101–110 of 188 posts
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How can I get Lenny? :) That is awesome. These is how to use it: Transfer, conference, or forward your telemarketing calls to 1-347-514-7296 Can't wait to try this out.
Doesn't work on cell phones.
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And bots could do pretty well there. I recently read an article (cannot find it; but it may have been even linked from here) which explained the benefit of poor grammar in the spam (i.e., they want to put off more knowledgeable users as the cost of the follow on emails is significantly higher). El cheapo bots have pretty basic English skills which can help them fit naturally into the spam target patterns.
The paper you're referring to is probably this one: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-... The same logic that favours using an opening gambit that scares off all but the most unworldly of people works against using bots for the followup conversation. You don't want to finally find someone that genuinely believes that a random central African stranger might want to split $138,400,000 with the…
It doesn't have to be deliberate. It probably evolved. If worse spelling and grammar work better than correct spelling and grammar, then even if no spammer ever consciously says "Ah, I need to make this crappier", the spams will evolve to be crappy.
Moreover, while our brains in this discussion are taking cognitive shortcuts and putting spams on a "correct crappy" single dimensional continuum, the reality is probably even more complicated, and it's actually specific crappiness that works better than others. For instance, I could hypothesize that it's not just typos, but typos that the recipient plausibly believe are the result of a non-native speaker from the relevant country. (I say "plausibly believe" rather than whether the non-native English is truly representative of the relevant country, because that's what matters.) That's an obvious possibility; more subtle things are possible and probably even likely. And again, the spams will evolve into those more subtle possibilities and exploit them even if no individual participant is sitting there and trying to deliberately figure out the best spams to send... which is, obviously, almost certainly untrue as well. And whoever is sitting down to write The Perfect Spam is probably doing so with a lot more data and a lot less scruples than you or I would apply to the problem.
I've often thought one of our best anti-spam defenses is the sheer mailbox stuffing quantity of them. Even the best crafted spam about how I won the lottery I never entered looks a lot less plausible the thousandth time I receive it.
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Were you trying to find innovation in scams? I imagine all these are at least thousands of years old :P
In other words - as a modern startup founder, one should pay particular attention to history books when developing their business model? ;).
Really cool. Two remarks: 1) If lots of people start using this, spammers might learn to avoid wasting time with Mnesty's CEO. Having a few more fake companies would help. 2) The bot could probably be made a lot smarter with some natural language processing. But it seems to fill its purpose pretty well already. I think this just shows how desperate for leads spammers are.
1) Yeah, there's support for multiple domains, but I have no domains right now :) If anyone wants to donate one, please open an issue! 2) Exactly, they're so desperate for leads that they will spend lots of time chasing someone who doesn't appear to make lots of sense.
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Doesn't work on cell phones.
I've always wondered why smartphone apps don't have better access to the telephone portion of the device. Why is it so difficult to do something as simple as recording calls? It would be neat if I could get apps to change my voice or encrypt the audio.
I remember once using something called HearSayApp, but it disappeared off the face of the internet without a trace. It used HTML5 to place a call, somehow. And the audio was crystal clear.
It's probably got something to do with some kind of regulations. Voice changers are fun, but not when calling 911, for example. Maybe it's a requirement that the sound goes directly to the baseband or something?
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Doesn't work on cell phones.
I've always wondered why smartphone apps don't have better access to the telephone portion of the device. Why is it so difficult to do something as simple as recording calls? It would be neat if I could get apps to change my voice or encrypt the audio.
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Doesn't work on cell phones.
I've always wondered why smartphone apps don't have better access to the telephone portion of the device. Why is it so difficult to do something as simple as recording calls? It would be neat if I could get apps to change my voice or encrypt the audio.
This is great and seems to work, check out this thread: https://spa.mnesty.com/conversations/hszegufh/