Nigerian spam

I just came across this Slashdot post. Besides going into more detail than its parent on the subject of giving fake data to phishing sites, it suggests a rather ingenius scheme to shut down 419/advance fee fraud (often Nigerian) email scams.

Program a mail client plugin to mark these as "419 scam", the way you would mark other mail as "SPAM." The plugin takes over, and proceeds to carry on a threaded discussion with the scammer over the course of days, using a conversational-AI like Eliza. I would suggest a timer, waiting a random amount of time between responses, to make it seem even more realistic; spelling and grammatical errors could be added as well, but not in excess.

Waste enough of their time, and the Nigerian spammers won't be able to actually spam anyone. Make them unable to tell whether the person they're carrying on a conversation with is really a person, and they'll be completely crippled. I like it.

Imagi-Nation Dot Net

Wow, I really should update my website.

welcome!

i'm testing out Google's new blogger web comments extension for firefox.

the web comments i make will go here, apparently. w00t! another BLOG.

i'm starting to think i'm somehow living, eating, and breathing blogs, without ever actually setting foot in the so-called blogosphere.

i'm working on blog software at work.
i'm writing blogs at home.
for that matter, i'm working on blog software at home.

and now i'm blogging about blogs, on a blog.

all the while, i've never really participated in the blog scene. i feel as though i'm late to the party, and nobody notices i'm here anyway. why did i bother coming at all?