I'm a lasagna boy!

Slang King Nr. 2

SPAM filters are failing against the latest round of randomly-generated Subject: headers.

Some recent favourites:

"cyclades manic repairman motherland"
"portage operating ineducable magnitude"
it's like poetry.
"imprompty amnesia falcon"
"explicable bullet scold"
AND:
radian frescoes bobcat
alsatian expositor (sounds like a Fall song)
fascinate pontiff antipasto ineradicable coalition

but "magneto snoshage links" was from aram :-)

February 5, 2004 UPDATE:
The New York Times has a nice article on this phenomenon in today's Circuits section

Yours Not So Truly, J. Goodspam
By LISA NAPOLI

PURPOSES L. XYLOPHONIST sounds like my kind of man. Unique. Creative. Focused, with a hint of formality.

There is no way to be certain that Mr. Xylophonist is, in fact, a mister. Actually, it is a pretty safe bet he is not a person at all. The fact that his name appeared in the return line of a piece of unsolicited e-mail almost assures that he is not.

Mr. Xylophonist wrote trying to sell some pamphlet about maximizing profits on eBay. Or maybe that was what Beiderbecke P. Sawhorse was pitching. It was definitely not the one from Marylou Bowling; she wrote to tell about "Government Free Cash Grant Programs." Then again, that might have been from Elfrieda Billman. As for Usefully T. Medicaids and Boggs Darrin, they both wrote about cheap drug sales, no prescription needed. (Of course.)

Alongside those missives from friends and that drudgery from the office is a cast of e-mail characters with fantastic names promising all manner of stuff for sale. Frequently the promises are bogus; virtually all of the names are, too.

Though it seems impossible to imagine the unwanted e-mail known as spam as anything but a nuisance, there is something creative about these return addresses - even if they are being used for untoward purposes. On Web bulletin boards, they are sometimes draw admiring observations.

"I like a lot of the names I see on spam e-mails because they're completely abstract, with little conception of culture or traditional sounds," said a posting by someone using the name Oissubke, a self-described fiction writer. "They jump out. They're memorable. They may not work for Grisham or Shakespeare, but they're ideal for my own writing style."

When it comes to making names up, August Kleimo, whose name is just unusual enough that it might have been invented, knows that the best source material is reality.

Mr. Kleimo, a Web designer in the Venice section of Los Angeles, said he was trolling at the Census Bureau's Web site a few years ago and found "tons of free data," including all the last names from the census of 1990. There was also information on which of those names were most popular.

This inspired Mr. Kleimo in a way only a computer aficionado could be inspired: he wrote a random-name generator that spits out pairings (www.kleimo.com /random/name.cfm). Site visitors can adjust the obscurity factor depending on how bizarre they would like the names served up to be (Alberta Trotman being one of the common sort, and Buck Charbonnel and Erasmo Pehowich exemplifying the "totally obscure" category).

Now in its third year, the site attracts about 3,000 visitors a day, Mr. Kleimo said. Some are just people looking to amuse themselves, but others have a more directed purpose.

"I noticed a lot of people were linking to the page who ran fantasy games, linking to it for their character names," Mr. Kleimo said.

But not everyone who visits uses his invention for harmless fun. "I've always suspected that people use it for spam," he said.

That he may unwittingly be contributing to one of the great modern scourges does not disturb Mr. Kleimo, whose business creates companion Web sites for television infomercials, among other things. "If people want to use it that way," he said, "it doesn't really bother me."

To be sure, many of the common software programs for spammers include random-name generation in any case.

And Mr. Kleimo's is not the only random-name generator on the Web: dozens can be sampled there. Mike Campbell, for example, an amateur etymologist and software developer in Victoria, British Columbia, built Behind the Name (www .behindthename.com/random.html), which allows visitors to generate names in various languages, from Icelandic to classical Greek.

Chris Pound, who works in the information technology department at Rice University in Houston, has written more than 40 random generators, including what he calls an "amazing verbal kung-fu" generator, as well as one that merges names from the worlds of Harry Potter and of Dickens (www.ruf.rice.edu/~pound).

"As a kid, I was a fan of the novels of M. A. R. Barker, who is a linguistic anthropologist," said Mr. Pound, whose Web site offers the code he uses to create his generators. "He, like J. R. R. Tolkien, had invented languages for all of the empires in his fantasy novels. It becomes a hobby after a while when you notice things you can turn into a name generator."

But for spammers, name generators can be the bones of the business.

Wildly unusual invented proper names are designed to attract your attention. Less inventive names are chosen to lead you to think the mail might just be real, and to open it. But aside from seizing the recipient's attention, spammers use random names because they are more likely to trick the anti-spammers, including Internet service providers.

"Spammers use software to randomly generate lots of unique names because they know it reduces the chance of their spam being filtered by I.S.P.'s or blocked by users," said Jason Catlett, founder of the Junkbusters Corporation, a company dedicated to the elimination of unwanted solicitations. "Thousands of people a day must hit 'refuse mail from this sender' when they get e-mail claiming to be from Mrs. Marriam Abacha, a favorite of Nigerian scammers. So she has become less common, and spammers know that if they choose any one fixed name they will be similarly treated."

Instead, Mr. Catlett says, they now choose random combinations of first and last names, "the software equivalent of putting a Chinese lunch menu on a dartboard."

Several years ago, spam filters began to catch on to the trend of using sender names that are a combination of letters and numbers, said Ray Everett-Church, chief privacy officer of the ePrivacy Group, which makes a filter called SpamSquelcher.

Randomly generated names are more likely to squeeze through so-called Bayesian filters, which keep track of common words used in spam, like Viagra, and weed them out. A human may detect a randomly generated name as a fake, Mr. Everett-Church said, but "a filter can't really see the irony of Tupperware J. Smithington."

During our phone conversation, he received an e-mail message from one Kentucky V. Clockwise, who was promoting low-cost Viagra. (The words "Saddam Hussein" were in the subject line.) A few hours later Mr. Everett-Church forwarded a missive from Offense C. Teats promising an electronic greeting card - although the crux of that message, too, concerned performance-enhancing drugs. Despite the use of various filters on his various accounts, Mr. Everett-Church said, spam still ekes through.

Everyone who fights spam concedes the difficulty of outsmarting the generators. "There is essentially a war going on between the spammers and the anti-spammers, and the spammers are always one step ahead," said Stu Sjouwerman, chief operating officer of Sunbelt Software, creator of the spam filter iHateSpam. Random-name generators are just "one of the weapons they use in this battle to get their e-mail first through the filters and then opened up," Mr. Sjouwerman said.

During a telephone interview, an e-mail from an Elly Havewinkel landed in his in-box, asking "if I would please call because I've been the lucky man - I've won a million euros, congratulations."
"It seems to be a genuine business letter," said Mr. Sjouwerman, who clearly knew it was not.

Which is why human users ultimately have the leg up on random name generators, said David J. Farber, a computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and an Internet pioneer. And also why, he said, e-mail is clearly a fallible technology on which people may need to become less reliant.

"I strongly suggest to people right now if they want to get hold of me, here's my cellphone," Mr. Farber said. "Myself and others have found getting your phone book back up to date is getting more important." Of course, what action he will take if he starts receiving voice mail from Purposes L. Xylophonist is an entirely different issue.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | Help | Back to Top

No transit left behind.

What we lose while California's debt mounts.

The revolution will not be magnetised.

China will open its first maglev train line next week. This opening co-incides with the Chinese New Year. It's the Year of the Monkey.

There's an extensive blog on this topic.

Read on for do-it-yourself Maglev instructions!

This is very similar to something my dad and I built when I was 8 or 9. Somewhere we still have the notebook with the design and notes!

From The Guardian:
How to make a maglev at home

1 Take a roll of double-backed sticky tape, a piece of cardboard, 20 to 30 small magnets (square ones work best) and ideally one sheet of Perspex.

2 Cut two strips of the tape no more than 1m long. Take 20 magnets (setting aside five for later use) and stick them to the tape. Try to space them as equally as you can, all facing the same polarity. To check this, run a spare magnet over each row. It should either be attracted or repelled by all the magnets in the strip. Now tape the magnets to the cardboard base of the box in parallel lines close to the sides of edge of the base. This is the guideway.

3 To prevent the maglev from leaving the guideway, build two walls. Cardboard will do, but Perpex is best because the point of this experiment is to see magnetic levitation in action. You should now have a makeshift open-top box with the Perspex constituting the longest sides.

4 Now you need a train. Cut a rectangular piece of cardboard that fits inside the guide walls. Attach four magnets to the corners of the train. Be sure that all four magnets are placed so that they are repelled by the magnets on the track. Place the train gently above the track inside the guide walls and watch it float. Hey presto! Magnetic levitation.

5 A gentle push will move the train along the track, but if you want to be really posh, use another magnet. With the lack of friction and wind resistance the maglev should float to the other end.

Take a memo.

Arrived home this evening to find a memo from the The Mayor's Disability Council of San Francisco, soliciting public comment on the recently-installed traffic circles. The meeting is set for a day and a half after the memo was delivered; I can't make it, but I'm going to send my comments via email.
A few weeks ago, the city distributed a questionnaire about the impact of the roundabouts. The online version doesn't work as a webapp, but one can print it out and send it via fax or post.

"Surely nothing on earth ..."

Francis X. Clines has a meditative editorial on cycling Manhattan in yesterday's New York Times.

Happily, Clines points out one of the most enjoyable aspects of urban cycling: "... storefront bars can be found for cold beer or hot coffee."

January 12, 2004
THE CITY LIFE

Rounding the Island, on Wheels
By FRANCIS X. CLINES

Urban biker's appropriately abrupt diary: begin tour by checking out familiar landmarks. The wild turkey dubbed Giuliani is still pecking around unharmed in the bushes up from the bike path on Riverside Drive. (Bird seems overfed by West Side liberals, and badly named — more resembling Ed Koch, as mayoral stares and prancings go.) Back on the bike, and zipping past the Amiable Child Memorial (5-year-old lad fell to his death in 1797, when New York was more rural than urban-wild). Soon shifting gears to curl down and around onto one of the modern wonders of Manhattan: the Waterfront Greenway bike path that circumvents the island by shoreline. Splendid. Most shocking, it is perfectly sign-marked; no way to miss a turn. Whoever heard of such consideration in New York? Must be a new and cunning biker's lobbyist at City Hall.

You don't need one of those Spider-Man designer costumes or racks of water bottles, as if traversing the Gobi. Scruffy is fine enough on a New York winter morning. "Watch it," works better as a caution to a pedestrian than the imperious "On your right!" that is standard elsewhere. The Hudson, Harlem and East Rivers ripple past, dark waters fiercely defining terra firma. The path unfolds north, east, south, the biker with a sense of pedaling upward into a simple, exhilarating city escape. "Surely nothing on earth of its kind can go beyond this show," Whitman said of his own Manhattan tour, and his summary works as well by bike as by boat.

Wheeling up to and under the George Washington Bridge, so high its traffic hum does not overwhelm the slapping sound of the river. Temptations abound: the Cloisters for a medieval detour? The great brownstone side streets of still another Harlem renaissance? The Bronx looms, salt of the city earth, half-finished as ever. The few forced veerings from the shore — down St. Nicholas Avenue, later dodging the United Nations — are a perfect respite: storefront bars can be found for cold beer or hot coffee. Studying passing faces on the sidewalk fuels the race back to more sights on the river.

Just across the water, there is beloved, beleaguered Queens, packed as ever with strivers. Green and stony Brooklyn glistens, its spirit arching like its bridge. Sea winds whirl round the jutting Battery, making the bike feel mortal-heavy; but then transcendent light at the sudden sight of distant pedestrians, small and still as architects' pin-people. They stare down on the island's trade center scars. The Hudson mercifully rushes on like time, escaping city history as much as explaining it to the laboring biker. Sights clash in review: the aircraft carrier ludicrously displaced at the peaceful midtown shore. The buckled and rusted skeletons of old terminals leaning wanly toward the river. They dodge extinction uptown, as dedicatedly as the biker.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

What time is it?

While German police are investigating for fraud a man who sold potatoes as computers, even more enterprising youth are installing sound systems run by russets and building a tuber-powered web server, which feature a 220uF capacitor which " ... can power the server for about 10 seconds, long enough to swap in a new potato or simply stab one of the nails or copper wires into a fresh, juicy area."

So much for my gags about a potato clock.

UPDATE: Down at the pub, Aram set up a full-scale potato clock while we quaffed whiskey and ate tiramisu with a bar spoon.

Reading found the scientific explanation for all this tomfoolery.

BERLIN (Reuters) - German police are investigating after an
angry man returned a computer he had just bought saying it was
packed with small potatoes instead of computer parts.

The store replaced the computer free of charge but became
suspicious when he returned a short time later with another
potato-filled computer casing, police in the western city of
Kaiserslautern said Monday.

"The second time he said he didn't need a computer any more
and asked for his money back in cash," a police spokesman said.

Police are now investigating the man for fraud.

Autumn suéter.

This morning experienced, perhaps for the first time in years, the dilemma of "what to wear." I was stuck on wearing blue-grey trousers, and don't have a suitable flannel shirt that matches. The solution presented itself as I opened a package sent by my mother: it contained an assortment of study woolens, including a cosy-looking grey cardigan. Perfect!