll consider it some kind of serious achievement. What that actually means, I have no idea. Probably nothing. I long ago gave up on the idea that there was anything useful in those strangely poetic utterances. Far too much noise, and far too little signal.
But still, pretty cool.
