Thursday, September 13, 2012

An Impressive Bit of Socially Engineered Blog Spam

Going through my email account revealed a comment waiting to be approved. While posted from that ever witty pseudo being, Anonymous, it looked legit at first before going off the rails:
Write more, thats all I have to say. Literally, it seems as though you relied on the video to make your point.
You definitely know what youre talking about, why
waste your intelligence on just posting videos to your weblog when
you could be giving us something enlightening to read?
Look at my homepage ... free porn
No video on the post is a wee bit of a giveaway even before the pornography offer (link deleted by me). Misspelling is no longer a surefire indicator that something is spam, so that can be forgiven. The idea of using constructive criticism as a form of social engineering in spam is a new one to me. I know it made me read the entire thing, so I bet this one is fairly effective.
Fiendishly clever is the phrase that applies, methinks.

UPDATED

Meanwhile, the Russian referral spam continues unabated. This time it is one from super-online-search . com that takes you to a site you do not want to visit.The Huns are at the gates, I tell you.

UPDATED 9-13-2012

A comment for another post is another clever variation of this that turned out to be a way to get clicks on a “survey” site as well as the video.

I'm having this exact problem with the video: http://www.youtube.com/(removed by me)  I've put one comment on the video site, but Youtube won't let me link your post as part of the explanation. So far, you are the only post that has tried to make sense of this stupid spam issue. Thanks for posting!

The identity of the commenter was “Ron” but the link to his profile is the afore mentioned survey at sprezzaturarrd . blgospot . com. Interesting development because it looks like they are aware of people trying to spread the word. Notice how the video gets another hyperlink via the comment?

Sadly they did get a couple of clicks out of me verifying the profile, but somebody has to take a look to see what is going on to warn others.

Runaway Inflation Is Now Unavoidable

Bernanke has chosen to do the worst thing possible and that is an open ended qualitative easing. If you have savings or an IRA, expect to lose your shirt since interest will be held low and hyper inflation will lower the value of every penny you have. I suggest looking up the Weimar Republic in German history to get an idea of what is going to happen now.

Stock up on foods and goods while you can, your purchasing power is going to decrease very quickly now. Buying ammo would also be prudent since it will be going sky high after this news is absorbed.

Incompetent and suicidal are the only words I can find to describe this development. It looks like a desperate bid to influence the election.

A Short Comment on the Embassy Attacks

Weakness is never a virtue and never, ever respected in the long run. What we are seeing in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen is the end result of trying to appease evil. Nothing good can come of that, so I expect a lot more to happen now that the United State is perceived as weak.

I have always advocated spreading democracy and republicanism to all states on all continents. Once I believed that it would encourage peace, but then I grew up and ceased being a teenager. Now it is because I believe that everyone must have their chance and be judged upon their resulting behavior.

Does that sound ominous? It should.

The Obama state department has been an abject failure since the beginning, insulting allies and cozying up to people who genuinely hate the West. Fear of offending our enemies and a perverse desire to offend friends has been a hallmark of this administration. So it was only a matter of time before the chickens came home to roost.

Al Qaeda and their associates coordinated the initial attacks on 9/11/2012 with the hope they would spread. Killing Osama bin Laden turned out to be as meaningless as I expected. This is a much bigger movement than one man.

Watching the media rally around the President and try to make Romney a bad guy for making a rational, not to mention needed, statement about the groveling message from the Egyptian embassy staff has been a depressing sight.

Once again, I repeat that weakness is not a virtue.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Gammera the Invincible (1966) Review

An American producer imports a giant monster movie from Japan and splices in new scenes. Godzilla, King of the Monsters? No… Gammera!  The result is something kids will enjoy and adults will find very silly. Park your brain – you won’t be needing it for this movie about a 200ft tall flame spewing turtle. And just what is the mysterious Plan Z? UPDATED September 2012 with DVD screen captures and revised text.

Gammera Title

In 1965, Daiei Studios released Gamera the Giant Monster to cash in on the giant monster craze started by 1954’s Gojira. It was a decidedly low budget film that surprisingly did well and spawned a series of sequels. While never as big as the Godzilla series, many a kid watched the films about Gamera, the children’s friend.

The version reviewed is the first Americanized one distributed by NTA, not the even more heavily edited Sandy Frank one most of us saw on TV back in the 1980’s. This one is only mildly incoherent by comparison.  On to the review!

Gammera Eskimo ChiefGammera Soviet Bombers

Gammera the Invincible begins with an overly serious narration introducing the setup. Dr. Hidaka (Eiji Funakoshi) is in the Artic to conduct some serious research. On what, I do not know. But he is a serious scholar and don’t you forget it! There he and his lovely assistant Kyoke (Harumi Kiritachi) meet an Eskimo chief. Pleasantries are barely exchanged before a squadron of Soviet bombers fly by at low altitude.

11 from 9/11

Watching the 9/11 ceremony streaming from the memorial site and listening to the names of the murdered read off has made the memories come back with a vengeance. One thing that strikes me is the names come from every ethnic background. When Bin Laden and company launched the attack, they did not attack just one hyphenated American, but the entire country.

I wish people would remember that this year when identity politics have gotten the worst I have seen in my forty plus years of living.

It is painful to listen to the families of the fallen speak and they are only up to ‘P’. It is one thing to remember watching what happened over a decade ago, but to see and hear just a fraction of the people whose lives were permanently changed reminds us of the very human dimension involved. So many kids left behind missing their parents and growing up without their presence are reading names.

Never forget.

Monday, September 10, 2012

Slow Motion

Since Saturday, I have not been doing so great, but managed to get out to socialize and go to church, though I missed the first hour of that. The drive home felt like it took a small eternity, which made me think of the excessive use of slow motion in modern action movies. Interesting in small doses and a massive chore to sit through when over used.

So today has been more of that wading in mud feeling. For over a week I have been working on two review posts and hope to get them up tomorrow at the latest. Part of the delay has been not feeling well, the other… well, sometimes reviews are painful to write. I have no idea how professional movie critics retain an ounce of sanity.

Actually, that would explain a lot of reviews, wouldn’t it?

Saturday, September 08, 2012

New YouTube Based Blog Referral Spam

Well that is interesting. The Russian spammers have come up with a new one that delivers up a YouTube video of a Grand Theft Auto 4 sequence. Why would they do that? Well, the account holder gets money from the ads that run before it plays. This is why you see pretty girls doing reply videos to just about every subject out there – they make a lot of money from people clicking on them.

So if you see youtube.com in your referring sites, do not click and enrich the Russian mob.