And, keep your anti-virus software updated.

An email address on nowhere.com forwards all SPAM it receives to fax machines that print it all.

On another issue, the SPAM problem on the Internet became a major problem: Prorams try to make believe that they are human beings in order to insert advertisment anywhere a user can write (in the messages of a forum, in the comments of a blog, etc). For some time now, it became common that human users must identify themselves by their capacity to recognize a badly written word. Theoretically, this is a very efficient Turing test allowing to differentiate a human from a machine only by the results of their actions. Practically, the abilities of software programs have become so impressive that SPAM is slowly coming back again through those filters named CAPTCHAs (those images that you must read and copy back in order to be identified and approved for a specific action).

The problem appears to be: create CAPTCHA tremendously difficult for the automated software and, simultaneously, bring human beings to the task of checking scans of documents difficult to read by program.

The solution: reCAPTCHA.

The idea is to provide a CAPTCHA service to thousands of bloggers and forum administrators (WordPress, phpBB, etc.) Users are invited to recognize two words specifically difficult to read (profesional OCR programs failed during scans done by Carnegie Mellon University). The user must recognize them both. One is used to check that this is a human being, the other will fill a database of OCR translations that will be used to deliver even more CAPTCHAs and to improve the quality of a document scanned by Carnegie Mellon. Dual core technology: efficiently fight spammers and deliver millions of human users to improve the scan quality of thousands of ancient documents (without using slave labor).

Example of a difficult to read/scan document:

One of the key advantages is that most pro OCR programs can tell when they fail to recognize a character or a word (when they are not confident enough).

It works best if you attack a company whose stock is circulating in very small quantities (they are more sensitive to small changes of market opinion). You buy at the lowest possible price over a long period of time; You convince your victims that the stock is undervaled and will go up, so they rush and make the stock climb quickly (most victims then become even more convinced that the information was right). But you are the only one able to profit from it since you are the one selling. Later, the victims are left with value-less shares that nobody wants to buy (and certainly not at the price of the recent transactions). The crooks can make a lot of money out of such a scam taking advantage of the individual victims (they gave their money to the scammers) and of the company (it will probably take a long time before the bad reputation earned by the stock at that moment can be cleared and come back untarnished).

The SEC thinks they found the solution: Recently, for 35 companies stormed by such SPAM campaigns, the SEC simply banned trading. It may not bring the complete solution, but it gives time for information to flow and the potential victims to be informed of what is happening before they go and make fools of themselves. The hope is to force scammers to loose their information advantage, leaving them with stock at their real value instead of an inflated one. Normally, the scam works on a period of one to two weeks (a short period of time that is acceptable for a trading ban).

Parallely, the Feds succeeded in catching people that were running similar scam but using hacked brokers accounts.

Sources: The Register, The Register, .

Today, it is the 419 scammers that have been baited by an Internet user who decided to have fun with them and convinced them that he would give a lot of money to people who would recreate famous scenes from movies or TV shows. Here, they accepted to play the well-known “dead parrot” Monty Python sketch.

This is pure exceptional anthology. A moment that will stays in the history of Internet scams and scam baits.

But there are some new functionalities too. The most important one is certainly the addition of the ability to send an email to your friends to let them know about a post that you would find particularly interesting (for whatever reason). Just before sending, do not forget to copy the code that is provided (it allows to protect us against robots that would be trying to send automated emails using this form). In any case, be reasonable and polite with your use of this nice little feature.

Just look at the link at the bottom of articles on the front page (or in the box at the bottom right for post pages).

Thanks to Akismet for catching all that. I only have to delete the stored SPAM.

This is exactly what is happening right now on MySpace, the virtual social network where teens have been spreading and sharing for months now (nearly 50 million users in this end of 2006). An example that borders on caricature is the appearance of pseudo user Red Passion (not only a user with a pseudo!). Here is how she present herself:

What I adore… Strong and skillful people, tolerance and freedom, the ambiguous side of life, testing… in every sense, excitement and thrill, sharing, seeing and being seen. What I hate… Strictness, simple-minded people, stupidity and foolishness, fear and shame, prejudice, meanness… in every sense and, more than everything, the lack of imagination. This is me, female, from a place you’ll never know. Explore my world…

With such an invitation, on a dating web site (even more than on a social network site), the first contact is virtually automatic. Red Passion is not a real woman (after all, who could blame her for that since false identities are plentiful on those sites – or at least identities that are fantastically more generous than the mere reality), but – more importantly – she is a real advertisment.

Yes! This is an online ad for Campari (the Italian alcohol drink) and HotelCampari.com the accompanying web site.

Some feeble-minded observers would think that this would not stand for long, but no. SPAM – here as everywhere else – uses the proven theories of advertising to extend them to their worst extreme. Isn’t abuse too big? Alcohol beverages advertised in a virtual location obviously crowded with teens.

Original image by Josef Stuefer

Happy Birthday SpamAnti.net!

But, a lot of us who tested some of the available tools (some of them are sold at very high prices) quickly observed that their efficiency is often quite poor. Sometimes surprisingly bad. So, how’s K9 going? Very well.

How does it work?

We must first understand how such a tool operates. It is installed between the mail server of your Internet Service Provider (ISP) and your email software reader. It runs on your PC anq requires a small modification of the configuration of your mail reader, then it works silently without help.

Or nearly without help, since during the first days of use, you have to show it the right email messages and the bad SPAM messages (it has some priori knowledge but it is quite crude). Then, it will draw its own conclusions on the criterias to use to clean up your mail box.

Efficiency

To be precise, K9 includes its own statistics collection and reporting. This way it is easier to see clearly its efficiency level. You have it all in front of your eyes.

then, there are two important measurements to be done:

1. efficiency while continuously operating
2. efficiency during the training phase (normally, it should be reduced)

For the continuous operation, I only had compliments and kudos during the past: After months of electronic mail (more than 100,000 emails in my mailboxes) the result speaks for itself: 99.95% minimum while I receive SPAMs from absolutely all kinds of origins.

The issue was still open during the training/learning phase (I did not measure it before). But, I recently rebuilt part of my PC email architecture and had to re-install completely K9; So, I could easily observe quietly a full training again. And the good news is that… out of 2994 emails (in a day… Boy! am I spammed?), I had to sort again 9 messages re-classified to “Good” and 5 messages re-classified to “Bad” (or SPAM). this leads to a nice 99,53% efficiency and the training phase is visibly finished well before 1500 received messages.

Of course, I would not advise to then close your eyes completely. But K9 provides an easy way to come back in the past and to identify wrongly classified messages (this is always a possibility): It sorts messages according to their probability of being SPAM (0% is Good, 100% is bad or SPAM). You just have to look at messages near the cut-off limit of 50%. Wrongly identified messages tend to group around that limit and are very visible there.

In the image above (click to enlarge), K9 clearly shows the legal message (blue and with a 2.5% probability of being SPAM) and SPAM messages (in black, with probabilities much higher than 50%).

For non-English speakers

It may be interesting to know that even if the web site of the author, Robin Keir, is in English, and I use the English default version, there are extensions that can be used to translate it into various European languages.

And it is FREE! As in free beer.

roumazeilles.net. IN TXT “v=spf1 ip4:81.57.246.28 a mx ptr include:free.fr include:magic.fr -all”

So, I received thousands of error messages from all over the world. They told me about people having left for holidays (and their return date), overflowing mail boxes, ISP sentries able to recognize and reject the messages as SPAM (and returning them to me. Thanks a million!)

After a few more hours, I finally could read my email. Again, I congratulates myself for using two excellent email tools:

• Pegasus mail: A VERY powerful mail reader. It has been free for years and tends to favor security and efficiency rather than pure user confort (quite the opposite of the Microsoft Outlook family). There are extensions to have it speaking various other languages (French and German immediately come to my mind).
• K9: an automated statistical SPAM-detection filter that seats between the mail reader and the POP3 mail server. It merely marks the SPAM messages for the mail reader to delete or sort them out.

Out of 20,000 messages, K9 only missed 2 SPAMs I had to remove manually. It also misfired on a message I sent myself from my vacation location (but it was so abtruse and specific that the filter could not fail to think it was SPAM).