Sat, 28 Oct 2006

SPAM Chatter
SPAMEvery once in a while I scan my SPAM traps to make sure that I've not caught a live one, so to speak. I hardly ever find legit emails in there, but every once in a while I run across a piece of junk that's, well, interesting.

This one isn't from Planet Dyslexia, because the grammar, spelling and word order are all correct. It seems to be from the insane asylum but it's a lot more cogent than other such missives, and it included an inline image that was pitching Viagra so it was in fact trying to sell something.

So I'm inventing a new category - Chatter SPAM. It greatly resembles the output of a chatterbot - it can certainly make you look twice, but there's no way this would pass a Turing Test. Here's the bit that piqued my interest:

When a statesmanlike eggplant hibernates, an inferiority complex of a warranty trembles. The hairy crank case dances with an alleged sheriff. Sometimes the nearest anomaly leaves, but an anomaly near the spider always usually caricatures a garbage can! Most people believe that a line dancer seeks a temporal hydrogen atom, but they need to remember how ridiculously a smelly cashier daydreams.

In fact, given the format, I'd wager a guess that this was generated by something akin to Racter, which was an absolutely fascinating bit of code. I worked with one of the authors of Racter in the late 80's, adapting it for use on a bulletin board system as "entertainment", going so far as to pipe it's output into a variation of Eliza, the "AI" program that aped a psychologist. That was interesting - the good doctor crashed and burned in short order!

But of course, all of that was long before the Curse of SPAM swamped the Net - when you could still use Usenet, and new emails were placed directly into your inbox. The good old days, indeed.

/Humor | 0 writebacks | permanent link

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Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
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