Hardly a day goes by without some online scam artist emailing me, usually with the standard Nigerian or 419 scam. You know, the ones that start with “Dear friend, I am an officer at a bank/government leader in exile/international merchant” and go on to outline why they need help retrieving some vast sum of money.

In the past, I have successfully wasted large amounts of these scammers’ time simply for amusement. Conceivably, if everybody were to do this, the amount of time the scammers would spend dealing with people who are just stringing them along might make the scam an unprofitable use of their time.

However, this would be far too time-consuming, especially since the scammers can send out thousands of emails at the click of a button.

That’s where the use of automated chatterbots come in. A chatterbot is a “computer program designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with one or more human users via auditory or textual methods”.

Basically, it’s a program that is designed to respond to things you say as though it is a human being. You can try one out by going here and clicking the “Chat with Alice” link on the left.

These programs are not very convincing when you know what you’re dealing with, but when someone is convinced they are chatting with another human being, the person can sometimes be fooled, often with hilarious results – for example, horny people trying to strike up sexual conversations in online chat rooms (warning, graphic content).

My idea is to apply this concept to scammers. A program to deal with scammers could be created that would work something like this:

1. You receive an email from an online scammer. You forward this to another email address that belongs to the anti-scammer chatterbot (I’ll call this program the scambot from now on.)
2. The scambot would receive the email and scan it for relevant keywords. (The scambot would already be set up to generally deal in subjects related to finances, bank accounts, retrieval of funds, etc.)
3. The scambot prepares an email response and sends it to the scammer, thus initiating an email conversation with the scammer. Since the email will be coming from the scambot’s own email address, no further user action is required. However, the scambot will maintain a record of emails in thread format, allowing the user to step in and drop in some more convincing emails if the user wishes.

I believe that the scambot could waste large amounts of time for scammers for several reasons. First, many of these scammers speak English as a second language, so they are not as likely to pick up on cues in the scambot’s responses as a native English speaker.

Second, it would be possible to use social engineering techniques in the scambot’s initial responses that would help overcome the skepticism of the scammer. For example, the scambot could also pose as someone who speaks English as a second language, or as someone who is somewhat addled (e.g. an elderly person with a touch of dementia but a ton of money).

Finally, greed is a powerful motivator.

[tags]scams, 419, chatterbots, artificial intelligence[/tags]

This is “Video from recent storm in Portland, Oregon. One resident heard crunching outside his apartment and witnessed about 15 car accidents at the intersection, many of which he captured on home video.”

It must not have been fun for the people involved, but it’s sure fun to watch.

Eleven days without a post! This must be some sort of record, one that I’m not terribly proud of. I have my reasons, which I hope to share with you at some point (now is not the time).

There are a couple of things I’d like to mention now, however.

A few minutes ago I got a call from Canadian Tire Financial Services. I have a Canadian Tire Mastercard. They were calling to offer me, their “valued customer”, an identity theft assistance plan.

For only $6.95 per month (the first six months are “free”), if a criminal assumes my identity and steals my money, uses my credit and debit cards, drains my bank account, and generally wreaks havoc with my finances and records, I could call up Canadian Tire and they’d help me out.

My response to this phone call was an emphatic “no” and I explained why: this is practically extortion. It’s a protection racket.

Worse, for a financial services company, they are providing a service that gives them a vested interest in making sure identity theft remains a problem, because without identity theft no one would be motivated to sign up.

This is different than insurance, because they’re not offering to pay me back what someone steals from me, they’re just offering to help me straighten things out. This is different than burglar alarms, because the intent is not to stop a crime in progress, it’s simply to clean up the mess afterwards.

“I’m not going to live in fear of identity thieves,” I told the woman, and that was that (I don’t think my response was on her script).

The second thing I’d like to mention is Raise the Hammer’s Second Anniversary Party. If you’re in the area on Saturday, January 27, please stop by.

Happy New Year. Here’s hoping 07 is a good one for you and yours.

Some of the things I’m looking forward to in 2007:

• A new birthday to celebrate.
• Discovering a new metal band that really rocks, something on the order of System of a Down.
• A sudden, severe and permanently incapacitating illness that afflicts George Bush, Tony Blair, and the rest of the warmongers that plague this planet.
• Not worrying about getting put on a watch list for speaking my mind (see previous point).
• Being able to forgive those who least deserve forgiveness (see previous two points). That one might have to wait for a different New Year – like 2050.
• The population of all the world’s most prosperous countries suddenly waking up en masse and deciding to do something about poverty, injustice and climate change.
• Failing that, a Canada-wide awakening.
• Failing that, I might settle for my neighbourhood getting riled up. Even my family would be a good start.
• Snow. Please!

There’s more of course – watching the flowers I planted in the fall come up in spring and summer, cold beers on the front porch in hot August, ice cream cones on Locke Street – but I could go on forever.

Except there’s one more thing worth mentioning. In 2007 I’m looking forward to continuing to hear what you have to say: how you feel about what’s happening here in Canada and in the rest of the world, how you feel about your own lives and those of the people around you.

My New Year’s resolution is to keep listening, and to do something about it when I can.

Thanks for reading. It’s going to be a great year!

Jimmy Buffet is best known for a bunch of songs that I would probably recognize if I heard them, but off-hand, all I know is that the name sounds familiar.

Since getting famous from his music, Buffet has opened two restaurant chains called Cheeseburger in Paradise and Margaritaville after two of his apparently better-known songs (if you’d like to point me to an mp3, feel free).

Buffet is apparently an ocean conservationist who has made “great strides in making people aware of the plight of the manatee”, although presumably he is less fond of the ocean creatures that he serves in his restaurant. Canadian aquatic organisms are breathing a sigh of relief, however, because Buffet has decided to boycott Canadian seafood.

“Margaritaville Cafes will not be purchasing or serving Canadian seafood products until the Canadian government ends the commercial seal hunt permanently”, says Buffet.

Meanwhile, up the coast in North Carolina, massive hog raising operations run by Smithfield Foods are killing millions of pigs and producing vast rivers of toxic and destructive pig shit. From the story in Rolling Stone:

Smithfield estimates that its total sales will reach $11.4 billion this year. So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do — even if it came marginally close to that standard — it would lose money. So many of its contractors allow great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems. Although the company proclaims a culture of environmental responsibility, ostentatious pollution is a linchpin of Smithfield’s business model.

A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield’s efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That’s a remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented concentrations.

Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs — anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.

These pits are a wicked mixture of “bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs”, a malignant concoction that turns pink. You can see it in these Google Maps: one and two.

So toxic is this mixture that if you fall in, you’re literally dead and so is anyone who might jump in to try and save you. So pervasive is the odor of dead pigs and shit that you can smell it from thousands of feet in the air while flying. It’s even dangerous:

Sometimes the stink literally knocks people down: They walk out of the house to get something in the yard and become so nauseous they collapse. When they retain consciousness, they crawl back into the house.

That has happened several times to Julian and Charlotte Savage, an elderly couple whose farmland now abuts a Smithfield sprayfield — one of several meant to absorb the shit of 50,000 hogs. The Savages live in a small, modular kit house. Sitting in the kitchen, Charlotte tells me that she once saw Julian collapse in the yard and ran out and threw a coat over his head and dragged him back inside.

Buffet says that his seafood boycott is not “one nation telling another how to best manage its affairs”, rather, it’s “an effort to make humans more humane in the way they manage the planet”.

Kudos to you, Mr. Buffet, for your concern and your responsibility. I’m looking forward to more boycott announcements from you, starting with pork from Smithfield Foods.

[tags]conservation, nature, environment, pigs, seals[/tags]