Last week I went through my spam folder in my e-mail client. One, I wanted to make sure that no good e-mails had slipped through the cracks. Fortunately, not. And two, I wanted to go through the word salad spams and see if I could find some completely batshit phrase that might make for a fun writing prompt — something like “The polar bear rode the pencil to the top floor.” I don’t know what that is, but it’s genius.<\/p>\n
I noticed something… odd<\/i>, however.<\/p>\n
Picture spam has become quite common in the past year. Rather than send yet another text message about some stock that’s about to become really, really<\/i> big, the spammers had taken to send an image with the text, on the belief that a spam filter won’t see the words that indicate that this might, in fact, not be a legitimate message.<\/p>\n
I noticed that the picture spam had become… strange<\/i>.<\/p>\n
The pictures weren’t legible. They were pixilated. Strange colors. The idea that, maybe, these were meant to be read with 3-D glasses even occurred to me. First thought — That’s weird. Second thought — Why? Third thought — Well, that<\/i>‘s going in the garbage.<\/p>\n
I filed the little factoid away. Spam for people wearing 3-D glasses. Gotcha.<\/p>\n
It turns out this is the latest spam tactic<\/a> — the thinking seems to be that spam filters won’t recognize the 3-D-ified image.<\/p>\n The obvious problem is, this isn’t going to make a sale. It’s confusing to the customer. Not that I’m in the market for what a spammer is flogging, because I’m not.<\/p>\n It’s just weird.<\/p>\n So, fair readers, if you get a 3-D spam image, it’s not your eyes deceiving you. It really is<\/i> supposed to be like that. \ud83d\ude15<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week I went through my spam folder in my e-mail client. One, I wanted to make sure that no good e-mails had slipped through the cracks. Fortunately, not. And two, I wanted to go through the word salad spams and see if I could find some completely batshit phrase that might make for aContinue reading “On the Latest Spam Annoyances”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4095],"tags":[396],"class_list":["post-1314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wordpress","tag-silly","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}