I imagine we’ve all been annoyed by spam selling viagra, watches, penny stocks and penis enlargement creams, but at least they make a certain sort of sense. Spammers send out millions of ads, get tens of sales, and make some money while annoying everyone else.

But what about the spam that isn’t selling anything? What is the point of sending out spam with a string of unrelated words that doesn’t even mention a product name, let alone claim that it will make your stock portfolio larger and more satisfying? To understand this kind of spam we need to think about the entire spamming process and how it has developed over the years.

Sending Spam

Originally spam used to be sent fairly directly. You’d sit (virtually at least) at your internet server or PC and send out your ads to unsuspecting mail servers all over the world. This approach didn’t work for long – blacklists were created to block known spam servers, anti-spamming clauses were written into internet service providers’ contracts, and anti-spam laws were passed in a number of countries. The spammers had to go under the radar.

At the same time this was happening, PCs all over the world were being infected by spyware, trojans, adware and other malware (a catch-all name for ‘malicious software’). Some of these were just annoyances that generated popup ads everywhere, but others would take over your PC and hand control of it to someone else.

The spammers saw this happening and realised that they could write malware that would send out spam – what could be stealthier then getting someone elses PC to send your spam for you? You’d infect their PC with spam-bot software, the spam-bot would connect to the spam server to get the latest ad campaign, and off it would go merrily sending spam out to all and sundry. If you could infect thousands of PCs with your software it didn’t matter if some got shut down, there were always plenty more to keep pumping it out. Spam was not only back, it was back in enormous volume.

Blocking Spam

However, the battle against spam wasn’t solely concentrated on stopping spam being sent. The other major front was stopping spam getting in by blocking incoming email that met certain rules. Originally these rules were fairly simple, looking for key-words like “viagra” in combination with links to websites. These worked somewhat, but they weren’t very effective (“Hey, let’s spell it as v1agra!”) and blocked too many real messages.

The anti-spam filters had to get more sophisticated and the new technique was something called bayesian filtering. Simply put, this technique works by taking a large body of email that has already been sorted into spam and non-spam. When a new email arrives, the bayesian filter is used to ask a simple question – does this new email look more like the emails in the spam group or more like the emails in the non-spam group? This method proved to be much more effective at filtering out spam and the anti-spammers were once again winning the battle.

Naturally the spammers fought back, this time by adding extra bits and pieces to their ads. A typical spam message would have the ad followed by a few paragraphs of pseudo-random generated text, with the hope that the email would look more like a real email and therefore get past the bayesian filters. (The pseudo-random text was quite surreally pretty at times and some geek-literateurs got quite excited and ran off to write learned papers about it.)

Tying it All Together

So the pieces are in place now but how does this explain the nonsense spam? Simply put, the spam-bot software isn’t very well written. It works something along these lines:

1. Infect PC.
2. Connect to spam-server and download the latest ad campaign.
3. Add nonsense text and other anti-anti-spam measures.
4. Start sending spam.

I believe that the nonsense spams happen when step 2 fails, either because of a bug in the spam-bot or because the spam-server has itself been shut down.

Well written software would just stop at this point, but spam-bots don’t have to be good and the software just marches on, adding the anti-bayesian text to the non-existent ad and sending the resulting ad-free nonsense spam out to the world.

And, for a final ironic twist, because the nonsense spams don’t have ads in them they’re more likely to get through the bayesian anti-spam filters and end up in your inbox!

Three comments about the police ‘anti-terrorist’ raids.

1. The political reaction is highly revealing. We have been told that Helen Clark and John Key have both been briefed on the raids and I assume that they therefore have more information than the general populace.

If there really was a serious threat that the police had averted through their investigations, don’t you think that we’d see these politicans lining themselves up behind the police, ready to bask in the glow of public approbation? Wouldn’t a nice juicy anti-government terrorist conspiracy be a great opportunity for both leaders to parade their law and order credentials and their love of peaceful democracy, all the while making sure they mention the words ‘Maori’ and ‘terrorism’ enough times to scare the white middle-class?

Instead the politicians have been distancing themselves from the police as fast as they can while mouthing general platitudes about “supporting the police and the rule of law”. I note even John Key did some anti-police posturing while speaking to the extensions to the terrorism bill.

These are not the actions of people who are expecting this to end with convictions and commendations, they are the actions of people who know that the police have made a colossal conspiracist balls-up and they’re trying to work out how they can get out of the splatter zone before the shit hits the fan.

2. I’m suspicious of the police’s use of the black-clad ninja squads. While their use would seem appropriate when you know you’re going to be doing an assault against an armed and belligerent defender (i.e. your average armed offenders callout or hostage situation), using them to execute arrest warrants seems like intimidation. Did they really have any reason to believe that just turning up and knocking on the door wouldn’t have worked?

3. This may sound odd, but the general scepticism shown towards the police raids have made me somewhat proud to be a New Zealander. While I expect that a real terrorist act in New Zealand would lead to the same sort of craven and cowardly behaviour that the US populace is still engaged in, at least it gives me some hope that we wouldn’t give up all of our suspicion of government power and the civil liberties that go with that view.

My current lifestyle tends to mean I move around a bit, connecting and disconnecting from the internet as required. However, I still want to use IRC to keep up with my online friends. One of the things about IRC is that ideally you want to leave it going all the time so that when you return you can see what’s been happening in your absence.

The simple answer is to use an IRC proxy (often called a bouncer) hosted on a well-connected system somewhere on the internet. The proxy remains connected all the time and logs everything that happens, you just then connect to the proxy as required and it plays back everything you missed.

The problem is that it can be hard to find a suitable system to host your proxy on. My normal solution would be to ask a friend if they would host it – but many IRC servers ban multiple connections from the same IP address so that would cause problems for their own proxies. The next option is commercial hosting, but a lot of hosting companies ban IRC proxies. So, it was time to look for a specialised hosting company and I decided to go for Spexhost.

They offer a suitable shell account (one login, up to two concurrent users) with a pre-configured IRC proxy called psyBNC for US$4/month. I signed up online and paid by Paypal and they responded with my login information within 12 hours. However, the documentation for setup wasn’t as good as I’d have liked, particularly around logging/history, so I decided to write this to help the next person.

Setting up MIRC with psyBNC

1. Use MIRC (or your favourite IRC client) to set up a new server with the details from Spexhost (Tools – Options – Servers). Remember to include the server name, port number and your password.

2. Change the ident and the first part of the email address in MIRC to your spexhost username (Tools – Options – Connect).

3. Connect to the server. psyBNC will open a private channel to you that you can use to send it commands.

4. First you need to setup the IRC servers you wish to connect to. In the psyBNC channel type the following (these are obviously my settings for undernet, modify as required):

/addserver us.undernet.org : 6667
/addserver eu.undernet.org : 6667

5. Next up we have the logging. I want to log everything that happens in my usual channels (psyBNC automatically logs private messages so this doesn’t need to be setup):

/addlog #wellyhaven : *
/addlog #nz : *

6. At this point you should be connected to one of the servers and logging your desired channels (use /listservers and /listlogs to check). Next we need to set MIRC up to automatically retrieve the contents of the logs when we reconnect. I added the following commands to the Perform section (Tools – Options – Options – Perform):

/playprivatelog
/eraseprivatelog
/playtrafficlog last
/erasetrafficlog

And that should be it. You can close MIRC (or, in my case, take your phone out of bluetooth range of the laptop and thereby lose your connection) and when you restart it and connect to your IRC proxy you should be back in the same channels with everything you missed.

This may expose me as being a sad and geeky person, but I’m completely enamoured with my new phone (Sony Ericsson k770i). A repackaged version of the k810i, not only is it small, svelte, purple and a good phone/text device, it’s also doing quite a lot more. This includes:

The Really Useful Features

• Access to Google Mail and LiveJournal from wherever I am. This is particularly useful at the moment as my temporary workplace blocks access to these sites.
• Internet access device for my laptop using 3G UMTS (up to 384kbps).
• High quality 3.2 megapixel digital camera, complete with direct upload to Flickr or LiveJournal courtesy of Shozu.
• Listening to music using the included headset and a 2GB M2 memory card.
• Using the Google Maps application for on-the-go navigation.
• Easy synchronisation of the phone calendar with my Google calendar using GooSync. If only it supported contacts as well (yes, it can be done in a two step Google-PC-Phone process but I don’t want to).

Bits of Good Design

• Sony Ericsson have replaced the sometimes fiddly joystick with a functionally equivalent but easier to use directional pad.
• They’ve replaced the superior Xenon camera flash with a LED photo light. While this isn’t so good for photos it means you can use the phone as a flashlight. I used this feature a lot on my last phone, especially when going down dark paths on steep Wellington hills at night.
• It multitasks! You can receive/send texts while connected to the internet while listening to music.
• You can set multiple alarms and even specify which days they operate. I’ve got one setup to ring at 6:45 from Mon-Fri but not in the weekends. (I cunningly remembered to turn it off for Labour Day.)
• While the connector is the same old ginormous Fast Port plug, it’s been moved from the bottom to the side which seems to work better, especially for headphones.
• It charges itself from USB.
• The shiny metal lense cover is beautifully integrated both physically and electronically. Once you get over the initial hesitation about using enough pressure to open/close it, it works very well and switches the camera immediately into camera mode.

Bonus advantage! We got a Sony Ericsson k530i for Kim the week before and the way that they both use the same chargers and cables and so on just makes life easier.

Stuff That Isn’t So Great

• I’m now paying $86/month to the dreaded Vodafone for my voice and data plans.
• The video quality is still limited to 176×144 pixels (aka crap).
• I miss the clock screen-saver on the k750i. This meant you could check the time without having to press a button.
• Why does the little power bar show the battery to be about 80% full when the phone status reports it’s 55% full?
• Power consumption when doing 3G data is high. When plugged into the mains it still manages to charge but only very slowly.
• I have no idea why the PC software takes 10 minutes to install itself.

My Next Phone

But no matter how good this phone is there’s always something more to desire. Some things I’d like in the next one:

• An even higher res screen. 320 x 240 pixels on a 1.9″ screen is pretty good but a bigger screen with even more pixels would be even better.
• Better text entry. I’m not sure how this would be down while still keeping the same size – and not losing the tactility of the buttons ala the iPhone. Maybe haptics will save me.
• An even even faster data connection.
• It’s going to have be an even better internet terminal (see all three points above this one). I’m impressed with what this one does but it’s still far short of a ‘real’ internet terminal. I wonder whether I’m going to have to sacrifice my desire for small size to get what I want.

And to finish, I’d like to mentally apologise to the very helpful woman at Etown who got me to change my mind from buying the k810i to the superior k770i. Yes, I shouldn’t have been surprised when you were reasonably knowledgeable about the product lines even if you were female and young and dressed like a [classist epithet deleted]. If only stereotypes weren’t so useful much of the time…