Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? (well, shall I?)Some spammers have taken to inserting decidedly non-spammy words in e-mail to try to convince the filters they are not junk mail. As a result spam is starting to appear with phrases such as "bernadine rustle lappet" and "arboretum severe acerbity henri" inside them ... This is perhaps why some spammers are turning to out-of-copyright novels [my emphasis] for their text.
I have plenty of spam samples which confirm this finding, that spammers are beginning to resort to quoting literature or other published writings (always with <FONT color="FFFFFF">), to defeat bayesean filters. But the notion specifically that they "are turning to out-of-copyright novels" seems a little far fetched.
Remember, these are the same people as are hacking away finding exploitable SMTP servers using SMTP AUTH, or who have installed proxy servers on machines operated by home cable/DSL users, and who often want to sell you very cheap "licensed" (i.e. ripped off) software -- all unambiguously illegal acts.
Why would these same people choose to respect the intellectual property rights of living authors? More probably they are just scraping text off web sites, and most web sites that quote literature at length can only do so with the permission of the author, or because he/she is dead.
I like this page though (recycling spam as art, linked from that same BBC piece). It has been done before (qv Spam Radio), but I did enjoy this example.
Category: Spam miscellany
Technorati: Spam miscellany
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