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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

litspam « Previous | |Next »
December 12, 2010

An important article on spam in Radical Philosophy by Finn Brunton. This introduces the concept of litspam, which is what my weblogs are subject to these days. The days of spammers circumventing spam filters by purposely misspelling key words, for example replacing "I" with "1" in the word "click have gone.

Spam Lit exists to circumvent the powerful spam filters developed by major email providers such as Google, Yahoo, AOL. These spam filters recognize the characteristics of typical spam messages and automatically delete them. Brunton says:

the spammers faced a truly strange problem of language: to produce text on a mass scale that would convince the filtering algorithm of its legitimacy while bearing the spam’s payload to the human on the far side of the filter. They had to create bifacial text, a kind of anadrome which reads with two distinct meanings when read forward and backward. This was a twist on Turing’s test: not only to convince a human but to convince a machine as well. Their solution to this problem created the first mechanized avant-garde, the advent of spam’s modernism: litspam.

The problem with trying to beat the Bayesian filter by adding random words to a spam message -- a ‘dictionary attack’ -- was that most words are little-used and new to the filter, so it would weigh them evenly without influencing the result. You need vital language and full sentences, with slight variations to keep the filter from learning your tricks.
The vast corpus of public domain literature happened to be ideal for this purpose, fed into the algorithmic maw of a program to be chopped up and reassembled, enlisting the Professor Challenger stories of Conan Doyle and the minor novels of Sinclair Lewis in the task of getting an online casino ad in front of a pair of human eyes. The result is immediately recognizable, a stochastic knockoff of Tzara or Burroughs, rife with bizarre synonyms that only we particularly anatomically-minded humans would understand, and a stop/start rhythm, flashes of lucidity in the midst of a fugue state, akin to rapidly changing television channels. (‘I began to learn, gentlemen,’ as the ape says in Kafka’s ‘Report to an Academy,’ another awkward speaker learning language as a means of escape: ‘Oh yes, one learns when one has to; one learns if one wants a way out; one learns relentlessly.’) These litspam systems.... don’t need to work perfectly, just well enough. If you send enough messages, you’ll get someone who will overlook the lexical potsherds and click.

Very little litspam comes into my mailbox. Most of the lit spam that attacks the weblog comments to goes into the junk folder of the weblogs, where I eliminate it after 24 hours. It's a pain, but it is manageable.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:32 AM |