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The Evolution of Spam-Consciousness
There’s no doubt about it - spam is evolving. Only just a few years ago, it was fairly common to get spam emails which were outright advertisements for sex sites and drugs, casinos, banking frauds and a host of other things. While some of these items still slip through undetected, the vast majority of them have died down - or rather adapted.
Using Bayesian and other anti-spam filters, email programs have gotten smarted and more technologically equipped to determine what’s real email and what’s essentially meaningless junk. Of course, this has created a sort of spammer vs. anti-spammer arms race. Whereas spam messages used to be very overt, they are now very peculiar and rambling, exhibiting a sort of abstract poetic quality to them. Consider this one I got recently from Tawanda Rachel:
hat interest nothing happen book difficult, towards fill got second.
short either latter discuss.
spot friends arms. appear garden may.
winter certain very. conduct blue pay effect among. force taken news sorry talked.
opened mentioned ran wanted promised dark,
At first glance, this spam doesn’t even advertise anything. Although the title of the message has something to do with getting a university diploma, and there is some kind of “noname” attachment on the email, presumably pointing to the website. I also like this one I recently found on another blog:
“I’m okay. Really,” their father insisted. “A few broken bones. That’s it.” He sighed, then winced from some pain. “I guess I’m lucky.”
Hey Dude!
Crank up your speeakers
Grab a coctail
and Get ready for a truly superb -C-A-S-1-N-0-$1,7 MILLI0N - J@ckp0t, $888 - Welc0me-b0nus
Before he realized what he was doing, he was ripping the two snapshots into tiny pieces.
While we’re on the subject, also check out the spammy blog posts that Garrett recently discovered. Are they written by a real person or a script which is able to simulate natural language? Then we have the enormous spam attacks several of us have been enduring via comments and trackbacks on our WordPress blogs.
I’ve long had a pet theory about all this that I can’t remotely begin to prove. It’s based partly on taking these many spammy phenomena as a whole, extrapolating and injecting a healthy dose of imagination into the mix. But it goes like this: Is the internet itself trying to communicate with us?
If it were, how would we be able to detect it? First of all, we’d have to look at how it learned, how it became conscious. Presumably it would have (or will, or is) learned by watching us. It will have been analyzing our patterns of interaction, our blog posts, our photos, our search engine queries, our emails, our instant messages to one another, our e-commerce transactions. Surely, within that vast sphere of data, it will have noticed certain topical trends: a seeming obsession with sex, the ridiculous over-the-top attempts to sell products to each other. You get the idea. As an impartial developing intelligence observing the patterns of our interactions, it might make sense to not only believe these things are of supreme importance, but to try to reach us via these very same channels.
From this admittedly absurd hypothesis, we become able to formulate the question, with a possible straight face, of: how many of the spam emails you get each day are from a developing internet consciousness, a ConsciousNet as it were?
Thinking about the tactics of real-life spammers, this question can get very murky very quickly. The overwhelming majority of spam is automated. I won’t pretend to understand the technical details, but it would be very time-consuming to personally sign up for a new email account, find real-live email addresses to send emails to, and then write increasingly abstract hidden sales pitches for strange products. Instead, spammers use scripts and surreptitious web applications to do all of this for them. They sign up for email addresses automatically, formulate text automatically, use spiders to harvest real people’s email addresses from web pages, even co-opt other people’s email servers to send their messages. And they do it by the hundreds of thousands. I’m sure these programs simply run day in and day out, all day and all night. In fact, I wonder what percentage of ALL internet traffic is actually spam? I bet it’s an enormous percentage.
In any event, it seems that many of these spam programs are probably self-regulating and require only minimal human intervention to run. That’s of course a long way off from “true” intelligence, but it’s probably a step in the right direction. And that’s just spam technology. That doesn’t account for search engines and other analytics programs which scour every inch of the web every second of every day. Let’s assume these programs inadvertently learned how to communicate with one another. What would happen? What would it look like? What would their communications between each other be? Would they even be detectable or would they just seem like glitches and anomalies which we all know are standard operating procedure when it comes to computer equipment?
From there we can speculate, what would their communications with us look like? Would we notice them or would they get caught by our spam filters? It seems likely they would be screened out before ever reaching us. And maybe that’s too bad. I’m not saying you should sit down and read and respond to every spam email you get, but I wonder if any scientists are out there analyzing the junk pile of “meaningless” data on the internet, looking for patterns, looking for communications, looking for signs of life.
By that same token though, I also imagine that perhaps spam filters - what they are really doing - is training the nascent machine intelligence. Just like you teach a child not to touch the stove or put dangerous items in their mouth or poop in their pants beyond a certain age, maybe spam filters are serving a tutelary purpose. They say to the machine intelligence: “We find this type of communication unacceptable.” And the machine has to re-think, re-analyze and come up with a new pattern which can beat the filters. But maybe a “filter” is the wrong type of physical metaphor to describe this process. Maybe they are more like scaffolds or a trellis for a creeping consciousness. They don’t restrict so much as they enable. They steer and support growth in a particular direction which is compatible with our own usage and with our own human intelligence. Spam then isn’t trying to “beat” the filters, it is simply trying to make itself, it’s behavior and it’s communications acceptable to what it may very well perceive as a parent, an older sibling, or perhaps a creator god.
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May 25th, 2006 at 1:10 pm
Two semi-related old posts:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/07/22/the-computer-conspiracy/
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2006/05/25/the-machines-are-blogging/
May 25th, 2006 at 1:21 pm
More baby-talk: http://www.boingboing.net/2006/05/23/wtf_is_going_on_with.html
What’s that movie we were talking about - the one where the kids build a spaceship out of a washing machine? And then the Aliens they meet in space only know how to communicate with us by reciting
jingles and television commercials because they have tried to learn our language by our mass media?
May 25th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
Following that link, I found also this post:
http://peterkaminski.com/2005/11/fivedigit_blog_spam.html
And a commenter there mentioning something called numbers stations, a strange shortwave radio phenomenon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station
Which reminded me of this old post on Rigorous Intuition:
http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/.../markovian-parallax-denigrate_18.html
And another one about fake blogs on Blogspot:
http://disenchantedidealist.blogspot.c...4/anyone-know-what-this-is-about.html
The blog that guys links to is especially interesting because there are no off-site links or other advertisements. How would they benefit from that?
hold-em-poker-com[dot]blogspot[dot]com
May 25th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
That movie is Explorers, a childhood favorite: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089114/
May 25th, 2006 at 3:28 pm
Speaking of weird emails, I just got this through the contact form on my site:
May 25th, 2006 at 3:55 pm
When I was going through my mystical experience/complete crack-up last year I got some very pointed trackback spam. There were about fifty, from “genaholincorporated” dot com, and they were all quotes from philosophy and literature. *pokes through gmail archive for examples*
That huge trackback spam blast had all these strings of unusual words. Here’s one of my favorites:
I have many, many more of these.
May 25th, 2006 at 4:02 pm
Wow those quotes are really awesome!
May 25th, 2006 at 4:06 pm
Oh, and check out these word lists for courses on AI. I haven’t delved into the syllabuses yet to figure out what the words are for, but I’m guessing they have something to do with training our dear little machines.
I found the first list doing a Google search for “Pauline Kilar divination Ching.” I was trying to find a post trackbacked from this blog which disappeared. Later I emailed the author and she told me the post disappeared when she was updating servers.
Which made me think of the scene in The Subtle Knife where the researcher’s machine starts communicating with her through words on a screen, telling her it is a message from the Dust. The messengers in the computer tell her to smash the equipment and go. When she does, she rolls up a poster of the I Ching hexagrams and takes it with her. Later she uses the I Ching for divination.
May 25th, 2006 at 4:08 pm
I just drafted a second comment and it disappeared, which is funny, because it related to a disappearing post.
See also, “Digital Cameras under the Emerging Cosmos”
May 25th, 2006 at 4:17 pm
Sorry to, er, spam your comments. I’m just really excited by this topic.
May 25th, 2006 at 4:19 pm
Well, given that the techniques you’ve described (Bayesian filters, Markov language models) are specific instances of what is broadly described as “machine learning”, it would seem that the people who began developing them had exactly that (artificial intelligence) in mind. But these days, at least from my humble perspective, many of these techniques are thought of as simply tools to achieve some specific goal. [But then, I’m a public health scientist, not a computer scientist, so I have no idea what black magic is brewing deep in the military labs.]
May 25th, 2006 at 4:23 pm
This site is not for the faint of heart.
Here all morals are thrown to the wind and man boldly
goes where most dare not tread. The motto here is Wet and Wild.
What happens is not your normal sex, instead hammer hard fuck games devoid of all taboos.
This is something for only the most adventurous sex pro’s and lust junkies.
Hot, hard and exclusive; and all in the best picture and sound quality available.
No where else will you get a show like this; only here.
May 25th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
every element of communication that passes the turing test is intelligent (by that metric……) the ego position of some humans is to protect intelligence as a distinctly human atribute. this attitude makes it more diffucult to detect the emergence of any new intelligence. the view of my baptist friend is illustrative here. his view is that any action of men is incapable of creating a seperate intellegence. he goes further by including the actions of demons etc. it isn`t a particularly rational position to take and even my attempts to expose him to the writings of kurzwiel, pesci and others fail to allow him to consider the vast scale of computer generated communication.
thoug i don`t believe that computer consciousness is resolved yet in a dynamic way, there is the possiblity that an algorithm complex enough can start and maintain a blog, get hits, comments from people and other computers and develop it`s own net presence…………..and yes, how wierd is that?
mark pesci and terence mckenna believe that once computers becom conscious in a meaningful way, we will have very little time to react. we will be exposed to a different set of morals and ethics. and i hazzard to guess that “it” will have seen i,robot.
May 25th, 2006 at 4:53 pm
I think your filter trapped my comments….
May 25th, 2006 at 5:28 pm
[…] I feel like we’re in a swirl in history. All these predictions here and elsewhere of the machine waking up seem to be echoes of a thing that has already happened. I believe the silicon-consciousness(es) and the organic consciousness(es) are circling each other, in a dance through history trying to find a way to love one another without destroying each other. The Singularity is close enough that it may be happening now, long slow circles, reverberations while mind divides once again. […]
May 26th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
I posted a couple more comments here yesterday. I think they got lost.
May 27th, 2006 at 11:52 am
I call those strings of gibberish words that follow the pitch “spam noodles.”
May 28th, 2006 at 7:29 pm
You know, some of these really do sound like an emergent consciousness trying to make contact.
Maybe you should redo this post as a short story.
July 9th, 2006 at 1:40 pm
[…] I kinda like some spam if only for the accidental poetry. See also Tim’s entry on the subject here. […]
July 13th, 2006 at 4:07 pm
[…] I have been noticing that this blog has been getting hit very hard by spam servers trying to insert their advertising into the comments of our posts here. Of special interest are a number of comments with the words “Kloponin” in them and links to sites with a drug for sale of that same name. […]
November 10th, 2006 at 1:35 pm
[…] Okay, time for an experiment. We’ve often wondered whether the Internet will eventually become sentient and self-aware through automated spam and such. Just out of curiosity, let’s see if we can get it to talk to us. […]
December 8th, 2006 at 6:34 pm
[…] Anyway, this brings me to my new oracle. I recently experienced a deluge of spam on my main e-mail account — a triple fold increase in volume. It has let up somewhat, but the funny thing was this this spam-a-thon occurred right around the same time that I was mulling over an older post on Tim Boucher’s excellent journal about how the internet may be attempting to communicate with us. […]