« Google Notebook arrives | Main | Media Lab Speechome Project »
May 22, 2006
But is it really Art ?
On May 21, 2006, at 4:02 PM, a professor wrote for information :
The level of junk mail received during a 24 hour period in my mailbox now easily surpasses 100. I often get 5 or more copies of the same email.
...
Has the issue of junk mail been discussed as a campus matter requiring attention?
No sooner than I answered his note referring him to yesterday's New York Times article The Fight Against V1@gra (and Other Spam)[1], than "spam" from the UVMTODAY Listserv arrived containing the sentence:
The day of the races had been a very busy day for Alexey Alexandrovitch; but when mentally sketching out the day in the morning, he made up his mind to go to their country house to see his wife immediately after dinner, and from there to the races, which all the Court were to witness, and at which he was bound to be present.
Not recognizing the character "Alexey Alexandrovitch", I cut and paste it into Google, got a hit on Tolstoy. Then I tried the first clause "The day of the races ... Alexandrovitch."
Bingo. Anna Karenina. Part 2, Chapter 26!
This is a hint of what the anti-spam folks have to face - is it Spam or is it Literature. The spammer can make each message contain a unique passage from her favorite author hoping prose can attract us.
In this case, the spam payload was a minimal graphic link - not even clickable - spelling out the site name as "somesite[dot]com". It was much easier to cut and paste a search for the literary passage. So an ad, perhaps for "vitamins," led to a visit to the bookstore. Or perhaps it was really an ad for a bookstore with a small subsidy from a drugstore :)
[1] Tom Zeller Jr., The Fight Against V1@gra (and Other Spam), The New York Times, May 21, 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/business/yourmoney/21spam.html
[2] Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part 2, Chapter 26., The Free Library, 2004. http://tolstoy.thefreelibrary.com/Anna-Karenina/2-26.
[3] Image from The Free Library's entry on Leo Tolstoy, http://tolstoy.thefreelibrary.com/
Posted by sjc at May 22, 2006 8:54 AM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)