Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

Milestones in the Annals of Junkmail

Posted by timothy on Sun Jul 07, 2002 04:53 PM
from the your-royal-highness-you-are-getting-a-dell dept.
It's funny. Laugh.
fdc writes: "Web pages are a great source of postal addresses for direct mailers. Judging by some of the addresses we've seen recently, it's evident that the data is harvested not by humans, but by computer programs that scan web pages for names and addresses. Several weeks ago we (the Kermit Project at Columbia University) announced a new release of our Kermit 95 communication software for Windows -- SSH, secure FTP, etc; cousin of C-Kermit for Unix (search Freshmeat). Since this was a major release, we chose a new icon for it: the Columbia crown. A web page explained that this is the emblem of Columbia University: the crown of King George the II of England (1727-1760), who founded Columbia in 1754. JUST ONE WEEK LATER guess who received a postcard from Dell."
+ -
unknown
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Milestones in the Annals of Junkmail 50 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.

  • Dude... (Score:5, Funny)

    by InterruptDescriptorT (531083) on Sunday July 07 2002, @04:57PM (#3838141) Homepage
    Thou art getting a Dell!

    ---
    I'm tired of waltzing for pancakes. -- Gwen Mezzrow

  • I hear that 31337 isn't a real zipcode (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    But that's what I always write when asked. Poor dudes at the postal services.
  • You should be glad that AI has come this far. For an intelligent agent to be able to harvest addresses by clicking through web pages, and then mailing out postcards is truly an advancement of the technology.

    Remember, there are good points to everything, even things like this which under normal circumstances could be described as "alienating our rights."
        • ive done this with a few lines of perl a few years ago to harvest email addresses from WHOIS data on netsol.. I just did it because I was bored, not to spam anyone. No AI involved, just regex to look for email addresses, or in this case home/business addresses.
          • That is a little different. The data you received clearly had a common structure as it was just retrieved from a database and placed into a template.

            Actually analysing language is a much more difficult task. Just look at the very imperfect quality of language translation tools on Google [google.com] and Altavista [av.com] to see just how hard it is.
            • This isn't language translation. All they have to do is look for a known city, followed by a known state abbreviation. The last two lines will be the address. And to make sure there's no junk data, they can simply verify that the address exists.

  • Looks like a prank by someone at Dell (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Gorobei (127755) on Sunday July 07 2002, @05:02PM (#3838162)
    There are no clear King George + address on the web-page. This just looks like a prank database addition by someone at Dell on a slow day (probably a Kermit user, tho.)

  • Ask Dell about it... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FurryFeet (562847) <joudanx&yahoo,com> on Sunday July 07 2002, @05:02PM (#3838164)
    Really, contact Dell and ask for an explanation. I think we'd all love to hear what kind of lame excuse they try to come up with in order to avoid admitting that they harvest spammable addreses from the net :)
    • Companies like Dell don't harvest addressess. They deal with direct marketing companies who either do the harvesting, or who buy large lists from email addressess from companies who swear up and down that they lists contain only people who asked to recieve information about this sort of thing (whatever this sort of thing may be).

      • Re:Dell doesn't harvest addresses (Score:5, Insightful)

        by jelle (14827) on Sunday July 07 2002, @06:10PM (#3838435) Homepage
        "Companies like Dell don't harvest addressess. They deal with direct marketing companies"

        Hiring a marketing company to do some work in your name makes you liable for whatever they do in your name.

      • Companies like Dell don't harvest addressess. They deal with direct marketing companies who either do the harvesting, ...

        Actually, nobody involved here did any "harvesting" of any addresses. "Harvesting" implies that they did something to earn their list of addresses, something akin to sowing and nurturing a field of crops. They did nothing of the sort.

        A better term for such behavior would be something like "scraped" or "dredged", something more appropriately descriptive of the indiscriminate collecting of addresses on a large scale. It's a change in usage that I would like to see happen. "Harvested" seems to have become something of a de facto standard term for the practice, unfortunately.

        There is a place for "harvested" in describing a list of addresses. This would be an appropriate term for a list of addresses built up by (confirmed) opt-in, i.e. everyone on the list knowingly consented to be on that list, for whatever the purpose of that list is.

        However, unlike agricultural harvests, a harvested list cannot be sold or given away. The moment it is transferred to someone other than the harvester, it's junk, it's garbage; it's beyond useless, in fact, as it would be counter-productive if ever used.
  • Why would direct mail companies choose to use automated programs like this?

    Let's look at what these programs give you:

    1. A ton of results.

    2. 80%(and probably a whole lot more, I'm just being conservative) of those results are probably false due to all those AOL member pages that haven't been updated in years, people who put up fake info, info that is out of date, etc.

    Wouldn't this be bad for the direct mail companies? Clients that hire them want to reach as many real people as possible. The direct mail companies that use the methods mentioned in this story can never provide their clients with what they want, the ability to reach real consumers.

    The Direct mail companies probably know this and either, are planning on changing it or don't care and are just interested in spamming as many people, real or not, as possible.

    Direct mail companies interested in doing what they promise should think about the way they collect information in order to provide better service if they are a real company not just looking to spam everyone alive, or dead in this case.
  • are incompatible...

    Dude, [userfriendly.org] you're going to hell!
  • I would just love to throw out a page with addresses like:

    Zephram Cochrane
    c/o Phoenix Research Institute
    186000 Miles Avenue
    Central, Montana 01701

    Seven Nine
    2349 Tendara Street
    Unimatrix, CA 79301

    John Kelly
    2032 Gravaton Ave.
    Mars, NC 02376

    Tobin Dax
    2135 Bajor Parkway
    Symbiant, UT 02230
  • Isn't it a Federal felony to read the post card if you're not King Geoge? Never mind scanning and posting someone else's mail on the web without their permission! :)
  • I sent this letter to the kermit project address. Maybe someone here can answer it for me:

    --Begin--

    Computers are stupid and would not be able to aggregate a name on one page to a snailmail address on another without human help, yet I can't find where King George and this address were listed near each other. Any ideas from which page this name and address were gleaned?

    thx :)
    very funny otherwise
  • Because that is all that fool Geordie could read.

    Stands Scotland where it did?

    If you don't get it read up some history.

  • Occams Razor (Score:4, Insightful)

    by KFury (19522) on Sunday July 07 2002, @05:48PM (#3838354) Homepage
    It seems much more likely that someone on the team was registering for something somewhere and, wanding to avoid stupid spam, put in the clever King persona instead.

    Promptly forgotten, it was a surprise when Dell, seemingly unrelated to the registration account, sends email to that profile.

    More than likely someone on your team remembers it now, but finds the alternative 'harvesting' explanation so funny he's keeping quiet.
    • 'sends email to that profile'

      Err, snail mail, rather.

      And it might not have been someone on your team at all. People use false data for setting up accounts all the time. Maybe they just thought this would be funny.

      Heck, they were apparently right.
      • I actually find it more irritating when people blatantly label others as 'pseudo-intellectuals' for using terms they personally don't like.

        Since your post is ambiguous, are you against the term 'Occam's Razor' or the underlying principle of complexity theory? Can you elaborate why?

        Thanks much,

  • joke (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Patrick13 (223909) on Sunday July 07 2002, @05:56PM (#3838380) Homepage Journal
    I know they really got the card. But I bet someone on the staff filled out a form somewhere and put down King George II as the contact. Looking at the page that they cite, a: doesn't not have their mailing address; b: refers to George II, not King George II. No machine inferred that this was King George's mailing address. Someone just fluffed a form with dummy info.

    I get mail addressed to "Ramon Mamon de la Chiflada" (you have to speak Spanish to get it) because my son wanted to be a member of "Cheeto town" [cheetos.com.mx], and I didn't want him to be on a mailing list for the rest of his life.
    • I don't speak Spanish, but I googled Spanishdict.com :-P

      Funny.
    • See this [slashdot.org].

    • I get mail addressed to "Ramon Mamon de la Chiflada" (you have to speak Spanish to get it) because my son wanted to be a member of "Cheeto town" [cheetos.com.mx], and I didn't want him to be on a mailing list for the rest of his life.

      Yes, but it sounds like your son has bigger problems... Cheeto Town ?

  • many moons ago i created a ficticious organization whereby i could register .orgs. the organization name was "The Organization for Sarcasm and Satire (T.O.S.S.)" and you wouldn't believe the mail i got, including free samples of pens & stationary with my 'company name' emblazoned on it.

    the best was probably getting a phone call telling me that i could receive (for a nominal fee) a copy of the dunn & bradstreet report about my company. the poor telemarketer didn't seem to understand that if i paid $49.99 for that report, my 'business' would immediately be $49.99 in the red...

  • ...of some fun I had with AOL, where you could fill in a web form and have them send a CD to your house (which is valuable when you're covering your ceiling with them [gregcorp.com]. It wasn't long before Seymore Butts started receiving AOL CDs [gregcorp.com].
  • You dirty colonist rabble with your General Washingham. The Quartering Act stands.

  • I don't really care about Postal junk mail (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Ryu2 (89645) on Sunday July 07 2002, @07:44PM (#3838748) Homepage Journal
    For me, postal spam it's not as bad as email, because it doesn't cost you in disk space or bandwidth.

  • The true test (Score:3, Funny)

    by Fat Casper (260409) on Sunday July 07 2002, @07:53PM (#3838796) Homepage
    Is whether or not ye King gets a pre-approved credit card application. Make sure the bills are sent c/o the office of Exchequer.

  • Let's use the system (Score:4, Funny)

    by Bouncings (55215) <ken@ken k i n d e r.com> on Sunday July 07 2002, @08:12PM (#3838885) Homepage
    Here we go:

    The Devil
    1 Microsoft Way
    Redmond, WA 98052


    Jack Fuck-me-in-the-ass Valenti
    MPAA
    15503 Ventura Boulevard
    Encino, CA 91436

    Just to start off with a few.

  • He was Hanoverian [britannia.com]....

    Geck, erhalten Sie ein Dell!
    • It would be very easy to interpret such simple encoding with a bot. I would think that such bots already exist that filter not only that but removing NOSPAM from e-mail addresses which seems to be another popular attempt at keeping a public e-mail address semi-private.
      • No, the point was that postal addresses (not email) addresses were being picked up, and in a fairly sophisticated manner. I believe the Web page in question is http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/k95.html [columbia.edu] which contains our postal address (near the bottom) and also mentions King George II (near the top). The address harvester recognized the postal address (no big accomplishment) but also picked out "King George II" as a name. Which I suppose it could be!
    • Oh geez...the owner of somebody@something.com is gonna be pissed!

      Kickstart
        • Hello Mr Coward, I work for the spamming industry.

          I see you have interest in business cards.
          Well Anonymous, I have a deal for you!

          Head on over to http://www.spam-industry.com/deals/bcards/ and sign up for 100 FREE business cards.

          Imagine giving your friends and partners a professional business card customized with the name Anonymous Coward.

          Please sign up now!

          MrP-,
          Spam Industry of America

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.