Need To Know 2003-03-14

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"I know people fear the opt-out link, but I want to reassure you and your readers that clicking on this link is 1. safe, and 2. the only sure way to remove your address from receiving future spam arrest promotions..." - SpamArrest antispam service shows grasp of local vernacular http://www.politechbot.com/p-04457.html ...FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STOP ME BEFORE I SPAM AGAIN! >> HARD NEWS << apologetic mews Something's stinking in UK online marketing: and yes, it's an even worse stench than usual. Remember the RSPCA, who somewhat tactlessly levelled FaxYourMP with cut-and-paste messages a few weeks ago? It turns out there's another reason why that load hit the site hard. As spotted by an NTK subscriber, one of the RSPCA's mass mailouts got sent further than they'd intended. Texans got pleas to save their local kittens from Guy Fawkes' night; bemused Virginians wondered why they should send outraged faxes to their local MP. These unprompted mails were obfuscated, using all the spamhaus' tricks: domains registered in Guatemala; SMTP relayed through boxen in Argentina, shadow companies based in Florida. Dirty, underhand, spamilicious mail - the kind that you'd expect from pornhounds and Nigerian 419ers. But apprently to advertise a legitamate British ad campaign. http://google.com/groups?selm=E18qwAx-000460-00%40scarlet.dcs.hull.ac.uk http://google.com/groups?selm=e82cnbN4JbXuhfWjXTWcjA%40giganews.com http://google.com/groups?selm=20030309004212.GA25533%40cadeau.d-and-d.com The RSPCA denies all knowledge about this camouflaged spam. As with any large organisation, they'd subcontracted out publicity to a professional marketing outfit called PHDiq. PHDiq - one of the top new media marketers in the UK - say there's been some big mistake, and the mailout they organised was inadvertently extended without their knowledge - but with, it seems, fake headers, bum unsubscribe messages, and various anti-filter forgery. Does this happen often? Searching for one of the domains in the RSPCA spam, maxroi.us, on six weeks of saved spam (all 20,000 messages), we found one other piece. Sent to an address that we've never signed up for any list, this mail had all the hallmarks of a fly-by-night spammer too, right down to the junk ASCII at the bottom to foil simple hash functions. It was an advertisement for British Telecom. http://www.ntk.net/2003/03/14/btspam.txt - BT spam, defanged http://www.ntk.net/2003/03/14/btspam.html - original spam, complete with webbug connections to spamhaus This week, the Advertising Standards Authority announced new rules for SMS and email marketing, requiring members to obtain explicit consent before sending mail. We'd like to test the mettle of that rule, and also dig up any more big corps that - knowingly or not - are sending borderline illegal spam to strangers. Scan your own spam prisons for the domains in the above mails, and let us know what you see. Because if big British corporations are using the lowest spamhausen for giggles, perhaps it's time they got a bit more publicity than they bargained for. http://www.quicktopic.com/19/H/V5cPAqX7zhf - post what you find here http://makeashorterlink.com/?Q182218B3 - ASA press release http://www.cap.org.uk/codes/Bcasp_11.pdf - section 43.4c has the dirt http://www.asa.org.uk/newcomplainbnm/ - new complaint form - automated scripts ahoy >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious A "perfect partner" for taking on the Meccano Separatist Nation: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1566868351/ ... she looks more than "worried": www.ntk.net/2003/03/14/dohmoore.gif ... good question: http://science.howstuffworks.com/question308.htm ... BLOCKBUSTER aims for that lucrative ORIC market sector: http://www.blockbuster.co.uk/search/options.asp?format=g (see under "Platform" - artefact of syndicating data from spong.com) ... though real money is in Roman tourists: www.proofreading.co.uk/ ... BLOGGIES http://www.fairvue.com/?feature=awards2003 give "best tagline" award to "cool, like the other side of the pillow" - which was old when Prince used it in 1997... terror under construction: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/terrorism ... subliminal advice for text browser users: http://www.ntk.net/2003/03/14/dohlynx.png ... how could the MAILWASHER program turn against its own CREATORS? http://www.ntk.net/2003/03/14/dohwasher.png ... your token PUERILE GOOGLISMS: http://google.com/search?q=%22two+bottom+mouse%22 - see also "beast implants", "martial counselling"... >> TRACKING << sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering Spamassassin has been too good for just a bit too long. When it says your friends' mail is spam, you start doubting your friends. And once you've installed it, it works so well that nobody (apart from those unstable Debian freaks) ever gets around to upgrading it. Well, SPAMASSASSIN 2.50 is as good an excuse as any to kick up your version number. This release famously includes tasteful Bayesian hand-waving. That means that with minimal training, SA will learn to differentiate your remaining friends' misspelt HTML mails from your average spammers' messages on "animal secx" (or vice versa). The assassin has dumped the distracting "**** ARGH!!!! SPAM ******" subject line and bodytext munging in exchange for discrete X-Flags and multi-part messages. And they've got a pile of new rules - including special tweaks for spam in Polish, which you have to appreciate. It still takes up a fair bit of CPU time, meaning that the spammers will be contributing just a little more to global warming than before - but hey, if that speeds their long-delayed burning in hell, then it really is *all* good news. http://spamassassin.org/ - can you spot this week's theme? http://www.gryzor.com/tools/#spamstats - you've junked the mail, now crunch the data >> EVENT QUEUE << goto's considered non-harmful ENCODING ALTRUISM: THE ART AND SCIENCE OF INTERSTELLAR MESSAGE COMPOSITION (from Sunday 2003-03-23, Paris, invitation only), sees a killer combination of "scientists, artists, and scholars from the humanities" trying to encode a "Universal peace and hello" that we could send to extra-terrestrials but which won't make them want to despatch the warrior-drones as soon as they receive it. Guess that rules out a hilarious all- caps Nigerian 419 spoof then: "DEAR SIR/MADAM, I FIND MYSELF IN POSSESSION OF 6 BILLION SENTIENT BEINGS PLUS 1 (SLIGHTLY SOILED) ECOSPHERE". Otherwise there's always the "hot weekend" of the UK's (slightly more down to earth) LOVEBYTES FESTIVAL (from 5pm Thu 2003-03-20, various prices and venues around Sheffield), which features the now-traditional usual suspects such as One Dot Zero, Warp Records Films, Aardman Animation and Tom "Nullpointer" Betts. Obviously there's no way of knowing what an alien civilisation would make of this line-up, but it certainly scares the hell out of us. http://publish.seti.org/art_science/2003/ - contact up to 40 million civilisations all on one CD http://www.lovebytes.org.uk/ - oh and a Linux audio workshop over at Redundant Tech http://circlelineparty.org.uk/ - and tonight: putting the "pub" back into "public transport" >> MEMEPOOL << ceci n'est pas une http://www.gagpipe.com/ now that's what we call a clumsily-modified topical Javascript: http://www.martian.fm/dump/weapons_dump.htm ... even funnier than those line-by-line nitpicking disagreements on Usenet: www.ukcdr.org/satire/lexmark/ ... big points! big prizes!: http://www.cockeyed.com/pranks/safeway/ultimate_shopper.html ... inevitably: http://www.kluc.com/audio/constipated.mp3 ... news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/03/americas_us_war_views/html/3.stm - LIFE vs ONION: http://www.theonion.com/onion3734/wdyt_3734.html ... FREEDOM CAR: http://www.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenfuel/ + FREEDOM FRIES: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/2848979.stm = plenty of Biodiesel: http://www.dawn.com/2002/10/22/int17.htm (and anyway, aren't they just implying that "French" is actually a synonym for "Freedom"?)... pron lookalikes of the tech journos: http://blogs.salon.com/0001437/2003/02/28.html#a550 ("Seymour Butts") vs http://www.benhammersley.com/cv/ ... and if that GUARDIAN CRICKET thing isn't a deliberate attempt to viral the page http://makeashorterlink.com/?A28112EC3 - then maybe they should seriously think about it?... >> GEEK MEDIA << get out less TV>> in deference to the multifaceted televisual car-crash that is COMIC RELIEF (from 7pm, Fri, BBC1), C4 ditches its usual Friday night comedy in favour of a mawkish 2-hour appeal on behalf of EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (8pm, Fri, C4)... DESIGNING THE DECADES (8pm, Sat, BBC2) takes a look at the wacky styling of the 1960s, but don't carry on using out-of-date technology for ever, warns SPACE SHUTTLE: THE HUMAN TIME BOMB (8pm, Sat, C4)... and it's Sharon Stone, Chloe Sevigny and Michelle "Dawson's Creek" Williams in HBO's lesbian retro triptych IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK 2 (12.10am, Sat, BBC2)... reality TV meets science in populist hypothesis-testing DIET TRIALS (6pm, Sun; 7pm Mon-Fri, BBC1), TWINS: THE IDENTITY TEST (9pm, Wed, BBC1) and, er, THE NATION'S FAVOURITE FOOD (8pm, Thu, BBC2)... C5 celebrates Japanese cultural differences with showings of both RISING SUN (9pm, Sun, C5) and BLACK RAIN (9pm, Wed, C5) ... and conoisseurs of subs and/or nuclear weapons are equally well catered for by the likes of ISRAEL'S SECRET WEAPON (7.15pm, Sun, BBC2), ULTIMATE SUBMARINES (8pm, Sun, C5), and U-234: HITLER'S LAST SUBMARINE (8pm, Mon, C4) - though perhaps "U-235" might have been a better name for it, eh, isotope fans?... there are new series of sub-"Egg Race" homemade robot nonsense TECHNO GAMES (6.45pm, Mon-Fri, BBC2), terrible fake CCTV comedy show DOUBLETAKE (9.30pm, Mon, BBC2) and bioweapon- response drill ER (9pm, Wed, C4)... maybe the French will retaliate by replacing the word "American" in films like AMERICAN PSYCHO (9pm, Wed, BBC3) with - off the top of our heads - "Arrogance" or something?... the neurological basis of religion is revealed in HORIZON: GOD ON THE BRAIN (9pm, Thu, BBC2)... and the makers of the "Alex [Garland] And I" spoof try to get their hands on some of that $27m reward in their satirical docu-comedy OSAMA AND US (11.10pm, Thu, C4)... FILM>> Christian Bale, Emily Watson and - topically enough - Saddam Hussein (as himself) are among the "[Common] Sense Offenders" in preposterously implausible martial arts "The Matrix" wannabe meets "Fahrenheit 451" knockoff EQUILIBIRUM ( http://www.capalert.com/capreports/equilibrium.htm : strong theme of persecution of the Christian faith; dozens of killings/murders at the hands of the "police"; it seems by the logic of this movie that one has to read a book or look at a painting to become a free-thinker or become open minded)... Tom Green, Jason "Chasing Amy" Lee and Megan "Will And Grace" Mullally don't quite reach the sophistication of some of their previous work in goofy grossout caper comedy STEALING HARVARD ( http://www.capalert.com/capreports/stealingharvard.htm : bikini carwash; transvestism forced at gunpoint, repeatedly; oral sexual stimulation by dog, repeatedly)... Ice Cube finds himself on a similarly urgent last minute dash for money in African-American community hairdressing feelgooder BARBERSHOP ( http://www.capalert.com/capreports/barbershop.htm : man grabbing a woman's behind so his fingers curled into her lower glutei fissure; sex counseling; insult to Jesus)... and another theme of "Stealing Harvard" - crying during sex - is revisited when Kevin Spacey, for once, plays an unjustly accused murderer in death penalty drama THE LIFE OF DAVID GALE ( http://www.screenit.com/movies/2003/the_life_of_david_gale.html : we then see the side of [former "Lara Croft" Rhona Mitra's] bare butt as she tells [Kevin Spacey] to rip her thong panties off her - he does)... AVAILABLE IN A WIDE RANGE OF BLACK>> the ever-controversial PayPal are now taking Switch and Solo payments if you click the "Outside the U.S.?" option from http://www.ntkmart.com/ , though our only new t-shirts at the moment are a version of the topical "uck Wa" design without the poem on the back, and an intriguing in-house experiment featuring a wireframe skull and crossbones plus the all-purpose conversational gambit "got waReZ?". Regarding reader designs, we're still torn over how to make BRUCE's http://www.geekstyle.co.uk/images/brain.gif look more like an authentic anti-drugs ad (get in touch and win $$$ if your design skills are up to it), and tempted by WILL GRAINGER's http://www.geekstyle.co.uk/images/trust.gif (some say that ASCII art never went out of style), and STEFAN MARIANSKI's unofficial sequel to Lloyd Wood's "++ungood;", the HTML close tag http://www.geekstyle.co.uk/images/uncool.gif - handily signifying just how "uncool" you're prepared to be. In text-only terms, MIKE REED proposed the pithy "E&OE", going on to explain that it stands for "Errors and Omissions Excepted" - in other words, "if something's not right, you're not to blame" - while DR JOHN A KING is tickled by an idea along the lines of "#find arse/ error: arse not found/ #where elbow/ Error: no such file/ #diff arse elbow/ ans = 0" but, at the moment, "can't quite make it funny in any one shell". NTKMart - just because the code is syntactically correct doesn't make the jokes any easier to explain... of course, this year's real action has been in the neverending contest to "Buy One, Subvert The Mass Media, Get One Free", with impressive product placement in outlets as varied as a story on BBC London News about how YOZ GRAHAME did all his socialising online; a full- blown fashion spread in the current issue of PC EXTREME (one of the few national computing titles to feature a PayPal tip jar/buy-the-writers-a-beer-fund); plus reader LOZ lurking in the audience for a recent edition of BBC's "Question Time" - full evidence at http://www.geekstyle.co.uk/images/ . Sadly, you don't win a free shirt just for spotting one in the media, to the likely disappointment of FRED EASEY, one of several readers to note that Marie Claire's famed reputation for hard- hitting investigative journalism had failed to prepare them for the sight of NTK's own Danny O'Brien wearing an "Elite" shirt in last month's issue of the popular women's magazine... >> SMALL PRINT << Need to Know is a useful and interesting UK digest of things that happened last week or might happen next week. You can read it on Friday afternoon or print it out then take it home if you have nothing better to do. It is compiled by NTK from stuff they get sent. Registered at the Post Office as "still keeping an eye on Dave Winer" http://www.msnbc.com/news/878445.asp NEED TO KNOW THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK. Archive - http://www.ntk.net/ Unsubscribe? Mail ntknow-unsubscribe@lists.ntk.net Subscribe? 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