Geekularity

When I got my first email account back in college, all of the websites on the World Wide Web were still at least a year away, so just about everything was ASCII text based. There were no embedded graphics, there was no bolded or italicized text. If you wanted to emphasize text, you had the choice of using capital letters, which was commonly interpreted as yelling, or to decorate your text with emoticons or better yet…

    ___   _____ ______________   ___    ____  ______
   /   | / ___// ____/  _/  _/  /   |  / __ /_  __/
  / /| | __ / /    / / / /   / /| | / /_/ / / /
 / ___ |___/ / /____/ /_/ /   / ___ |/ _, _/ / /
/_/  |_/____/____/___/___/  /_/  |_/_/ |_| /_/

ASCII art is the process of creating graphics out of text using combinations of the 200 or so visible characters in the ASCII character set. I used to have a .signature file, which I appended to the end of each outgoing message, that had a little stick-figure image of an alpine skier carving through a slalom. It took me approximately 5 hours to create this figure which was only 10 lines tall by 20 characters wide, but totally worth it! ASCII art was a clever, if not geeky, way to illustrate your otherwise boring text. ASCII art truly was an art form. I have seen portraits of U.S. Presidents, pictures of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley, and the NY City skyline. But alas, HTML came along, and anyone who wanted to add artwork to their email could just embed a GIF or JPG image into the message.

Well, what was old is new again. While experimenting with new SPAM fighting tools, I kept finding SPAM messages which were just gibberish characters. But when I changed my screen font to a fixed-width font, suddenly I found a poker site’s URL spelled out in large ASCII art block letters. Interesting technique, but my spam filters obviously still caught it. Then this morning, I found one in my email box. Sure enough, it was ASCII artwork, but instead of using seemingly random characters, the ASCII art block letters were carefully spelled out using a passage from The Odyssey by Homer. The spammers just used extra spaces and carriage returns to transform the text into ASCII art.

This is pretty clever as I’m not sure how spam filters will be able identify ASCII artwork SPAM messages based solely on the message content. Granted there are many other techniques that anti-spam applications use to identify these messages, but the ASCII artwork might nullify at least some of them, making it easier from the spammer to land their message in your inbox. Perhaps this explains why so many previous SPAM messages were just blocks of classical book passages. Spammers may have been using these blocks of text to throw off the Bayesian filters found in most anti-spam applications in effort to slip messages, like these ASCII art URLs, into your inbox. This may be an interesting trend to watch.