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It’s not often that you get spam with this sort of clarity:

From: “Hayes, Bryan”
To: dan@dansdata.com
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2007 03:08:14 -0500
Subject: Message subject

Message subject

%CUSTOM_CONTENT

%CUSTOM_BIZLINK

Bryan Hayes

%CUSTOM_QUOTE

Regrettably, there was no X-Mailer line with the name of a spamming program in it, so we don’t get to know (possibly after some detective work) with what software “Brian” failed to fill in the form before clicking the “Send 100,000,000 e-mails” button.

(The sending server was, according to ancient tradition, a Chinanet IP address.)

I look forward with enthusiasm to the reduction in spam bandwidth consumption that’ll occur when we all start getting tiny little messages that just say “%NIGERIAN_SCAM” or “%DICK_PILLS” or “%BUY_SOME_STOCK” rather than the informationally equivalent uncompressed versions.

Yes, as I anticipated, Overlord is fun. And it runs fine at decent resolution on my GeForce 7900 GT, once I disabled a couple of pretty-features in the config.

It’s hard not to love a game where you come upon what is obviously Bag End, but cannot be bothered to stoop to enter the silly little round door.

Instead, you just send your minions to bash that door down, flood inside, smash and kill everything in sight, and then bring anything of value out to you.

(Ideally, you’d be picking your nose while you waited for them to return. Perhaps in Overlord II.)

Drop shipping comes to the common man. (Via.)

Drop shipping, where A buys a product from B and B arranges for C, the actual source of the product, to send it directly to A, is a normal business practice for many online retailers. They may keep substantial stock of lots of mainstream items on hand, but their catalogue may also include expensive low-volume items that they don’t want to sit and go stale in their warehouse.

A computer dealer may get hundreds of orders a week for hard drives and motherboards and CPUs, for instance, but only sell one video projector a fortnight. If they get eight projectors in stock and have only sold two when a newer, better, cheaper model comes out, they’re boned. Better to not offer stuff like that for sale at all.

If the local distributor of that video projector has their act together, though, the retailer can just act like an order processor as far as that product goes, and get the distributor to send the product directly to the customer whenever someone orders one. This can also cause problems, of course, but as long as the retailer obeys the relevant consumer protection laws - just because they never even saw the product they just sold doesn’t exonerate them from having to make things right if the thing turns up broken - everybody can, and usually does, end up happy.

So that’s drop shipping as it applies to $5000 video projectors. This is drop shipping as it applies to 75 cent books.

And here’s drop shipping for people who don’t want to keep their eBay account much longer.

EBay is also absolutely jam-packed with people selling sooper sekrit lists of incredible low-priced drop shipping sources. You know - those special companies that sell things really cheaply to Masons, and Jews, and, uh, maybe the homos too - and to you, once you’ve bought the list! Makes perfect sense!

Some of those outfits are just variants on the multilevel marketing scam where suckers are tricked into paying for little more than the privilege of tricking other people into paying for little more than the privilege of tricking, et cetera.

Others, while they’re very good at taking money from fresh-faced new drop shipping entrepreneurs, aren’t so good at ever actually sending anything to a customer.

(I bet this post’ll attract some really choice Google ads.)

I am typing this on my little green computer.

Well, actually I’m adding these words to the top of a half-written block of text that I composed on my PC.

Which, yes, means that I’m able to move text from the PC to the eMate.

And if you’re reading this, it means I’m also able to move it back. Which is a nice bonus.

(Here’s my post about transferring data to and from the eMate. It took me a while to edit all of the cursing out of it. Precis: Use the serial cable, Luke. Don’t bother with anything else.)

The eMate keyboard’s only about 90% of normal size, but I can still type on it much faster than the poor little computer can squeeze small-font-size words onto its 480-by-320 bitmapped screen.

As an example, I’m hammering out this paragraph at the best speed I can manage, and when I stop typing and look at the screen NOW, the eMate has only actually gotten around to printing the “when I stop” part of this sentence to the screen. It took another seven whole seconds before it made it to the “NOW”.

When you’re starting a new document, the eMate Notes application is much faster. Then, it nearly keeps up with my roughly 80 word per minute typing (slowed a bit by the smaller keyboard). Once there’s a significant amount of text in the document, though, things slow down.

(The dotted handwriting recognition guide lines don’t make any difference to screen drawing speed, but they’re unnecessary if you’re only going to use the keyboard. This stationery file lets you create new notes without lines.)

Fortunately, the eMate keyboard buffer is big enough that the slow update speed isn’t a problem. It’s not as if the thing just sits there and beeps at you when you’ve typed 16 characters ahead of what it’s gotten around to displaying.

I suppose a lightning typer could freak the eMate out if they really tried. But the small keyboard means this isn’t really a computer for that kind of user anyway. As long as you pause for thought now and then, and don’t often decide to delete the last word (”How many times did I just press backspace? Dammit, now I have to wait and see.”) you ought to be fine.

This slowness also means that the eMate isn’t the greatest place to do your editing, let alone HTML markup. 153600 pixels sounds like quite a lot - why, an old greyscale Palm has only 25600! - but it really only gives you about 100 characters by 23 lines of small-font text, plus menu stuff above and below.

That sounds perfectly decent, by ancient-word-processor standards. It’s not as if people didn’t get lots of work done on 80-by-24 text mode programs like WordStar or AppleWorks.

But text mode was fast, and the eMate’s bitmapped graphics are slow.

Amigas had no text mode and some lightning-fast text editors, but that was because of their coprocessors. I think the principal strategy used by the early Macintoshes to deal with the same problem was (a) only having 1.14 times as many pixels as an eMate, and (b) encouraging patience in their users. MacWrite was a great success, but it bogged down just like the eMate when a document was more than trivially long.

(Perhaps I should add an overclocking switch to my eMate - though I’d need at least three toggle switches sticking out of the casing for the eMate to match my old Amiga 500. You didn’t have a proper A500 if the RF shield inside hadn’t been removed so many times that all of the little tabs had broken off, resulting in metallic boinging noises while you typed. Maximum resolution? Well, that depended on how much overscan you could cram onto your monitor, didn’t it?)

Absence of usable editing features can, of course, itself be a feature. This sort of thing is at the very core of the Write Without Interference philosophy, in which the elimination of distractions like editing or looking up hyperlinks allows you to get to the core of your thoughts both faster and better. If you know you’re going to have to edit what you just wrote, put in a couple of asterisks or something and keep on going with your brain still afire with the magnificent creativity that only you can, uh, create.

See? See what I mean? I’m back on my PC, now, and I just had to take time out to find that funny link, which broke my train of thought and left me writing this paragraph instead of filling in the perfectly judged words that I intended to come after “magnificent creativity”, above.

And now I’ve finished that paragraph, saying something else because I forgot what I intended to say, and look what a hash I made of it.

Here, the Bad Astronomer demolishes the ludicrous, but strangely popular, claim that our Sun is actually part of the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, not the Milky Way.

And so, uh, global warming is fake.

Or something.

(Ten points to anybody who posts a comment featuring an astrologer’s point of view on this amazing Sagittarius revelation.)

In the olden days, you used to get spam from people running link farms (groups of many-paged sites full of useless “directory” pages with hundreds of links to each other), telling you that they’d added a link to your site from one of their dreadful pages and unless you linked back, they’d DELETE THE LINK OMG.

Back in the mists of time this may actually have worked - if, by “worked”, you mean “artificially inflated the value of these sites so their worthless pollution floated up into people’s search results and they got some ad-viewing traffic”.

It doesn’t work any more, though. Anybody who joins in these scams by linking back now connects themselves to the “bad neighbourhood” mojo that’s applied to all known link farms by the search engines. This achieves the exact opposite of the ranking-boosting traffic bonanza promised by the spammers.

So, nowadays, the spammers have moved on to trapezoidal triangular linking.

You used to get spam from someone who runs www.creativeusesforsnot.com and is apparently convinced that some random page on your site where the word “snot” appears is a perfect match for his very important directory of links, but not if you don’t link back. Now, you get spam from the same guy, except he’s telling you that if you link to creativeusesforsnot.com, he’ll link to you from elephant-toenail-trimmers.com.

Because the search engines don’t know his two sites are connected, all of these links look like perfectly kosher “one way” propositions, and everybody wins. Eh? Buddy? Buddy buddy buddy?

A few of these e-mails a day have been leaking through to me. Here’s a typically moronic example:

From: “Shamim”
To:
Subject: Link Exchange Request
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 10:30:44 +0530

Dear Webmaster

I handle online marketing for my client’s site http://www.petwellbeing.com/dog-kidney-disease-p91.cfm

As you all know about the Google’s new algorithym and the improtance of oneway linking. I am also looking for triangular linking ( New Virsion of Oneway linking ) to increase the linkpopularity of my site as well the ranking in major search engines.

I will also add your site on to my directory http://www.rainforests.com.au/ within24 hours of your positive reply.

please add my site at least page rank(2) page.

I request you to do have a look on to my website and add it on your website and reply me with your site’s details.

Here is my linking details :-

URL : http://www.petwellbeing.com/dog-kidney-disease-p91.cfm

Title :Canine Kidney Disease Treatments

Description :Effective natural pet medication for canine kidney disease treatments to reduce irritation and pain.

Link will be added at: http://www.rainforests.com.au/rainforests/Rainforest_Birds.htm
: http://www.petidtags.org/linkmachine/resources/resources.html

You can also paste the code given below :

Canine Kidney Disease Treatments Effective natural pet medication for canine kidney disease treatments to reduce irritation and pain.

Your link will be added on my site within 24 hours. So if you are interested for link exchange with my site please let me know and we can do a better work for our sites.

Thanks and Regards

Shamim

shamim124@gmail.com

There’s no connection between the three domains mentioned in this e-mail as far as whois records go (although I was amused to note that the registrant of rainforests.com.au put what appears to be his real Australian Business Number in his registration!), but Google would have to be pretty stupid to be unable to connect them. Google are all about seeing patterns in links, and triangular linking creates repetitive patterns. A links to X, then X links to C. A links to Y, then Y links to C. Et cetera. This sort of thing seldom happens for valid reasons.

Oh, and these guys keep sending out these brain-hurtingly stupid e-mails to zillions of recipients, who then post them to the Web and Usenet, where the world can see the scheme exposed. Sometimes the spammers cut out the middleman here, by spamming mailing-list addresses and getting their messages archived online automatically.

So even if these dorks don’t accidentally spam people (or spam-trap addresses…) that actually lead directly to the search engines, they can still be discovered very quickly.

Are they, though?

Well, the root pages for the sites mentioned in the above spam are all still sitting pretty at Google PageRank 4, which is quite good. The sub-pages actually mentioned in the spam are down around PR3, but it’s normal for sub-pages on valid sites to have a slightly lower rank than the root page.

When I looked at some sites promoted in previous spams that’ve been visible online for months - here, for instance - I found that their root pages still had OK PageRanks - well, PR3 at least. More interestingly, the sub-pages that the spam tells people to link inward to are also still doing OK, but the sub-pages that link outward in return are now down on PR0 with the rest of the hoi polloi.

So it does seem that Google is somewhat wise to this scam. If you do what a triangular-link spammer asks you to do, your site’s PageRank mojo will indeed contribute to the PageRank of the page you link to, but as soon as Google notices the pattern, the spammer’s return-link page will plummet to PR0 and so his link will do you no good.

This isn’t an optimal solution, since it means the triangular-link scam will still work just fine for the spammer, if people do what he says. It’d be better if triangular link beneficiaries were being classed as “bad neighbourhoods” just like the old-style link farms.

But if it becomes common knowledge that these schemes are as fishy as they sound, at least fewer people will fall for them.

I presume that almost all of you dorks will, without my prompting, read the latest PA and its newspost.

For the benefit of the three of you who would not otherwise have done so (and who would therefore have missed out on the word “shitwizards”, which I feel obliged to state at this juncture is not only an obviously marvellous name for a rock band but will, I suspect, now become at the very least a nerd sub-meme, you see if I’m wrong), I was startled to see Tycho’s Doritos ad concepts.

I found them startling because they were advertisements which did not fill me with the urge to punch the face of the person responsible.

OK, the third one has a certain distasteful Nike-ish swagger, and the second one sounds too much like the work of Ray Smuckles to be considered on its own merits.

But the first one?

I’d seriously consider buying that chip.

Yes, I’ve been drinking.

What?

You got a problem? You wanna fight about it?

OK, you guys go and fight about it, then. I’ll stay here and maybe watch a Supreme Commander replay.

In celebration of the first new Spamusement for ages (if you don’t count the tons of fan-made strips in the forum), I present another Word Only Found In Spam These Days, On Account Of How Gangsters Outside David Mamet Movies Don’t Use It Any More:

“Doxy.”

A Usenet search does not turn up the string “doxy” as 100% indicative of spam, but that’s only because the word is short for doxycycline. I still think “doxy” counts, though, because if most people get e-mail mentioning an antibiotic then it’s probably spam anyway.

The subject line of the porno spam I got this morning was, somewhat disappointingly, “second-best whhi Ladys mtfi sucking icw dick!”

Honestly. The very idea. If I’m going to download Ladys mtfi sucking icw dick, I will not settle for anything less than the best Ladys.

The content, before the URL (for a now-broken site) and a further line of pure gibberish, was “fascinating lxnt Doxy bxa ass bmnd banged by rkkw Man!”

I note that the super-heavy obfuscation in these sorts of spams is now leaving the actual “content” words alone, and just inserting random characters between them. This is a great disappointment for those of us who appreciated the random-second-character blank verse of such deathless classics as “Clhica sjucking her first ANEIMALS pgenis” and “Bvabe In Cfute Lkingerie Skuck BHLACK & Fyacial”.

In the face of this terrible change and decay, so cruelly forced by the continuing spam-versus-filters arms race, it’s good to see that some hardy perennials survive unchanged, like crocodiles.

Yes, that’s right: “She wants a better sex? All you need’s here!” and “We cure any desease!” are still going strong.

God alone knows why, of course. These spam subjects have remained unchanged for almost two years now (according to Google Groups, anyway - I can’t remember how long I’ve been seeing them for, though it feels like forever), so they’re probably the two most-filtered strings after “Make Money Fast“. But their senders keep on trucking with those distinctive slightly-wrong subject lines, bless ‘em.

I presume it’s some sort of dada art project.

My turn to hop on the polarised-photos bandwagon.

An LCD monitor is an excellent source of polarised light, and lots of see-through things also polarise light to different degrees as it passes through different parts of them. For this reason, you’ll see faint rainbows around the edges of various clear plastic things if you hold them up in front of a plain white LCD screen. Put a second polariser over your eyes or camera lens, though, and things get trippy.

(If you see someone looking at an LCD through polarised sunglasses and doing the Indian head wiggle, that person is not necessarily on drugs.)

When a local discount store was closing down, I seized the opportunity to buy a lifetime supply of little plastic shot glasses. It struck me that they might be good for mixing glue, holding small parts, reenacting the drinking contest scene from Raiders, et cetera. They are also good candidates for polariser photography, especially if you stick a few of them together.

One day, I’ll get around to making a cup sphere, in which you glue or staple disposable cups together to make a globe. Stapled paper cups are probably the fastest way to do it. I’ve got a lot of magnets here, though, so I decided to try sticking the little shot glasses together temporarily with those.

I got 24 cups together before the process started becoming really difficult, with the structure shifting around and magnets snapping onto each other and the wailing and the cursing, glayven.

I just received this:

Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:25:40 +0800 (CST)
From: “karl.kang”
To: “dan”
Subject: About the domain names of dansdata

Dear sir,
We are SQL Network Information Technology Co., Ltd, a domain name register organization in China.We have something urgent need to confirm with your company. Because we formally received an application from a company named Sai Bo (China) Investment company.They are applying to register and so on as internet brand name”dansdata”and CN domain name”dansdata.cn /.com.cn /.net.cn /.org.cn” through us.Now we are in charge of this matter .In order to keep other party from using these domain names,hope to get your confirmation about these domain names¡¯registration asap.
Please let someone in your company who is responsible for information management contact us as soon as possible.

Karl.Kang

Tel: +86-21-51750304
Fax: +86-21-51750301
Email: Karl.kang@govnic.org.cn Karl@govnic.org.cn
Web: www.govnic.org.cn

SQL Network Information Technology Co., Ltd
Room A601, Block 2,ShanghaiWithub White-cat Science Park No.641 TianshanRoad ,Shanghai,China
2007-06-20

This message would have been entertaining if all it did was alert me to the fact that there exists in China a place called “Shanghai Withub White-Cat Science Park”, but it also provided some wonderful nostalgia.

There is, of course, very probably no actual company trying to register dansdata.cn. Even if there were, I wouldn’t care; I don’t need to cover every possible variation of my domain name, since everybody knows where Dan’s Data is already and dansdata.cn wouldn’t fool anybody unless it copied all of my content. Which you could do just as easily with some other domain.

This is a scam, and an old and hoary one. The FTC’s been shutting down similar scammers in the States since at least 2001. In the olden days, they at least sent you a paper invoice; what’s up with this cheapskate e-mail crap?

Even if I did want to register .cn names, there are plenty of places to do that which’re certain to be better than the awfully official-sounding “SQL Network Information Technology” govnic.org.cn site. I note that govnic.org.cn doesn’t even tell you what it’ll cost to register a domain. The going rate for non-Chinese is actually less than $US30 for a year - and Chinese citizens can apparently register domains for one yuan!

The SQL Etcetera site is also a rich fount of Chinglish, including some magnificently incomprehensible press releases.

The only other mention I can find for SQL on the Web (this SQL, not the real SQL) is on this Indonesian site, where they apparently filled out the Web complaint form with a copy of the come-on they sent to me.

Update: Here’s a mention of them from a few years ago, when they were calling themselves “Shanghai Squile Network Information & Technology Co., Ltd”.

“Squile“?

WTF?

I’d think about this more, but it’s making my brain hurt.