An observation about spam

[womzilla]

kent_allard_jr had a recent post about spam actively putting pictures of naked people in front of audiences who had mostly not chosen to see it. agrumer pointed out in response that most of the spam he gets is "penis enlargement and stock trading ads". I responded,

Because of some odd choices I made in my e-mail configuration, embedded pictures in my spam go into their own folder. I have to periodically remember to clean that folder out.

The vast overwhelming majority of the pictures are gifs of text explaining, as you say, where to get stocks and medicines for a low low price that it still infinitely more than they are worth. Of the 600 or so span-related pictures currently in that folder, I see one which actually shows any significant portion of a naked woman--the backside of a woman hugging her man in an erectile-dysfunction ad. At a guess, more than 500 of the rest are just text in .gif form to evade spam filters.

I quote this all here because I noticed something in this latest batch of pictures that I hadn't noticed before: the ads are getting harder to read. Deliberately. By way of illustration, here is an image I got in spam in July:



And here's one I got in spam last week:



It's obvious that the latter image is heavily obliqued; it's also obvious that this is done to help the image slip past Optical Character Recognition software which would be scanning images in spam looking for key words. This is, of course, the opposite of the CAPTCHA idea, where difficult-to-OCR images are used to keep spammers out.

Spammers are evil. I don't favor death for them, but they need to be hunted down and neutralized before they reduce all forms of communications to unusability.