Obama Beats McCain In Spam Landslide 154
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times runs an article about the spammers' choice of presidential candidate. From the article: 'According to Secure Computing Corp., spammers were nearly seven times more likely to slap Obama's name in the subject line than McCain's during September. The bulk of Obama's lead in the spam wars came from a massive blitz early in the month.' Secure Computing released additonal numbers for the past weeks, and McCain was able to close the gap in the latest spammers' poll."
This is stupid. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is such non-news. Does anyone really care who spammers use in a subject line for spam?
Political interest? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems to me that the spammers must be working on a basis of whatever words most likely to interest the reader into clicking further, so it's perhaps an indicator of how interesting "person X" is overall at a given time. I've seen various celebrity names pop up, and I believe that Obama's did awhile back before the newer spams containing Palin's name in conjunction with various sexual keywords.
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I'm analyzing spam headers is part of your job description, otherwise you have way too much spare time :D
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Gah! That should read: "I'm hoping analyzing spam headers".
Technically, it is (Score:1)
Depends on the SPAM header, but if we're getting a lot of any particular SPAM variety, then adding a rule which will tag+filter/trash it without killing off legit mail is part of the job.
Re:Technically, it is (Score:4, Funny)
Surely that would be the X-Spam header?
Now... all we have to do is get the spammers to start using it, and we can all get on with our real jobs ;)
Re:Political interest? (Score:5, Interesting)
"I'm (hoping) analyzing spam headers is part of your job description, otherwise you have way too much spare time :D"
I know I look at my spam folder and could come up with similar "analysis" without spending much time or effort. It is usually pretty obvious what the trends are.
Most of us know that spam filters are not perfect, so we scan our spam folders for false positives. Every now and then I open one up, mostly just curious as to what the scam is.
A few months ago I opened one up. It was an email confirming my registration with some dating site. I was perusing it, looking for the scam, when I noticed it had the last 4 digits of the credit card used to open this account. Strangely, it was the same as my credit card!
I checked my bank website and sure enough, somebody was using my credit card. They foolishly used my email account, and I use unique email addresses when I buy things online. I canceled my card immediately and contacted the company associated with that email address.
I convinced them it was likely real and suggested they contact a security firm. Sure enough, a few days later, the FBI called and thanked me for being persistent and asked for any more info I had. They indeed had been hacked (SQL injection), about a year earlier, and about 90% of the credit cards used at that site over the last year had been canceled due to fraud.
In my case, I was able to cancel my card within hours of it being compromised, and about $1000 worth of fraudulent purchases wiped off my card with almost no questions. It would have been a lot uglier and more hassle if I did not catch this until the statement came. I now get a daily statement in email and scan it thoroughly.
Bottom line, a little basic analysis of your spam is a good idea. Doesn't have to be your job to find benefit. To the best of my knowledge nobody got busted, but that gaping hole was fixed, and that company now uses a trusted service for their shopping cart application.
Actually what I worry about more (Score:3, Insightful)
is the amount of spam email I get that is blatantly pro-Obama propaganda.
Either his campaign is hiring them, or someone who supports him is spending a HELL of a lot of money (and violating campaign finance laws) hiring them.
I don't vote for spammers or corrupt chicago crooks. Therefore, I won't vote Obama.
You too? (Score:2, Informative)
I tried to submit stories on this MONTHS ago, after the Obama campaign somehow got my email and started sending me their constant spam messages. Content directly traced back, emails all about their campaign stops, from "David Plouffe", "Michele Obama", links to their blog entries on the official Obama site, etc... but the headers most DEFINITELY through known spam houses and zombie spam networks.
For some reason, Slashdot wasn't interested that the Obama campaign does this. I'd think it should be a major con
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Although I wouldn't put it past anyone's campaign to do these kinds of things, it's quite possible that there are simply a large number of loose cannons in the spam world who want to do Obama a favor by spreading his name around. Let's face it, spammers and their targets are not the sharpest knives in the drawer so the spammers are likely to think they are helping their candidate even if they're not, and as to intended spam targets, well, they're an oblique proof of evolution in that apparently it sometime
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Small problem (Score:2)
Small problem:
I NEVER signed up for Obama campaign mail. In fact, after they repeatedly ignored my unsubscribe demands, I called them via voice to demand they remove my name and email from any of their lists (I don't need my work email clogged with their spam, I have enough trouble sorting what comes through that's actually relevant).
I can guarantee you, I've been receiving the same ones you are. The reply-to address changes names from "Barack Obama", "Michele Obama", "David Plouffe", etc, but the underlyin
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Wasn't there some canned spam act that made a place you can complain to about things like that?
When dealing with spam, the remove me from your list option is generally not a good Idea though. I doubt this applies with the Obaba spam but in general, they know your address is good after asking to take you off the list which makes it more valuable when they sell it to other spammers.
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I usually ignore those "take me off your list" things. I figured the Obama campaign would be a different story once I verified that it was actually going to their servers and not elsewhere.
Silly me - I found out how honest Obama really is (read: not at all) the hard way.
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Im not suprised you have trouble sorting what comes through, if you cant manage a simple delete *@barakobama.com rule with your email client of choice. personally i signed up to his spam service but as soon as i unsubscribed they stopped bothering me .
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I have a hypothesis: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=Break+in+Republican+laptop [google.com]
Another hypothesis could be that people are signing up their "friends" (often inadvertently, but sometimes on purpose). This was really popular back in college (as I recall) by signing up known person's emails as a prank.
Remember at the Dem's convention they were collecting cell phone numbers of the numbers of family and
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Nope, not Missouri, and I'm not a member of the Repuglican party either. I don't have any friends who pull that kind of prank (they're much more the "replace toiletries with something amusing" types). I also keep my work and private email separate, and my relatives (even grandparents) know better than to include me on any chain or "blanket the entire address book" emails.
The interesting part is that my private, work, and even my "this is probably going to get spammed so I'll only use it when I'm doing a wei
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[snip]
Interesting link on the voter registration fraud. I knew about a lot of his bad connections, but that one's even worse than most.
Note that basically every site that talks about how bad ACORN is is a site with a known conservative bent. No, I haven't read every site out there, and I don't plan to. I found information on many sites by checking SourceWatch [sourcewatch.org], a site that shows the ties that various online and print news outlets have. They do note that they're a progressive organization, so at least they're being honest. Of course, they also use facts and don't really seem to put much opinion in their synopses. They also cite sources,
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That's disturbing. MySpace should sue.
Incidentally the domain is registered to one PrivacyProtect.com, which apparently is a service that registers domain names for individuals who wish to remain anonymous. Hmmm... I wonder why they want to remain anonymous?
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Did you happen to notice that the domain was registered in February of 2004? It's unlikely that the Obama campaign decided to grab it for this campaign. (actually, this thread [dnforum.com] shows that it may have been handed over to MySpace in 2006.)
So who knows who decided to point it at the Obama campaign site.
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Did you happen to notice that the domain was registered in February of 2004?
Actually, yes.
It's unlikely that the Obama campaign decided to grab it for this campaign.
Of course; I never implied that. More likely it's an Obama fanboi.
I don't know why, but I find a tendency of certain supporters of Democrats to break the law. (I'm not saying Republicans' supporters don't, but I certainly haven't observed it.) In my city, at least the past two presidential elections (this one and the Bush/Kerry in '04, maybe before but I don't specifically remember it from before so I'll just say the last two) there have been Democrat yard signs pounded into city property. (Fr
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Interesting. We don't have that particular restriction on "yard signs" as far as I can tell. Of course you're not allowed to put them in someone else's yard, including city building lawns, but you are allowed to put them on the "treelawn" - the place between the road and sidewalk. The rule we do have is that you must remove any signs you put up - the trash is yours to keep. :)
As for Democrats breaking the law more often than Republicans - I don't know. There are people who will do anything they can to g
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I'm not talking about the "tree lawn" (heck, most people think it belongs to them anyway), I'm talking about grassy medians in boulevards and highways, along roads at the edges of city parks, and next to exit ramps on the highways. In 2004 I specifically remember hundreds and hundreds of Kerry/Edwards signs lining the grassy median on one boulevard in my city. They were placed maybe 20 or 30' apart. Frankly I thought they were an eyesore and they'd have been equally so if they'd been Bush/Cheney signs.
And a
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Last time I checked, "Freedom of Speech" actually meant something in this country--regardless of political preference.
Re:Actually what I worry about more (Score:5, Informative)
Oh come on, .be email address for gods sake.
I've gotten plenty of Obama or/vs McCain mails too and I have a
These mails are NOT targeted, they are just sent out at random based on some lousy email-list; So yes, that implies they are coming from some spammer/bot-net.
However, receiving a mail from candidate X does not necessarily mean that X (or his spin-team) asked given spammer to send these out. Jumping to that conclusion is just bad-mouthing IMHO. In fact, I find it much more likely that
* the spammer is simply sending out spam to un-train the filters
* the spammer prefers candidate Y and tries to make X look bad by drowning people in annoying X-spam, whether Y paid given spammer for this or not is impossible for me to find out.
* the message contains some malicious payload
Frankly, I don't care, it's going straight to the recycle bin anyway.
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Actually, they are targeted. Just not very well.
For the entire run up in the election starting with the primaries, Obama put a splash page on their site's main page and if you didn't look at the enter site in print about the size of the copyright notice in the lower corner, you couldn't get in without giving your email address. Unfortunately for you, someone probably entered your email address instead of their own and your getting targeted information from an ass-clown who was specifically harvesting email
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They probably just scrape headlines and look for common words that are proper nouns (capitalized) hoping that these will attract interest. Obama has had more hype than McCain for the most part.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=obama%2C+mccain&ctab=0&geo=US&geor=all&date=2008&sort=1 [google.com]
Most likely because, like Palin, he entered the national spotlight suddenly and so people aren't as familiar with him as they are with McCain.
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Or they're working on the basis of what words you're already receiving in your email. I can tell you, since I signed up the day his website went online, that Obama's campaign sends a buttload of email. I actually read or skim most of it (I really did ask for it, after all), but the spammer is hoping I'm as interested in their junk as the real deal.
What I don't understand is why spammers are too stupid to make their emails look legitimate. It's been years since I can remember receiving even a single spam
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who spammers use in a subject line for spam
it's perhaps an indicator of how interesting "person X" is overall at a given time
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It is at least as relevant as the Halloween mask race. Well it could be. That is why it is interesting.
Obama Obama Obama (Score:1, Funny)
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Lol.. someone wasted a bunch of mod points. Whats the problem? afraid to have something critical of your supreme leader in public? I mean I'm a troll for pointing out that most people don't know what a snake oil salesman is anymore? That's like saying people are trolling when they don't know what one of the bushisms mean.
419 (Score:4, Funny)
But who do the 419 scam jerks want?
Re:419 (Score:5, Funny)
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Duh! (Score:5, Funny)
Clearly there's no point in the spammers forging the send as McCain, he openly admits he doesn't know how to use email!
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they already do [slashdot.org]
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"I don't e-mail, I've never felt the particular need to e-mail," Senator John McCain
Reference: here [nytimes.com]
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...and why would he, when he has people hired to do that sort of thing?
Oh, and the NY Times is stupid... why do I need a free login to see their article?
Obama is the king on internet. (Score:4, Informative)
Google is evil! (Score:5, Interesting)
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A few more words... On youtube, Videos against Obama posted by Hillary/McCain supporters or independents have low click counts and posts against Obama are frequently missing. This begins the age of internet Big Brother!
Hint: Using the N word will get something censored.
Re:Google is evil! (Score:5, Funny)
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If the site is Probama, then yes.
oh iiiiis it. (Score:2, Flamebait)
and the person you label as 'big brother' openly declares support about net neutrality and lectures about what freedom and equal opportunity means to internet and how it is tied to network neutrality on his website and policies.
dont spurt crap without knowing about what you speak about next time.
Re:oh iiiiis it. (Score:4, Insightful)
and the person you label as 'big brother' openly declares support about net neutrality and lectures about what freedom and equal opportunity means to internet and how it is tied to network neutrality on his website and policies.
Politicians preaching one thing and practicing the exact opposite has been around since the dawn of politics.
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I started noticing a certain "bug" on youtube where certain clips would be stuck at 200-300 views, yet have more ratings and comments than the view count. It first popped up on Ron Paul and other political videos. The bug would last long enough to keep the clip out of any most viewed category on the main page.
I've been using youtube since its inception and have only noticed this "bug" on political clips. It would be great if someone could share an experience of this "bug" on a non-political clip.
It is also
No surprise (Score:5, Funny)
Spammers peddle in CHANGE (in size) and HOPE (for a lower mortgage rate).
Easy explanation (Score:2)
Then again, McCain is for the same nanny-state, so this explains nothing!
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This is not that the spammers have backed Obama with their support. It is that more spam delivered has the string 'Obama' than 'McCain' - it is a crude (but independant) measure of the popularity or current awareness of each individual.
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Then again, McCain is for the same nanny-state, so this explains nothing!
Wait... What?
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Obama promises to hold a gun to your head. McCain promises to let you choose what brand of gun he holds to your head.
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As for the legislation at the federal level, I was referring to the ineffective garbage that they continually pass, which completely ignores the whole world outside of the US.
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Sorry but thats wrong. Spammers from anywhere profit from spamming anybody because dumbasses buy their services.
That there is a continual stream of dumbasses who think they can sell something on the internet is the real problem. They pay the spammers to send out spam and it matters not a whit that they make nothing at the end of it. The spammers made their profit and still have a queue of dumbass customers who because
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I'm not sure that a "No commerce with spammers" policy could realistically be implemented with all the free trade and other agreements we have. While is feels justifiable, I'm not even sure it would be a good idea in reality.
Even when there isn't a free trade agreement in place, a competitor could just start spamming in their competition's products to effectivly lock them out of the market. But more interesting would be how other countries react and if they would impose embargo or tariffs in US products or
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A "no commerce with spammers" law would be well within the powers of the federal government.
But it would also be virtually impossible to enforce. All the US bank is going to see is a transaction with a foreign merchant account. Where the money goes after that they are going to find basically impossible to track without the help of the country the merchant account is in.
Equally unless you totally shut down the international post service you are going to find it very difficult stopping the products sold throu
Meaningful? (Score:4, Insightful)
So thats the trend, but how is it meaningful?
If the spammers are doing it, I assume thats because the majority of their target customers are aligned similarly with Obama. Makes sense, since Obama's online presence is considerably more progressive than McCains... Still doesn't say a whole lot about anything.
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Still doesn't say a whole lot about anything.
Isn't that what politics is all about?
Re:Meaningful? (Score:5, Funny)
It could be the opposite - "OMG exclusive video of Obama eating babies !!!!eleventyone".
Disclaimer: Obama does not eat babies. But I heard he huffs kittens.
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If the spammers are doing it, I assume thats because the majority of their target customers are aligned similarly with Obama.
but I thought only stupid people responded to spam. What could this mean?
Obvious Link (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Obvious Link (Score:5, Funny)
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Isn't elections in a democracy a big popularity contest?
Or I must be disillusioned...
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Obama is the candidate of choice by nearly 90% of the rest of the world. It's no secret that if you want people to read your spam, you'll put his name in the header. He's popular.
That's as may be, but spammers in general are simply idiots who try to exploit people that are even dumber than themselves. I think you are overestimating their intellectual capabilities by quite a wide margin.
IMO it is more likely that these spam campaigns are yet another way of trying to piss off voters with the candidate named in the subject.
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Spammers are consistently evading some of the brighter technical minds who are constantly trying to trace and/or filter their crap. They are unethical, greedy, and overall evil but they are hardly stupid.
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Or...maybe it's because they view Obama supporters as more gullible and likely to respond?
*ducks*
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So why doesn't he run for president of the rest of the world? I mean it isn't America, but I've heard that at least parts of it are nice.
ahhh in a perfect world... (Score:2)
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Way to RTFA.
Re:ahhh in a perfect world... (Score:4, Funny)
In a perfect world, their right to vote would be forfeited and they would be in a 10'x12' cell.
But in the real world of economic uncertainty, can we afford to give them that much space? Might be better to squeeze a few in there...
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Yea, 2 x 2 is plenty of room if you shackle them vertically...spammers do not deserve the best accommodations.
How about we pack them in like sardines ... every second one upside down?
Re:ahhh in a perfect world... (Score:5, Interesting)
Who cares who spammers want to be President? In a perfect world, their right to vote would be forfeited and they would be in a 10'x12' cell.
This has nothing to do with who spammers want to be president. This has to do with whose name spammers think will get somebody to click on a link.
My estimate is, they're probably right. Obama supporters will clilck to see what their candidate is up to, and Obama opposers will click to see what their opposition is up to.
McCain, on the other hand, usually isn't up to anything much. I doubt either side would be easily lured into clicking a link, because he's pretty boring.
Pics of hot chicks (Score:1)
You put Obama in the subject line for the same reason you you use pictures of attractive women to sell products. Obviously men want to look at hot women, but marketing research shows women are more drawn to, and persuaded by, pictures of attractive women. Not for any sexual reason but due to competitive pressures women feel.
Right wingers can't get enough Obama email. Claiming he's a Muslim, talking about how much he hates America, tying him to terrorists, questioning his ethnicity, etc. I know because
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On the other hand, the lefties are so excited to finally have another candidate that can appear both intelligent AND human, after Kerry and Gore, they can't see/hear/read enough about Obama.
Appearances aren't everything.
So which party... (Score:2)
...nominated Giant Tallywhacker?
rj
Well... (Score:2)
not impressed (Score:2)
Have to say it. (Score:2)
Because it is easier for them to spell.
My Favorite So Far.... (Score:4, Funny)
McCain says "I want to invade your vaginas"
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I dislike spam but most of the time I don't see it. Sometimes I get drunk and stupid and actually go to their links or respond and find their contact information only to send them long diatribes about any ol' subject. Sometimes they're worse than my drunken /. posts.
*shrug* (Score:2)
Looks to me like the spammers think Obama supporters are more gullible than McCain supporters. . . .
. . . . Either that, or McCain supporters are less apt to have email accounts. . . .
There; I've been an equal-opportunity insulter, don't you think?
];)
Want to see what the market says about Obama / McC (Score:2)
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Vegas stays in business because the majority of people lose more money then they win. I'm not sure that watching people going into debt is a good barometer.
But what about the actual McCain spam??? (Score:2)
After receiving my first unsolicited spam from the McCain campaign I used the unsubscribe link. Sure enough, the next spam arrived a couple weeks later.
To date I have received four unsolicited mails. I have used the unsubscribe process with each and every one and have even sent an email to the campaign through the contact form all to no avail.
I can't be the only one out there is experiencing this problem?
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Um.... A.D.D. much?
-Mike
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Think about the age range of people between party lines. The republican party targets older voters who are not likely to even own a computer.
Not to mention that the Democrats are pushing the get out and vote to first time voters who are more tech-savvy.
Perhaps. Personally, I feel that it is completely tied to the makeup of the geographic area. I was convinced that technical people were predominately conservative until I found /. to balance it out. This perception was mainly due the region in which I worked.
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You're confusing "technical people" with "/. users". The two intersect, but they aren't congruent.
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The republican party targets older voters who are not likely to even own a computer.
WTF are you talking about? Both parties cater to all age ranges. Yes, the youth 'hipster' crowd are more likely to vote Democrat, but not necessarily so. There are plenty of Young Republicans [yrnf.com], too.
Also, I know plenty of older people who have and know how to use a computer.
This stereotypical image of old people as being technophobic is really out of date with the times [seniors-site.com].
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Might wanna see this link:
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=436 [harrisinteractive.com]