the weeeeblog about nothing

I've always been very careful about spam and was pretty successful in avoiding it. One glaring exception has been MusicRip, since the previous owner put email addresses in plain text on the website.
But apparently spammers are really good at making and keeping New Years resolutions. In the past few days I've been flooded in different kinds of spam, some traditional, but more interestingly some in what appears to be new ways.

Comment Spam:
I managed to avoid this for so long, but when I logged on to write this entry, I had about 90 new comments. If you didn't know me, you'd think I really liked penis pills.

Work Email:
Lately I've been working with many more people outside the company walls, customers and vendors alike. Coincidentally I've begun receiving a few pieces of spam per day, mostly about the next hot stock. I really hope it's just a coincidence, and not unscrupulous marketers selling addresses.

Friendster/MySpace:
I've started to receive messages from new users asking me to visit their webcam site, or IM hotBaBe98837849695 on AIM, but most interestingly go to a "type4nano" site. Here's what the message looks like:

From: Jeanne
Date: Friday, January 06, 2006 3:38:00 AM
Subject: whats up bro
Message: dammit dude. i just went to the mall and bought and ipod nano like 2 days ago.

hit me up later and let me know when youre done.

This site utilizes humans to decipher captcha (those weird looking words you have to type in to prove that you're a human) and sign up for more fake spam users that way. I'd heard about porn sites forwarding hotmail/yahoo/gmail's captcha out when you sign up for their site, but this takes it to a whole new level. 75 words for a free nano! This is an interesting take on the whole Amazon Mechical Turk (wikipedia) Human Intelligence Task idea.

If you want to see the bleeding edge of technology, just take a look at what the pornographers and spammers are doing.