What’s with the spam filter these days?
Every few minutes my inbox gets another of those annoying spam messages telling me how wonderful Viagra is or how fucking good the big penis is. Gone are the days when I could just tweak the filter to include the latest permutation on Viagra. Now these clever spammers are into jpgs and all kinds of other tricks to get through the mail servers. Images are hard to filter out. It’s not that I mind being reminded every now and then what the wonderful little blue pill can do. Well, I’ve just had a déjà vu moment all over again. When I was just starting out in IT back in the 70s, one of the standard tools was ASCII, what means American Standard Code for Information Interchange - a code for characters, numbers, symbols, etc. And what did we clever people do when we got bored? We made pictures out of all those characters. And guess what’s just popped into my inbox. You got it. It’s a headline with the message built out of ASCII. So it made me sit up and take notice - just like taking Viagra really. Spammers have found a new way to beat the filters and firewalls.