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by Hugh Cook |
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Section 111 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 May 10 Monday.
(diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) A few days ago I wrote about mystical text strings, incantatory creations of cabbalistic arcana discovered hidden inside vulgar HTML spam messages, the purpose of such messages being, evidently, to conceal the spammed message's true nature from defensive software. spam hidden text strings I thought the idea of engineering spam to contain secret text strings such as "miseria awoke fatalist" was intriguing, the kind of idea that could be used to kick off a Thomas Pynchon novel. A practical commerical application (at last!) for the techniques of Joyce's Finnegans Wake. (The English teacher in me wants to put an apostrophe into "Finnegan's," but, even though James Joyce himself taught English to stay afloat, the Wake woke to the world apostropheless, and has remained in that state ever since.) Anyway. What returns me to the topic of the unexpected creativity of spam is that, checking through my e-mail at 03:30 this morning (four hours of sleep and that was me done, though I will probably sleep some more on trains today) I found some non-secret Finneganish texts strings in a spam e-mail advertizing "Academic-Qualifications from NON-ACCR. Universities". The text strings were in plain view at the foot of the short e-mail, which I found distressingly public, the inner secrets of the spam industry paraded for all to see, without even a figleaf to hide their shame. I saved this spam message, opened it up with my plain text editor and took a look at the headers, and I found that the spam message had been looked at by a spam-killing program which had awared it a score of 3.4 "looks like spam" hits (a score of 8.0 required, apparently, for it to be killed.) The two text strings which probably helped baffle the diligent Executioner of Spam were:- allege iv fredericksburg promiscuity gigavolt veneto swanson frye cecil diorama christopher covary drew aldehyde potassium norwich and cuckoo scotsman douce inferential wintry substitute corbel chimique dahl preach dryad herschel charley foyer andromache muff dent tailgate gothic bluish geodesic polonaise smother glissade census So here is today's poem:- |
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You recoil from my aldehydes, From my gigavolt promiscuity. Am I so monstrous? Douce leashpet! Your bluish lips so beautiful. Do not deny me, dryad. We are fated to be here together Posed in this diorama, Locked here together in the gothic, You by your participation in the census, Me by my profession. My instructions are, Justine, That your role is to suffer, mine to inflict. Your choice, leashpet. Will you acknowledge it as love? Or must I be, to you, forever, Just another soldier, following orders? |
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