ENIGMA 2000 Newsletter - Issue 21

March 2004
Articles, newsreports and Items of interest :enigma2000-owner@yahoogroups.com

ENIGMA 2000 article - Spam experiences

Here’s a non-radio mystery (to be specific, an Internet mystery) for you. Quoting from the Column 8 section of the back page of the Sydney Morning Herald, just before New Year’s Eve:

In the flood of spam that washes across our desk is a series of emails that has us intrigued. We get up to a dozen a day. In each, the sender’s address is (probably deliberately) garbled, although country names such as India, Canada, and others recur. The message is a meaningless jumble of words. For instance:
homemade bonfire appian hospital burtt usps inverness injure fleabane shantung radiate integrable badminton daphne upperclassmen swamp alight allah speak ale rent fomalhaut plagued

Another:
coliseum delouse nelsen shareholder brighten pill cdc preach these venturesome demultiplex

The writer then goes on to speculate, in a not too serious way, about possible sources of these mysterious emails (practice messages from the Cyberspace School of Spam, coded messages for spies, Internet Scrabble). On the following day a letter to the editor (I forgot to make a note of the writer) took up the columnist’s query and in an apparently knowledgeable letter wrote the whole thing off as a way for spammers to get around heuristic anti-spam filters. This seems improbable, as the messages are meaningless while spam always coveys a meaning, usually something to do with the male genitals. My only contribution is to note that:

“USPS” is the US Postal Service
“CDC” is an overworked acronym being the Centre for Disease Control at Atlanta, the Climate Diagnostics Centre (another US government agency), the Cult of the Dead Cow (the well-known hacker group), the Carl Duisberg Centren (a German training group), the Canadian Dairy Commission, la Convergencia Democratica del Catalunya, the California Design College, the Connected Device Configuration in the Java computer language and on and on….
“Fomalhaut” is a star in the southern sky in the constellation of the Southern Fish (its name means “mouth of the fish” in Classical Arabic); 17^th brightest in the sky.
“Burtt” is a surname
“Nelsen” is a surname

Any suggestions?

[Thanks John for the article and for telling us about your ‘spam’ experiences. Some us were beginning to think that the luxury of a small penis was only to be found in the Northern Hemisphere. We never ever considered there was a glut of them to be found in the Southern Hemisphere too]!