Viral Text Craft

The ChoiceMail challenge-response filter has cut the spam email I receive to almost nothing over the last 18 months.

Almost 100,000 spam emails blocked

Last night, I was exploring whether the Mozilla mailreader ("Thunderbird") would be able to extract my "good" email from the clutches of Microsoft Outlook Express, so I could archive it. (I had presumed these messages would prove to be utterly unexportable—why would Microsoft help you get off one of their products, anyway?—but I found to my amazement that Mozilla was able to find and read them easily, converting them to mbox format).

In testing this out, I temporarily turned off the ChoiceMail spam filter. With the long-blocked spam deluge now resumed and crashing down on the Mozilla mail reader, I got a renewed look at the state of the art in crafting text to tempt someone to open a virus.

I thought this was impressive:

We have received reports that your e-mail account was used to send a huge amount of unsolicited commercial e-mail messages during the last week. Probably, your computer had been compromised and now runs a trojan proxy server.

We recommend you to follow our instructions in order to keep your computer safe.

Sincerely yours,
The best.com support team.

Attached was a virus-laden file, best.com.zip. Maybe it installs a trojan proxy server.

Galois Theory

I used the typogenerator to make this.

Earl Emery's Crossword Dictionary

In his spare time—he worked as weatherman in Valentine, Nebraska for many years—my grandfather was an amateur crossword puzzle dictionary compiler. He died of cancer in 1981. I've had his last typewritten manuscript of the dictionary in my office for about 10 years, intending to edit it into some online form; however, each time I've looked at it, I've wondered, well, what to do with it exactly?

Type it in verbatim? This seems to ignore the possibility of making it into an more usefully organized online tool.

Organize it as a set of puzzle clues and answers? The manuscript is not really amenable to that. It's more of a loosely associative scheme for finding answers to puzzle clues, not a tool for looking up clues for given answers (naturally). Since I've had a closet interest in the possibility of automatically creating puzzles (and clues), I've always been tempted to wedge grandpa's efforts somehow into my own schemes, but that's got to be the wrong approach, too.

There's also the problem that whenever I open his manuscript (it's over 500 pages), I end up getting sidetracked into other investigations. For example, the very first entry in the manuscript is for the letter "A". The entry is

"A" Theatre's Mrs. A, Gertie.

What does it mean? I recently found the answer via Google and some discreet enquiries to a puzzler's list that Dan Asimov told me about (an Internet search three or four years ago yielded nothing). I sent this email

My grandfather was an amateur crossword puzzle dictionary compiler (a hobby) and I've got his 500+ page crossword dictionary manuscript that I've been meaning to edit. He died in the early 1980s but the dictionary incorporates clues that go back to at least the 1930s. It's a bit of a challenge tracking down clue origins.

The very first entry in the "A" section is "Theater's Mrs A" [Answer: GERTIE] My question, is this a reference to Gertrude Lawrence and a 1954 book by Richard Aldrich? Google seems to think it would be...

The book I'm referring to in that email was published in 1955:

Gertrude Lawrence as Mrs A.
An Intimate Biography of the Great Star By Her Husband Richard Stoddard Aldrich. [source: alibris]

I got useful information from Craig Hamilton and from Wendy Howard-Benham, who wrote

I'd put a lot of money on it - Gertrude Lawrence was definitely well-known by the diminutive Gertie (see "Noel & Gertie" for intersection w/Coward) and was married to Richard Aldrich, as hinted in the bio title. And both those facts were no doubt a lot more topical 50 years ago, 2 years following her death during the run of 'The King and I.'

"I am not what you'd call wonderfully talented, but I am light on my feet and I do make the best of things." (That's her, not me!)

Best...

So at least I understand the first entry. This may be too big a job. I thought I would buy a few crossword puzzle dictionaries to see how they are organized. There they are in the picture.

None of them knows about GERTIE.