1997-03-14 - Re: Is Graham-John’s inane spam robogenerated?

Header Data

From: Dale Thorn <dthorn@gte.net>
To: “Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM” <dlv@bwalk.dm.com>
Message Hash: 1645812fa380bf187f9911d33067296f1717c59a638e17e2e536a34a2a8d44a7
Message ID: <3328C5B6.E2E@gte.net>
Reply To: <k3ci4D12w165w@bwalk.dm.com>
UTC Datetime: 1997-03-14 03:28:10 UTC
Raw Date: Thu, 13 Mar 1997 19:28:10 -0800 (PST)

Raw message

From: Dale Thorn <dthorn@gte.net>
Date: Thu, 13 Mar 1997 19:28:10 -0800 (PST)
To: "Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM" <dlv@bwalk.dm.com>
Subject: Re: Is Graham-John's inane spam robogenerated?
In-Reply-To: <k3ci4D12w165w@bwalk.dm.com>
Message-ID: <3328C5B6.E2E@gte.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
> ichudov@algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home) writes:
> > Dale Thorn wrote:
> > > It was obvious to me (a native speaker) early on that the messages
> > > from GB referring to Dr. Vulis were auto-generated.

> > i am sure they are not machine generated. the content is different
> > every time, plus it srt of depends on the context to which he is replying.
> > like, if vulis's article is about sexual perversions, GB calls him a
> > pervert.

> I've been writing a program (in C, actually, although perl might be
> a good tool for strings and such :-) that would scan Usenet newsgroups
> for trigger keywords and generate randomized follow-ups depending on
> what's been said. It's a big project; I hoped to have it done by
> April 1st, but it'll definitely take longer.

I could write what GB's auto-postings were doing in a handful of
hours.  It was painfully obvious, i.e., it was obvious that GB would
no more take the time to hand type those inane contentless replies
than Gilmore would take the time to hand inspect c-punks messages.

Before the modern DOS word processors came along, text parsers for
formatting and printing were a dime a dozen, and GB's parser gave
no signs of being anything beyond the simplest one-phrase reply 'bot.






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