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Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

spa.mnesty.com

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Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#101

Post by systematical »

squarefoot wrote: post #84

Great idea! Wasting spammers time is one of the very few ways of making them effectively lose money. Still the project needs some pseudo randomization in order to fool basic research. Some of the messages I read contained the sentence "I am a bit busy now, but I am definitely interested. When can we talk?". If one searches for that sentence in quotes Google returns four pages of references to Spamnesty. A slightly mo…

For now they should simply "noindex" the message history. But your larger point is correct.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#105

Post by peterburkimsher »

I look forward to sending many emails your way!

Spam is a daily problem for me. I can't use auto-filters, because I live in Taiwan and most emails written in Chinese are flagged as spam. That includes important messages from my bank, colleagues, and landlord. Eventually I gave up using auto-filters, and I now manually delete ~50 spam every day.

Being able to do something useful with that will make my spam-sorting a little less mind-numbing.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#106

Post by StavrosK »

systematical wrote: post #101
squarefoot wrote: post #84

Great idea! Wasting spammers time is one of the very few ways of making them effectively lose money. Still the project needs some pseudo randomization in order to fool basic research. Some of the messages I read contained the sentence "I am a bit busy now, but I am definitely interested. When can we talk?". If one searches for that sentence in quotes Google returns four pages of references to Spamnesty. A slightly mo…

For now they should simply "noindex" the message history. But your larger point is correct.

Great idea, added, thanks!

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#107

Post by topspin »

jdietrich wrote: post #35
Tempest1981 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very well done. And the ducks -- hilarious! Now how do you scale and vary this enough, to prevent suspicion? That's the next step. Near the end (28 min), it felt like the caller was probing with "can you hear me" to collect Lenny's canned responses. Would it be better to hang up earlier to avoid suspicion?

"Lenny" is only 21 short recordings, stitched together into a crude sequence. It's a remarkably unsophisticated trick on a technical level. It wouldn't be difficult to produce dozens or hundreds of Lennies on quite a small budget. Tweak the script a bit, get someone on Fiverr to record it and you've got a new and unrecognisable Lenny MkII.

Somehow, somewhere Lenny has gotten connected to Lenny, detecting mutual silences and muttering at each other for years.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#110

Post by haikuginger »

squarefoot wrote: post #84

Great idea! Wasting spammers time is one of the very few ways of making them effectively lose money. Still the project needs some pseudo randomization in order to fool basic research. Some of the messages I read contained the sentence "I am a bit busy now, but I am definitely interested. When can we talk?". If one searches for that sentence in quotes Google returns four pages of references to Spamnesty. A slightly mo…

You could probably build a Tracery grammar that conveyed a certain set of semantic information with a large number of possible syntactic permutations.
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