That Gibberish in Your In-Box May Be Good News

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

From: Monty Solomon <monty () roscom com>
Subject: That Gibberish in Your In-Box May Be Good News


SP@M SHEN@NIG@NS!!

That Gibberish in Your In-Box May Be Good News

By GEORGE JOHNSON
January 25, 2004

IF you could sit back with Zen-like detachment and observe the dross
piling up in your electronic mailbox, the spam wars might come to
seem like a fascinating electronic game. Like creatures running
through a maze with constantly shifting walls, spammers dart and
weave to sneak their solicitations past ever wilier junk mail
filters. They are organisms, or maybe genomes, grinding out one
random mutation after another, desperately trying to elude the Grim
Reaper.

Viagra becomes "vi@gra" or "v-i-@-g-r-a." Then, as the filters adapt,
"v1@gr@" and even "\/l@gr@." Currently, the Internet is swarming with
mutants like this: "Cheap Val?(u)m, Viagr@, X(a)n@x, Som@ Di3t Pills
Many M3ds RIZfURqgHr77B," the final string of gibberish hanging like
an appendage of junk DNA.

Taking a different approach, a come-on for barnyard pornography
devolves into "faurm galz bing e rottic." Another pitch promises to
reveal "Seakrets of ((eks-eks-eks)) stars."

Dispiriting as it is to start the morning with a hundred of these
orthographic monsters crouching in your in-box, there is reason to
take heart. Measured in bits and bytes, the sheer volume of spam may
not have diminished. But advanced filtering software, which learns to
recognize the mercurial traits of junk e-mail, is having an effect.
The spammers' messages are becoming harder and harder to decipher.
Sense is inevitably degenerating into nonsense, like a pileup of
random mutations in an endangered species gasping its last breaths.

Earlier this month, when Internet experts met in Cambridge, Mass.,
for the 2004 Spam Conference (available as a Web broadcast at
spamconference.org), they showed just how far the science of spam
fighting has come. For all the recent talk of suing spammers and
compiling a national do-not-spam list, most speakers were putting
their hopes in technological, not legal solutions. The federal
government's new junk e-mail law, the Can Spam Act, barely rated a
mention.

...

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/weekinreview/25john.html

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